REAL SCOOP: Killer who raped/tortured Victoria-area teen denied parole
Credit to Author: Kim Bolan| Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:01:10 +0000
It was a heart-wrenching day at Mission Institution Wednesday as the family of Langford teen Kimberly Proctor gathered to prevent one of her killers from getting parole.
Kruse Wellwood was denied both day parole and temporary escorted absences, but the family fears they may be back at the prison in less than a year when Wellwood is eligible for full parole.
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MISSION — Lucia and Fred Proctor said the months leading up to Wednesday’s parole hearing for one of their daughter’s killers were absolutely agonizing.
But there was some relief when the Parole Board of Canada denied Kruse Wellwood both day parole and escorted temporary absences from the medium-security Mission Institution prison.
Eighteen-year-old Kimberly Proctor was lured to Wellwood’s Langford home in March 2010, raped and tortured for hours by Wellwood, then 16, and Cameron Moffat, then 17. They killed her, stuffed her in a freezer overnight, and later burned her body along a popular Victoria trail.
The teens pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and were given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 10 years.
They were both eligible for day parole in 2018, something that shocked the Proctors and their extended family when they learned last January that Wellwood had applied for release.
“Why we had to come here after really only eight years since sentencing and nine years since the crime was committed — premeditated rape and murder of our daughter — is just ridiculous,” Fred said after the hearing in Mission. “In my mind, anybody who has gone through this shouldn’t have to ever deal with these things ever. People like this should just be locked up permanently and the key thrown away.”
Lucia said her worst fear was that Wellwood would be released and others would be at risk.
“That has been my nightmare,” she said. “I don’t want this guy out there for anybody to go through what we went through — what we are still going through. It will never go away.”
Parole Board members Ian Mackenzie and Karley Scott decided that Wellwood, now 25, still posed an undue risk to society, scoring 96 per cent on the psychopathy scale.
“I am not going to sit here and try to put into words the horrific nature of what you have done,” Mackenzie said. “You are capable of brutality that can’t be described.”
He said that Wellwood had “a lot more progress to make” in rehabilitating himself.
Bearded with light brown hair and glasses, Wellwood wore a blue t-shirt and jeans to the hearing. He sat facing the parole board members, with his back to his victim’s relatives, police officers, prison officials and reporters.
When Mackenzie mentioned Wellwood’s “sadistic nature and psychopathic traits,” the young killer reacted, prompting the board member to say: “You can roll your eyes if you wish.”
Earlier in the hearing, Wellwood rejected psychiatric reports calling him a psychopath and a sexual sadist.
Mackenzie said Wellwood lacked empathy and only expressed emotions when thinking about his own plight.
The parole board heard devastating victim impact statements read by Proctor’s aunt Joanne Landolt and grandmother Linda Proctor.
Linda said the whole family is “still reeling from the terrible, terrible things he did to our Kim.”
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think about Kimmie and weep,” she said. “Everyone of us has some sort of stress-related illness.”
Landolt said the justice system is not to aid victims, but for the violent offenders.
“It makes me feel sick that this monster is trying to walk our streets,” she told Mackenzie and Scott. “The only way Kruse Wellwood should be free to leave prison is in a bag — the way Kimmie left his house on March 18, 2010.”
Wellwood apologized to the family and said he was determined to become a better person. He admitted that he didn’t have a proper release plan prepared in the event that he was granted either day parole of escorted temporary absences into the community.
“I recognize I have done a tremendous amount of harm,” he said.
He blamed the brutal crimes he committed on a dysfunctional childhood stemming from his father Robert Raymond Dezwaan sexually assaulting and killing 16-year-old Cherish Billy Oppenheim in Merritt in 2001.
“I think it’s my childhood, my exposure to what my father had done,” he said.
He was 11 when he met Moffat and the two bonded over videogames and online pornography that grew into a violent fantasy to kidnap, rape and kill a young woman.
He noted that Proctor, a classmate who had dated a friend of his, was the third choice on their list.
Mackenzie asked him if he ever thought what he was planning was wrong.
“I didn’t have a moral centre in my life that would allow me to see it like that,” he said.