From the time Ashley Simpson went missing eight years ago, her boyfriend Derek Favell blamed everyone but himself for her disappearance. Days after he murdered the 32-year-old St. Catharines native, he told her mother that she had taken off from their rural trailer after a fight over money.
He told a Facebook friend of mine that he wasn’t even in a relationship with Ashley, saying she was a hooker and he was her driver. He told the RCMP that she was murdered by the Hell’s Angels. And he told his own daughter that he was an innocent victim who had nothing to do with her disappearance.
Even when he was arrested, after taking the cops to her body in the winter of 2021, he pleaded not guilty to the charge of second degree murder. It was only after he saw the evidence against him that he changed his plea to guilty — not because he felt guilty, but because the cops had him over a barrel.
Yesterday, he finally took responsibility for causing Ashley’s death telling the court he felt sorry for the pain he caused Ashley’s family after leaving her uncovered in a ditch for five years. As a father, he said, he couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a child and he would try to be a better person.
It’s hard to imagine he is capable of change. Even at the sentencing, speaking through a Gladue report that described his terrible upbringing, he threw everybody under the bus: the school system for cutting his pony tail, his extended family for getting him into drugs and alcohol, even his own mother for his mental health issues. At ever turn, Derek has blamed everyone else for his actions but himself — even though nobody else was present in that trailer where he murdered Ashley, even though he had no helpers dumping her body.
Thankfully, the judge didn’t buy what he was selling, and sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for 12 years which was the upper limit asked for by the Crown. His background didn’t get him off the hook for torturing the Simpson family for five years. It didn’t excuse him for murdering my cousin in cold blood. And he couldn’t blame his drug use for not just killing the young woman and, in his own words, tossing her into a truck and dumping her in a ditch where she lay, exposed to the elements while her family searched the Salmon Arm area over and over again.
He will now have a lot of time for soul searching, but I will bet dimes to donuts that he will abandon any kind of aboriginal healing or rehabilitation efforts if there is nothing in it for him. Given his past, he will likely choose a team in prison and follow its leader into whatever nefarious activities they are up to.
Because he is only in it for himself.
I hope for the sake of his family, especially his children, Derek Favell has an epiphany. He was clearly embarrassed yesterday when he was told his daughter was in attendance. His children give him a reason to live, and to hope. Maybe the love of his children will be enough to make him a better man.
For their sake, I hope so.
If he does, it will be cold comfort to the Simpson family who will forever have a hole in the centre of their family. They are forever changed by his actions. My hope is that this verdict will give them some amount of peace.
It’s hard to imagine how to right a ship after such an ordeal. But they are strong, and close, and simply amazing.
Rest in peace, Ashley. You did not deserve this fate.
Good explanation of this sad affair. Your cousin didn't deserve this fate.