VANCOUVER - Kelly Ellard was convicted yesterday of second-degree murder for her role in the beating and drowning death of 14-year-old Reena Virk, a crime that stunned the entire country.

When the verdict was read, Ellard, 17, flushed in the prisoner's box and began blinking back tears before collapsing into her seat. Her mother, Susan, lowered her head and wept.

Justice Nancy Morrisson, of B.C. Supreme Court, advised the jury they could make a recommendation on when Ellard should be eligible for parole, but noted sombrely: "The sentence is life."

The jury declined to make a recommendation after a brief deliberation, and a shaking Ellard was whisked out of court to begin serving her sentence within an hour of the verdict. A sentencing hearing will be held on April 12 to determine her parole eligibility. >{? Mukand Pallan, Ms. Virk's grandfather, sat through the entire trial, and immediately after Ellard was led away, he crossed the crowded courtroom to shake the hand of Ellard's stepfather, George Pakos. "I thought I owed it to him," he said afterward. "I said: 'I am sorry for you and your family.' I said: 'You are more the victim than the criminals.' "

Tarsem Pallan, the dead girl's grandmother, walked over to Ellard's sobbing mother and wrapped her arms around her to comfort her. "It's hard for everybody," she said teary-eyed outside the courtroom.

Ms. Virk's mother said from Victoria she was elated with the verdict and relieved that the trial was over. "I'm just very satisfied that justice has been done," Suman Virk said. "There's a sense of elation that all the hard work of Crown counsel and some of the witnesses who testified was all worth it.

"We're just happy now life is going to proceed as normally as possible."

Mr. Pallan said outside court that he felt justice had finally been done in the case. "I am happy to hear the verdict: that's all I wanted to hear."

Mark Jette, one of Ellard's lawyers, said the verdict has left her family in shock. "It was the kind of trial where you really felt like there was a shot at acquittal, and you don't always feel that way."

He said there has not been time to consider an appeal, but added there were serious questions about the reliability of some of the teens who testified against Ellard.

"I think there was some real reason to doubt that some of these people in particular were being truthful."

Ellard was 15 at the time of the murder, but her case was moved to adult court because of the seriousness of the crime.

The verdict came after three days of deliberations by the six-man, six-woman jury and followed testimony from 32 witnesses, including 10 teenagers who said Ellard bragged about the killing and "seemed happy ... like she was proud of what she did."

One girl, who was convicted as a young offender of attacking Ms. Virk the night she died, told the court Ellard was the most aggressive of the group that inflicted a savage, frenzied beating on Virk under a bridge on Nov. 14, 1997.

The Crown alleged that Virk was first attacked under the bridge, then followed across the bridge, beaten again and drowned.

Warren Glowatski, who was with the girls under the bridge, was found guilty of second-degree murder last year and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for seven years.

One teenager testified that one week after Virk disappeared, Ellard took a friend to the scene of the killing.

Chandelle Naysmith said Ellard told her what happened the night Ms. Virk died as they walked by an area known as the Gorge.

"Kelly and Warren were going to go back and see if she was OK," Ms. Naysmith testified. "She [Ms. Virk] started lipping them off or something so they followed her.

"They grabbed her hair and smashed her face into a tree and pushed her down."

Ellard testified that she participated in a swarming attack on Ms. Virk, even admitting to throwing the first punch. But she denied joining in the final, fatal assault.

She was the last of eight teens tried in Virk's death and her lawyers pointed out many inconsistencies between the teenage witnesses' testimony and earlier statements.

The defence had argued that those who testified against Ellard were either covering up their role, or had confused the truth with the rumours.

In his closing argument, Derrill Prevett, Crown counsel, said Ellard knew details about Ms. Virk's death that only her killer would know.

Saturday, April 01, 2000

'Killer Kelly' was toughest girl in the gang, friends said
Results of psychiatric examinations contradictory

Mark Hume
National Post

VANCOUVER - Her nickname was "Killer Kelly" and eventually she lived up to it.

Kelly Ellard, the girl who lured Reena Virk out on the night of her murder with the promise of a party, and one of the two who later beat her to death, was a tough girl in a gang of tough girls.

One of her friends, according to court documents, described her as "messed up in her head ... really weird," and that she liked punching people in the face.

Another said she was "really wacko."

And a third described her to the court "as crazy and said that her nickname was 'Killer Kelly.' "

Barbara Smith, her school counsellor, described her to the court as "a very angry kid, one who had refused counselling."

Shortly after the murder of Ms. Virk, Ellard told the counsellor "that she liked punching people because punching bags just didn't do it for her."

At the time of the fatal attack, Ellard was 15 and could have been tried as a young offender. In deciding whether to try her as an adult, the court turned to the evidence of a battery of experts, including Dr. Lori Vogt, who prepared a psychiatric report, and Dr. Colin Williamson, a psychologist.

There were also two assessments done at the request of defence counsel by Dr. Mel Strangeland, a psychologist, and Dr. Stanley Semrau, a psychiatrist, as well as reports by the youth justice team.

What emerged was a contradiction.

Dr. Vogt said Ellard "has some unfortunate habits of telling lies, abdicating responsibility for her acts and using aggression or verbal techniques in order to manipulate others to her own ends. She lacks internalized social values and is somewhat rebellious and not accepting of the values of society to the same degree as most teenagers."

Dr. Vogt also noted Ellard had "a moderate to severe conduct disorder" and a substance abuse problem.

Chris Pollard, a youth worker, said Ellard "refused to take responsibility for her behaviour and blamed others for her problems both in school, in the community and in custody ... In particular in the school setting, her level of anger and her response to incidents she was involved in was very much out of proportion to the incidents themselves."

Dr. Semrau, however, told the court "he had difficulty believing the girl he interviewed could have committed so heinous a crime."

Both Dr. Semrau and Dr. Strangeland "found her capable of empathy for the victim ... [and] went so far as to speculate about the possibility of some drug having influenced [Ellard's] behaviour if she had indeed committed the murder."

Neither Dr. Semrau nor Dr. Strangeland thought she had a conduct disorder and Dr. Semrau said, "I considered her to be basically at her core a decent kid with a relatively pro-social personality."

But in the end, the judge said he tended to believe those who had a darker view of her character, including the schoolfriends who had seen her as "Killer Kelly."

At trial, one teenage witness recalled talking to Ellard at Shoreline Community junior secondary school, just six days after Ms. Virk was killed nearby on the Gorge waterway.

"She made it sounds as if she was telling a joke -- 'Oops. I forget to take my foot off her head,' " one recalled of her conversation with Ellard, who the court heard held Ms. Virk's head underwater.

Saturday, April 01, 2000

Virk's self-esteem battle led her to rough crowd
Idolized L.A. Gangs

Mark Hume
National Post

VANCOUVER - She was, like all 14-year-old girls, insecure about her looks and desperately in need of friends. But fitting in wasn't easy for Reena Virk, who had brown skin, substantial size -- she was five-foot-five and more than 150 pounds -- and dark body hair.

The beautiful little daughter of Manjit and Suman Virk had grown into a teenager who was awkward in her own body and uncertain of her personality as she tried to make the difficult transition from child to young adult.

She was picked on at school and sometimes came home crying.

And there were other problems. She told a Victoria social worker in 1996 that she had been sexually abused. At one time, she accused an unnamed relative in India; then she said it was her father; then she recanted the charge.

The issue was never resolved. There is some evidence she was led into making the allegations by friends, foster kids, who told her it was a good way to get independence from her family. The police investigated, and charged Mr. Virk with sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching -- but the charges were later stayed.

Whatever the root of the allegations, the result was that Reena Virk moved out of her parents' home and went into the care of foster parents.

She had freedom. And she chose a rough and troubled group of children for friends, many of whom were in foster care, too.

She started shooting heroin and began to fantasize, as many of the teens in her group did, about L.A. gang life. They scrawled the names of two notorious gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, on the sides of buildings, under bridges, anywhere graffiti could take hold. Reena for awhile had "Crips" in blue ink on her hand.

The kids cultivated a "bad as I wanna be" attitude. The irony was they were growing up in an almost idyllic urban setting, where affluent homes looked out on a scenic sea inlet known as the Gorge -- and where the government provided shelter and care for those who needed it.

Perhaps it was the banality of life in Victoria, or their own troubled home lives, that made them want to construct a private world that eventually devolved into unthinkable violence.

Reena was in the process of reconciling with her family, in November, 1997, and was planning to move home on the night she was called out "to go party" by girlfriends who were really planning to beat her up.

Reena's crime: She'd looked in another girl's diary and had called up some of the boys named in it.

In her book Sex, Power, & The Violent School Girl, Sibylle Artz, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, writes about how low self-esteem can lead girls into violent confrontations as they try to win or hold on to the attention of boys.

Flirting or having any kind of sexual interaction with a boy, especially one who is spoken for, can trigger girl-on-girl attacks, she says.

" 'Acting like a slut,' or being called a 'slut' rate highest on the list of provocations for violence, and demand the most immediate redress," she states in the Journal of Child and Youth Care. "Those who are designated as sluts by others are fair game for a beating. Those who are called sluts must seek out those who have so labelled them and make them take back the label. Either way, the path has been cleared for violence, violence that, in the minds of the participants at least, is entirely justified."

On the night of Nov. 14, 1997, Reena found herself under the Craigflower Bridge, over the Gorge waterway, surrounded by a group of girls who were intent on attacking her over the perceived slight related to the diary and the phone calls to boys.

Six girls and a boy attacked her. One girl put out a cigarette on her forehead. Another tried to light her hair on fire. They beat her and left her curled up, sobbing and bleeding in the mud.

The boy, Warren Glowatski, and one of the girls, Kelly Ellard, later followed Reena across the bridge and finished her off in a second attack.

Ultimately, she was knocked unconscious, had her arms broken and was dragged into the Gorge, where she was held underwater until she drowned.

Reena Virk's brutal death flowed from a youth subculture that idolized gang life and sought to compensate for a lack of self-esteem through extreme violence. Had she survived that night, had she been allowed to walk away after the first beating, she might finally have broken away from that world.

Instead, she died at 14 -- and became a symbol of youth violence, which, Ms. Artz says, "is more intense, vicious, and deadly than ever before."

Saturday, April 01, 2000

Slaying left lingering stain in Victoria

The Times-Colonist

VICTORIA - The conviction of Kelly Ellard ends the legal saga that began Nov. 14, 1997, when 14-year-old Reena Virk was beaten and drowned near the Craigflower Bridge in the Victoria suburb of Saanich, B.C.

Now, the process of closure begins, at least for the Virk family. For Victoria, it may be another story.

"I don't think the community will ever recover from this, or should we," said Carole James, former Victoria School Board chairwoman. "We shouldn't forget this.

"The only good that will come out of this is we don't forget."

Ms. James, now president of the B.C. School Trustees Association, said she is already seeing students increasing their efforts at educating against violence, bullying and racism.

And she thinks the community, not just the schools, has a responsibility to work on those issues.

Some worry about the lingering effects of a brutal murder in normally peaceful Victoria.

"It's going to promote a sense of community insecurity, fear and threat," predicted Derek Swain, a Vancouver psychologist who has studied and written on youth violence.

Adults may look at teens with restraint or fear, while young people may be confused and fearful or stick closer to groups or gangs for protection, he said.

Mr. Swain blames problems with teen violence on lack of adult leadership in families and government, suggesting young people don't see the kind of positive values they need.

He fears some people are in denial over the significance of incidents such as the Virk swarming and killing, while others may be numbed or desensitized to it.

"Every newscast has some degree of violence," Mr. Swain said.

Some are hoping something positive can come out of the Virk case.

Alexandra Bordon of the Centre for Research on Violence against Women and Children, who has monitored the case since the murder, says less than 4% of youth violence involves girls, so this case was different. It was unique in how age, gender, race and class intersected, compounding the issues.

Ms. Virk was Indo-Canadian, and her assault and murder involved a boy as well as girls from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of those involved were in provincial care.

There were also two separate incidents. The first was a swarming attack involving eight teens, seven of whom were girls. Three of the girls pleaded guilty and three were found guilty of assault causing bodily harm.

A male, Warren Glowatski, was found guilty of second-degree murder last June for a second attack and drowning that occurred at the Gorge, off a small park near the north end of the Craigflower Bridge. The first attack occurred at the south end.

"We as a society ask ourselves what can we do about this," Ms. Bordon said.

"Now is the time to start talking about the questions around violence. I think it's just the beginning.