VICTORIA – Her father wanted them executed, but the two Vancouver Island youths who brutally raped and murdered 18-year-old Kimberly Proctor won’t be going free any time soon.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert Johnston ruled Wednesday that Cameron Moffat, now 19, will be transferred to a federal penitentiary to serve a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 10 years. His accomplice, Kruse Hendrik Wellwood, will stay in the relatively more-protected environment of the Youth Detention Centre until he turns 18 next January, when he will be transferred to the federal system.
Moffat will spend the next three months being assessed at the federal intake centre to determine his course of treatment while inside.
Outside court, Kimberly’s father called for the death penalty, saying any money spent on treating the Langford, B.C., youths would be wasted.
In October, Wellwood and Moffat pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Proctor, whose badly burned body was found under a bridge on the Galloping Goose Trail on March 19, 2010.
The two admitted they lured the Grade 12 student to Wellwood’s home, tied her up, gagged her, sexually assaulted her, beat her, suffocated her and mutilated her body with a knife over a period of several hours. Then they put her body in a freezer, and the next day travelled by bus with the body to the Galloping Goose Trail and set it on fire.
In April, Johnston sentenced Wellwood, 17, and Moffat, 18, as adults. This means they are sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 10 years. Johnston also lifted the publication ban that had been protecting their identities since their arrest last June.
Johnston also sentenced Wellwood and Moffat to five-year concurrent sentences on the charge of indignity to human remains, authorized the taking of DNA samples from the teens and imposed a 10-year firearms prohibition. Charges of sexual assault and unlawful confinement were stayed last week during the grim two-day sentencing hearing in which Crown prosecutor Peter Juk urged Johnston to impose adult sentences for the protection of the public.
Victoria Times Colonist
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