Not a monster, but flesh, blood and venom
“I am not a killer. I’m not. You are 100 per cent wrong. I’m not a monster.”
Kelly Ellard made that declaration at the second of her three murder trials, the only occasion in which she took the stand.
This week, 19 years after the pack-of-girl-wolves attack on Reena Virk, Ellard — alpha wolf — nudged closer to the truth.
Asked during her Tuesday parole board hearing who was responsible for Virk’s death, Ellard took the grudgingly passive route: “I believe I am.’’
Had she not been set upon by a gaggle of teenagers — one of whom had been a dear friend — Virk would now be 33. Ellard is 33.
The inmate had long denied being involved in the second assault on Virk, underneath a Victoria bridge, the night of Nov. 14, 1997. Denied dragging an allegedly unconscious Virk — battered and bleeding from the pummeling inflicted by a mob of casually violent teenagers — into the water, holding the girl down and drowning her.
That fatal episode — the kill — Ellard continues to disavow. “I pushed her in and walked away.’’
Ellard still clings to the distinction, even while conceding: “If I hadn’t been there, she would be alive.’’
The scene, as an eyewitness testified: “Reena was kind of bobbing in the water and she put her foot on her head in the water and made a joke about it.”
Another trial witness said Ellard pointed out the tree where she’d boasted about smashing Virk’s head.
Punched, stomped on, a lit cigarette ground into her face, a shoe impression on her scalp, bruises to the stomach, liver and pancreas — those were but some of the injuries a pathologist documented later, damage so extensive he could compare them only to being run over by a car.
It was a crime that shocked the country, triggering hand-wringing about girl-on-girl violence and peer bullying, long before bullying erupted as a social media phenomenon.
These girls were hands-on. While Ellard and a male friend went back for the followup assault on Virk — purportedly to assure the victim didn’t “rat’’ anybody out — the other participants in the savage swarming casually dispersed, allegedly didn’t even talk about the incident as they walked home or boarded transit, several returning to their foster homes. It was that unremarkable. Just another night of casual adolescent drinking and pot-smoking and pile-on frenzy. For nine days, until Virk’s body was retrieved from the bottom of the black water gorge, nobody said a word.
If there are monsters, Killer Kelly — as she became known within the group because of her bragging about the crime — was not the only one.
After Ellard was convicted of second-degree murder in 2005 — tried as an adult, sentenced as a minor — her mother told reporters: “She’s not the monster people have made her out to be.”
We retreated into the language of horror out of incomprehension and disbelief. No normal person, no normal teenager, would ever commit such abominable acts. Except they do, repeatedly. While many claimed Ellard had been an ordinary girl who loved animals and was sweet to children, she once set another girl’s hair on fire and was caught holding a knife to a classmate’s throat.
Parents of wayward children who fall into trouble, patterns that start with petty shoplifting and truancy and recreational drug use, commonly blame the influence of delinquent friends. It’s always somebody else’s kid, the incorrigible other held to blame, mixing up with a bad crowd.
Know what? Your kid is the crowd. Usually not with such a ghastly outcome, but teenagers with miserable intent and minimal supervision are legion.
Virk, a social misfit desperate to ingratiate herself with what she saw as the cool crowd — so desperate she invented a story about sexual abuse by her father so she, too, could be placed in temporary foster care like the girls she idolized — was lured into an ambush by those same “friends.” Her crimes? Allegedly having sex with the boyfriend of one of the wolves, with palming a girl’s phone book, with talking trash, with spreading gossip.
Mean girls, without conscience or empathy. For their sins, a half-dozen received youth sentences of six months to a year. The male teenage punk — Virk a stranger to him — was convicted of second-degree murder, only belatedly admitting to his part in her death, and now on the road to rehabilitation following a restorative justice session with Virk’s remarkably forgiving and compassionate parents.
Ellard didn’t know Virk, either. She was aligned with one of the aggrieved she-wolves.
Her acts were monstrous. But, no, Ellard isn’t a monster. Monsters aren’t real. She is flesh and blood and venom. And her next full parole hearing is automatically scheduled for next February.
The hearing at the medium-security Abbotsford Fraser Valley Institution for Women on Tuesday was Ellard’s application for day parole. She sought limited release to pursue better treatment for substance abuse.
At her 2005 sentencing — trial No. 1 ended with a guilty verdict overturned on appeal, trial No. 2 with a hung jury, trial No. 3 with conviction, a subsequent appeal dismissed by the Supreme Court — Ellard was given the maximum sentence for young offenders: life, with no possibility of parole for seven years.
Four times before, Ellard had waived her right to a parole hearing. There has been no significant transformation behind bars; her case team recommended against granting day parole. Her application was denied. Kelly Ellard wants out. Eventually she’ll get out, as an adult woman who’s already spent 11 years in prison, to little discernible effect.
“I was 15 years old, I was a child,” she told the board. “I’m not that child anymore.”
Only by dint of her actual age, though, it would appear. Otherwise, she remains the vacuous, disaffected, patently unremorseful enigma she was as a teenager.
“Enough is enough. It’s time for this to be done.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.