VANCOUVER – Every two years, Suzanna Seto’s mother, Susan, gets stressed out and worried, wondering if her daughter’s killer will be released on parole.
“It takes her months to get over it,” a Seto family friend, Jack Yee, explained in an interview.
“She wants to forget about it, but she has to go through this every two years,” he said.
Susan Seto, her husband Wah and their two adult children plan to attend the parole board hearing Wednesday of Kelly James Toop, 51.
They will give victim impact statements about how Suzanna’s murder in June 1980 devastated their family and Seto’s many friends in Vancouver’s Chinese community.
It will be the fourth time since 2005 that Toop will seek release on parole for the first-degree murder of Seto, 29.
He wants to be paroled to spend time with his wife, Patricia, whom he married in prison in 2003. So far, he has been unsuccessful.
Toop has been in custody for almost 30 years – since 1982, when he was arrested for the rape and attempted murder of another woman in Williams Lake.
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He asked the Williams Lake woman for a ride home from the local curling rink. Once in the car, he physically overpowered her and took her to the home of his parents, who were away for the Thanksgiving long weekend.
There, he raped and sexually tortured the young woman for eight hours before taking her naked in her truck to a local isolated spot, hit her in the head with a tire iron and left her for dead in sub-zero conditions.
The woman survived after she was found by a man out walking his dog. The man took her to hospital, where the woman later described to police the man who repeatedly raped her and tried to kill her.
Once arrested, during the interrogation of Toop, police learned that he was in Duncan at the same time as Seto, whose murder remained unsolved for two years.
Police then matched one fingerprint at the Seto crime scene to Toop, who later confessed he tried to rob Seto while she was staying at Village Green Inn on a business trip.
The robbery confession, however, did not explain the forensic evidence, which showed Seto had been sexually assaulted and tortured for up to two hours before her body was dumped beside the Cowichan River.
Toop claimed he didn’t intend to kill Seto when he hit her in the head with a cement brick – he only wanted to keep her quiet.
He was convicted in 1983 of the first-degree murder of Seto and now is serving a life sentence. He was convicted the next year of the rape and attempted murder of the Williams Lake woman and is serving another concurrent life sentence.
He also confessed, at one point, that he had committed four other sex slayings. But he eventually recanted those confessions, saying he was just trying to impress police and make them look incompetent.
Toop has completed numerous sex offender programs, is deemed a model prisoner, reportedly makes $30,000 a year from making cedar chests, which are sold on eBay, and recently offered an apology to his victim in Williams Lake, as well as the Seto family.
Seto’s mother rejected the apology.
“She is very resentful and angry and won’t forgive him,” Yee said. “She wants him dead.”
By law, Toop is allowed parole hearings every two years until he is paroled or dies in prison.
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