VICTORIA—Exactly three months after 18-year-old Kimberly Proctor’s badly burned body was discovered in a ravine along a popular Vancouver Island hiking trail, the RCMP announced Saturday the arrest of two teenagers for her “premeditated murder.”
Proctor’s body was discovered on March 19 in Langford, a rural suburb of Victoria, in a wooded ravine along the Galloping Goose hiking trail that runs 60 kilometres from Victoria to Sooke.
The Grade 12 student’s murder shocked the small community and sparked a flurry of online rumours and web postings, some of which investigators said were untrue and hampering their investigation.
On Saturday, RCMP Insp. Mark Fisher announced that two male teens, aged 16 and 18, were arrested without incident on Friday and now face charges of first-degree murder. The teens cannot be identified because both were under 18 at the time of Proctor’s killing.
“Crimes such as these thankfully do not happen very often, but when they do they have a devastating effect on the community,” Fisher told reporters in Victoria.
“It is my hope that the young women in the community, their parents and the citizens who use the Galloping Goose trail can now rest easy.”
Fisher did not say what investigators believed motivated the killing, but he stressed it wasn’t a random attack and described it as “premeditated.”
The RCMP said late Saturday afternoon that at least one of the teens had been formally charged. The 16-year-old was charged with first-degree murder, forcible confinement, sexual assault and indignity to human remains. He is expected to make his first court appearance in Victoria on Monday morning.
Police were still waiting for charges to be approved against the 18-year-old.
Last month, the RCMP announced they had identified suspects in the case after executing a search warrant at a home in Langford near the Galloping Goose tail.
In March, police searched a lake near the trail but did not say what they were looking for or what they may have found.
Fisher said the extensive investigation required “specialized investigative techniques,” and the mayors of Colwood and Langford were asked for extra money to cover those costs.
Proctor’s parents recorded a tearful video statement, describing what father Fred Proctor called the “hell” they’ve been living through since their daughter’s death.
The teen’s father described his daughter as a homebody who spent much of her time listening to music, chatting with friends on the computer and playing with the many pets she had kept over the years.
“Our home is quiet now,” Fred Proctor said in the video, released Saturday by the RCMP.
“This has left a huge void in our lives and we’ll never know what she could have become or would have been or what future we would have had with her. . . . Words cannot describe what we’ve been going through”
Proctor was last seen getting off a bus in Langford in the morning of March 18, the day before her body was discovered. She was reported missing after she didn’t show up for a babysitting job that night.
The following day, a passerby discovered her remains under a bridge along the well-used Galloping Goose Trail that runs through Langford. The body was unrecognizable and pathologists needed DNA to confirm her identity.
Nearby residents reported hearing screams and detecting an odour near the area where her body was found.
At the time, the RCMP said investigators had received tips about issues involving bullying and the Internet, but they have never speculated on a motive.
In the days that followed the killing, the RCMP said they were following the trail the teenager left on the web.
For example, Proctor’s Facebook page included a March 6 posting about her relationship with an unnamed boyfriend she said she recently ended, complaining she had to “dump him (because) he turned out to be psycho with really bad anger issues.”
She also used the Goth website vampirefreaks.com, where she discussed being bullied by teenage girls.
But the RCMP cautioned some of the postings they reviewed, by Proctor and others, turned out to be false.
Proctor went to Pacific Secondary in Colwood. The RCMP interviewed more than 300 students at the school and several staff members during their investigation.
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