By

August 24, 2021

-Western Standard

 

The Abbotsford Killer is dead.

Known as the “Abbotsford Killer” because he taunted police and confessed anonymously to his crimes, Terry Driver died of apparent natural causes in prison, according to a statement from the Correctional Service of Canada.

Driver — whose father had been a police officer — killed a teenage girl October 1995, and attacked her friend near the hospital in Abbotsford, B.C.

The killer was sentenced in 1997 to life in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder in the death of 16-year-old Tanya Smith in 1995, as well as the attempted murder of her friend, Misty Cockerill, 15.

The two friends were assaulted with a baseball bat as they returned from a birthday party.

Smith’s lifeless, body was later found in B.C.’s Vedder River. Police later learned she’d been raped. Cockerill suffered severe head injuries after being pounded unconscious.

The vicious, senseless attacks numbed the entire province before Driver was eventually caught in 1996, but not before he relentlessly taunted cops throughout the investigation.

His story ended at Mountain Institution, a medium-security federal penitentiary in Agassiz, B.C., on Monday. His death will be investigated by correctional services.

During the investigation, police weren’t looking for Driver, who was unknown to them.

Over the course of the seven-month investigation, Driver taunted police investigators by leaving threatening phone calls.

His bold tactics didn’t stop with the phone calls; Driver attended Smith’s funeral and later swiped her headstone and left it on an Abbotsford radio station vehicle. Words written on the headstone included “She was not the first” and “She won’t be the last.”

Driver also threatened to continue to murder through messages left at the radio station and with police.

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