The Unforgettable Story of a Teen Murdered by Her Peers

[Guest Nicole]

Twenty years after Reena Virk’s horrific death, the reporter who knew the teenage girls involved goes deep on a crime that shocked the world.

This past October, in Abbotsford, British Columbia, a young woman named Kelly Ellard, serving a life sentence for murder, went before the Parole Board of Canada to request prison release. In the small room, Ellard told the board members that she was eight months pregnant, and her impending motherhood changed her, allowing her to "see the world with different eyes."

For those born in the 90s, the name Kelly Ellard might not be familiar. Yet, the woman, dubbed "Killer Kelly" by the media, was once a staple of breaking news updates and newspaper front pages. Her part in a vicious, unfathomable murder sparked an intense media frenzy, drawing reporters from GQ, The New York Times, and Dateline to her hometown on Vancouver Island, Canada. Her case became the subject of artwork, poems, plays, academic essays, documentaries, and my book, Under The Bridge. Now, twenty years later, the crime, often called a "national tragedy," continues to fascinate and disturb. The story has been distilled into poetry in the recent Griffin Prize nominated book Tell, discussed on true-crime podcasts, and studied in high school, college, and law school classrooms.

In 1997, Kelly Ellard seemed an unlikely candidate for such attention and infamy. She lived in View Royal, a town one passes on the highway to Victoria, a picturesque tourist destination, full of manicured gardens and quaint tearooms. In 1997, Ellard was 15; she wore her hair in a short brown bob and a stud in her nose.

In the months before the murder, Ellard was in the throes of an intense, fervent friendship with a blonde, delicate girl named Josephine Bell.* Of the two, Bell was the more charismatic, confident one. Both girls shared an unsentimental interest in gangster rap, serial killers, and ruthless men like the former Mafia boss, John Gotti. Bell boasted of stealing cars and dating Crips. Moving to New York and joining the mob was here dream. I'll become the first female hit man, she told an older boy, Colin Jones, who thought she was cute but a "twisted, little troublemaker." In her locker, her best friend Ellard kept the sketches she'd drawn in her schoolbooks: gangsters shooting cops, line drawings of disembodied heads, and severed hands.

In the autumn of 1997, when the island skies were relentlessly gray, the two friends turned vengeful. It might have seemed to them that their fantasies of violence could at last turn real, that they could assert themselves as tough. Their unfortunate target was Reena Virk—a shy, yearning, 14-year-old South Asian girl with broad shoulders and uneasy eyes. She chafed against the rules of her home (her parents were Jehovah's Witnesses) and admired the carefree swagger and freedom of Bell. She painted her nails blue and listened to The Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy in her uncle's car. She was vulnerable and tender and daring. One day, she took Bell's notebook and called some boys in it, telling them Bell wasn't as beautiful as she thought, that she had AIDS and that her eyebrows were fake.

Read more: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvpqa7/the-unforgettable-story-of-a-teen-murdered-by-her-peers