Warning: This story contains graphic content of a sexual nature and details which could be upsetting to some readers.
In the years before raping and murdering their Pacific secondary schoolmate, Kimberly Proctor’s killers showed a tendency towards violence and sexual sadism, the court heard Tuesday.
A B.C. Supreme Court sentencing hearing scheduled to last two weeks, ended after the second day. The defence was unable to offer any argument to against the two teens receiving an adult punishment for pleading guilty to first degree murder.
Reports by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers who evaluated the Langford teens, said they showed little remorse for their crimes and diagnosed them with extreme psychopathy for their lack of empathy.
The younger teen’s feelings of superiority over others, history of violent attacks on his mother and peers, anti-female behaviour, and sexual attraction to corpses and the pain and suffering of others were indicators of necrophilia and sexual sadism.
The older teen was harder for experts to analyze because he was more reserved and admitted to lying in interviews, but he had been receiving counselling since kindergarten for beating up other students.
Experts found him to have conduct disorder with childhood onset, psychopathy and characteristics of the same sexual disorders as the younger teen.
The reports said both youth were very likely to re-offend and should be monitored for decades after their rehabilitation in the prison system.
The defence’s independent experts also analyzed the teens, but their reports mirrored the original findings
The defence submitted only one piece of evidence to the court: a three page letter written by the younger accused after the first day of the hearing.
The 16-year-old who led the attack and exhibited a worrying lack of remorse, according to psychologists and other experts who evaluated him. But his letter said he was now “deeply sorry” for what he had done.
“There is little optimism that I can change,” he wrote. “I will prove them wrong ... I hit rock bottom and only have one place to go.”
The letter made reference to his father who is currently serving a life sentence for the second degree murder of a 16-year-old girl — a crime occurred when the teen was seven years old.
“I hated my father for what he’d done,” he wrote, “I’ve become a worse man than him.”
He called the premeditated murder of Proctor “the worst crime in B.C.,” which, among youth crime, it likely is.
Citing case law, Crown Prosecutor Peter Juk said the most similar youth offense occurred in Ontario when a young man, at the urging of his jealous girlfriend, stabbed to death a girl he’d once dated. Both the boyfriend and girlfriend received adult sentences in that case.
In the Proctor case, the teens committed not only murder, but prolonged sexual assault.
On March 18, 2010, the teens lured Proctor to the younger teen’s home on Happy Valley Road, duct-taped a wadded up sock in her mouth as a gag, bound her wrists and ankles with duct-tape, and beat and sexually assaulted her for many hours.
In his summery Juk described the eventual murder as “neither swift nor painless.”
They attempted to suffocate Proctor by duct-taping a plastic bag over her head and checking her pulse several times to see if she was dead. When she continued breathing, they shut her in a freezer. When that did not kill her either, they finally strangled her to death.
The pair then did obscene things to her remains, the details of which are too disturbing to print.
The next day, they burned the remains under a bridge on the Galloping Goose trail near Millstream creek. Her body had to be identified using dental records.
“It’s hard to imagine a more serious offense,” Juk told the court Tuesday. “Especially one without sense or motive.”
The judge offered the older teen an opportunity to speak for himself, but he did not wish to address the court.
During police interrogation older teen claimed the 16-year-old had forced him to take part. But when pressed to explain how a much smaller teen, two years younger and “no more threatening than Harry Potter” could make him do anything, he offered no explanation.
If sentenced as adults, both teens will receive the mandatory sentence of life in prison. In recognition of their youth, parole will be available to them after 10 years, not 25 years.
The youth sentence for the same crime is maximum six years in prison and four years of community supervision.
But as adults the two could be placed on a registry of sexual offenders and monitored for life. Their identities could also be revealed publicly.
Several psychiatrists evaluating the teens found they are at significant risk to re-offend. On this basis Juk concluded it would be in the public interest to sentence the teens as adults.
“Their names should be public, they should be known for what they’ve done,” Juk told the court, adding that such measures “wouldn’t unduly harm them or interfere with their rehabilitation.”
A Supreme Court judge will announce Monday what sentence the teenage killers of Kimberly Proctor will face.
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