Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This article contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
The Real Friday the 13th
Terry Driver (25 January 1965 – 23 August 2021) was a Canadian murderer who attacked two teenage girls with a baseball bat, killed one, then taunted police in Abbotsford, British Columbia with letters and phone calls.
two yung innocent girls and then a psychopath that´s tormenting the police.
This guy , he’s not just somebody , who sort of killed somebody he´s really a sick mind and he´s till out their .
Ambushed , aussaulted , and left for dead.16 ear old misty cockerill was attacked by a deranged psychopath on the most unlikely nighs she have ever thought of.
the friday the 13th.
When the infamous Abbotsford killer attacked her best friend , misty didn’t hesitate and with unimaginable courage almost lost her own life trying to protect her .
thats when she realizing,” i might not live tonight , i´m not going down without a fight …”
the folowing day the community of Abbotsford British Columbia was in shock.
Police have been informed that a teenage girl with severe braintrauma has been admitted to the hospital
she had what the doctors described to the investigators , at least three home run type swings to the head .
Between life and death.misty only had brief moments of clarity and despite the detective’s efforts to extract informatuion from her ,
she was mostly concerned by tayna´s safety . unuware that her body had been found s gfew hours earlier. unuware that her body had been found few hours earlier.
Tanyas naked body was found floating in the middle of a river. and her chest was badly injured ,almost like something bit her .
by reaching one of the pathways by the bed of the river ,the inspector mad another grim discovery.
at the enctrance to that path, what turned out to be tanya’s clothes had been thrown up in the bushes.
Usually when someone commits a crime, they’ll try to distance themselves from it.often the’ll hide evidence, cover their tracks, or create an alibie for them selves.
or create an alibi for themselves. but in this crime scene. the inspector was met with the total opposite.
he´s initial thought was ,” this guy wants to be known. he wants people to knwo what he´s done”
so while je was waitning for tanyas autopsy results. the isnpector set up a tip line in cse anyone from the public had any information.
on of the first calls he received caught his a attention .and this gentleman said he was the one that had driven misty to the hospital .
but up to that point , the police were under the impression that misty made her own way to the hospital. and the inspector was trying to talk him into coming in and then he hung up.
sensing something unusual, he asked the telecommunications company,operating the city phone boots to trace all incoming calls to the tipline and the local 911 dispatch.
and he was right to do so, because later that day they received another call .
with the autopsy results finally in , they were able to confirm that the man on the other end of the line was the killer.
the main piece of holdback informationat that the investigators had was the location of the bite on tanya’s body .
And the caller ,when he called the tipline , allways referred to thatt area of the bite as his calling card, so to speak
tracing thecall back to a phone booth lcoated beside thecitiy city rink, the police arrived within minutes,even if hey had no idea what the suspect looked like, they had to at last try to catch him.
for the timing of the phone call being made and the time it took to drive to the exit , the inspector fet that the first police responder must have met him as he driving out. the response was that quick. unfortunately didn’t identify him.
the following day misty woke up after four days on the brink of death. she was finally back to herself. but tanya was the only person she had on her mind.
misty’s mom told her daughter tthat tanya didn’t make it.
together they watched tanya’s funural on TV.
the ceremony was being held in a church., closew to the ice rink where the call happened the day prior.
during the funural swams the area where the phone call had been made, they tried to check the booth for fingerprints. but theirattempts were unsuccessful.
they did surveillance in the area in feeling that he maybe watching. they ad a lot of cars out checking people.that were watching,checking cars driving by.
eventually they received a third phone call. this time the suspect chose to directly target them.
caller: you think i would be stupid enough to leave finger prints behind when i make a phone call?
And that led police to believe that he was watching them dust the payphone.where the 911 call was made.
Againe, the police showed up within minutes. but the booth was empty with no prints and no trace of the suspcet.
In the end , his taunting succesfully got on the nerves of the lead investgtor , as hi had to admit the ineffectiveness of his strategy .
Caller: ´m the one … giving the chance to try and find me.
R. Gehl: How can we not be caching this guy ,yet when he is making himself so available
The police needed a change of plan if they ever hoped to catch him before he attacked again. so the inspector chose to rely on misty even though her memories of the events were impaired by the injuries she suffered.
the police had, of course ,released a composite that misty had assisted in preparing.they had debated about the value of that ,given her injures, but they decided to release that.
that generated a lot of tips from the public.
at this point the police had threevialbe elements at hand. mistys fleeting memories, tanya’s bite marks,from whitch they were able to recover dental prints and partial DNA sample.
and finally ,the composite sketch they just released to the public. following this announcement , multiple calls came in , all pointing toward the same suspect.
three spearate people phoned in identifying this particular individual from this composite drawing. it looked very strong in that particular case that we had the suspect in custudy .
The man they arrested looked almost exactly like the composite sktech and categorically
refused to take part in a lied etector test. raising the investigator’s suspicion.
and in fact, another sexual assault victim came forwared and said
” that looks like the guy that attacked me”
eventually he agreed to provide a DNA sample, but back in the 90´s DNA testing was new technology and they had to wait for two months before any results could be handed to hem.
to the dismay of the inspector his superiors thought the case was solved even before the results came in.
and here was a felling among the managers that the case was over ,the guy was in jail and they would cut back the resources for this investigation .
Unsatisfied ,the inspector asked to be left alone for 12 hours with the suspect to interrogate him thoroughly. his conclusion didn’t look good.
after the 12 hour interview ,the inspector was satisfied that he was not responsible for the murder .and the attacka on misty and tanya. and he knew the guy was still out there.
while the inspector continued to investigate, the two months eventually came to passand he was right. The DNA test came back negative.
But one of the investigtors noticed something about the situation .the actual culprit never contacted them while they were keeping the wrong suspect in custody.
so it appeared like he was pepared to allow whoever this chap was the police had in custody take the rap if that’s what was going to happen.
up to that point ,the city had prevented the investigators from releasing the rapes of the killer ,fearing that social panic would take over the small community, but they were now totally out of options.
Robert Linden , a jorunalist and radio personality was present when they first aired the tapes and remembers the media circus that surrounded the release.
-all of the media from the lower mainland and nationally descended on the rfraser valley for that one defining moment when the tapes was released they had nothing else to go on. and that was really the point of this whole investigation .they had nothing else to go on, but the voice.
caller : i’ll be cruising around ,looking for someone else.
City officials were right though, the population’s immediate reaction was one of fear and disgust it was the first ime they heard the killer directly threatening them and taunting the police.
People were escorted by security guards to their cars. everybody traveled in pairs . the community was in terror.
The campaigne proved to be almost too successful with thousands oif people calling in. overloading the Abbotsford police and RCMP capacities to investigate each and every lead.
9,500 tips came in, so the police getting lookalikes to te composite drawings and sound alikes to the voice.
shortly after , the suspect started to communite again. this time he directly targeted misty.
misty and her family were put into witness protection.
the police thought that by securing misty’s family into the witness protection grogram she would be spared from future contact with the killer.
this seemed to have angered the suspect.because for his next move ,he went all out .
He took tanya´s gravestone and he defaced it ,wrote across her face.
He called the local radio station and told the host to go look for his car in the parking lot. and therre was the headstone slammedagainst the hood of his car in the middle of the city.
and quite amazingly nobody saw him lift this big 180 pound headstone out there and put it on the hood of the car. so it was like the investigators chasing a ghost.
It seemed like the intense media coverage and the attenttion he got from the release of the tapes. reignited his willingness to communicate with them.
– things weren’t moving along fast enough for him. so what does he do? the wildeest thing possible.but the story had moved up, now the media was part of the story ..got all the publicity he could possibly hope for as a result of it.
but apparently it still wasn’t enough, because after that not only did he call them again ,
but he also sent them a letter.
He had walked up to the front of this house and right thorugh the forn livingroom window, he heaved this wrench.
after carefully opening the letter,strapped to the wrench investigators finally discovered the extent of his crimes.
turns out that the Abbotsford kiler was not only a murderer but also a serial rapist with a particular interest in teenage girls who he refers to as his conquests.
the investigators never forget the night they read that note for the first time.
and just chills going up their spinesHe talked about other Qonquests and in the end he said , “you wont catch me and i will strike again, goodbye for now ,guys”
but finally ,the suspect made a misstake.on the piece of tape holding the wrench and the letter toghether , the police found a fingerprints, they immediately logged it into the national database
the investigators whole perception of who they were after changed they were thinking before it would be somebody that had a record for sexual assault or assault or something like that.
A known criminal or some kind of criminal record. and in fact, he did not have a criminal record at all.
later that day the police received a most unusual call.on the other end of the line is someone claiming to be the mother of the man behind the calls.
she phoned the tips line and told t one of the tip takers:
” yeah, this is,. i think t that’s my son’s voice and he fishers at the Vedder River and he went to tanya smith’s funural”
contrary to the behavior seen in the last major suspect this man wasn’t cooperative at all. he refuse to follow to follow them to the station .and didn’t provide any further information .
Terry Driver
investigators told him , if he was innocent ,get down to the police station , and if you’re guilty , we will get you.
Apparently the suspect wasn’t aware that he left a fingerprint on the letter .because it was the only thing he agreed to provide to investigators.
he seemed to be confident,that he wasgoiung to supply his fingerprints and he was going to walk out after suplying his fingerprints.
he´s lawyer asked that his fingerprints be examined right there at the station under the condition that they should be destroyed if the match couldn’t be established.
innocent people will proclaim their innocence loud and long.Guilty guys will run to their lawyer, generally , not always , but genrally .
So they did the test in the cellblock ,right in front of him.
Gerry Ennisse ,a forensic scientist performed the check
G. Ennisse : my heart was racing.it ffelt like i’d won the lottery. when i compared that print and found that it was his. so i advised the investigators , i think it was …..inspector Gehl . and i advised him it was his print .
from tears to high fives or sights of relife,the Abbotsford police and the RCMP were overjoyed to finally have a credible suspect in custody .
but inspector mcLoed knew that they weren’t done with the friday the 13 murder just yet. the most important part of the ordeal was yet to come.
when there’s an arrest made,as far as the police are concerned , that’s really when the work starts.
cause now you’re , the clock is ticking to get ready for trial
and the suspect was prepared,bringing in a strong defense.he claimed that he was responsible for the rape of tanya but not the attack . this allowed him to plead not guuilty to the murder charges imosed upon him.
inspector mcLoed:i think what he said on the stand was, he had sex with tanya that’s consistent with the evidence, but then there’s no direct evidence that says that he was the person that threw her in the river and infact killed her ‘ cause she drowned’
Without any evidence to back the murder charges, the crown wasn’t in a good position, but the prosecutor hd a backup. on the last day of the trial.
misty took the stand. after seven months of rehabilitation, she regained most of her memory and went on to deliver a horrifying testimony starting from the beginning
On 13 October 1995, 16-year-olds Misty Cockerill and Tanya Smith were walking to a party when Driver broke through a hedge nearby with a baseball bat and ordered the girls to go through the bush. After stumbling into a clearing, Driver told both girls to remove their clothes. While Smith complied, Cockerill attempted to fight back, grabbing the bat and hitting Driver across the back as he prepared to rape Smith. Driver eventually overpowered Cockerill and beat her into unconsciousness. Cockerill regained consciousness in a parking lot and walked to the hospital, where she was immediately rushed into surgery for severe skull fractures.
The moment of truth came when she was asked to identify the man who attackedh er and killed tanya.
he was starring at her and smiling and giving that cooky grin .and misty stared right back at him and she pointed to him .
After Misty’s testimony the judge directly convicted him. he was sentence to life.
after months of terrorr, the residents of Abbottsford ,
misty , and tanya’s family were fanilly liberated.
MORE DETAILS
Terry Driver, known as the “Abbotsford Killer” after taunting police and confessing anonymously to his crimes, has died of apparent natural causes in prison, according to a statement from the Correctional Service of Canada.
CBC News ·
He died at Mountain Institution, a medium-security federal penitentiary in Agassiz, B.C., on Monday. His in-custody death will be investigated by correctional services.
- Abbotsford city council has voted to give the mother and brother of the Abbotsford killer Terry Driver the $10,000 reward for turning him in.
- Abbotsford Mayor George Ferguson says without the reward, the case might not been solved.
- Driver was convicted of first degree murder in Smith’s slaying, and sentenced to life in prison in 1995 with no chance of parole for 25 years.
- Then in 2000, a judge ruled he was a dangerous offender, which means he will be kept in jail for an indeterminate length of time.