No parole for Abby Drover's abductor
Raped captive 12-year-old in Port Moody bunker over six months in 1976
CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, December 07, 2006

PRINCE ALBERT, Sask. -- A man who imprisoned and raped a 12-year-old girl in an underground chamber in Port Moody for six months in 1976 was denied parole yesterday.

Donald Alexander Hay, 73, looks like a benign grandfather, with his grey, balding pate, sweater and walker with wheels, but he still blames his crime on alcohol and his belief the neighbour girl had been abused before he kidnapped her.

"I thought I was helping her. That's how I thought," Hay said during a two-hour hearing before a two-member panel of the National Parole Board at Riverbend Institution. Hay has been housed at the minimum-security federal prison since undergoing surgery for an unspecified reason in 2003.

Hay was sentenced in 1977 to life in prison for kidnapping Abby Drover in Port Moody and to a concurrent eight-year term for having sexual intercourse with a minor.

National Parole Board members Dave Scott and Heather Musgrove expressed concern that Hay does not have insight into why he abducted the girl and confined her for 181 days.

After offering Drover a ride to school, Hay locked her in a homemade bomb shelter under his garage, where he raped and tortured her, at times handcuffing her and at other times withholding water and food.

Hay said yesterday that a few days after abducting Drover he offered to release her if she would tell her mother she had run away. He said the girl told him she wouldn't lie. After that, he felt like he was the one being held hostage, he said.

Hay said he was confused and suicidal at the time of the offence.

"I thought I could recapture my youth. That was my way of thinking back then. Now it's ludicrous. You'd have to be an alcoholic to realize how confusing life can be," he said.

Hay disagreed with psychiatric reports which diagnose him as a pedophile, saying he knows himself better than do psychologists, who speak to him to "satisfy their curiosity."

"Each psychologist has to dream up reasons to be original," he said. "I pray for Abby every day, hoping she gets on with her life. I hope she can forget about what I did. I'm 73 and handicapped. I have no animosity to her. I feel sorry for her."

Drover, who eventually married and had children of her own, did not attend the hearing.

Hay is eligible for parole hearings every two years but successive panels have found his risk to reoffend remains too great.

His next hearing is scheduled for December 2008.

© The Vancouver Province 2006