New York author's book on Kelly Ellard and Reena Virk due out next year

By GREG JOYCE

VANCOUVER (CP) - Young teenaged witnesses at Kelly Ellard's two trials have grown into adults with children, jobs and vastly different lives since they gathered under a bridge where Reena Virk was beaten and later drowned.

The parents of Virk and Ellard have endured years of preliminary hearings and trials. The horror of the attack, the reasons behind it, and the continuing aftermath intrigued writer Rebecca Godfrey from the outset.

The Victoria-born author, now residing in New York, has written a book on the infamous incident that garnered headlines because of the ferocity of the attack and because it involved mostly female teenagers.

The book, Under the Bridge, published in the U.S. by Simon and Schuster and in Canada by Harper Collins, is to be released in June 2005.

"It's a literary narrative that recreates central events and offers portraits of people whose lives were dramatically changed by this event," said Godfrey, who is in Vancouver to attend the second trial.

She also sat through Warren Glowatski's trial in 1999 and Ellard's first trial in 2000.

Glowatski was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 in Virk's killing and was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance for parole for seven years.

The jury in the second Ellard trial began its third day of deliberations Friday after hearing evidence over four weeks from some two dozen witnesses.

She was convicted at her first trial and sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for five years.

The events of that night in Greater Victoria are by now indelibly scarred into most people's minds.

Virk, who was 14, was lured under the bridge by others who had heard rumours about her and planned to beat her up.

Under the bridge, she was set upon by at least eight people including Glowatski and Ellard and beaten to a pulp.

She staggered up the stairs and walked across it, followed according to testimony at the trial by Glowatski and Ellard. There, she was beaten further and drowned in a tidal inlet known as the Gorge waterway.

But the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial because the Crown improperly asked Ellard under cross-examination to explain why the other witnesses were saying the things they did.

In her book, Godfrey promises the book will contain information that has never come out in any of the preliminary hearings or trials.

"There are many players who the public has never read about," said Godfrey, who was born in Toronto and grew up in Victoria.

"I was looking at the question of how did this happen and why.

"An event of this magnitude led to so many moral dilemmas or choices. Some people were heroic, others less so."

What drew Godfrey's interest was the seemingly innocent nature of the beginning of that tragic night Nov. 14, 1997.

"It started out as an average teenagers' night and turned unexpectedly into a night that changed so many people's lives forever. A single act of violence can have such massive repercussions and that is the thing the book is exploring."

Godfrey has seen a metamorphosis of the teens between both the Ellard trials.

"The two main differences are the witnesses were teens then and now in their early 20s," she said.

"During the assault trial (for six other female teens) and the Glowatski trial and Ellard's first trial, many people said they didn't seem to understand the significance or horror of the event.

"But this time as they recounted the events the assault under bridge they seemed much more saddened and aware of the significance."

She said many of them came across at the earlier trials as "often defiant and detached and resentful of authority. This time all of them seemed more mature and adult."

Her first novel, The Torn Skirt, also explored the travails of adolescence and was set in Victoria.

Like everyone in the jam-packed courtroom listening to Ellard's every word, Godfrey noticed how Ellard's latest testimony had changed.

"Her first cross-examination was cursory and flat and she didn't sob. This time it seemed like a battle of wills between (Crown prosecutor Catherine) Murray and Ellard.

"People are drawn to the case perhaps because there is no smoking gun, no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon. So the truth is more elusive."

The public doesn't realize that many of these witnesses, who were 14 or 15 at the time, "have been subjected to often brutal cross-examination again and again.

"The intent of cross-examination is basically to demolish a person so these kids have had to endure that by various brilliant and skilled lawyers during preliminary hearings, the assault trial, the Glowatski trial and two Ellard trials.

"One witness even compared it to being held hostage."