The Big Picture

• Reena Virk's murder by her peers led to national panic about girl-on-girl violence in Canada.
• Seven teens including Kelly Ellard were charged, but their racial backgrounds influenced the case.
• Virk's murderers, Glowatski and Ellard, received different sentences and are currently serving time.

A teenage girl murdered in cold blood, accused of spreading rumors about one of her classmates. A police officer trying to make her way through a male-dominated field. An author returning to her hometown to try to understand the circumstances of such a gruesome crime. Hulu’s new true crime drama, Under the Bridge, based on the book of the same name by Rebecca Godfrey, seems like a promising enterprise for fans of the genre. Starring Daisy Jones and the Six’s Riley Keough as Godfrey and Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone as Officer Cam Bentland, the series is set to drop on April 17.

The story is, of course, a real one, albeit with the customary fictionalized additions to make it more suitable for television. The show focuses on the killing of Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), a Canadian teen of South Asian origin who left home for a party and never came back. Her murder at the hands of seven of her peers shook the small community of Saanich, in Greater Victoria, on Vancouver Island — a community that Godfrey herself used to belong to growing up.

It's a shocking story and one that took the media by storm, leading to a nationwide moral panic about girl-on-girl violence. It’s also definitely the kind of material that true crime dramas are made of. But what is the reality behind Under the Bridge? What is the true story of the murder of Reena Virk?

Who Was Reena Virk, the Teenager Whose Murder Inspired ‘Under the Bridge’?

Described by Godfrey in a Vice article as a “a shy, yearning, 14-year-old South Asian girl with broad shoulders and uneasy eyes” who “chafed against the rules” of her strict, Jehovah’s Witness parents, Virk was murdered on November 14, 1997. She had left home to attend a regular Friday night teenage gathering on the field behind Shoreline School. When the police showed up, the party dispersed, and the kids regrouped under the Craigflower Bridge, near Victoria’s Gorge Waterway.

That’s where things got ugly. Accused of stealing a notebook from an unidentified girl whom Godfrey dubs “Josephine” (Chloe Guidry) and spreading nasty rumors about her, Virk was surrounded by a group of six of her peers between the ages of 14 and 16. The beating began after one of the girls tried to put out a cigarette on Virk’s head, and soon a 16-year-old boy had joined in as well. Most of the other kids that were around walked away, with just one girl reportedly trying to put an end to it all. Virk escaped with her life and made her way to a nearby bus stop, but two of her assailants, whose names would become well-known by the Canadian public, followed her and dragged her back. Her body was discovered in the gorge by police officers eight days later. According to the coroner who performed the autopsy, Virk drowned to death, but her injuries were so severe that she would’ve likely died either way.

But the rumor mill had already started spinning a few days before Virk’s body was found. Teens that had been present at the gathering started talking about what had happened to Reena, and soon the police heard about the possible murder of a girl who had been reported missing by her parents. On November 21, a day prior to the discovery of Virk’s body, Warren Glowatski (Javon 'Wanna' Walton), the aforementioned 16-year-old boy, was arrested and charged with the murder of Reena Virk. Seven girls were also taken in, including Kelly Ellard (Izzy G.), who would eventually become the face of the crime and receive the nickname “Killer Kelly” from the media.

What Happened to Reena Virk’s Killers?

According to witnesses, Ellard was the most vicious of Virk’s assailants and even bragged about smoking a cigarette while she held her victim’s head underwater with her foot. Thus, though she was only 15 at the time of the crime, it was decided that she would be tried as an adult. As for Glowatski, Godfrey remarks that he was the one that looked the most the part of the criminal, as he fitted a series of stereotypes: he lived in a trailer park and came from a broken home; he had an alcoholic mother and frequently told others that he was a gang member. According to Godfrey, "though he'd never met Reena before, and though he was not part of Josephine and Kelly's plan, he'd kicked Reena ferociously under the bridge, and the next day showed up at his girlfriend Syreeta's home, asking her to bleach the blood out of his pants." The author also remarks that, according to Syreeta’s statement, Warren was interrogated for hours without the presence of his parents or a lawyer.

It was during this initial phase that Godfrey’s interest in the case first sparked. The author, who passed away from lung cancer in 2022, recalls hearing about the murder from The New York Times as she was in the process of wrapping up her first novel, The Torn Skirt, about a group of teenage girls who get involved in a crime. “My friends and family started calling me, saying, ‘Your novel has happened in real life’,” she recalls in a 2019 interview. “I was curious about the case, and if there were parallels, who these girls were, if I knew anyone involved.”

In 1998, the trials started for real. Three unidentified girls pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm, and three others were charged with aggravated assault. They received sentences ranging from 60 days conditional to one year in jail for participating in the initial beating. As for Glowatski and Ellard, though both maintained that they had not killed Virk, they were charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Glowatski received seven years without the chance of parole, while Ellard got the lightest sentence possible given her verdict: five years without parole.

“The killer was given all kinds of breaks and sympathy because she looked like a nice, white girl from a 'good' family,” Godfrey stated. “If Reena had been accused of the murder of a white girl, I don’t think she would have been given the same assumption of innocence. And the girls of color who were charged with assault were treated terribly on the stand; it was implied that one of them was the 'real' killer - I assume lawyers thought that might stick with the jury because she was dark-skinned, tough-looking, and had been in foster care.”

Where Are Warren Glowatski and Kelly Ellard Now?

The trials, as well as the many appeals that followed, were muddled by complicating factors. Ellard accused Josephine of being the killer, while, in 2004, a witness testified that Glowatski had paid her to spread rumors concerning Ellard’s involvement with the murder. However, both are still serving their sentences. Ellard eventually served the same time without parole as Glowatski, receiving day parole in 2017. She claimed to have taken Virk to the gorge to splash water on her face so that she would wake up. In 2022, she declined the chance at full parole, claiming that she wasn’t ready.

Things were a lot different for Glowatski, who was granted full parole in 2010, after three years of day parole. He admitted to the crime and even met up with Virk’s parents. "If I had a child and this happened to my child, you bet your ass I'd be seething with anger," he told the two-member parole board panel, according to The Globe and Mail. Reena’s father, Manjit Virk (Ezra Faroque Khan), however, merely told him to do good with his life. He has participated in restorative justice programs with Virk’s parents, as well as in First Nations' justice programs, having found out after his imprisonment that he is of Métis origin.

Turned into a fierce anti-bullying activist after the death of her daughter, Virk’s mother, Suman, also came to forgive the killers. “If I don’t forgive them, then I will be behaving in the same way that they did when they had no forgiveness for Reena on the night that they murdered her,” she’s quoted as saying in her 2018 obituary. Manjit Virk also has a 2008 book on the life and death of his daughter, titled Reena: A Father’s Story.

The first two episodes of Under the Bridge premiere on Hulu on April 17 in the U.S.

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