Man who murdered his mother decides he's a she, is granted day parole
Clayton Warkentin killed Lois Unger in her home in 2016, is now living as a woman, served her time in a female prison, and was granted day parole this week after 6.5 years behind bars
Jacked up on steroids and cocaine, Clayton Jacob Warkentin asphyxiated his mother Lois Unger in her Yarrow home on Feb. 24, 2016. He then dragged her body to the garage, hung her by a noose and stabbed her in the neck post-mortem, a crude attempt to make it look like a suicide.
After pleading guilty to second-degree murder in 2018, Warkentin was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years.
He was sent to Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, a multi-level prison for men on King Road near Highway 1. Soon after his sentence began, apparently tired of being sexually assaulted, according to a source inside the institution, Warkentin decided he was a she.
Welcome to the world, Natalie Warkova.
Warkentin/Warkova was granted day parole at a hearing in Abbotsford yesterday (Jan. 21, 2025), according to a family member. The matricidal trans woman will be living in Vancouver. She is not allowed to contact the family, and is banned from visiting Abbotsford or Chilliwack unless given permission from a parole officer.
The last time family members saw Warkova she had long, blonde hair and was skinny. But this week I was told she cut her hair off, apparently has been working out, and looks more like he did at the time of the murder (and the photo above).
[Note: I apologize if it is confusing but I alternate between pronouns in this article because the events span nearly a decade, the first part of which Warkentin was a he, the latter a she. The first sentence in the next paragraph is particularly perplexing in this regard - PJH]
Just five years and five months after his sentence, on Dec. 1, 2023, relatives told me she had a hearing to see if she could have escorted releases. Why did the killer have a release/parole hearing seemingly so soon after he was sentenced, serving at the most eight years with a 1.5-to-1 calculation to include his pre-sentence custody? I don't know. But I was told that despite entreaties from relatives of his mother whom he murdered, he, now she, was granted the right to visit with her father. She was also permitted to go to Vancouver for transgender group meetings, and she was going to work at a food bank in Abbotsford.
"He's blaming it all on [that] he was on drugs and didn't know what was happening," a family member told me back in 2023. "He has done all his treatments in prison so they feel he is not a risk to the public now that he is a transgender. He sees who he really is."
An emotional hearing
Tears flowed in courtroom 202 in B.C. Supreme Court in Chilliwack on July 18, 2018 as, one-by-one, victim impact statements were read aloud following Warkentin's confession that he murdered his mother a year-and-a-half prior.
He asphyxiated 51-year-old Lois Unger in her Yarrow home on Feb. 24, 2016 tried to make it look like a suicide.
His family was horrified by the 19-year-old's acts.
“I struggle to trust people as one of the people I trusted most, my baby brother, killed my mother,” Clayton’s older brother Logan said in a victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing after the then 21-year-old’s guilty plea to second-degree murder.
“How do I tell my children that their uncle killed their grandmother?”
Warkentin was charged with first-degree murder, and while an element of pre-planning existed, Crown agreed it wasn’t enough to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
He pleaded guilty to the lesser-included charge of second-degree murder on Jan. 30, 2018, which still comes with a mandatory life sentence. The only question was parole eligibility of between 10 to 25 years. Crown counsel Grant Lindsey and Warkentin’s lawyer Gary Botting put forward a joint submission for 10 years.
It has now been six years, six months, and six days since he was sentenced on July 18, 2018. With credit for time served at, I thought, two years and seven months, that's a little under nine years two months of jail time. These calculations are tricky and I do not have access to the file and the precise dates, so presumably the justice system arrived at 10 years served by him/her, which is the minimum required for the possibility of parole in his life sentence.
In reading from an agreed statement of facts back in 2018, Lindsey explained how Warkentin became obsessed with body building at the age of 15. Along with the body building came the use of steroids and human growth hormone. To counteract the soporific effects of the steroids, he was using heavy doses of caffeine, something that later led to cocaine use and his subsequent dealing in the narcotic.
Heavy steroid and cocaine user, Clayton Warkentin told friends he might kill his mother for money he owed to drug dealer. On Feb. 24, 2016 he asphyxiated the 51-year-old to death in her Yarrow home.
— Paul J. Henderson (@PeeJayAitch) January 30, 2018
“Using cocaine did not help his financial situation,” Lindsey told the court, a reality that led Warkentin to desperate measures to fend off real or perceived threats from drug dealers to whom he owed money.
Witnesses in his circle of friends told Crown counsel that Warkentin said he might kill his mother for the insurance money, a level of planning that led to the charge of first-degree murder. This was later suggested as nothing more than a sick joke, something Lindsey said the Crown accepted in order to allow for the plea to the lesser-included charge of second-degree murder.
Unger was fearful enough of Warkentin to have instituted an emergency plan with a close friend, a plan that had to be put into place on at least one evening prior to the murder when he showed up at her house unannounced.
The night of the killing, he was at the home on Yarrow Central Road at Unger’s invitation for a mother-son visit. He had consumed half an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce) of cocaine, and as the cocaine wore off, his deep-seeded rage grew.
Lindsey said that Warkentin did not remember what happened next, although he later agreed to the outline as concluded by the forensic investigation. After asphyxiating her to death in the bathroom, he brought his mother’s body to the garage where he affixed a noose around her neck, stabbed her in the neck post-mortem, then placed the knife in her hand.
Trans rights confound the justice system
After he became a she, Warkentin/Warkova was transferred to Fraser Valley Institution for Women (FVIW) as per Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) policy. FVIW is right next door to Pacific Institution and in between Pacific and Matsqui Institution.
It was at FVIW that Warkova used her intact man parts to get at least one female inmate pregnant, a source inside the institution told me in 2022.
Presumably unrelated to this case, it was around this time (May 9, 2022 to be exact) that CSC put into place "Commissioner's directive 100: Gender diverse offenders," to address inmates who identify as something other than what they were born as.
In part, that policy states that all transfer requests to a different institution are assessed on a case-by-case basis by a parole officer at the sending institution. In the case of a transfer to a women's institution, such as Warkova's, included in that assessment is a "security reclassification scale" completed by a parole officer at the receiving institution. This is meant to "identify any health or safety concerns, including mitigation strategies and accommodation measures considered at both sites, and why these measures were accepted or rejected and deemed sufficient or insufficient."
While that government-speak is painful, and there is a lot of red tape in this policy, and several bureaucratic steps to be taken regarding gender-diverse inmates, in practice, if a man says he's a woman and wants to go to a female institution, CSC allows it.
After printing a story about this case in 2022, writing that Warkentin "continues to serve his sentence in the Pacific Institution," I was contacted by someone who worked at the women's prison next door.
"You didn't hear it from me but ... 'she' now serves at Fraser Valley Institution for Women," the source told me. "Oh and 'she' has a 19-year-old girlfriend now too. We have had sexual assaults, pregnancies and who knows what else since we became 'coed.' I see no coverage of this in the media."
The source suggested I file freedom of information requests to find out more, which I did. My request to CSC was to find out how many inmates born and sentenced as a male had transitioned to female and been moved to female institutions in the five years prior (to 2022) in British Columbia. After many months, the response I received was "one."
Anecdotally, I have heard that many more have done this since then.
"I am not anti-trans or in any way opposed to LGBTQ people or their rights, however, CSC began transferring anatomically correct male inmates to female institutions without any policy framework in place," the institutional source told me in 2022. "They may tell you something different but it is spin. We recently had to emergency transfer one inmate back east after several credible reports were brought forward of inappropriate behaviour culminating in sexual assaults. Management ignored correctional officer reports, but were forced to take action after a contract psychologist was having a session with an inmate who reported what had been occurring."
What is clear is that government officials and political leaders are terrified of this topic. On the one hand is the real fear of lawsuits over ignoring the rights of gender diverse people. On the other hand is a sentiment that may be growing regarding the trans question and it sucking up an outsized amount of media attention, stoked as it is by the radical religious right and other anti-LGBTQ pundits.
Gonnae no dae that Prime Minister
On Feb. 15, 2023, Scotland's Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon resigned from her post and as leader of the Scottish National Party, allegedly because of this exact issue.
“I’ve had more abuse hurled at me over the issue of trans rights than probably any other issue I’ve discussed, including Scottish independence probably, so it has been really, really difficult,” Sturgeon said at a public speaking event in May 2024, according to a the Daily Telegraph.
It was a perfect storm in Scotland. Right around the time Sturgeon's government passed the Gender Reform Act, in part to lower the age people could change their legal gender from 18 to 16, and remove the requirement of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, two prison transfers raised eyebrows.
Isla Bryson identified as a woman in January 2023 when she was convicted of two rapes committed prior to her gender change, when she was Adam Graham. Bryson was sentenced to eight years and was remanded to Cornton Vale women's prison, prompting an outcry from the publilc, before she was transferred to HMP Edinburgh, a male prison in that city.
Then it got worse. Still in January 2023, Tiffany Scott, who was previously known as a man called Andrew Burns who was serving an indeterminate sentence due to a history violence and stalking a 13-year-old girl from prison by sending her letters, was due to be moved to a female prison estate.
Justice Secretary Keith Brown then announced a pause on the transfer of transgender prisoners with a history of violence against women, to women's prisons. A review of the practice was undertaken by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS).
All this seems to be an example of how extreme cases can prompt oversized uproar. In a BBC interview, Sturgeon pointed out that the transgender population in prison was tiny, at 0.2 per cent and that she had confidence in how the SPS was managing them. SPS data reported by the BBC in 2023 found there were a total of 15 transgender prisoners in all of Scottish prisons, seven in men's prisons (one man, six women), and eight in women's prisons (three men, five. women).
At the same speaking engagement quoted above in May 2024, Sturgeon said pointed to what appears to be a widespread issue in the western world, namely, “it seems like everyone in society is raining down on trans people” and that they were increasingly being used as “a battering ram” in political debate.
Incidentally, the violent offender Tiffany Scott died in prison 11 months ago, according to the SPS.
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Paul J. Henderson
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