Within 10 days, two pedophile child killers were given temporary passes to leave prison

In just a little more than a week, the Parole Board of Canada granted to two B.C. men jailed for murdering children temporary passes to leave prison.

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Both men are pedophiles who committed their crimes in the early 2000s, and whose victims would now be in their 30s. Both men are believed to have been freed into the Victoria area, but their releases were not accompanied by public warnings.

Shane Ertmoed was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2000 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Heather Thomas.

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In a Sept. 2 decision, the parole board granted him 60-day unescorted absences from prison.

Scarcely more than a week later, on Sept. 11, the board then granted the exact same concession to Douglas Lambier, a repeat child sex offender who strangled a nine-year-old boy to death in 2005.

According to a report by the Windsor Star, Lambier is being released from William Head Institution, a minimum-security prison on the outskirts of Victoria, B.C., that has occasionally been dubbed “Club Fed” due to its scenic coastal location and generous amenities, such as an amateur theatre program.

Lambier will be spending his 60 days at a Salvation Army residential facility.

The prison holding Ertmoed was redacted from parole board documents, but Ertmoed was also held at William Head Institution as recently as 2025.

Although both Ertmoed and Lambier were given life sentences, it is standard practice in Canada that even pedophile child murderers will be given unescorted absences from prison, as well as early parole, as part of a program of eventually granting them full release into the community.

In one particularly notorious case, child killer Harold Smeltzer is currently out of prison despite his 1980 abduction and murder of a five-year-old girl who was walking to kindergarten.

Smeltzer began receiving day parole as early as 2008, 27 years after the crime – and would continue obtaining new rounds of parole despite instances of him admitting that he was encountering children in public, and was attracted to them.

Despite receiving a 25-year prison sentence, Ertmoed has been receiving temporary releases since 2021, and his most recent Parole Board decision made reference to his eventual plan to become a plumber.

“At sentencing, the judge described your offence as the most horrific crime known to our law, ‘the killing of a defenceless young girl.’

The judge noted also that you had no remorse,” read the decision, which also noted Ertmoed’s history of “deviant sexual behaviour” leading up to Thomas’s murder.

Nevertheless, the two-member panel decided that Ertmoed’s “risk to re-offend will not be undue,” citing his use of “arousal reducing medication.”

Ertmoed was working as a Surrey construction worker in October 2000 when he lured Thomas into his home on the pretence of looking at picture of birds, before killing her when she resisted sexual assault.

Thomas would have been 36 this year.

In Ertmoed’s most recent parole hearing, as with others, the family of Thomas was in attendance to request that the release be denied. “They do not believe you should have this opportunity and that you should remain in prison until you die. They are fearful that you will re-offend and harm another child,” reads the parole board’s summary of their testimony.

At a similar hearing in 2025, Thomas’s mother Jody Aspin testified “Shane Ertmoed has been victimizing me and my family for the last 24 years … Every time I get that phone call that there is yet another demand, I am paralyzed with fear.”

Lambier has also been granted repeated releases from prison, with this most recent one being his tenth.

In 2005, Lambier was babysitting his victim, step-grandchild Brandon Burchell, when he smothered the boy after the child resisted a sexual assault.

At the time of the murder, Lambier had already been convicted twice before for sexual assaults on children.

Burchell’s family also attended his parole hearing, only to have their request for Lambier’s continued incarceration denied.

“I don’t think this man should be out of prison at all,” said the victim’s mother Tina Gervais, as reported by the Windsor Star. “It’s not safe for any community. I don’t think people like this change. It’s in their DNA. There is no help for this kind of person.”

William Head Institution has twice been the site of high-profile escapes in recent years.

In 2019, William Head inmates James Lee Busch and Zachary Armitage escaped from the prison and proceeded to ambush and murder nearby homeowner Martin Payne.

In June, the prison reported that another murderer, Ernest Jensen, was at large from the facility – only for Jensen’s body to turn up floating in the Pacific Ocean.

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