KELOWNA – One Okanagan woman was beaten to death as she walked to meet friends. Another woman was sexually assaulted at her work place. A third was brutally attacked while sleeping at home.
Already convicted of first-degree murder, former Cherryville resident Matthew Stephen Foerster, 28, pleaded guilty Wednesday to the other two assaults.
Foerster is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years for the 2011 sex related slaying of Armstrong teenager Taylor Van Diest.
Now he’s admitted to raping a Kelowna escort agency worker at knife point in 2005 and to the physical assault of a Cherryville neighbour in 2004.
Then 19-year-old Kaili Paul was attacked while asleep in bed. Foerster was wearing a face mask and packing a BB gun pistol when he threw her twice against a wall, splitting Paul’s scalp.
Foerster told his terrified victim he “wanted” her before he got scared and left.
Reading from her Victim Impact Statement, a sobbing Paul told the judge she will never be the person she was before the attack.
“I suffered severe emotional trauma. I was constantly frustrated, stressed, emotional, disgusted, angry and very scared. It seems I will never completely move on from this horrible experience.”
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In a plea bargain deal, the judge agreed to a joint submission by Crown and defence lawyers that Foerster be sentenced to six years for assaulting Paul and six years for raping the woman in Kelowna.
“There’s a lot of value to having a guilty plea instead of a trial,” says prosecutor Iain Currie. “For the system, for the complainant and for witnesses who would have had to testify at a trial.”
The prison time will be served concurrently, instead of consecutively, to Foerster’s sentence for the murder of Taylor Van Diest.
“Unlike the U-S where they stack life sentences one on top of the other, in Canada a life sentence is just that. Mr. Foerster is subject to a life sentence on the murder conviction for the rest of his life. So the sentence today (Wednesday) is concurrent because that’s the only thing it can be,” explains Currie.
It’s common for convicted people to address the court before being sentenced, usually to express remorse for their crimes and offer apologies to their victims. Foerster chose to not say anything.
He’s being held in a maximum security prison and spends 21 hours a day in super protective custody. That’s to shield Foerster from general population inmates who don’t take kindly to sex offenders.
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