Living a ‘forest rape’ fantasy
SARNIA, ONT., COUPLE KISSED PASSIONATELY AS KINDERGARTEN TEACHER NOELLE PAQUETTE LAY DEAD NEARBY OF 49 STAB WOUNDS
The white Grand Prix was broken down at the side of the road, on the outskirts of Sarnia, Ont., not far from where 27- year- old kindergarten teacher Noelle Paquette had just been murdered.
It was just after 4 a. m. on New Year’s Day, 2013. Two Ontario Provincial Police officers approached the car.
Inside, were Paquette’s killers — Tanya Bogdanovich, 32, and Michael MacGregor, 22 — both covered in blood and MacGregor with a serious injury to his hand.
There was blood on and in the car. On the driver’s floor was a knife that looked like it had been freshly cleaned off in the snow.
The first encounter with the murderers i s one of many dark and disturbing revelations in pretrial court documents released Friday in the case of Bogdanovich and MacGregor, who both pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in December. A sealing order, now lifted, had been imposed on some of the material by Superior Court Justice Bruce Thomas when the guilty pleas were heard.
What emerges is a picture of two killers who acted out a “forest rape” fantasy fuelled by sexual fetishes that brought them together online, and, ultimately, lead them to abduct, rape and kill Paquette.
Bogdanovich got out of the car before police reached it. She was crying and had blood on her face and hands. She told the officers her friend in the passenger’s seat had cut himself.
Then she said she and MacGregor were out to try sexualized “knife play.” They’d driven out into the country to celebrate the new year by indulging in their “kink” relationship.
The Crown and defence motion materials filed with the court, and Thomas’s decisions on the admissibility of certain evidence at trial, fill in blanks left after the killers’ guilty pleas, about what happened to the teacher.
Pacquette was taken from a downtown Sarnia street where she was walking after a New Year’s party. She was driven 25 kilometres to a wooded area, where she was raped and stabbed 49 times.
As police found out, the couple were acting out a sexual fantasy, linked to what the Crown described as “forest rape.”
They had met only seven months earlier on a social media site for people interested in bondage, dominance and sadomasochism. The couple became what Bogdanovich, who had her own “sexual bucket list” of things she wanted to do, described in her many texts and online activities as “a perfect match.”
They called themselves Sterling Archer and Lana Kane, after characters in their favourite cartoon, FX Network’s Archer.
Their activities escalated from role-playing rape fantasies, to knife play, to ultimately, hatching a plan to abduct a young victim for them to rape.
On New Year’s morning, when officers found them but before authorities knew Paquette was missing, the “besties” — as they called themselves — were trying to convince the police that what they were up to was weird, but not murderous.
The car had run out of oil, Bogdanovich told the officers, but she and MacGregor had decided to experiment with knife play, anyway, and MacGregor had badly hurt himself.
The officers called an ambulance and Bogdanovich and MacGregor were allowed to wait in the car, where they were seen “kissing passionately.”
They were taken to Sarnia’s Bluewater Health hospital. MacGregor smiled and asked the paramedic, “Is this the strangest thing you ever had?”
At the hospital, where MacGregor was being exami ned, Bogdanovich was seen by staff with her nose pressed up against the treatment room window and pacing. They believed she was MacGregor’s mother.
Later, the two were seen in the emergency room area, holding each other, kissing and embracing. In a treatment room, witnesses saw them lying on stretchers “with their hands to their faces, giggling and laughing as if they thought something was funny,” one Crown document revealed.
There’ s evidence the couple returned to the crime scene on Jan. 2, 2013, and left mere minutes before Paquette’s body was discovered about 10:30 a.m.
Stabbed 49 times, the fatal wounds to Paquette were to her neck and heart. She’d tried to defend herself, as wounds to her hands indicated.
The car was towed to a compound in nearby Wyoming. Bogdanovich and MacGregor went there on the afternoon of Jan. 2 to try to get it back.
Police told the tow- truck operator to hold onto the vehicle. Officers interviewed the couple, but at that point they were not suspects, since the investigation was in its early stages. They stuck to their story that they were “friends with benefits.”
Police kept watch on the two, and the next day, about 30 hours after the discovery of Paquette’s body, Bogdanovich was arrested in London, Ont., where MacGregor had gone for surgery on his injured hand.
MacGregor’s arrest came four hours later.
At the hospital, the two were seen kissing in an elevator.
Bogdanovich was arrested in the parking lot. “How can you be so calm?” an arresting officer asked her. “Have you ever felt nothing?” Bogdanovich replied. “I know I will never feel anything again.”
“Will Archer be medically taken care of,” she asked, using her fetish nickname for MacGregor.
MacGregor left the hospital with his father and was arrested by city police at the Lamplighter Inn, a London hotel.
The killers were taken back to the Petrolia OPP detachment. While MacGregor maintained his silence during the police interview, Bogdanovich was chatty but wanted to talk to her lawyer first.
The police put a female undercover officer in Bogdanovich’s cell. She whispered to the officer that she didn’t know what she’d do in jail for the next 18 years, and that the past four days were “like a giant house of cards caving in.”
She told the undercover officer about her love of porn and suggested she and MacGregor were “just convenient suspects.”
“She said the police wanted her story, but her name was Tanya, not ‘ Patsy,’ ” Thomas wrote in his decision on one of the completed pretrial motions.