Warning: This story contains graphic content of a sexual nature and details which could be upsetting to some readers.
Two-week sentencing hearing begins for teen killers
On the day of her death, after hours of sexual assaults at the hands of two male classmates, Kimberly Proctor tried to make a deal with one of her killers to be allowed to live.
Crown prosecutor Peter Juk, while summarizing facts gathered by police and psychiatrists during interviews with the killers, revealed to the court that during the attack on March 18, 2010, the older of the two males brought Proctor into a bathroom, unbound her duct-taped wrists and allowed her to use the toilet.
They had lured Proctor to the younger teen’s Langford home around 11 a.m., gaged and bound her, cut her clothing off with a knife and raped her. She wasn’t killed until around 6 p.m.
During the bathroom break, Juk said, “she apologized to (the older teen) and repeatedly asked him to help her.” She tried to bargain, saying they could “do anything, just don’t hurt me.”
But the young man, 17 at the time, did not help. But his level of involvement in each component of the crime is a story that has been inconsistent throughout his interviews and confession.
In early statements, he took joint responsibility for the crime, using the word “we” to describe who brutalized and killed Proctor. But as his first court date approached he began saying the younger teen, who was 16 at the time, committed the significant acts while he helped out by holding the young woman down and binding her.
“It’s clear he was reducing the level of culpability as he gets closer to being before the court,” Juk said in B.C. Supreme Court on Monday, the first day of a hearing to determine if the teens will be sentenced as adults or minors.
The teens have been incarcerated since their arrests on June 18, 2010. In October, the pair pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and causing indignity to the human remains.
Meanwhile, in separate interviews, the 16-year-old gave statements that were the mirror image of the other teen’s admissions — he claimed he was standing back while the older teen committed the significant acts.
Juk said the crown’s opinion, based on the DNA evidence and crime scene investigation, that the older teen’s claims are likely closer to the truth.
“Both are significantly implicated in all parts of the crime, as a party to or principal offender,” Juk explained, noting that because the stories are so similar — though opposite — one may be projecting himself into the role of the other teen.
Crown presents audio, Internet evidence
Sitting inside the courtroom, the teens sat in guarded booths with their hands free but ankles in restraints. Five court sheriffs watched over them and every seat was full in the gallery.
A first bench of seating was filled by the Proctor family. Media, friends of the teen and curious members of the public filled two more rows.
The teens were in dressed in crisp collared shirts, the younger also wore a suit jacket. They kept their eyes forward, avoiding looking at each other of the audience.
Some evidence aroused a response from the teens, who were mostly stone faced. The younger teen wiped tears from his eyes as he heard Juk present evidence surrounding DNA found at the crime scene in the home — an area the young teen had tried to clean with bleach.
The older teen slumped forward in his seat and held his head while the court heard 30 minutes of audio recorded collected, without their knowledge, on hidden devices in the back of a police van a day after their arrest. The teens were discussing the interrogation they’d been through.
“I’ve been exercising my right to silence,” the younger teen said in the recording, also noting he had spent twelve hours under bright lights drinking coffee and wanting to go to the bathroom.
The older teen told the other he’d never spent more than a couple hours at a time in interrogation rooms. The two made fun of their interrogators and talked about who they knew had spoken to police.
Juk noted it took days of forceful interrogations before the older teen broke down and admitted to his part in the crime.
However for the younger teen, Juk said, “it seemed to hardly affect him.”
A key witness in the crime was a young woman in Nova Scotia who the teens had met through the online role playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). Both teens confessed their crime to the woman using a chat function in the game.
In the course of the investigation computer forensic investigators were able to retrieve many MSN conversations where the teens discussed the crime. However because the WoW conversations are stored on overseas servers, they were never recovered. Often the teens would chat partially on MSN and partially on WoW, so the context of some comment is lost.
The Nova Scotia woman co-operated with police and told them what the boys said over the online game, including that the younger teen had told her that he dreamed about killing someone since he was young and that it didn’t feel like he thought it would.
In one instance where the killer teens were chatting to each other over the two medias simultaneously, an MSN message read, “Since we killed that bitch and it wasn’t too hard, we should do it again.” The message was a few days after the two had killed Proctor, but Juk said the teens may have been referring to that of a character they killed in their online game.
In some early chat conversations, the teens had talked about rape fantasies and made plans to sexually assault a woman who was dating the younger teen at the time. However, there’s no evidence that attack took place.
Police were also able to find what words the teens looked up in search engines days before the crime, and see that they both stored sexual images of bondage on their computers. The younger one also had images of people burning.
The Crown is expected to wrap up its statements Wednesday and the lawyers for the teens will begin presenting their statements.
The Crown now is requesting both teens be sentenced as adults, which would mean guaranteed life sentence with no parole for 10 years. A youth sentence for the same crime is maximum six years in prison followed by four years of conditional supervision in the community.
Their sentencing is scheduled to continue Monday to Friday in Victoria Supreme Court until April 8.
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