Shortly after midnight on October 14, 1995, sixteen-year-old Tanya Smith and fifteen-year-old Misty Cockerill were attacked while walking to Misty’s boyfriend’s home from a party in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada, a city of approximately 105,000 people just across the Washington border. Both girls were raped and beaten with a baseball bat.

Misty fought with the attacker before she was beaten unconscious. She survived and the man was gone when she awoke. She made her way to a nearby hospital. Her injuries were severe; her fractured skull required brain surgery, but she ultimately made a full recovery.

Tanya, however, was killed; her nude body was found the following day in the Vedder River, nine-and-a-half miles away. She had also beaten unconscious and would have perished from the injuries if she had not drowned first.

DNA retrieved from both girls’ bodies confirmed the culprit’s identity one year later. The forensic evidence, however, was not what initially led to his identity. The Abbotsford Killer was instead captured by another common means of a killer’s undoing: his inability to keep his mouth shut.

                                Tanya Smith                     Misty Cockerill

Beginning in February 1996, four months after the attack, a man made the first of a series of telephone calls to police and emergency services boasting of being Tanya Smith’s killer and saying he would kill again.

The caller was confident that he was smarter than the authorities. In one call he boasted, “Do you think that I would be stupid enough to leave fingerprints behind when I make a phone call? Are you having trouble finding the killer? I’m the one, giving you the chance to try and find me. I’ll be cruising around, looking for someone else. Just to let you know who I am.”

Police knew the man was the killer of Tanya Smith by his concluding remark. He said “I’m the killer. Her right nipple tasted pretty good.” The finding of a bite mark on Tanya’s right breast had not released to the public.

Misty helped investigators develop composites of the attacker.

Composites of the Cocky Killer

On February 19, 1996, the man called an Abbotsford radio station and told employees to look in the parking lot. A producer found the headstone from Tanya Smith’s grave perched atop the station’s news cruiser. Pen-written profanities and threats including “One Day, Misty” were barely legible; the words “I’m still out there, I’m the one” and “she wasn’t the first, she won’t be the last” were scrawled across a picture of Tanya engraved on the headstone. An arrow was drawn pointing toward her right breast where the bite mark had been inflicted.

Two days later, a note taped around a wrench was thrown through the window of an Abbotsford home. The note mentioned three other assaults for which the killer claimed credit and made further threats against Misty. A thumbprint was found on the duct tape that was used to tape the note to the wrench, but no matches to the print were found.

The homeowners did not know Tanya, Misty, or any member of either girl’s family. Police believed the killer chose the home at random.

Tanya’s Taken Tombstone

After hearing the recordings of the phone calls in May 1996, seven months after the attack on the girls, Audrey Tighe, the mother of thirty-two-year-old Abbotsford resident Terry Driver, recognized her son’s voice. He and his wife, Val, had two children and he worked as a printer. Driver had no criminal record and his father, Grant, had been a decorated Vancouver Police Sargent. Driver is believed to have used a scanner to monitor police responses following his taunting phone calls.

Driver’s thumbprint was ultimately matched to the one on the tape. After being ordered to provide a sample following his arrest, his DNA was deemed a match to that found on Tanya and Misty’s bodies. His teeth marks were also matched to the bite mark on Tanya’s breast.

When questioned by police, Driver also mentioned that Tanya was wearing sandals. Like the bite mark, that information had not made available to the press.

Terry Driver

Driver admitted to raping the girls but said it was only after finding them unconscious and beaten and having seen an unknown man fleeing from the area. He said he then threw Tanya’s body into the Vedder River after realizing she was dead. He then claimed he drove Misty to the hospital.

Driver told investigators that he had never met Tanya Smith but had attended her funeral because he was grief-stricken over her murder. Authorities believe his real reason for doing so was to learn the location of her burial so that he could later return and remove her headstone under the cover of darkness.

Driven to Kill

Driver opted to have his case decided by a judge rather than a jury. Many expected him to plead insanity, but Driver instead claimed he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder causing verbal and physical tics. His lawyers argued this disease, along with his obsessive compulsive and attention deficit disorders, were the causes of his illicit actions.

Judge Wally Oppal rejected Driver’s arguments and convicted him of the first-degree murder of Tanya Smith and the attempted murder of Misty Cockerill in October 1997 and sentenced him to life in prison.

Driver’s appeal was denied in 2001.

Tourette Defense Rejected

Driver was later convicted of two of the sexual assaults he had boasted of committing in the note he had thrown through the window.

In 2006, Driver was transferred from the Kent Institution Correctional Service to a prison in Abbotsford. Corrections Canada was criticized for moving Abbotsford’s most infamous killer to the community where the families of his victims still lived. In addition, the department admitted it did not notify the victims’ families of the transfer.

Driver was again denied parole in May 2021. The parole board told The Abbotsford News that in 2019 he had assaulted a client while working as a caregiver in the Peer Assisted Living Program.

On August 23, 2021, three months after his parole bid was denied, Terry Driver died at age fifty-six at the Pacific Institution/ Regional Treatment Centre in Abbottsford.  The cause of death was determined to have resulted from a pancreatic attack, i.e. when enzymes and digestive juices attack the pancreas.

Driver Is Done

The letter taped to the wrench which Driver threw in the window of the Abbotsford family in February 1997 included newspaper clippings from the Vancouver Sun of the 1985 murders of three area woman; Linda Tatrai, Colleen Shook, and Kim Stolberg. All three murders are still unsolved.

Eighteen-year-old Vancouver prostitute Linda Tatrai was raped and stabbed to death on February 21, 1985.

After a night of dinner with a friend on September 5, 1985, twenty-four-year-old legal secretary Colleen Shook was found lying on the front lawn of a New Westminster home. She too had been raped and stabbed to death.

Three months later, on December 4, twenty-one-year-old Kim Stolberg was stabbed to death in her father’s Richmond engineering office where she worked as a receptionist. She had gone to the office after hours to call her sister and arrange a surprise party for their parent’s twenty-fifth anniversary. As she was speaking to her sister on the telephone, Kim put her on hold, saying someone was at the door. She never returned to the phone.

Authorities have ruled out Terry Driver as the killer of Kim Stolberg, saying DNA found on her body does not match his. He is still a person of interest in the murders of Lina Tatrai and Colleen Shook.

                        Linda Tatrai      Colleen Shook        Kim Stolberg

Misty Cockerill is now an advocate of victim’s rights and is devoted to helping others who have endured traumatic situations similar to hers.

One of her two daughter’s is named Tanya, after her slain friend.

Misty Is Making a Difference

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75592796/tanya-selina-smith#

 

SOURCES:

• Abbotsford News
• Associated Press
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
• Chilliwack Progress (British Columbia, Canada)
• The Globe and Mail
• Murderpedia
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Vancouver Sun