For half a year, the man who came to be known as the Abbotsford killer terrorized the valley community.
On Friday, Oct. 13, 1995, two teenage girls - Tanya Smith, 16, and Misty Cockerill, 15 - were attacked by Terry Driver in the heart of the city. Smith's body was found near the Vedder Canal. Driver had clubbed Cockerill seven times in the head with a baseball bat, but she managed to get to the nearby hospital to tell her story.
The case was a bizarre cat and mouse game; the murderer taunted the public and the police by dumping a gravestone on a vehicle at a local radio station. The killer would call the station and police from local phone booths, saying he would kill again. People, women and girls in particular, deserted the streets at dusk, too afraid to be out on their own.
Dozens of Abbotsford Police officers worked with the RCMP, tracking down the suspect.
The case broke when two things happened: investigators found a complete fingerprint on an envelope that was with an item Driver had thrown into a window. The second was when Driver's own mother recognized his voice on tapes the police made public.
Rod Gehl, a retired Abbotsford police inspector who took the first call from Driver back in 1995, will discuss his book on the case, called, THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: The Search for the Abbotsford Killer-Rod Gehl