Pet killer sentenced to four months for using internet

Judge urges offender diagnosed with psychiatric disorders to keep working on her mental health with psychiatrist

A high-risk violent offender diagnosed with psychiatric disorders was sentenced to four months in jail on Friday for using the internet in violation of one of many court-ordered restrictions against her.

Kayla Bourque, 29, convicted in 2012 of killing a family dog and a cat, and causing them unnecessary pain, was arrested last month for the breach of the conditions imposed on her after release from an earlier sentence.

She pleaded guilty to the breach, which happened in November. She has been in custody since her Jan. 10 arrest. Crown and her lawyer both recommended four months in jail. She was credited for 100 days served and is to be released in 20 days.

Bourque sat in Vancouver provincial court Friday wearing a jail-issued dark green sweatshirt and her dark hair partly braided as Crown prosecutor Bernie Wolfe read out an exchange Bourque had with a police officer about her online activity that he said indicated she was still at risk for violence.

Bourque has been diagnosed as a psychopath and sexual sadist. Earlier court documents include evidence of her having told a university classmate she hoped to kill a homeless person and was studying forensics so she could evade police.

Police found a bag containing a seven-inch knife, a razor blade, zap straps, a mask and a syringe in her room during the previous offence, as well as a video of her killing the cat plus another with her narrating the evisceration and hanging of the family dog.

At sentencing, provincial court Judge Malcolm MacLean described Bourque, then 23, as a “psychopathic and narcissistic … sexual sadist” obsessed with violence and devoid of empathy or remorse.

In the police interview read into court Friday, Bourque told the officer in the online chat rooms she took on the personality of a fictional character and the chats would go “dark.” She would discuss violent things “like killing ... not killing animals, killing people.” One of her online names was “Killa Berserk,” Wolfe said.

Bourque told the officer, “It was getting away from me and I wanted to stop things and I didn’t know how” and “I go back and forth between being dark and being normal.” Wolfe said the interview with the officer showed her online chat room activity in 2017 was similar to behaviour in 2015 and could “not be seen as an isolated incident or an anomaly. It speaks to a continual pattern. It’s on ongoing mindset, it’s not a slip.”

Her lawyer, Karen Mirsky, told court Bourque’s “attitude has changed” since she killed the family pets years ago, when she took “some kind of pride in this identity.”

Mirsky said Bourque is frustrated because she says psychiatrists “are not treating me, they’re simply managing me” and she is reluctant to engage with assessors or with risk managers.

She said Bourque says, “I would like treatment. I would like some help.”

She said Bourque is establishing a good rapport with her latest psychologist.

Bourque, who was adopted from a Romanian orphanage by a Prince George family, addressed the court when asked by Judge Gregory Rideout. She said she’s being trying to adjust but she feels like she’s been “in the middle of a deep hole since age 16 on and I’ve been held back from climbing out of it.”

Bourque is kept isolated from other prisoners at the women’s jail she’s in and she said “they’re all scared of me.”

Rideout told Bourque she had artistic talent judging from her sketches, noted the good rapport with her psychologist as a positive, and urged her to “keep at it, OK?”

He said earlier in court she “has to be monitored closely by our authorities, for sure.”

Last June, the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety alerted the public that Bourque had moved to Surrey from New Westminster and remained subject to close monitoring and 42 court-ordered conditions that included a ban on the possession of any pornography and devices capable of accessing the internet, a 10 p.m. curfew and no contact with anyone under 18. She is banned for life from owning a pet.

(I feel like I’ve been) in the middle of a deep hole since age 16 on ...” Kayla Bourque