Calls intensify for urgent action on intimate partner violence after 3 women killed in B.C. in a week

July 10, 2025

RED FM News Desk

A Vancouver-based non-profit is urgently demanding action following the alleged killings of three women by their partners in British Columbia over a week.

On June 30, an elderly couple in their 80s died in Abbotsford in what police are describing as a “murder-suicide involving intimate-partner violence.” Days later, on July 4, James Plover allegedly killed his ex-wife, Bailey Plover, in Kelowna and has since been charged with second-degree murder. Most recently, on July 7, a woman in her 60s was found dead in her Surrey home in what police suspect was another case of intimate partner violence. After a brief interaction with police, the armed man believed to be involved was shot and killed by officers when he attempted to attack them.

Police believe all three women were victims of intimate partner violence.

Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS), stressed that these women must not be forgotten, which she says often happens. “That’s one of the problems with murder-suicides, is that we never get to know the victim’s name, because there’s nobody to hold accountable,” MacDougall stated. “The husband is dead, so women just disappear, which is a problem.”

She further commented on the public’s reaction: “If all three women had been killed by a stranger on the street, on a bus and in a courthouse, the reaction would have been different. It probably would have been more swift. But when the killer is a husband or an ex-husband, the urgency disappears, and everybody is just quiet.”