Kruse Wellwood confessed in detail how he murdered Kimberly Proctor and mutilated her body to several people, including his girlfriend, online friends and fellow prisoners at a youth detention centre, according to police evidence.
Caution: This story contains material that may be disturbing to readers
Wellwood's girlfriend was just 14 when he told her that he had raped and killed 18-year-old Proctor and set her body on fire near a Vancouver Island walking trail on March 18, 2010.
In an interview with RCMP on Oct. 14, the girl told police that her then-16-year-old boyfriend confessed the brutal crime during a stroll together about a month after the brutal killing.
"He just says ‘I killed Kim,'" she said.
The girl, who cannot be named, offered few details about what she had learned, but said that Wellwood had "tortured" Proctor. She said that the boys strangled their victim and possibly broke her neck to finish her off; forensic evidence has revealed that Proctor actually died of asphyxiation.
"I was shocked the first time he told me," she told police, explaining why she hadn't asked more questions about the murder. But she admitted, "I still wanna be with him."
She also said she'd met a teenager who'd recently been released from the Victoria Youth Correction Centre, where Wellwood was being held after his arrest. He told her that Wellwood had described his crimes in detail to other prisoners.
"I just wondered why he would do that, just tell everybody," she said.
In fact, at least five inmates at the correctional centre approached police to tell them that Wellwood had confessed the murder to them and other teens in their unit.
The teen prisoners told Mounties that Wellwood tried to pin the blame for the murder on his accomplice, Cameron Moffat, saying that the other boy forced him to play along. Wellwood said that he fell asleep after the boys bound and raped Proctor; when he woke up, she was dead.
"I didn't believe him that when he said ‘I'm gonna go to sleep,'" one inmate said. "How are you gonna go to sleep; you have a tied-up girl in your house."
Moffat was held in a separate unit of the correctional centre from Wellwood, but fellow inmates said they'd heard he was trying to shirk the blame as well.
"Kruse is just trying to pin it on Cameron, Cameron's just trying to pin it on Kruse," one prisoner said.
In his conversations with police, Moffat insisted that he was the one who had fallen asleep during the vicious attack.
Prisoners in Wellwood's unit described him as "weird" and "not right" in their conversations with police, and suggested that he should be punished to the full extent of the law. They said he showed no remorse when he described the murder.
"I did not see any form of regret in him. This guy, he had a smirk in his eyes, he was kind of smiling, you know," another inmate said.
Murderer ‘bragged' to online friends
Wellwood also spoke of the murder with at least two online acquaintances.
Police investigators flew to Halifax to meet with his ex-girlfriend, a fellow World of Warcraft online video-gamer.
"He told me that she went over to his house, and they like raped and murdered her, and then took the body and burnt it," she told an RCMP constable.
"He basically told me that he did it ... and he told me this over World of Warcraft." Wellwood mistakenly believed that the company behind the popular role-playing game wouldn't give police access to its chat logs, and insisted that any discussion of the murder be done inside the game.
The gamer friend also told police that Wellwood described for her in detail how he mutilated Proctor's body.
"He told me specifically that he put a knife in her vagina and cut through to her organs. And he actually, like, bragged about that part, like he highlighted it," she said.
Another online friend told police that Wellwood had confessed the murder in a telephone conversation.
"When I asked him why he did it, he just said, ‘Because it was easy.'"
But Wellwood was far less forthcoming when he spoke with police about a month after the murder. He suggested that some of Proctor's other friends -- so-called "Juggalos," or fans of the horror-themed rap group Insane Clown Posse -- might have been responsible for her murder.
"Why would you think I killed her?" he asked investigators.
He told the officers that he could never justify taking a life. "I don't believe in capital punishment either .... I don't even believe in war."
When police asked Wellwood if he was prepared to give a DNA sample, however, he refused.
"I have this thing about conspiracies," he said, referencing George Orwell's classic book "1984".
Wellwood and Moffat were sentenced last week as adults in the murder, receiving life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years.
