HALIFAX, N.S. — A parole board hearing scheduled for June 18, will give a Nova Scotia convicted killer a chance to persuade members and the public that she is not the same person who admitted to packing twine in the trunk of her car in 2008 before murdering her 12-year-old daughter.
Now 51, Penny Boudreau is serving a life sentence at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, Nova Scotia, where she works as a cleaner and orders groceries for her unit. Seventeen years ago, Judge Margaret Stewart sentenced Boudreau to 20 years without eligibility for full parole for confessing to killing her only child, Karissa. That would have meant a release date of June 13, 2028. However, under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, she is now eligible to apply for unescorted passes, including day parole, three years prior to completing that sentence.
Because this is Boudreau’s first application for unescorted time away from jail, it automatically prompts a review by way of a hearing. Under the Act, she is now eligible for day parole for rehabilitative purposes that allows an offender to participate in community-based activities in preparation for full parole or statutory release. Offenders must return nightly to a halfway house unless otherwise authorized by the Parole Board of Canada. In addition to standard conditions of day parole, the Parole Board may also impose special conditions that an offender must abide by during release.
Boudreau’s decision to apply for unescorted release — viewed by the public as “early” release — has provoked a backlash in a case that has gripped Atlantic Canada for almost two decades. Etched in many people’s memory is the mother’s televised pleas for the public’s help finding her daughter as she concocted a story to make people believe her child was alive and may have been abducted from a grocery store parking lot.
Emotions are already running high in Nova Scotia where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are still searching for two other local children, Lilly and Jack Sullivan, who have been missing since May 2, after their mother and stepfather reported the kids wandered off from home. The disappearance of those children without a trace stirred up memories of Boudreau who committed what many think of as an unthinkable rare crime: filicide.
On Jan. 27, 2008, Penny Boudreau was a 33-year-old cashier living with her boyfriend who worked at the same grocery store in Bridgewater, a small town of less than 9,000 people on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. Karissa had recently moved in with the couple in their small two-bedroom apartment after living with her father. But the new arrangement caused friction for all of them.
Karissa’s diaries revealed how she resented living with the boyfriend. That Sunday afternoon, the mother and daughter went for a drive to have a heart-to-heart chat about the house rules and conflict the pre-teen and her mom were having, said Penny at the time. A winter storm set in and shortly before 6 p.m., Penny Boudreau ducked into the grocery store to pick up a few things while Karissa stayed in the car. As she exited the store, she claimed Karissa had disappeared and, two hours later, called 911 to report her daughter missing. The grade six child could be out in a snowstorm in a hoodie, vest, jeans and pink Crocs on her feet.
For 13 days, there was a frantic search involving helicopters, police dogs and worried people across southern Nova Scotia. People in Bridgewater raised money to help the family as they watched the young mother plead on TV for help finding Karissa. “Karissa, we love you. We are all looking for you, just come home or call or something,” Boudreau urged.
Police contacted Karissa’s friends, including Courtney Sarty, to check their backyards to see if the child may be hiding. “I thought she ran off,” Sarty recalled 17 years later. “I was so afraid. I kept sending her messages on MSN back then urging her to let somebody know where you are and that you are OK.”
Two weeks later, Karissa’s frozen body was discovered on the LaHave riverbank less than five minutes from Boudreau’s apartment. RCMP launched an undercover operation as they focused on Penny’s boyfriend after receiving reports of yelling and fighting at their small apartment. In an elaborate plan that targeted Boudreau’s boyfriend for months, investigators tried to determine whether the couple played a role in Karissa’s death.
By June 2008, they had cleared the boyfriend and set up a Mr. Big fake crime organization scenario to elicit a confession from Boudreau. Not realizing she was speaking to police, Boudreau re-enacted how she strangled her daughter on a deserted road.
Initially, Boudreau was charged with first-degree murder but later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, giving up her right to a trial that spared family members who had already been through agony. During the sentencing, Judge Stewart told her: “You can never call yourself ‘mother’ in conjunction with Karissa’s name again, and the words ‘Mommy don’t’ from a trusting and loving Karissa are there to haunt you the rest of your natural life.”
At the June 18 hearing, parole board members will consider whether Boudreau is a risk to society. They will review her psychological risk assessments that have consistently found Boudreau was in a dysfunctional relationship at the time of the murder and feared being abandoned by her boyfriend. She’s no longer in touch with him according to previous parole board decisions.
Because of her model behaviour in jail for the past seven years, Boudreau has regularly been granted escorted temporary absences to leave jail for several hours under supervision to attend church services, Bible study meetings and, more recently, to visit a friend she met in the congregation.
Personal development is part of her rehabilitation, according to the decisions. After a file review in March, two parole board members concluded Boudreau’s risk to society is low and the board does not consider Boudreau as “presenting an undue risk to society,” wrote the members in their March decision to let Boudreau attend church travelling in a Correctional Service Canada vehicle.
However, they did comment on police opposition to any further “liberal release.” “It is their opinion that you were issued a life sentence with no parole before 20 years served which needs to be followed,” they wrote of the unnamed police agency.
The Parole Board of Canada has received victim impact statements and a host of letters (a signed petition at one point) opposed to any type of release. For those opposed to Boudreau being granted further freedoms, there is still a “deep sense of loss and grief, be it family members, friends or the community at large. The grief and opposition to your release continues to this day,” the parole board members wrote.
Whether jail is intended to punish someone convicted of a crime or a place to protect society until the inmate is rehabilitated is the thorny issue that divides not only the people of Nova Scotia, but politicians and Canadians.
During the recent federal election, the Conservative party vowed to re-emphasize the rights of victims and safety of communities over the rights of criminals. “The residents of the South Shore, Halifax and communities across Canada deserve to feel safe in their own neighbourhoods,” read a press release issued by Rick Perkins, the former Conservative MP for South-Shore-St. Margarets, who lost his seat.
“Like many Nova Scotians, I am appalled to learn that Penny Boudreau…has been on day passes from prison and could soon be granted unescorted leave from prison,” he said in the statement released April 25.
There will be submissions at the June 18 hearing from those impacted by Karissa’s murder. Courtney Sarty, who has the date Karissa died tattooed on her right arm, Until We Meet Again, above a yellow rose for friendship and a pink one, Karissa’s favourite colour, is unequivocal: “I think she should serve what she was sentenced to. I read that her assessment to reoffend is really low and that she’s not probable to commit the same crime,” said Sarty.
But she’s not convinced that the counselling Boudreau received during her prison stay is a guarantee she would not react again in a similar situation. “Killing Karissa was unprovoked, so who is to say it wouldn’t take the right situation for her to do something again.”
She urged the parole board to be fair. “If she is given parole, I don’t think she should have access to children whatsoever,” said Sarty, now a 29-year-old mother studying to become a licensed practical nurse.
Boudreau is estranged from her family since the murder but has befriended a pastor at a church she attends in an undisclosed community. The pastor has confirmed Boudreau will receive continued support as she works her way towards proving she can successfully integrate back into society.
The Corrections Conditional Release Act allows for an inmate to apply for day parole and unescorted passes as part of assisting the rehabilitation of offenders and their reintegration into the community as law-abiding citizens through the provision of programs in penitentiaries and in the community.
The Conservatives focused on toughening up the chance for early parole for criminals convicted of multiple murders. Leader Pierre Poilievre promised to use Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, known as the Notwithstanding Clause, to reintroduce the Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act, which the Supreme Court of Canada struck down in 2022 because, in their opinion, it violates an offender’s Charter rights.
The Supreme Court’s decision has impacted the sentences of some of Canada’s most notorious killers like Alexandre Bissonnette, who was serving a life in prison with no chance of parole for 40 years for shooting and killing six people in a Quebec Mosque in 2017. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Bissonnette will be eligible for parole after serving 25 years.
The decision doesn’t affect Boudreau, who was convicted of one murder (not multiple murders). She is required to provide her DNA and is prohibited from owning weapons for her lifetime. She has no previous offences that offer insight into her mindset at the time of the murder. She has referenced experiencing low self-esteem, a sense of inadequacy and fears of abandonment, according to her psychological risk assessments in her prison file.
Her assessments described her overall risk for unescorted absences and/or day parole was “generally low.” These ratings, it said, have withstood the test of many years of incarceration and would not be expected to change unless “you were in an unhealthy relationship which is currently not a concern.” It also noted Boudreau has recently spoken of “how you work through the many emotions that come with accepting the offence you committed, daily feelings of guilt and shame.”
Boudreau toured a community residential facility — halfway house — last December and met with the director. The location remains confidential. In March, the Parole Board of Canada acknowledged recent threats made to Boudreau’s personal safety increase the need for security and suggested any measures necessary will be taken when Boudreau appears before the hearing.
Today, there is still a memorial for Karissa on the LaHave riverbank where her body was found. Sarty goes there when she is struggling to make sense of how her friend’s mother, a woman she knew, could forsake her unconditional love for her daughter.
“I have my own son and my love is deep. He could curse me and put me down to the lowest, and I’m still going to look at him and say, ‘I love you.”
Sherri Aikenhead is a Nova Scotia author of Mommy Don’t: From Mother to Murderer, The true story of Penny and Karissa Boudreau.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.
