Teen who bludgeoned girl loses appeal

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This article was published 19/04/2018 (2197 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Wabowden teen sentenced to life in prison for the 2011 murder of a 14-year-old intellectually disabled girl has lost an appeal for a lesser sentence.

Bo Junior Anderson was sentenced as an adult for the second-degree murder of the innocent and trusting girl, who had the cognitive abilities of a seven- or eight-year-old. He was 16 when he bludgeoned her to death with a rock after offering her $5 to have sex with him. He killed her because he was worried about being made fun of in the community of about 500 people if others found out they had sex and didn’t want to become a “laughing stock” if the girl told others what had happened.

For three years, the murder was unsolved, and the teen repeatedly denied it to police and tried to blame others until he was eventually confronted with DNA evidence. His defence team argued he should have been sentenced as a youth, with a maximum seven-year sentence, because of his immaturity at the time of the killing, and because the sentencing judge failed to properly consider his Indigenous background.

In a decision released Thursday, Manitoba’s top court dismissed his appeal for a youth sentence. A youth sentence wouldn’t have been long enough to hold Anderson accountable for this “horrific” crime, Appeal Court Justice Christopher Mainella wrote in his decision, also signed by Justice Freda Steel and Justice William Burnett.

“The purposeful cover-up of the murder in its immediate aftermath and the young person’s moral fortitude to carry on with the concealment of his responsibility for years in a small community looking for some answer to the mystery is nothing short of extraordinary,” Mainella wrote. “It is noteworthy that, as he aged and matured, he did not deviate from the path he first embarked upon years earlier when he covered the victim’s body with vegetation and hid the murder weapon: to get away with murder.”

The appeal court decided the sentencing judge did make “an error in principle” by failing to consider Gladue factors in this case, but because an adult sentence for second-degree murder has an automatic life sentence, the Gladue factors would have been “inconsequential.”

The teen was caught three years after the murder after he submitted a voluntary DNA sample to RCMP, forgetting about a bloody sock he’d left at the crime scene. The girl’s body was discovered the day after she died, and for years her killer “hid in plain sight,” the Appeal Court decision noted.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca