It seems like everybody is growing up faster these days. This includes murderers. I am sure it is only a matter of perception, but I don't recall a lot of mass murderers haunting high schools when I was growing up. In recent years we've had the murder of whole families by kids, as in the case of Jeremy Steinke and his accomplice, the 12 year old who joined in the slaughter of her family in 2007 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. We've had shootings in Toronto, kids blowing away kids when a profusion of handguns darkened the streets around Jane and Finch in 2009. (Police seem to have that gun play under control, touch wood.)
Cops have to work extremely hard to deal with youth crime that seems to spin out of control, and there are occasions when cops are almost ahead of the curve in containing the mayhem. Case in point: The enormity of the crime against Kimberly Proctor in Victoria, B.C., has few parallels and we can be thankful for this. We can also be thankful that it didn't get a lot worse.
The atrocious rape and murder of Kimberly Proctor was done by two youth offending knaves who confessed to all the cavalier plotting, doing so unrepentant after serpentine evasion of their responsibility by moral turpitude, unnamed due to the Young Offenders Act, but ages 16 and 17 (18 at the sentence-hearing of Mar. 28, 2011).
The two youth offenders pleaded guilty last autumn to First Degree murder and presently face sentencing in Victoria for their monstrous deeds. The reality of this case is that almost by accident it stopped at one murder. The 16 year old and the 18 year old who was 17 when he raped, mutilated, and butchered Kimberly Proctor, attempted to lure another girl over to the scene of the killing frenzy while Kimberly's remains were still in the house.
Kimberly had once spent a short period of time dating the 16 year old. She was acquainted with the 17 year old. The 16 year-old and the 17 year-old had spent the months after the dating period raising hell with Kimberly's social circle, and part of the plot in luring her to the house involved an 'apology' and an 'explanation' of why the two were making life miserable for Kimberly. This evil March 2010 event has been described in the courtroom of Victoria as the Proctor family and the public hears the evidence aired before sentences are delivered.
The two murderers made the last hours of Kimberly's life a trauma-event seeming without end. She was bound and gagged and raped and mutilated with tools while still breathing, still witness to her own torment. Her life was not permitted an easy ending, as the news report from the CBC describes from the courtroom: "There were gasps in the courtroom Monday (Mar. 28, 2011) as the Crown revealed Proctor was likely still alive when her killers put her in a freezer and that the two boys probably also had sex with her after she was dead and before they took her body in a duffle bag on a bus to the trail where they set her on fire."
While Kimberly Proctor is feeling her own life being extinguished in the freezer, a second girl somehow resists the intensive cellphone call entreaties from the 16 year-old, and this girl's life was undoubtedly spared a fate closely resembling that of Kimberly. Indeed, the pair of killers had plotted some kind of rape/murder atrocity against another girl from their high school in the weeks prior to Kimberly's senseless and grotesque slaying.
The police spared Vancouver Island society further atrocities from a pair of serial killer wannabes who took Kimberly Proctor's existence for granted, and who were likely going to take others' existences for granted. They intervened on a serial killing duo to prevent further mayhem, nevertheless, the question is how much justice will be done, and how much crime prevention is the correction system going to supply?
The reality is that over the course of time a desire for killing will remain strong in these two rapacious and mindless fiends. A sentence for either of them cannot guarantee society that promises are made to the Proctor family (nor assurances are made to wider society) that we shall never see these perpetrators in the streets as long as they shall live. Oh no. The youth offender, sentenced as an adult, is eligible for parole after 10 years. Sentenced as a youth they are scot-free after 10 years (as in the case of the 12 year-old killer of her Medicine Hat family). There is absolutely no justice in that. None whatsoever, so the harder cops work, it seems, the harder they will make it for themselves.
