We take a look at some of Canada's most notorious serial killers, some of whom will be in prison until they die, with no chance of parole.
This is a list of notable serial killers from Canada, ranked by number of proven victims (deadliest):
| # | Name: | Number of victims: |
| 20. | Bobby Jack Fowler | 1 – 20 |
| 19. | Scott William Cox | 2 – 20 |
| 18. | Camille Cleroux | 3 |
| 17. | Christian Magee | 3 |
| 16. | Paul Bernardo | 3 – 5 |
| 15. | Cody Legebokoff | 4 |
| 14. | Wayne Boden | 4 |
| 13. | Leopold Dion | 4 |
| 12. | Peter Woodcock | 4 |
| 11. | John Martin Crawford | 4 – 4+ |
| 10. | William Dean Christenson | 4 – 4+ |
| 9. | Allan Legere | 5 – 5+ |
| 8. | William Patrick Fyfe | 5 – 9-25 |
| 7. | Robert Pickton | 6 – 49 |
| 6. | Russell Maurice Johnson | 7 – 7+ |
| 5. | Michael Wayne McGray | 7 – 18+ |
| 4. | Gilbert Paul Jordan | 8 – 10 |
| 3. | Clifford Olson | 11 – 11+ |
| 2. | "Highway of Tears" Killer | 18 – 43 |
| 1. | Earle Nelson | 22 – 25 |
(See also 7 Myths About Serial Killers)
(See also The Last Words of 30 Famous Serial Killers)
(See also Top 30 Intelligent Serial Killers With Highest IQ)
(See also Top 30 Serial Killers By Number of Victims (20th century))
20. Bobby Jack Fowler (1 – 20)
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| (Bobby Jack Fowler; Fowler's booking photo in Lincoln County, Oregon, 1995) |
Bobby Jack Fowler (June 12, 1939 – May 15, 2006) was an American and a native of Texas serial killer and rapist active in the United States and Canada. He died in prison of lung cancer during a 16-year sentence following a conviction for rape, kidnapping and attempted rape in Newport, Oregon, in 1996 (for an attack that took place in 1995).
Classification: Murderer (Serial killer?)
Characteristics: Rapist
Number of victims: 1 - 20 +
Date of murders: 1973 - 1995
Date of arrest: June 28, 1995
Date of birth: June 12, 1939
Victims profile: Colleen MacMillen, 16
Method of murder: Strangulation
Location: Oregon, USA / British Columbia, Canada
Status: Sentenced to 16 years in prison on January 8, 1996. Died in prison on May 15, 2006
Fowler was a transient construction worker who is known to have travelled extensively across North America. He spent time "rabbiting around" North America to such places as British Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, Oregon, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee and Washington State.
During his travels he developed an extensive criminal record and is known to have committed several violent crimes. An alcoholic, amphetamine and methamphetamine user Fowler's criminal record ranged from attempted murder and sexual assault to firearms offenses.
In 1969 he was charged with murdering a man and woman in Texas but was only convicted of discharging a firearm within city limits. Fowler also spent time in a Tennessee prison for sexual assault and attempted murder because, in the words of an investigator, "he tied [a woman] up, beat the hell out of her with her own belt, covered her with brush and left her to die."
He liked to travel far and wide in beat up old cars, frequently picked up hitchhikers and spent time in bars and motels. Fowler believed that women he came into contact with hitchhiking and in bars wanted to be sexually assaulted.
Suspected victims
Fowler is a suspect or person of interest in at least 16 murders in British Columbia and Oregon dating as far back as 1969.
Highway of Tears
Fowler is a suspect in the Highway of Tears murders. His DNA was found on the body of Colleen MacMillen, one of the presumed victims. Fowler is also strongly suspected to have killed both Gale Weys and Pamela Darlington in 1973. The RCMP believe that he may have also killed as many as ten of the other victims, and possibly as many as 20.
Potential Canadian victims include mostly First Nation girls reported missing from Highway 16, a 724 km roadway dubbed the 'Highway of Tears' due to the high number of murders and disappearances of young women beginning in the 1970s; however, three of these murders occurred after Fowler's imprisonment in 1996.
Other murders
May 3, 1992, just after midnight, around 1:00 a.m. Sheila Swanson, 19 and Melissa Sanders, 17 were last seen making a call from a payphone near the Beverly Beach State Park where they had been camping. Their bodies were later discovered on October 10, 1992, by hunters in a wooded area near Eddyville, Oregon.
January 28, 1995 just after midnight, around 1:00 a.m. Jennifer Esson, 16 and Kara Leas, 16 are last seen walking on NW 56th Street in Newport, Oregon walking toward Highway 101 near Moolack Beach after leaving a friends house. Their strangled bodies were later discovered on February 15, 1995, by loggers in a wooded area, covered up with brush.
Arrest and investigation
On June 28, 1995, Fowler was arrested following an incident which involved a woman jumping out of a Tides Inn motel in Newport, Oregon motel window with a still rope tied to her ankle. She survived the attack and reported her harrowing tale to the local police.
On January 8, 1996, Fowler was convicted of Kidnapping in the 1st Degree, Attempted Rape in the 1st Degree, Sexual Abuse in the 1st Degree, Coercion, Assault in the Fourth Degree, and Menacing. He was sentenced to 195 months (16 years, 3 months) with the possibility of parole.
On 25 September 2012 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Lincoln County District Attorney Rob Bovett named Bobby Jack Fowler as a suspect in three of the Highway of Tears murders. His DNA was found on the body of Colleen MacMillen, one of the presumed victims.
Death
In May 2006, Fowler died at the age of 66 in Oregon State Penitentiary from lung cancer.
19. Scott William Cox (2 – 20+)
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| (Scott William Cox) |
Scott William Coxwas (born 1962) is a convicted American and Canadian serial killer. Stabbed one prostitute and strangled another in Portland. Suspected in more than 20 others murders, including the 1988 homicide of Snohomish County transient Hazel Gelnett and the 1990 murder of Tia Hicks, a Seattle woman whose body was found in Montlake Terrace. Also suspected of raping and trying to kill a Seattle prostitute in May 1991.
Classification: Serial killer?
Characteristics: Long-haul trucker - Rape
Number of victims: 2 - 20 +
Date of murders: 1980's - 1991
Date of arrest: May 30, 1991
Date of birth: 1962
Victims profile: Rheena Ann Brunson / Victoria Rhone (prostitutes)
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife - Strangulation
Location: Several States USA / Canada
Status: Pleaded no contest in September 1993 to two counts of intentional murder, and is serving a 25-year term in Oregon
Serial killers prey on 'the less dead'
By Mike Barber - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Leonard Hicks and Deborah McDaniel thought they were doing what responsible parents ought to do, that day in 1990 when they told police their daughter, Tia, was missing.
Hicks signed the missing-person report at 2:20 p.m. Dec. 13 and the couple gave a picture to the Seattle police community service officer, who said she would pass it on to a detective.
Hicks hadn't heard from Tia since Nov. 19, when he had dropped her off near the Elbow Room Cafe in Columbia City. She had been visiting him and her grandfather and needed a ride home. So Hicks dropped her off, planning to go cash a check to give her some money later.
But Tia vanished.
At first, Hicks didn't think much about it. Tia, 20, sometimes dropped out of sight for days at a time. But as days stretched into weeks, he called police.
Hicks was frank with the Seattle detective who responded the day after the missing-person report was filed, saying that Tia had a drug problem and sometimes was out of touch. He wanted to tell everything he knew, to help them find Tia.
The detective heard it a different way. In his report, he wrote that Hicks "explained . . . this is not the first time that Tia had not come home in several days."
The report was filed away as "unfounded" and purged from state and national crime computers.
"The police concluded Tia was not a minor, was of age and there was not much they could do," said her mother, who lives in Federal Way.
Six months would pass before police learned that Tia had been murdered.
It's impossible to say whether a better response would have saved Tia or led police to her killer. Seattle police now say they've fixed their system -- with sweeping changes coming last year after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked about problems such as the Hicks case.
But even before police knew Tia was dead the only suspect in her murder had killed two women in Oregon -- entering the ranks of known Northwest serial killers.
"Officers take a chance with such cases by sloughing them off as 'just doing drugs or prostitution,' and they can get away with it -- until that one case like Tia's comes along where they should have taken it more seriously," said Tom Jensen, a veteran King County detective who took up Tia's case when no one else would.
Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent who has interviewed dozens of serial killers and helped start the bureau's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program -- ViCAP -- said that's a lesson more departments need to learn.
"That's just common sense, but it's something that police continue to fall down on," Ressler said. "If they really hit it hard, they can probably prevent a killer from getting his next victim."
Ressler and other experts in the field know that serial killers, the sexual psychopaths and sociopaths whose crimes generally appear random and motiveless, are adept at using the system against itself. They prey on people like Tia Hicks -- a drug user police suspected of prostitution, though she had no record -- because they are more vulnerable than most.
Criminologist Steven Egger calls the victims of serial killers "the less dead" because they are usually people who have been marginalized -- prostitutes, drug users, homosexuals, farm workers, hospital patients and the elderly.
"We don't spend a lot of time dealing with missing people who aren't particularly important; who don't have a lot of prestige," said Egger, a University of Houston-Clear Lake professor and former police officer. It's a public failing as well as a police failing, a common belief being that such people take big risks and get what they deserve.
Leonard Hicks wasn't willing to let his daughter go out that way.
The father cared
A month after the first report was snubbed in 1991, Hicks walked into the King County Sheriff's Office, approached a clerk and asked for help. This time he got it. He was sent to Jensen, who was then single-handedly keeping the Green River serial murder investigation alive.
"This was just one case where a dad cared enough to come in to report his daughter missing," said Jensen, who is now retired but remains a consultant to the revived Green River Task Force.
"It's significant when a parent walks in. You have to take it seriously," Jensen said. "I had seen enough of this crap with these agencies that wouldn't take reports, or dump them. It was always my policy to take a report."
The fact that the case was in Seattle's jurisdiction didn't matter. After years of experience with the likes of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, King County knew missing-person reports can be a clue that something is amiss -- sometimes the first indication of a murder. Taking them seriously can yield fresh evidence, statements from witnesses with fresh memories, names of people last seen with the missing person. If nothing else, Jensen said, investigators may quickly obtain dental records, DNA and other forensic samples for later use.
Michael Nault, a retired King County police detective commander who led two serial murder investigations during his career and now is a U.S. Department of Justice and State Department contractor working with Indonesian police, said Jensen's instincts are right.
"There is no more important nexus to find serial killers than missing persons," Nault said. "The major things done wrong in the Ted Bundy and Green River cases were failures to track and identify missing persons."
Knowing this, Jensen immediately began his own investigation. He ran computer checks, looked for prostitutes who might have known Tia and contacted the father of her two sons, who was then in jail. He came away with a long list of names and locations to check.
Jensen was working the case on April 22, 1991, when something on his computer screen caught his attention. Seattle police had reopened its "unfounded" case, entering it in state and national crime databases and superseding the case Jensen had posted there.
The reason: A man checking out an old boat stored in the parking lot of the Silver Dollar Casino in Mountlake Terrace had found the nude body of a woman in the bilge. Tia was identified through her fingerprints and dental work, but after six months there was precious little evidence for investigators to go on.
A learning curve
Dick Kraske, a former King County Sheriff's major who first headed the Green River serial murder investigation in 1982, saw the same thing happen with missing persons more than 15 years earlier. Kraske, who retired in 1990, was there at the beginning of the learning curve for police when serial killer Ted Bundy's murder spree was putting the Pacific Northwest on the map in the 1970s.
In the middle of the "Ted" investigation, before Bundy was unmasked, the failure to form a nexus between missing persons and serial murder blew up in the county's face.
"The missing-person issue stomped us bad back when Bundy was running around the country," Kraske recalls.
It happened over the disappearance of 19-year-old Vonnie Stuth of Burien on Nov. 28, 1974. Stuth was initially thought to be a Bundy victim. Stuth's husband, Todd, had tried to report her missing almost immediately after she disappeared, only to be rebuffed by a police dispatcher who cited a 48-hour waiting period then required by state law.
Six months later, Gary Addison Taylor, 40, an escaped Michigan mental patient suspected in the murders of four women and several sexual assaults in Michigan and Texas stretching back to 1957, as well as a string of freeway sniper attacks, was arrested in Houston. His long confession led authorities to her grave near the house in Enumclaw where he had moved a few days before killing Stuth.
Public outcry over Taylor and Bundy, especially loud because the victims were generally young college students or middle-class women, prompted reforms in the reporting system and helped bring back the death penalty to Washington state. Stuth's family helped found the non-profit Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims in Seattle, one of the first victim advocate groups in the nation.
Authorities said Stuth had been shot twice in the head during a desperate escape attempt.
What was frustrating, Kraske said, is that investigators on the Bundy case had been asking colleagues to give higher priority to missing-person cases.
"I thought, 'goddamn, some people just don't get the word,' " Kraske said.
"We didn't have too good a track record until 1974 when Bundy descended on us. Then we had a lot of discussion about the communications center people screening people to determine that a missing-person case was not just run of the mill. There was a consensus that it was being done wrong."
Northwest killers
The Pacific Northwest seems to have had more than its share of high-profile killers, including some of the most infamous -- Bundy, Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi and the Green River Killer among them.
But Kraske and other veteran investigators and criminologists don't believe the Pacific Northwest's reputation as a breeding ground for sociopaths. They caution that serial killers are at work everywhere -- police in the Northwest are just better than most at detecting them.
"In some states, 'serial' is what they have for breakfast," said John Turner, chief criminal investigator of the state's Homicide Investigation Tracking System -- or HITS -- a unit of six veteran homicide investigators who use a computer to track violent crime statewide.
In a yearlong investigation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found major flaws in the way Washington law enforcement handles reports of missing persons and unidentified bodies, but it also found a startling fact: Washington's system is the best there is.
The HITS system, created in 1987 with a federal Justice Department grant, and now run by the state Attorney General's Office, is widely known as a national model and functions even better than the federal government's vaunted ViCAP, formed in 1985 to improve communication between law enforcement agencies nationwide.
HITS operates in a similar fashion within the state and, to a lesser degree, with police in Oregon and Idaho. The unit was founded by Bob Keppel, the Attorney General's chief investigator and a former King County detective who pursued Bundy. He has since retired.
HITS in 1991 expanded to include reports of "missing persons with foul play" in its database of murdered and missing. At last count, it held 7,404 murders and disappearances from Washington, but included some from Oregon and Idaho. Of them, 1,827 are unsolved, and 178 are missing-person cases believed to have potential for foul play.
"We get every murder, or at least pretty close to every one," said HITS investigator Jim Hansen.
What sets HITS apart, however, is its team of veteran homicide investigators, all retirees from local departments. Each is responsible for a region of the state in which they collect data on violent crimes from each police agency and provide confidential consultation about tough cases.
Programs such as HITS are critical in overcoming "linkage blindness," a term coined by Egger, the University of Houston criminologist, to describe the failure to recognize related crimes.
Serial killers, for example, often can escape detection for some time by crossing jurisdictional lines. Detectives tend to focus intently on the crimes they're investigating while often being hyper-secretive for fear that media exposure could damage a prosecution, tip their hand to a suspect or bring public pressure to make an arrest.
Sometimes, departments in the same region end up chasing the same killer for months before they discover that their cases have anything in common -- or officers may not make a connection when a string of people drop out of sight and are dismissed as flakes or runaways.
"Linkage blindness is basically a communication problem," Egger said. It's an Achilles heel in the nation's strongly decentralized police departments, which range from one-man departments to thousands.
But Egger said police nationally "have gotten better because the press has done a better job of identifying patterns and putting pressure on police."
"Police have done a better job of sharing information, but there is a long way to go," he said.
Some states now require that departments fight linkage blindness by sending case information to ViCAP. New York legislators, for example, passed such a requirement in 2001. A new, easier-to-use online ViCAP system has allowed more states to join in, and the number of cases in the system has grown from 17,000 in 1998 to 80,000 today.
Kirk Mellecker, a major-case specialist with ViCAP, said it now can effectively pinpoint the unique aspects of crimes, linking them in ways local police may miss.
"If it's a prostitute dumped nude in an alley somewhere, we probably won't be able to give as much help as we'd like," Mellecker said. "That's what happens to prostitutes.
"But if you've got a string of prostitutes dumped across five states and each of them are wearing a red bow tie, that's where we can step in and help police recognize patterns. The main benefit here is that through ViCAP, we're bringing police agencies together."
While ViCAP's star is rising, HITS has been the victim of declining support. The state program's budget has fallen from $1.6 million in 1993 to $1.3 million in 1999, forcing the elimination of one investigator's position.
Last month Gov. Gary Locke proposed a budget that would have eliminated HITS, but since has backed away, instead allowing the agency to live on slightly less money.
Robin Campbell, of the state Office of Financial Management, blamed the initial cut on a lack of information, and said lawmakers will instead be asked to fund HITS.
That reversal has made local police breathe easier. Over the years, the program has linked scores of seemingly unrelated cases and generated information to keep other cases alive -- just as it connected an Oregon man's crimes to similar attacks in Washington state, making him the only suspect in the murder of Tia Hicks.
Investigator saw more
A month after Tia's body was found, HITS received a Seattle police report of a woman who had been raped, choked and left for dead in May 1991.
The case was not being pursued because the woman, a prostitute, was intoxicated -- all factors making it a long shot that police would ever make a case -- but a HITS investigator saw more.
The assailant clearly intended to kill the woman, and his method of operation indicated that this probably wasn't a first-time attack.
Though the victim didn't know the man's name, he was thought to be a truck driver, a job that would make it easy to avoid detection for similar crimes elsewhere.
HITS helped activate the case and sent a bulletin to police agencies in the state and in Oregon, where investigators recognized similarities to the murder of two Portland prostitutes.
On Nov. 24, 1990 -- a week after Tia disappeared -- Rheena Ann Brunson, a suspected prostitute with no history of arrest, was found dead in front of a Portland Safeway store. She had been handcuffed and was stabbed in the heart. On Feb. 19, 1991, the partially clad body of Victoria Rhone, who had a prostitution record, was found in a railroad car in suburban Portland. She had been strangled.
Scott William Cox, a Portland man who has family in Tacoma, was linked by DNA evidence to the Brunson and Rhone murders. He pleaded no contest in September 1993 to two counts of intentional murder, and is serving a 25-year term in Oregon.
Cox, whose long-haul driving took him across the West from Canada to Mexico and as far east as Ohio, has drawn the interest of police nationwide who were examining at least 20 similar murders of known or suspected prostitutes.
He's also of interest to police in Mountlake Terrace.
Perusing the five binders compiled during an investigation now more than a decade cold, Mountlake Terrace Police Sgt. Craig McCaul said decomposition was so complete that there was nothing to indicate when or where Tia was killed.
"The evidence is very circumstantial," he said. "We don't know what caused her death."
Time had also eliminated any recoverable DNA that might have been used to match the victim to her killer.
Decomposition is just one factor. The lack of an initial investigation right after Tia was reported missing also means detectives had to try to piece together her movements right before her death long after memories had faded or witnesses had moved on.
Cox has not been charged in connection with the Hicks murder, but Mountlake Terrace police said they consider him their only suspect.
McCaul said investigators checking out Cox's long-hauling trips to Washington placed him in Mountlake Terrace between the time of Tia's disappearance and the discovery of her body. In fact, a delivery route to a car dealership would have taken him past the Silver Dollar Casino, McCaul said.
"We sent people to interview him twice. We had the (Snohomish County) Prosecutor's Office write a memo saying we want to close the case and would give him immunity, but he would never confess to Tia Hicks' case," McCaul said.
No blame cast
Oct. 2 would have been Tia's 32nd birthday. Each year, her family gets together with Tia's two sons, now teenagers and doing well, for a celebration of her life.
Leonard Hicks died more than three years ago, frustrated that Tia's killer was not made to answer.
Her mother, Deborah McDaniel, keeps Tia's ashes in a box surrounded by angel dolls and family photos.
Detectives kept her informed long after Tia's body was found and had indulged her frequent phone calls.
Despite the crucial early foul-ups in investigating her daughter's case, McDaniel is reluctant to cast blame on police officers. The problem, she said, is more systemic.
"I wish they had more manpower or they had searched harder," she said.
Yet, after a dozen years, "I would like some resolution, some closure," McDaniel said.
"If this person (Cox) is not the one, it's someone else who could be out doing something to someone else's daughter or child."
18. Camille Cleroux (3)
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| (Camille Cleroux) |
Camille Cleroux (born 1954) is a convicted American and Canadian serial killer. An Ottawa man who killed two wives and a neighbour in three separate crimes over a two-decade period has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Parricide - Killed neighbour so he could get her apartment
Number of victims: 3
Date of murders: 1990 / 2001 / 2010
Date of arrest: June 2, 2010
Date of birth: 1954
Victims profile: Lise Roy, 27 (his wife) / Jean Rock, 32 (his common-law wife) / Paula Leclair, 64 (neighbour)
Method of murder: Beating with a rock / ????
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Status: Pleaded guilty. Sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years on June 25, 2012
Ottawa serial killer gets life sentence for 3 murders
'I welcomed a monster into my home' father of victim says in statement
CBC News
June 26, 2012
Camille Cleroux, 58, pleaded guilty in an Ottawa court Tuesday to the first-degree murder of neighbour Paula Leclair and to second-degree murder in the deaths of Jean Rock and Lise Roy.
Ontario Superior Court Judge Lynn Ratushny denied a defence request for credit for time already served.
"With a mind that has functioned in a way that yours has and does, there's no better place for you than in custody," Ratushny said in handing down the sentence.
"After hearing the stomach-churning details today, and your plan to kill these cherished women just to get them out of your way, we can all take some comfort knowing that you are incarcerated and likely will be for the rest of your life."
Killed neighbour over apartment
Cleroux was first arrested and charged in 2010 in the death of Leclair, 64, after her body was discovered in a wooded area near where she lived.
He lived in the same apartment building and had taken over her apartment, prompting her son to report her missing.
After the plea, the Crown attorney told the court Cleroux killed Leclair because he wanted her apartment.
"When she refused to let him move in, he killed her," James Cavanagh said.
Cavanagh said Cleroux led LeClair to the site where he had already dug her grave and then stabbed her repeatedly in the back before striking her in the head with a rock.
After he was taken into custody, Cleroux was charged in the deaths of two former wives. Roy disappeared in 1990 and Rock was last seen in 2003. During the course of the investigation, police found human remains at his former home on Heatherington Road in south Ottawa and later at a second site in a forest off Albion Road.
'My heart is broken beyond repair'
Family members delivered victim impact statements in court as part of the sentencing hearing immediately following the plea.
"No loved one should ever have to go through this pain," said Audrey Creelman, Rock's mother.
Jean Rock's stepmother read a statement from Rock's father, who had earlier suffered an apparent seizure in the courtroom.
"Our family is now incomplete and will never be the same," read John Rock's statement. "I welcomed a monster into my home and now I feel sick. My heart is broken beyond repair."
Rock's brother Daniel also gave a victim impact statement, saying "I think about old memories, and my heart breaks when I think we won't create new memories."
Leclair's son also provided a written victim impact statement to the judge.
Camille Cleroux case timeline:
June 26 - Serial killer Camille Cleroux pleads guilty to one count of first-degree murder and two of second degree murder Tuesday in the deaths of two ex-wives and his neighbour.
April 20, 2012: Police confirm they’ve found more human remains connected to Cleroux in a forested section of Fairlea Woods.
March 20, 2012: Cleroux’s preliminary hearing ends and he agrees to stand trial on three counts of first-degree murder.
Nov. 16, 2011: Cops start digging for human remains in Heatherington Park. Police say their investigation into the human remains found at 1535 Heatherington Ave. led them to the second site.
Nov. 4, 2011: Police investigators conclude their dig at 1535 Heatherington Ave. The human remains are shipped to Toronto for analysis.
Nov. 4, 2011: Preliminary hearing for accused serial killer Camille Cleroux adjourned after human remains found at his former home.
Oct. 31, 2011: Workers find human remains in the backyard at 1535 Heatherington Ave. A neighbour tells the Sun that accused serial killer Camille Cleroux once lived at the property. Police begin digging.
June 25, 2010: Camille Cleroux charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jean Rock in 2001 and Lise Roy in 1990.
June 2010: After hearing of first-degree murder charges against Cleroux, former neighbour Robert Fling approaches cops about hearing screams from Cleroux’s Heatherington Ave. house 20 years earlier. He admits he wasn’t “100% sure.”
June 3, 2010: Camille Cleroux, 56, charged with first-degree murder in the death of Paula Leclair. He had moved into her apartment and told Leclair’s son that she had given Cleroux the apartment after winning the lottery and moving to Florida.
May 2010: Paula Leclair, 64, goes missing from her Fairlea Cres. apartment. Her body is found days later in a nearby wooded area.
2001: Jean Rock, 32, believed to be Cleroux’s common-law wife, disappears.
1990: Lise Roy, 27, was married to Cleroux when she disappeared.
17. Christian Magee (3)
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| (Christian Herbert Magee) |
Christian Herbert Magee (born 1948), also known as the Mad Slasher, is a convicted Canadian serial killer. Magee has been in jail since the late 70's, after he raped and murdered three women. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and has been held at the maximum security Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre ever since.
A.K.A.: "Mad Slasher"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape
Number of victims: 3
Date of murders: 1974 - 1976
Date of arrest: June 1976
Date of birth: 1948
Victims profile: Judith Barksey, 19 / Patricia Jenner, 19 / Susan Lynn Scholes, 15
Method of murder: Cutting their throats
Location: Strathroy, Ontario, Canada
Status: Found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1977, and has been held at the maximum security Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre ever since
Victory' for serial killer
May 13, 2006
A serial killer known as the Mad Slasher is one step closer to gaining his freedom after a provincial tribunal ruled he should be moved immediately to a west end Toronto health care centre.
The Oak Ridge division of the Penetanguishene mental health centre faces possible contempt charges for ignoring a ruling last year from the Ontario Review Board calling for the transfer of Christian Magee to the Queen St. W. health centre, a facility with programs allowing patients to travel into the community, chairman Crawford MacIntyre said yesterday.
"We find it rather offensive that the review board's order (from last year) has been snubbed," said MacIntyre at a hearing at Oak Ridge, as Magee looked on.
He said there was "a weakness" in the Criminal Code on how the board could enforce its rulings and called upon Magee's lawyer, Dan Brodsky, to bring a motion citing Oak Ridge for contempt at a later hearing.
"A year ago an order was made ... and nothing was done," he said, as two relatives of one of Magee's victims looked on glumly in the hearing room. "It could be said that the board's nose is out of joint."
Magee, who sexually assaulted and killed three women, and raped two others, was all smiles after the hearing. "I'm elated," the father of three said in an interview. "I'm no longer dangerous. I don't want to hurt anybody. I'm hoping sometime down the road I will be able to go out and visit with my family."
"This was a flat-out victory for Chris," Brodsky said later. "If Chris is not at the Toronto facility by next week I will go to the Superior Court with a motion calling for contempt charges to be laid against Oak Ridge."
Magee had been declared not criminally responsible because of mental disorder for the rape and murder of three women in the Strathroy area between 1974 and 1976, and sent to Oak Ridge in 1976, where he has remained for the past 30 years.
For years, he had been trying to get a transfer from the maximum-security facility to the Centre of Addiction and Mental health on Queen St. W., a medium secure facility with outpatient programs.
He won that right last year, but the transfer was put on hold after officials with Oak Ridge appealed to Ontario's Court of Appeal, arguing that Magee was still a "substantial danger" to society who shouldn't be moved. The case was heard just before this past Christmas. A ruling is expected in the next month.
The review board is mandated to hold hearings yearly, but MacIntyre decided to wait until the appeal court's ruling before having one on Magee's transfer.
At last year's review board hearing, a report from a clinical team of specialists described Magee as a sexual sadist, a man with an antisocial personality disorder who has a 76 per cent chance of reoffending in 10 years were he to be released.
"There is no proven and effective treatment or intervention that is likely to change the outcome in a man who commits serial, sexually sadistic homicide," warned the report.
Dr. Lisa Ramshaw said in the report that it would be safest for society if Magee stayed in a "highly structured environment" because he has a "dangerous combination" of personality disorders.
"He should never get out. There's nothing much more to say than that," said Geoffrey Scholes, whose 15-year-old sister, Susan Lynn Scholes was raped and murdered by Magee in June, 1976.
"What gives him the right to even exist?" asked a man at yesterday's hearing whose sister was raped by Magee and left for dead. "Thirty years have passed and my sister has never been the same. Magee took away her God-given right to enjoy the magical act of enjoying a normal relationship with a loved one. Justice will not be served until he is dead."
Magee is not asking for his keepers to fling open the locked gates and let him walk out scot-free, Brodsky said.
He said Magee is seeking more of a "controlled exit," perhaps starting with weekend passes to visit his family, just to show society that he can be trusted.
Now 57 and a grandfather, Magee spends his time playing solitaire on his computer in his room at Oak Ridge, watching 24 on TV and listening to gospel music. He's become a woodcarver, a born-again Christian, a foster parent, the "model prisoner" with a spotless record after three decades in custody.
Magee has a short, stocky build, a thick chest and powerful forearms. His handshake is strong. Sitting close to Magee, it's hard not to focus on the serial killer's large hands that were once wrapped around the necks of the two terrified teenagers and a woman seven months pregnant — women he sexually assaulted and murdered.
Once illiterate, he now talks eloquently about his "mental health condition," at times sounding like one of the many psychiatrists he has seen over the years.
"I was out of reality when I killed her," Magee recalled about his first victim, Judith Barksey, 19, during four hours of interviews at Oak Ridge.
"The reality is I'll always have the problem, but now I can recognize the symptoms and take preventative measures — stop myself — before it happens again."
He spotted Barksey by chance, he said, that March 1974 evening in the town of Strathroy, and in the four blocks that he followed her, he had made up his mind he was going to rape her.
"I talked myself into it," he said. "I was fantasizing more and more as I walked behind her, building up the courage, the desire, the want.
"She looked good from behind," he admitted when asked about what was then going through his head.
He never saw her face as he lunged at her in the darkness. He wanted sex, not thinking what would happen after the attack.
But when the startled teen turned around, Magee said he realized right then that he had to kill her because she knew him and could identify him later to the police.
"I just couldn't walk away, even though I hadn't done anything yet. But in my mind I had already committed the crime," he said.
When she struggled, Magee took out a jackknife and slashed her throat, earning him the media nickname he so thoroughly detests. His two other victims also had their throats cut.
"If I were in the same situation now, I would just walk away if I got those thoughts," he said of his personality changes. "Now I would be able to recognize the warning signs and stop myself before anything happened. Back then I couldn't do that."
Several factors, he said, led him to kill. He was born into an abusive, loveless home that was followed by an equally loveless marriage, although the union produced three children. He lacked self-esteem.
When he was young, he walked around with his head down so much that his mother got him to curl his arms through a broom behind his back to force his head up. His parents berated him constantly, telling him he would never amount to anything. An older brother frequently beat him up, he said.
He was in his mid-teens when his father took him out of school and sent him to work to help support the family.
Even after he got married, he was still searching for the affection he wasn't getting from his wife. Magee has told psychiatrists that at one time he was confused by sex and love, believing that forcing sex on someone could get him the affection he so desperately needed. He said he realizes now that was wrong.
Magee said learning a trade — woodworking — has given him confidence.
He has raised more than $25,000 for charity by donating his woodwork at auctions. Magee sponsors a student in Ethiopia who is studying to become a nurse.
Magee freely admitted he still gets deviant sexual fantasies. He said he can never be cured of that problem but insists those thoughts can be controlled.
"I was sent here because I have an illness," he said. "I didn't understand that then. I do now."
"I would have been out years ago had I been found guilty at a criminal trial, and given the mandatory life sentence," he said. People convicted of first-degree murder are allowed to apply for parole after serving 25 years.
"We're a compassionate country. That's the way our system is set up. I can never repay my debt to society. But in Canada you're supposed to be given a second chance."
16. Paul Bernardo (3 – 4)
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| (Paul Kenneth Bernardo, also known as Paul Jason Teale) |
Paul Kenneth Bernardo, also known as Paul Jason Teale (born 27 August 1964), is a Canadian serial killer and serial rapist. He is particularly known for the highly publicized sexual assaults and murders that he committed with his wife Karla Homolka. Bernardo also committed serial rapes in the east-Metropolitan Toronto city of Scarborough. In addition to the confirmed murders of Tammy Lyn Homolka, Leslie Erin Mahaffy, and Kristen Dawn French, suspicions remain about other possible victims or intended victims.
A.K.A.: "Paul Jason Teale" - "The Scarborough Rapist" - "The Schoolgirl Killer"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Serial rapist
Number of victims: 3 – 5
Date of murders: December 1990 - April 1992
Date of arrest: February 17, 1993
Date of birth: August 27, 1964
Victims profile: Tammy Homolka, 15 / Leslie Mahaffy, 14 / Kristen French, 15
Method of murder: Poisoning - Strangulation
Location: Ontario, Canada
Status: Sentenced to 25 years in prison on September 1, 1995. Later, Bernardo was also declared a "Dangerous Offender", making it unlikely he will ever be released
Early life
Bernardo was born into a wealthy but dysfunctional family. His mother Marilyn, who had been adopted by well-to-do Toronto lawyer Gerald Eastman and his wife Elizabeth, was raised in a stable household. His father, Kenneth, was the son of an English woman and an Italian immigrant who created a highly successful marble and tile business, but was abusive to his wife and children. Instead of entering the family business, Kenneth Bernardo became an accountant. After her father had disapproved of an earlier boyfriend, Eastman married Bernardo in 1960.
Like his father, Kenneth Bernardo was said to be abusive. Marilyn, after having given birth to a son and a daughter, began seeing a former boyfriend. She became pregnant and gave birth to Paul Kenneth Bernardo on August 27, 1964. Kenneth Bernardo tolerated his wife's affair and is listed as the biological father on Paul's birth certificate.
In 1975, Kenneth Bernardo fondled a girl and was charged with child molestation; he also sexually abused his own daughter. Bernardo's mother became depressed over her husband's abuse, withdrew from family life and lived in the basement of their Scarborough home. Though the elder children felt the effects of the emotional and mental turmoil, young Paul appeared to be unscathed by it. In his book Lethal Marriage, Nick Pron describes the young Bernardo: "He was always happy. A young boy who smiled a lot. And he was so cute, with his dimpled good looks and sweet smile, that many of the mothers just wanted to pinch him on the cheek whenever they saw him. He was the perfect child they all wanted: polite, well mannered, doing well in school, so sweet in his Boy Scout uniform."
Following an argument between his parents when Bernardo was 16, his mother told him of his actual parentage. Repulsed, he began openly to call his mother "slob" and "whore".
Bernardo graduated from Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute, opting to work for Amway, whose sales culture had a deep effect on him. "He bought the books and tapes of famous motivational get-rich-and-famous experts." Bernardo and his friends practised their techniques on young women they met in bars, and were fairly successful. By the time Bernardo attended University of Toronto Scarborough, he had developed dark sexual fantasies, enjoyed humiliating women in public and beat up the women he dated.
In October 1987, he met Karla Homolka. They became sexually interested in each other almost immediately. Unlike the other girls he knew, she encouraged his sadistic sexual behaviour, also encouraging his acts as the "Scarborough Rapist."
Sexual assaults
The Scarborough Rapist
Bernardo committed multiple sexual assaults, escalating in viciousness, in and around Scarborough, Ontario. Most of the assaults were on young women whom he had stalked after they exited buses late in the evening.
● May 4, 1987, Bernardo committed his first rape in Scarborough against a 21-year-old woman, in front of her parents' house, after following her home. The attack lasted more than half an hour.
● May 14, 1987, Bernardo committed his second rape. He attacked a 19-year-old woman in the back yard of her parents' house. This incident lasted over an hour.
● July 27, 1987, Bernardo attempted his third rape. Although he beat the young woman, he abandoned the attack after she fought back.
● December 16, 1987, Bernardo committed his third rape, against a 15-year-old girl. This rape lasted about one hour. The following day, the Toronto Police Service issued a warning to women in Scarborough travelling alone at night, especially those taking buses.
● December 23, 1987, Bernardo committed his fourth rape. During this attack, Bernardo raped the 17-year-old with the knife he used to threaten his victims. It was at this point he began to be referred to as the 'Scarborough Rapist'.
● April 18, 1988, Bernardo attacked a 17-year-old. The fifth assault, this one lasted 45 minutes.
● May 25, 1988, Bernardo was nearly caught by a uniformed Metro Toronto investigator staking out a bus shelter. The investigator noticed him hiding under a tree and pursued him on foot, but Bernardo escaped.
● May 30, 1988, Bernardo committed his sixth rape, this time in Clarkson, about 25 miles southwest of Scarborough. This attack, against an 18-year-old, lasted 30 minutes.
● October 4, 1988, Bernardo attempted a seventh Scarborough rape. His intended victim fought him off but he inflicted two stab wounds to her thigh and buttock which required 12 stitches.
● November 16, 1988, Bernardo committed his seventh rape against an 18-year-old in the backyard of her parents' house.
● November 17, 1988, Metro Police formed a special task force dedicated to capturing the Scarborough Rapist.
● December 27, 1988, an alerted neighbor chased Bernardo off after he had begun his attempted eighth rape.
● June 20, 1989, Bernardo attempted to rape another young woman. She fought against him and her screams alerted neighbors. Bernardo fled with scratches on his face.
● August 15, 1989, Bernardo committed his eighth rape, against a 22-year-old woman. He had stalked her the previous night from outside the window of her apartment and waited for her to arrive home. This particularly vicious attack lasted two hours.
● November 21, 1989, Bernardo committed his ninth rape, against a 15-year-old whom he saw in a bus shelter. This attack lasted 45 minutes.
● December 22, 1989, Bernardo committed his tenth rape, against a 19-year-old. This attack occurred in a stairwell of an underground parking lot and lasted 30 minutes.
● May 26, 1990, Bernardo committed his eleventh rape. This rape lasted over an hour. However, his 19-year-old victim's vivid recollection of her attacker permitted police to make a computer composite photograph, which was released two days later by police and published in Toronto and area newspapers.
● July 1990, two months after receiving tips that Bernardo fit the Scarborough Rapist composite, he was interviewed by two police detectives.
Investigation and release
Between May and September 1990, the police had submitted more than 130 suspects' samples for DNA testing when they received two reports that the person they were seeking was Paul Bernardo. The first, in June, had been called in by a bank employee. The second call was received from Tina Smirnis, the wife of one of the three Smirnis brothers who were among Bernardo's closest friends. Smirnis told the detectives that Bernardo "had been 'called in' on a previous rape investigation — once in December, 1987 - but he had never been interviewed." He frequently talked about his sex life to Smirnis and liked analingus, rough sex and anal sex.
Alex Smirnis' phrasing was awkward and stilted and consequently left the detectives unsure of whether to take him seriously. But after cross-checking several files the detectives decided to interview Bernardo. The interview, on November 20, 1990, lasted 35 minutes and Bernardo voluntarily gave samples for forensic testing. When the detectives asked Bernardo why he thought he was being investigated for the rapes, he admitted that he did resemble the composite. The detectives concluded that such a well-educated, well-adjusted, congenial young man couldn't be responsible for the vicious crimes; he "was far more credible than...Alex Smirnis who, with his awkward, strange way of speaking, might just be trying to collect the reward." Paul Bernado was released the following day.
St. Catharines
Following the interview, Bernardo drove to St. Catharines and held a secret meeting with Homolka, assuring her that he was not the Scarborough Rapist.
Bernardo moved permanently to St. Catharines on February 1, 1991. The sexual assaults in Scarborough had stopped. However, on April 6, 1991, Bernardo committed his 12th rape, this one in St. Catharines. Again, the victim was young (14). Unlike the other attacks, this one occurred early in the morning and he was not near a bus stop.
"Jane Doe"
When she still worked at a pet shop, two years earlier, Homolka had befriended a then 15-year-old girl. On June 7, 1991, Homolka invited the teen, referred to as "Jane Doe" in the ensuing trials, for a "girls' night out." After an evening of shopping and dining, Homolka took "Jane Doe" to 57 Bayview Avenue and began to ply her with alcohol laced with Halcion.
After "Jane Doe" lost consciousness, Homolka called Bernardo to tell him his surprise wedding gift was ready. They undressed the girl, who was a virgin, and Bernardo videotaped Homolka as she raped the girl before Bernardo vaginally and anally penetrated her. The next morning, the teenager was nauseous. She believed her vomiting was due to having drunk alcohol for the first time. She did not realize she had been violated.
She was invited back to Port Dalhousie (a district in northwest St. Catharines, situated on Lake Ontario) in August this time to "spend the night." In a replay of Tammy Homolka, "Jane Doe," whose identity remains protected by law, stopped breathing after she was drugged and Bernardo had begun to rape her. Homolka called 911 for help but called back a few minutes later to say that "everything is all right." The emergency crew was recalled without follow-up.
"Jane Doe" visited the couple once more, on December 22, 1992. This time Homolka pressured her to have sex with Bernardo; she became upset and left.
Schoolgirl Killer murders
Tammy Homolka
By 1990, Bernardo was spending large amounts of time with the Homolka family, who liked him. He was engaged to the eldest daughter and flirted constantly with the youngest one. He had not told them that he had lost his job as an accountant, and instead was smuggling cigarettes across the nearby U.S.-Canadian border. He had become obsessed with Tammy Homolka, peeping into her window and entering her room to masturbate while she slept. Karla Homolka helped him by breaking the blinds in her sister's window to allow Bernardo access. In July, Bernardo took Tammy across the border to get beer for a party. While there, Bernardo later told his fiancee, "they got drunk and began making out."
According to Bernardo's testimony at his trial on July 24, 1990, Karla Homolka laced spaghetti sauce with crushed Valium she had stolen from her employer, Martindale Animal Clinic. She served dinner to her sister, who soon lost consciousness. Bernardo began to rape Tammy while Karla watched.
Over the summer, he supplied Tammy and her friends with gifts, food, and sodas that had "a film and a few white flecks on the top."
Six months before their 1991 wedding, Karla Homolka stole the anaesthetic agent Halothane from the clinic. On December 23, 1990, Homolka and Bernardo administered sleeping pills to the 15-year-old in a rum-and-eggnog cocktail. After Tammy was unconscious, Homolka and Bernardo undressed her and Karla applied a Halothane-soaked cloth to her sister's nose and mouth.
Karla Homolka wanted to "give Tammy's virginity to Bernardo for Christmas" as, according to Homolka, Bernardo was disappointed by not having been Karla's first sex partner. With Tammy's parents sleeping upstairs, the pair filmed themselves as they raped her in the basement. Tammy began to vomit. The pair tried to revive her, then called 911, but not before they hid evidence, dressed Tammy, and moved her into her basement bedroom. A few hours later Tammy Homolka was pronounced dead at St. Catharines General Hospital without having regained consciousness.
Despite the pair's behavior — vacuuming and washing laundry in the middle of the night, and despite the presence of a chemical burn on Tammy's face, Niagara Regional Coroner and the Homolka family accepted the pair's version of events. The official cause of Tammy Homolka's death was accidental — choking on her vomit after consumption of alcohol. The pair subsequently filmed themselves with Karla wearing Tammy's clothing and pretending to be her. They also moved out of the Homolka house to a rented Port Dalhousie bungalow, to let her parents cope with their grief.
Leslie Mahaffy
Early in the morning on June 15, 1991, Bernardo took a detour through Burlington, halfway between Toronto and St. Catharines, to steal licence plates where he found Leslie Mahaffy. The 14-year-old had missed her curfew after attending a funeral, was locked out of her house and had been unable to find anyone with whom she could stay overnight.
Bernardo approached her and told her he was looking to break into a neighbor's house. Unfazed, she asked if he had any cigarettes. As Bernardo led her to his car he blindfolded her, forced her into the vehicle and drove her to Port Dalhousie, where he informed Homolka that they had a playmate. Bernardo and Homolka subsequently videotaped themselves torturing and sexually abusing Mahaffy, all while listening to Bob Marley and David Bowie. At one point, Bernardo said "You're doing a good job, Leslie, a damned good job." Then he added, "The next two hours are going to determine what I do to you. Right now, you're scoring perfect." On another segment of tape, played at Bernardo's trial, the assault escalated. Mahaffy cried out in pain and begged Bernardo to stop. In the Crown description of the scene, he was sodomizing her while her hands were bound with twine. Later Mahaffy told Bernardo that her blindfold seemed to be slipping, an ominous development as it signaled the possibility that she might be able to identify both her tormentors if permitted to live.
The following day, Bernardo claimed, Homolka fed her a lethal dose of Halcion. Homolka claimed that, instead, Bernardo strangled her. The pair put her body into their basement.
After the Homolkas and their remaining daughter, Lori, had left, Bernardo and Homolka decided the best way to dispose of the evidence would be to dismember Leslie Mahaffy and encase each piece in cement. Bernardo bought a dozen bags of cement at a hardware store the following day. He kept the receipts which would prove damning at his trial. Bernardo used his grandfather's circular saw to cut the body. Bernardo and Homolka then made numerous trips to dump the cement blocks in Lake Gibson, 18 kilometres south of Port Dalhousie. At least one of the blocks weighed 200 pounds and proved beyond the pair's patience or abilities to sink. It rested near the shore, where a father and son on a fishing expedition discovered it on June 29, 1991. Leslie Mahaffy's orthodontic appliance proved definitive in identifying her.
Kristen French
On the afternoon of April 16, 1992, Bernardo and Homolka were driving through St. Catharines to look for potential victims. It was after school hours on the day before Good Friday. Students were still going home but by and large the streets were empty. As they passed Holy Cross Secondary School, a main Catholic high school in the city's north end, they spotted Kristen French, a 15-year-old student, walking briskly to her nearby home. The couple pulled into the parking lot of nearby Grace Lutheran Church and Homolka got out of the car, map in hand, pretending to need assistance.
As French looked at the map, Bernardo attacked from behind, brandishing a knife and forcing her into the front seat of their car. From her back seat, Homolka controlled the girl by pulling down her hair.
French took the same route home every day, taking about 15 minutes to get home in order to attend to her dog's needs. Soon after she should have arrived, her parents became convinced that she had met with foul play and notified police. Within 24 hours, Niagara Regional Police ("NRP") had assembled a team and searched the area along her route and found several witnesses who had seen the abduction from different aspects, thus giving police a fairly clear picture. In addition, one of Kristen's shoes, recovered from the parking lot, underscored the seriousness of the abduction.
Over the three days of Easter weekend, Bernardo and Homolka videotaped themselves as they tortured, raped and sodomized Kristen French, forcing her to drink large amounts of alcohol and to behave submissively to Bernardo. At Bernardo's trial, Crown prosecutor Ray Houlahan said that Bernardo always intended to kill her because she was never blindfolded and was capable of identifying her captors.
While Bernardo was out buying pizza on April 18 he was spotted by Kerry Patrich (see below), whom he had stalked the previous month. Her report to NRP was mishandled by police, as noted by Judge Archie Campbell in his 1995 inquiry into the police investigation of Bernardo's crimes, thus negating any chance of Kristen French's being discovered at the Bernardo house.
The following day, the couple murdered French before going to the Homolkas' for Easter dinner. Homolka testified at her trial that Bernardo had strangled French for exactly seven minutes while she watched. Bernardo said Homolka beat her with a rubber mallet because she had tried to escape and that French ended up being strangled on a noose tied around her neck secured to a hope chest. Immediately thereafter, Homolka went to fix her hair.
French's nude body was found in a ditch on April 30, 1992 in Burlington, approximately 45 minutes from St. Catharines, and a short distance from the cemetery where Leslie Mahaffy is buried. It had been washed and the hair had been cut off. It was originally thought that the hair was removed as a trophy, but Homolka testified that the hair had been cut to impede identification.
Other potential or possible victims
In addition to the confirmed murders of Tammy Lyn Homolka, Leslie Erin Mahaffy and Kristen Dawn French, suspicions remain about other possible victims or intended victims of Bernardo and/or Homolka.
● Shortly after Tammy Homolka's funeral her parents went out of town and Lori visited her grandparents in Mississauga, leaving the house empty. On the weekend of January 12, 1991, according to author Stephen Williams, Bernardo abducted a girl, took her to the house and raped her while Homolka watched; afterward he dropped her off on a deserted road near Lake Gibson. Bernardo and Homolka referred to her simply as "January girl."
● At about 5:30 a.m. on April 6, 1991, Bernardo abducted a 14-year-old who was warming up for her duties as coxswain on one of the local rowing teams. The girl was distracted by a blonde woman who waved at her from her car, enabling Bernardo to drag her into the shrubbery near the rowing club. There he sexually assaulted her, forced her to remove all her clothes and wait five minutes, during which he disappeared.
● On July 28, 1991, Bernardo stalked Sydney Kershen, 21, after he saw her while driving home from work. On August 9, 1991, he resumed stalking her. This time she took evasive action, stopping at her boyfriend's house just prior to his arrival. After spotting Bernardo the boyfriend gave chase, came across Bernardo's gold Nissan and took note of the licence plate. The couple reported the incident to Niagara Regional Police who established that the car belonged to Paul Kenneth Bernardo. A NRP officer visited the Bernardos' house where the car was parked in the driveway, but did not pursue the matter, nor did he submit an official police report.
● On November 30, 1991, 14-year-old Terri Anderson vanished about three blocks from the parking lot where Kristen French would be abducted, and never returned. Terri was a grade nine student at Lakeport Secondary School, next door to Kristen French's school. Terri Anderson and Kristen French disappeared within two kilometres of each other. In April 1992, NRP said they had no evidence to suggest a link. But in May 1992 Terri Anderson's body was found in the water at Port Dalhousie. The medical examiner saw no evidence of foul play, despite the difficulties of determining such factors in a body that had been in the water for six months. The coroner's ruling, that her death was by drowning, probably as a result of drinking beer and taking LSD, was controversial in light of Leslie Mahaffy's and Kristen French's murders.
● A newspaper clipping found during the police search of the Bernardo house described a rape that occurred in Hawaii during the couple's honeymoon there. The presence of the article, the rape's similarity to Bernardo's modus operandi and its occurrence during the Bernardos' presence led police to speculate on Bernardo's involvement. Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border have stated their belief that Bernardo was responsible for this rape, but due to extradition issues, this case was never prosecuted.
● In 1997, Derek Finkle's book No Claim to Mercy was published, which presented evidence tying Bernardo to the murder of Elizabeth Bain, who disappeared on June 19, 1990, only three weeks after the last known attack of the Scarborough Rapist. Bain told her mother she was going to "check the tennis schedule" on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto. Three days later, her car was found with a large bloodstain in the back seat. Robert Baltovich, who has consistently maintained his innocence, was convicted on March 31, 1992, of second-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend. At trial, his lawyers suggested that the then unidentified "Scarborough rapist" was responsible for the crime. He served eight years of a life term before being released pending his appeal. In September 2004 his appeal was processed. His lawyers alleged that he had been wrongfully convicted and that Bernardo was guilty of the murder. On December 2, 2004, the Ontario Court of Appeal set aside the conviction. On July 15, 2005, Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney-General announced that Robert Baltovich would face a new trial and on April 22, 2008, after a series of pretrial motions including the presentation of evidence implicating Bernardo in the murder of Elizabeth Bain, Crown Attorney Philip Kotanen advised the court that he would be calling "no evidence" and asked the jury to find Baltovich not guilty of second-degree murder.
● On March 29, 1992, Bernardo stalked and videotaped Shanna and Kerry Patrich from his car and followed them to their parents' house. The Patrich sisters incorrectly recorded his licence plate number; Shanna Patrich reported the incident to NRP on March 31, 1992, and was given an incident number, should further information develop. With Kristen French under Homolka's guard on April 18, 1992 Bernardo went out to buy dinner and rent a movie. He was spotted by Kerry Patrich, who attempted to track him to his house. Despite losing him, she got a better description of his licence plate and car, which she reported to NRP. This information, however, was mishandled by police and slipped into the "black hole" to which Judge Archie Campbell would refer in the Campbell Report of 1996, an inquiry into police mishandling of evidence in the case.
● In 2006, Bernardo confessed to a 1987 assault against a 15-year-old girl. Another man, Anthony Hanemaayer, had been convicted of that assault and served the sentence for it. On June 25, 2008, the Court of Appeal for Ontario overturned that conviction and exonerated Hanemaayer.
Trial and Incarceration
Bernardo's trial for the murders of French and Mahaffy took place in 1995, and included detailed testimony from Homolka and videotapes of the rapes. The trial was subject to a publication ban which applied to Canadian newspapers and media, and the venue was moved to Toronto from St. Catharines, where the murders occurred. However, the ban did not affect American newspapers and television stations from nearby Buffalo, New York from reporting trial proceedings, which were easily seen in Southern Ontario. During the trial, Bernardo claimed the deaths were accidental, and later claimed that his wife was the actual killer. On September 1, 1995, Bernardo was convicted of a number of offences, including the two first-degree murders and two aggravated sexual assaults, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Later, Bernardo was also declared a "Dangerous Offender", making it unlikely he will ever be released.
In return for a plea bargain (12 years in prison for manslaughter), Homolka testified against Bernardo in his murder trial. This plea bargain received much public criticism from Canadians as Homolka's first defense lawyer Ken Murray had withheld for 17 months videotapes that Bernardo made. This was considered crucial evidence, and prosecutors said that they would have never agreed to the plea bargain if they had seen the tapes. Murray was later charged with obstruction of justice, which he was acquitted, and he also faced a disciplinary hearing from the law society.
During her interrogation in 1993, Homolka told police Bernardo once bragged to her that he had raped as many as 30 women, double the 15 assaults police suspected he had committed. She described him as "the happy rapist."
Bernardo has been kept in the segregation unit at the penitentiary for his own safety, nonetheless he has been attacked and harassed. Once he was punched in the face by another inmate while returning from a shower in 1996. In June 1999, five convicts tried to storm the segregation range where Bernardo lived and a riot squad had to use gas to disperse them.
The Toronto Star reported on February 21, 2006, that Bernardo had admitted having sexually assaulted at least 10 other women in attacks not previously blamed on him. The majority of those assaults took place in 1986, a year before what police termed the reign of terror by the Scarborough Rapist. Authorities suspected Bernardo was the culprit in other crimes, such as a string of rapes in Amherst, N.Y., and the drowning death of Terri Anderson in St. Catharines, he had never acknowledged his involvement. It was reported that Bernardo's lawyer, Anthony G. Bryant, had forwarded this information to legal authorities the previous November.
In 2006, Paul Bernardo gave an interview in prison suggesting he had reformed and would make a good parole candidate. He is not eligible for release in 2010 under the "faint hope" clause, since he was convicted of multiple murders. Bernardo is currently serving his term in the maximum security prison at Kingston Penitentiary, in the segregation unit. He spends 23 hours a day in an 8' x 4' jail cell.
Homolka's release
Homolka was released from prison on July 4, 2005. Several days before, Bernardo was interviewed by police and his lawyer, Tony Bryant. According to Bryant, Bernardo claimed that he had always intended to free the girls he and Homolka kidnapped. However, once Mahaffy's blindfold fell off, allowing Mahaffy to see Bernardo's face, Homolka was concerned that Mahaffy would identify Bernardo, and subsequently report them to the police. Further, Bernardo claimed that Homolka planned to murder Mahaffy by injecting an air bubble into her bloodstream, eventually causing an embolism.
Books, film and other references
A number of books have been written about the Bernardos, and in October 2005 a motion picture of their story was released under the title Karla, starring Misha Collins as Bernardo and Laura Prepon as Homolka.
Kristen French, one of Bernado's victims, is mentioned in the song "Nobody's Hero", by Canadian progressive rock band Rush.
The Law & Order episode "Fools for Love" and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes "Pure" and "Damaged" are based on the events, as is Series VII of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries, "Know Thine Enemy".
15. Cody Legebokoff (4)
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| (Cody Alan Legebekoff) |
Cody Alan Legebekoff (born c. 1990) is a Canadian serial killer convicted in 2014 by the British Columbia Supreme Court of murdering three women and a teenage girl, between 2009 and 2010, in or near the City of Prince George, British Columbia. This trial of one of Canada's youngest serial killers drew national attention.
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape
Number of victims: 4
Date of murders: October 2009 - November 2010
Date of arrest: November 28, 2010
Date of birth: January 21, 1990
Victims profile: Jill Stacey Stuchenko, 35 / Cynthia Frances Maas, 35 / Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23 (her body has not been found) / Loren Donn Leslie, 15
Method of murder: Blood loss and blunt force trauma
Location: Prince George and Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Canada
Status: Sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years on September 16, 2014
Background
Cody Legebokoff is a Canadian citizen who was raised in Fort St. James, a district municipality in rural British Columbia. He has been described by friends and family members as a popular young man who competed in ice hockey and showed no propensity for violence. Though Legebokoff had a minor criminal record, he was not "on the radar" of local police.
After graduating Fort St. James Secondary School, Legebokoff lived briefly in Lethbridge before moving to Prince George. There, he shared an apartment with three close female friends and worked as a mechanic at a Ford dealership. In his spare time, Legebokoff frequented the Canadian social-networking site Nexopia, using the handle "1CountryBoy."
2010 arrest
On November 27, 2010, at approximately 9:45 p.m., a rookie Royal Canadian Mounted Police ("RCMP") officer observed Legebokoff pull his truck onto British Columbia Highway 27 from a remote logging road. According to a case report prepared by the officer, the 2004 GMC pick-up truck was speeding erratically, and on a hunch, the officer decided to pull over the vehicle for a routine traffic stop. It was odd and even suspicious that someone would be on that road, that late, in frigid November, so he suspected Legebokoff of poaching in the backwoods and signaled for him to pull over.
The officer was joined by a second RCMP officer. Upon approaching the vehicle, the officers say they noticed Legebokoff had blood smears on his face and chin, blood on his legs, and a pool of blood on the driver's mat. The officers claim that upon searching the pickup truck, they discovered a multi-tool and wrench covered in blood, as well as a monkey backpack and a wallet containing a children's hospital card bearing the name Loren Leslie. When questioned about the blood on him, Legebokoff purportedly stated that he was poaching and had clubbed a deer to death because: "I’m a redneck, that’s what we do for fun." There wasn't a deer carcass with him.
The officers arrested Legebokoff under the Canada Wildlife Act and called for a conservation officer with animal tracking skills. The warden retraced the tire tracks of Legebokoff's vehicle back up the road and in the freshly fallen snow found footprints leading to Loren Donn Leslie's remains. After Legebokoff's arrest in connection with Leslie's death, he was linked by DNA to the deaths of Jill Stacey Stuchenko, Cynthia Frances Maas, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery.
Victims
The police allege Legebokoff is responsible for the murders of:
● Jill Stacey Stuchenko, 35-year-old mother of five, last seen on October 9, 2009. She was found dead four days later in a gravel pit on the outskirts of Prince George, British Columbia.
● Natasha Lynn Montgomery, 23, last seen August 31 or early September 1, 2010. Her body has never been found, but her DNA was later found in samples taken in Legebokoff's apartment.
● Cynthia Frances Maas, 35, last seen September 10, 2010. Her body was found in a Prince George park the following month. Maas died of blunt-force trauma to the head and penetrating wounds. She had a hole in her shoulder blade, a broken jaw and cheekbone, and injuries to her neck consistent with someone's stomping on it.
The Crown has said Stuchenko, Montgomery and Maas had worked in the sex trade, and that Legebokoff was addicted to cocaine and used sex workers to get him the drug.
● Loren Leslie, 15, murdered on November 27, 2010. Leslie is something of an outlier, as she was far younger than the other victims and allegedly met Mr. Legebokoff online at the website Nexopia. Leslie was legally blind, having one completely blind eye and only 50% vision in the other. She is considered one of the victims in the infamous Highway of Tears murders.
Trial proceedings
Legebokoff's trial on four counts of murder was originally scheduled to begin in September 2013, but was delayed a month until October and then again until June 2014. Legebokoff pleaded not guilty to all four counts of murder. The judge and 12 jurors heard testimony from 93 Crown witnesses and the defendant.
Legebokoff testified during the trial that he was "involved" in three of the deaths but claimed that he did not actually commit the killings. He alleged that a drug dealer and two accomplices, whom he would only name as "X, Y and Z", were the actual murderers. Prosecutors did not accept this attempt to plead guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder.
14. Wayne Boden (4)
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| (Wayne Clifford Boden) |
Wayne Clifford Boden (c 1948 -. 27 March 2006) was a Canadian serial killer and rapist active between 1969 and 1971. He was raised in Dundas, Ontario, near Hamilton. He earned the nickname "The Vampire Rapist" because he had the penchant of biting the breasts of his victims, a modus operandi that led to his conviction due to forensic odontological evidence. His was the first such conviction in North America, several years before Ted Bundy, another serial killer. He was caught while mauling a pair of severed breasts howling like a werewolf.
Wayne Boden attended Glendale Secondary School (High School) in Hamilton, Ontario in the early to mid-1960s. He was quiet, muscular, and played on the school senior football team. He dated girls from the school. In 1964 or 1965 he was once observed by numerous students on school property in a violent, bloody fist fight with a fellow student (George Tirone) where Boden was victorious.
A.K.A.: "The Vampire Rapist"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Left bite marks on the breasts of his 4 female victims
Number of victims: 4
Date of murders: 1969 - 1971
Date of arrest: May 19, 1971
Date of birth: 1948
Victims profile: Shirley Audette, 20 / Marielle Archambault, 20 / Jean Wray, 24 / Elizabeth Pourteous, 33
Method of murder: Strangulation
Location: Montreal, Quebec/Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Status: Sentenced to four life sentences in prison on February 16, 1972. Died in prison on March 25, 2006
Deaths in Montreal
Shirley Audette
On October 3, 1969, Shirley Audette was found dumped at the rear of an apartment complex in downtown Montreal. Although she was fully clothed, she had been raped and strangled, and showed savage bite marks on her breasts. There were no signs of bloody skin under the fingernails of the victim which led one biographer to theorize that she did not struggle against her assailant.
One of Audette's former boyfriends told the police that he believed that she got involved with a very dominant, attractive man because she was "getting into something dangerous"; she never mentioned the man's name. Based on this interview, police have surmised that the killer had an attraction for girls who wanted and accepted "rough sex."
Marielle Archambault
On November 23, a jewelry clerk named Marielle Archambault left work at closing time with a young man whom she introduced as "Bill" to her co-workers, who afterwards remarked that she seemed happy and entranced by the man.
When she did not report for work the following morning, Archambault's employer went to check on her in her apartment to see if she was ill. Together with her landlady, they discovered her naked body under a blanket on the living room floor. However, it appeared that she put up a struggle against her assailant, as shown by the wrecked state of her apartment. The killer ripped her pantyhose and bra, raped her, and left his telltale teeth marks on her breasts.
The police were able to find a crumpled photograph amid the wreckage of Archambaut's apartment, which was readily identified as the mysterious "Bill" by her co-workers. However, despite this apparent break, the police were not successful in connecting the photograph to any known suspect, even through a police sketch based on the picture was distributed for publication in the newspapers.
Jean Way
"Bill" waited two months before he struck again. On January 16, 1970, the boyfriend of Jean Way, 24, came to pick her up for a scheduled date at her apartment on Lincoln Street in downtown Montreal. When she did not answer the door, he decided to come back a little later.
Upon returning, he found the door unlocked and found her naked body on the sofa, her breasts chewed all over; it seemed that the killer had been in the apartment when Way's boyfriend Brian Caulfield was knocking at the door earlier that evening. An autopsy done by Dr. Jean-Paul Valcourt found two small fibers under the fingernails of her left hand, indicating that - contrary to legend - the victim had indeed struggled against her assailant. (Rapport Medico-Legal from the Institut de Medecine Legal et de la poliec scientifique 20 January 1970, page 4).
The resulting publicity from the murders put the city under a grip of fear. But it turned out that Jean Way's murder was the last in that city, as "Bill" had disappeared, only to turn up in another city 2500 miles to the west more than a year later.
Boden's last victim and arrest
Elizabeth Anne Porteous
In the city of Calgary, a 33-year old high school teacher named Elizabeth Anne Porteous did not report to work on the morning of May 18, 1971. Her apartment manager was called, and found her body on the bedroom floor. As with Marielle Achambaut, her apartment showed considerable signs of a struggle. Raped and strangled, her breasts were likewise mutilated with bite marks. Amid the wreckage, however, the police recovered a broken cufflink under the victim's body.
In their investigation of the murder, the police were able to find out from two of her colleagues that she was seen at a stoplight riding in a blue Mercedes on the night she died; the car was reported as having a distinctive advertising bull-shaped decal in the rear window. A friend of the victim also informed police that she had been recently dating a man named "Bill", described as a "flashy" dresser with neat, short hair. Clearly, there was a link between Elizabeth Porteous' death and the murders in Montreal.
The following day, on May 19, the blue Mercedes was spotted by patrolmen, parked near the murder scene. Boden, a former fashion model, was arrested half an hour later as he went to his car. He told the police that he moved from Montreal a year previous and admitted that he had been dating Porteous and was with her on the night of the murder. When the broken cufflink was presented to him, he admitted its ownership. However, he insisted that Porteous was fine when he left her that night.
The police in Calgary were in possession of a copy of the photograph recovered from Archambaut's apartment and, as Boden resembled the man in the picture, they held him for suspicion in murdering Porteous. They then turned their attention to the marks on the victim's breasts.
Bite mark evidence
The police turned to a local orthodontist, Gordon Swann, to prove that the marks on Porteous' breasts and neck were Boden's bite marks, with the intent to verify them as having been left by Boden. As there was nothing in Canadian forensic literature on bite mark evidence, Swann wrote to the FBI, hoping for any information on the matter. What he got in reply was a letter from then-director J. Edgar Hoover, who directed him to England, where he met a man who had dealt with 20 or 30 cases.
Eventually Swann was able to get the information he needed and based on a cast made of Boden's teeth he demonstrated 29 points of similarity between the bite marks in Elizabeth Porteous' body and Boden's teeth. This evidence was sufficient for the jury of Boden's trial to find him guilty of murder for which he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
Conviction, imprisonment, and death
Boden was returned to Montreal to face trial, where he confessed to three of the related murders, but denied involvement in the death of Norma Vaillancourt, a 21-year-old student killed on July 23, 1968. Boden had been suspected in that homicide as well but, in 1994, Raymond Sauve, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Boden was sentenced to three additional life terms and he was sent to the Kingston Penitentiary, where he began serving his sentence on February 16, 1972.
In 1977, while Boden five years into his life sentence, American Express granted him a credit card, which he used while out on a day pass from Laval prison. He escaped and was recaptured 36 hours later while eating lunch in a restaurant in the Mount Royal Hotel in downtown Montreal. Three prison guards were disciplined and American Express conducted an internal investigation to find out how a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder managed to get a credit card.(Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1984 Page 1), (Toronto Globe and Mail p. 9, May 23, 1984)
Boden died at Kingston Regional Hospital on March 27, 2006 of skin cancer after being confined in hospital for six weeks.
13. Léopold Dion (4)
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| (Léopold Dion) |
Léopold Dion (February 25, 1920 - 17 November 1972) was a Canadian sex offender and serial killer who was active in Quebec in the 1960s. He was nicknamed the “Monster of Pont-Rouge”. Sentenced to death on April 10, 1964. Commuted to life imprisonment. Stabbed to death by a fellow inmate named Normand Champagne on November 17, 1972.
A.K.A.: "The Monster of Pont-Rouge"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Serial rapist (21)
Number of victims: 4
Date of murders: April-May 1963
Date of arrest: May 27, 1963
Date of birth: 1921
Victims profile: Guy Luckenuck, 12 / Alain Carrier, 8, and Michel Morel, 10 / Pierre Marquis, 13
Method of murder: Strangulation - Smothering
Location: Québec, Canada
Status: Sentenced to death on April 10, 1964. Commuted to life imprisonment. Stabbed to death by a fellow inmate named Normand Champagne on November 17, 1972
Crimes
His first sexual assault, which also involved an attempted murder, was against a young woman from Pont-Rouge. Léopold Dion and his brother raped and stabbed the woman on the railway track linking the Rang Petit-Capsa (a street) to the village of Pont-Rouge. They left her for dead, but she survived, albeit with both physical and psychological injuries.
Dion sexually abused 21 boys, killing four. He lured his victims by posing as a photographer.
His first murder victim was 12-year-old Luc Luckenuck, in Quebec City that day for clarinet lessons. This boy came from Kénogami. We travelled together every week to take music lessons at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec in Québec City. Dion lured the boy by taking a series of snapshots with an old camera that had no film before claiming to want to continue elsewhere. He drove the boy into the country, where, in a remote spot, Dion then strangled him, and then buried him.
On 5 May 1963, Dion crossed paths with eight-year-old Alain Carrier and 10-year-old Michel Morel. He used the same ploy to lure them into his car, driving them to a run-down building in Saint-Raymond-de-Portneuf. With Alain, he pretended to play prisoner so that he could tie the boy up in the cottage. Once the younger boy had been overcome, Dion turned to the older one, Michel, whom he led outside, whereupon he asked the child to take his clothes off. Dion then strangled him with a garrote, before going back inside and smothering the other boy.
On 26 May 1963, he met 13-year-old Pierre Marquis, who was also taken in by the fake photographer’s promises. They were a couple of paces from a dune, the same one that had become Guy Luckenuck’s grave a bit more than a month earlier. Once again, Dion asked his victim to pose naked. The child complied, but when Dion tried to assault him, he fought back before succumbing to the assault. Dion strangled Marquis.
Arrest
Dion, who was then on conditional release for raping a schoolteacher several years earlier, was arrested the day after his last murder. It was a description of Dion from another boy whom he had waylaid, but who had got away from him, that led to the police apprehending Dion. Once in prison, Dion held out for a month before he finally admitted his crimes to his interrogators, in detail. He then led investigators to the spot where he had buried the children's bodies.
Trial
Criminal lawyer Guy Bertrand defended Dion at his trial. Dion was, in the end, charged with only one murder, Pierre Marquis’s, for lack of evidence in the other cases. On 10 April 1964, Judge Gérard Lacroix sentenced him to be hanged.
The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by then Governor General of Canada Georges Vanier after Bertrand's appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in the matter had failed.
Death
On 17 November 1972, Dion was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate named Normand “Lawrence d'Arabie” Champagne, who was later found not guilty of this crime by reason of insanity.
12. Peter Woodcock (4)
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| (David Michael Krueger, Birth name: Peter Woodcock) |
David Michael Krueger (March 5, 1939 – March 5, 2010), best known by his birth name, Peter Woodcock, was a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who gained notoriety for the murders of three young children in Toronto in the late 1950s, as well as for a murder on his first day of unsupervised release from the psychiatric institution he was incarcerated in for his earlier crimes.
An adopted child, Krueger was shuttled around numerous foster homes as an infant, and showed signs of severe emotional trauma when he found a permanent foster home at the age of three. Unable to adjust to most social situations, he would be bullied by and isolated from his peers. He would often wander from his home by foot, bicycle or train to parts of Toronto where he would molest dozens, and ultimately murder three young children. Found not guilty by reason of insanity for these crimes, he was placed in a psychiatric facility where he was deemed to be psychopathic. Experimental treatment programs for psychopathy tried with Woodcock proved ineffective when he murdered a fellow psychiatric patient in 1991; and, after his death in 2010, he was described in the Toronto Star as "the serial killer they couldn't cure." On March 5, 2010, his 71st birthday, Krueger died of natural causes.
Birth name: Peter Woodcock
Classification: Homicide
Characteristics: Juvenile - Child rapist
Number of victims: 4
Date of murders: 1956 - 1957 / 1991
Date of arrest: 1957
Date of birth: March 5, 1939
Victims profile: Wayne Mallette (male, 7) / Gary Morris (male, 9) / Carole Voyce (female, 4) / Dennis Kerr, 27 (fellow psychiatric patient)
Method of murder: ??? / Stabbing with knife
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Status: Declared legally insane and placed in Oak Ridge, an Ontario psychiatric facility on 1957. Died there on March 5, 2010
Early life
Peter Woodcock was born in Peterborough, Canada to a 17-year-old factory worker, Waita Woodcock, who gave him up for adoption after breastfeeding him for a month. Adoption agency records report that the newborn, Peter, showed feeding problems and cried constantly. As an infant, he stayed in various foster homes; unable to bond with any of his foster parents. After his first birthday, he became terrified of anybody approaching him, and his speech was incoherent—described as strange whining animal noises. He was also physically abused by at least one of his early foster parents, with a 2-year-old Woodcock having to be given medical treatment for an injured neck after receiving a beating. He was placed into a stable home at the age of three, to foster parents Frank and Susan Maynard – an upper-middle-class couple with another son. Susan Maynard, who was described as a "forceful woman with an exaggerated sense of propriety", became strongly attached to the maladjusted child who would still scream when someone approached him. By the age of five, Woodcock would no longer scream when approached, but he remained a strange child and became the target of neighbourhood bullies. He often wandered far away from his neighbourhood, once being found cowering in some bushes, in an attempt to hide from other children.
Worried about the child's fragile emotional state, Frank and Susan Maynard would regularly bring him to the Hospital for Sick Children, where Woodcock received extensive treatment. Woodcock was sent to a private school, but again failed to make friends or interact successfully with his peers and remained isolated. By the age of eleven, he was described as an 'angry little boy', with a Children's Aid Society report on him from that time reading:
Slight in build, neat in appearance, eyes bright, and wide open, worried facial expression, sometimes screwing up of eyes, walks briskly and erect, moves rapidly, darts ahead, interested and questioning constantly in conversation ... He attributes his wandering to feeling so nervous that he just has to get away. In some ways, Peter has little capacity for self-control. He appears to act out almost everything he thinks and demonstrates excessive affection for his foster mother. Although he verbalizes his resentment for other children, he has never been known to physically attack another child ... Peter apparently has no friends. He plays occasionally with younger children, managing the play. When with children his own age, he is boastful and expresses determinedly ideas which are unacceptable and misunderstood.
Signs of Woodcock's violent fantasies were present at this time also, seen when a social worker was walking with him at the Canadian National Exhibition and Woodcock muttered, "I wish a bomb would fall on the Exhibition and kill all the children". Woodcock was sent to a school for emotionally disturbed children in Kingston, Ontario, and began acting on his strong sexual urges with other children – with Woodcock stating that here he had consensual intercourse with a 12-year-old girl when he was thirteen. When he turned fifteen, he was discharged from this school and returned to live with his foster parents, but was soon re-enrolled at his original private school, where he again failed to connect with his peers. At the age of sixteen, he left the private school again and was sent to a public high school, where children from the neighborhood instantly recognized him and resumed the bullying; he transferred to a private high school six weeks later. While his peers again shunned him, his teachers there remembered him as a very bright student who excelled in science, history, and English, and who frequently scored 100 percent on his tests.
Early crimes
Peter Woodcock’s prized possession was a red and white Schwinn bicycle on which he satisfied his continuing compulsion to wander. He rode the bike to the far reaches of the city—even during the deep, cold Toronto winters—and evolved a fantasy in which he led a gang of 500 invisible boys on bikes called the 'Winchester Heights Gang'. His foster parents were aware of this fantasy and his compulsion to wander, but they, as well as everyone else, were unaware that he had begun traveling around Toronto on his bike and sexually assaulting children.
Murder of Wayne Mallette
On September 15, 1956, Woodcock was riding his bike around the grounds of the Exhibition Place when he met 7-year-old Wayne Mallette. He lured the boy out of sight and then proceeded to strangle him to death. Mallette's body was found in the early hours of September 16. He was dressed in a British schoolboy blazer, shirt and plaid pants. It appeared that his clothing had been removed and he had then been re-dressed. His face was pushed into the dirt and two bite marks were found on the body — one on the boy’s calf and the other on his buttock. There was no evidence of rape, however. Pennies were found ritualistically scattered near the body and someone had defecated next to the victim as well.
Murder of Gary Morris
On October 6, 1956, Woodcock was riding his bike around Cabbagetown when he picked up 9-year-old Gary Morris. He then drove the boy to Cherry Beach, where he strangled and beat him to death - with a coroner later determining that Morris had died from a ruptured liver. Morris' body was found with a bite mark on his throat and this time paper clips seemed to have been ritualistically sprinkled near the corpse. Again, the clothing had been removed from the victim and then he had been re-dressed.
Murder of Carole Voyce
On January 19, 1957, Woodcock was riding his bike when he approached 4-year-old Carole Voyce and offered her a ride. He then drove her under the Bloor Viaduct and murdered her. When she was found, her clothes had been pulled off. It appeared that she had been choked into unconsciousness and sexually molested, and that her death was caused by a tree branch being forcibly inserted into her vagina.
Apprehension and trial
Witnesses saw a teenager cycling away from Carole Voyce's crime scene, and an accurate composite sketch was created based on those witnesses' descriptions. This sketch ran on the front page of the Toronto Star and would lead to Woodcock's arrest on January 21, 1957, and his subsequent confession to all three murders. He recalled upon his arrest: "My fear was that Mother would find out. Mother was my biggest fear. I didn’t know if the police would let her at me."
Woodcock was tried only for the murder of Carole Voyce. On April 11, 1957, after a four-day trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to the Oak Ridge division of the maximum-security Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre in Penetanguishene, Ontario.
Imprisonment
While imprisoned, Woodcock underwent various forms of psychiatric therapy, including LSD treatments when they were popular in the 1960s. He was also given other personality-breaking drugs: scopolamine, sodium amytal, methedrine and dexamyl. He was subjected to "dyads" — a personality-breaking therapy in which inmates challenged each other’s belief systems — which inmates referred to as "The Hundred-Day Hate-In". Dyads were developed in the late 1950s to early 1960s by a Harvard psychologist and former CIA interrogation and psychological warfare expert, Henry A. Murray. In the 1960s, one of Murray’s volunteer personality-destruction subjects had been a young Harvard student—Ted Kaczynski, the future Unabomber. Woodcock did not respond well to these treatments, and was not an ideal prisoner. He engaged in homosexual acts and exploited his fellow inmates, who were often less intelligent or less sane than he was. He formed an imaginary gang, the Brotherhood. He convinced inmates that he had contact with the mythical group on the outside, and that in order to be initiated, inmates had to perform oral sex on him and bring him gifts of cigarettes.
Woodcock was eventually transferred to less restrictive institutions, and ultimately arrived at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. Here, staff indulged his passion for trains by taking him to the Smiths Falls Railway Museum, and even took him to see The Silence of the Lambs. During this time, he legally changed his name to David Michael Krueger and rekindled a relationship with Bruce Hamill, an Ottawa killer who had been released from Oak Ridge and was working as a security guard at the Ottawa courthouse. Krueger convinced Hamill an alien brotherhood would solve his problems if he helped kill another Brockville inmate, Dennis Kerr.
Murder of Dennis Kerr
On July 13, 1991, Bruce Hamill went to a hardware store, bought a plumber's wrench, hatchet, knives and a sleeping bag, then went to the Brockville hospital and signed out Krueger on his first publicly escorted day pass. During the first hour of his first weekend pass (unsupervised release) in 34 years, Krueger arranged to meet Dennis Kerr in the woods near Brockville where Krueger would loan Kerr five hundred dollars. When Dennis Kerr arrived as instructed, Krueger struck him in the head with the pipe wrench and continued to beat him into unconsciousness. Krueger and Hamill then seized the hatchet and knife they had hidden in the bushes while waiting for Kerr's arrival and hacked and stabbed Kerr, mutilating his body, cutting it open, and nearly severing his head. Drenched in Kerr’s blood, they then stripped themselves naked and sodomized the corpse. Krueger then left the scene, walked to a police station about two miles away, and turned himself in.
Death
For the murder of Dennis Kerr, Krueger was transferred back to the Oak Ridge division of the Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre, where he had spent the majority of his 34 preceding years in custody. In the years after Kerr's murder, he was the focus of a biography and several documentary films and sometimes tried to explain why he killed, but he never came up with rational reasons. He said in a 1993 interview: "I'm accused of having no morality, which is a fair assessment, because my morality is whatever the system allows." On March 5, 2010, his 71st birthday, Krueger died of natural causes.
11. John Martin Crawford (4 – 4+)
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| (John Martin Crawford) |
John Martin Crawford (born 29 March 1962) is a Canadian serial killer. John Crawford is serving three concurrent life sentences in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert.
A.K.A.: "The Lady Killer"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Torture
Number of victims: 4 – 4+
Date of murders: 1981 / 1992
Date of arrest: January 1995
Date of birth: March 29, 1962
Victims profile: Mary Jane Serloin / Eva Taysup / Shelley Napope / Calinda Waterhen
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife / Strangulation
Location: Alberta/Saskatchewan, Canada
Status: Sentenced in 1981 to 10 years imprisonment for manslaughter. Released on March 23, 1989. Sentenced to three concurrent life sentences in 1996
John Martin Crawford: Serial Killer of First Nations Women
By Sylvia Clare
July 2, 2008
Canadian serial killer John Martin Crawford preyed on First Nations women. As a serial killer, Crawford is not as well-known as media darlings Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, or pig farmer Robert “Willie” Pickton, but his attacks on women were just as vicious.
The product of an abusive family, John Crawford was a bully at the age of twelve. He sniffed glue, and talked aloud to himself and to inanimate objects. When he was thirteen, he and some friends paid an eleven-year-old girl to have sex with them. At sixteen, Crawford was hearing voices. The voices began to torment him.
First Murder
In 1981, the 19-year-old Crawford killed for the first time. He met 35-year-old Mary Jane Serloin, his first victim, in a bar in Lethbridge, Alberta. Her nude body was found on Christmas Day, her breasts mutilated with bite marks.
Although charged with first-degree murder, Crawford pled guilty to manslaughter and received a sentence of ten years. In 1989, the system released him. The big, burly man moved in with his mother in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Serial Killer
By 1992, Crawford was shooting drugs and sniffing glue daily. He drank twenty-four beer and 26 oz of hard liquor a day, and cruised the run-down areas of town almost every night, looking for prostitutes.
On May 9, 1992, Janet Sylvestre told police that Crawford had raped her. Police found Crawford on a beach, almost dead from sunstroke and substance abuse, and held him in remand. In June, his mother put up bail for his release into her custody.
Later the same year, he and former fellow inmate Bill Corrigon picked up 16-year-old Shelley Napope. Both men raped and beat her. Afterward, Crawford dragged Shelley into the bushes, and stabbed her to death.
On September 20, Crawford raped, tortured and strangled Eva Taysup. He sawed off Taysup’s arm, before he buried her body. The next day, Calinda Waterhen, 22, met the same fate, although he left her body intact.
In Oct, 1992, Crawford took part in the beating death of a Saskatoon man. He spent most of 1993 in the Saskatoon Correctional Centre, on another assault charge.
In 1994, a hunter discovered human remains southwest of Saskatoon. John Crawford became a suspect. Police put him under surveillance for four months. During that time, he picked up Theresa Kematch, brutally beat and raped her, and dumped her on the street. Police picked her up, and promptly arrested her.
Janet Sylvestre was murdered in 1994. Her case remains unsolved.
Arrest and Conviction
When police finally took Crawford into custody in January 1995, other women came forward with accounts of rape and attempted strangulation by Crawford and Bill Corrigan. In May 1996, Crawford was convicted on three counts of murder. Authorities suspect he killed several more women.
At the time of Crawford’s trial, two other Canadian killers, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, were also on trial. The vast publicity generated by the Bernardo case left the crimes of John Martin Crawford largely unknown, and raised questions of racial discrimination.
In his 2001 book, “Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada’s Indifference,” Warren Goulding suggests that the Crawford case received less media publicity because the victims were First Nations women.
John Crawford is serving three concurrent life sentences in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert.
Media reaction
Crawford is discussed in Warren Goulding's book, Just Another Indian, A Serial Killer and Canada's Indifference with the message that crimes by marginalized minorities go unheeded by an uncaring society at large. The theory is posited that Crawford's case was played down by the media because his victims were Aboriginal women.
10. William Dean Christenson (4 – 4+)
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| (William Dean Christenson, aka Bill Owen) |
William Dean Christenson (born c. 1945), also known as "A real American Jack the Ripper" and Bill Owen, is a convicted Canadian serial killer. Sentenced to life in prison without parole in Pennsylvania in 1983.
A.K.A.: "A real American Jack the Ripper"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Dismemberment - Barroom altercation
Number of victims: 4 – 4+
Date of murders: 1981 - 1982
Date of birth: 1945
Victims profile: Sylvie Trudel, 27 / Murielle Guay, 26 / Michelle Angiers / Jeffrey Schrader, 51
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife / Shooting
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada / Pennsylvania, USA
Status: Sentenced to life in prison without parole in Pennsylvania in 1983
A native of Bethesda, Maryland, born in 1945, Christenson logged his first felony conviction in 1969, charged with assault and battery in the stabbing of a teenage girl in Washington, D.C.
Two years later, he pled guilty to raping a Maryland go-go dancer, serving nine years before his parole in 1980. On April 16, 1981, traveling as "Richard Owen," he was picked up for rape in Montreal, bargaining down to a guilty plea on charges of indecent assault. A year later, he was "inadvertently" released by Canadian authorities, despite a request that he be delivered to Maryland as a parole violator and suspect in other violent rapes.
On April 27, 1982, the decapitated, dismembered body of 27-year-old Sylvie Trudel was found in the Montreal apartment occupied by "Richard Owen."
That same afternoon, the sectioned corpse of Murielle Guay, 26, was found wrapped in trash bags at Mille-Isles, 50 miles northwest of Montreal.
Police were initially reluctant to connect the crimes, noting that Trudel's killer displayed "a certain amount of expertise," while victim Guay was "really butchered," but their doubts were resolved by April 29, with murder warrants issued in the name of William Christenson.
Back in the United States, Christenson met his parents at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, tapping their bank account for a $5,000 grub stake. (Both were later charged with harboring a fugitive.) With cash in hand, the killer started drifting over the eastern half of the country, spending time in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
He was living in Scranton, as "Stanley Holl," when go-go dancer Michelle Angiers was stabbed 30 times in a tavern parking lot at nearby Dickson, her body recovered on September 13, 1982.
Nine months later, in Trenton, New Jersey, Christenson shot and wounded two black men whom he had befriended in a local saloon.
On December 4 of that year, in Philadelphia, he used the same gun to kill another black, 51-year-old Jeffrey Schrader, in a barroom altercation. Arrested in that case, Christenson sat in jail while police searched his apartment, retrieving a bloody mattress and a hacksaw, matted with blood and hair. (No trace has been found to this day of the dancer with whom he had once shared the flat.) Convicted of the Schrader homicide, he drew a prison term of life without parole.
By the summer of 1984, felony charges were piling up against Christenson. Trenton authorities wanted him for trial on the double shooting, while Montgomery County, Maryland, sought to try him on another rape charge. That August, Canadian authorities closed their file on the Montreal murders, citing Christenson's present life sentence, but he was already suspect in two other slayings, the victims dismembered with a hacksaw. Nationwide, police named him as a suspect in at least thirteen deaths with suggestions that the final count might reach thirty. Pennsylvania officers dubbed him "a real American Jack the Ripper."
Christenson responded to the attention by striving to make himself mysterious, signing court documents with a check mark and challenging prosecutors to prove his identity. In November 1984, he spoke to Philadelphia newsmen about his "extreme mental and alcohol problems," voicing the fear that he would be charged by police in numerous unsolved murders.
On February 16, 1985, Christenson left state prison in a heavily armed convoy, complete with helicopter escort, bound for Philadelphia and his arraignment in the murder of Michelle Angiers. Convicted of third-degree murder in that case, on August 5, 1987, the killer faced a new term of twenty years on completion of his existing life sentence.
The investigation in Christenson's case continues, with further prosecutions anticipated by authorities in several states.
Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers
9. Allan Legere (5 – 5+)
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| (Allan Joseph Legere) |
Allan Legere (born February 13, 1948) is a Canadian serial killer, also known as the Monster of the Miramichi (not "of Miramichi": at the time this nickname was first applied to him, the City of Miramichi proper did not exist, and so it referred to the region along the Miramichi River).
He escaped custody in April of 1989 (while serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of a shopkeeper, John Glendenning) and remained free for seven months. During this time he committed four more murders, arson and multiple rapes, before he was recaptured. Rewards of $50,000 were collected for his capture.
His trial featured one of the first Canadian uses of DNA fingerprinting during which his lawyers argued that the relatively shallow gene pool of the Miramichi region could easily lead to false positives.
Legere was convicted for a second time in 1991, and is currently one of only 90 prisoners held in Canada's maximum security Special Handling Unit (SHU).
A.K.A.: "The Monster of the Miramichi"
Classification: Murderer, Serial killer, Arson
Characteristics: Rape - Robberies
Number of victims: 5 – 5+
Date of murders: 1986 / 1989
Date of arrest: November 24, 1989
Date of birth: 1948
Victims profile: John Glendenning (shopkeeper) / Annie Flam, 75 / Sisters Donna and Linda Lou Daughney, 45 and 41 / Rev. James Smith, 69
Method of murder: Beating
Location: Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada
Status: Sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 18 years on January 22, 1987. Escapee May 3, 1989. Sentenced to life in prison on November 3, 1991
Early life
Allan Joseph Legere was born in Chatham, New Brunswick.
First murder
Legere was convicted in the murder of shopkeeper John Glendenning, of Black River Bridge, New Brunswick, which occurred on the evening of June 21, 1986. After cutting the power, Legere and his accomplices Todd Matchett and Scott Curtis, broke into the elderly couple's store. After repeatedly beating John and his wife Mary, the trio fled the scene. Mary then discovered her husband (who had been beaten to death); she crawled up the stairs to the phone and dialed 911. The dispatcher spoke with Mary on the phone until the emergency forces arrived. Police tracked down the three and arrested them. Matchett pleaded guilty to murdering John Glendenning and brutally beating his wife Mary; Curtis and Legere were convicted at trial.
Trial and escape
Legere was serving his murder sentence at the Atlantic Institution maximum security penitentiary in Renous-Quarryville, under the responsibility of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). On May 3, 1989, Legere was transported by CSC personnel from the penitentiary to the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, New Brunswick, for the treatment of an ear infection. Legere managed to convince the CSC personnel to let him use a washroom at the hospital alone, and there he picked the lock on his handcuffs with a homemade key he had hidden in a cigar. He then used a piece of television antenna that he had concealed on his body as a weapon, and held the officers at bay before fleeing the building. Legere escaped the hospital property and through a combination of carjacking and motor vehicle theft, was able to evade recapture.
More murders and eventual capture
Legere was at large for a period of seven months and during this time committed four additional murders in and around the towns of Chatham, Newcastle, and adjoining communities (now part of the city of Miramichi). The individuals he murdered were Annie Flam (May 29, 1989; during this incident, Flam's sister was also assaulted); sisters Linda and Donna Daughney (October 13, 1989; Legere set fire to the Daughney home before leaving), and Father James Smith (November 24, 1989). Legere was recaptured on November 24, 1989 following a failed carjacking that began in Saint John and ended outside Rogersville; rewards of $50,000 were collected for the information that led to his arrest.
Conviction
In August 1990, Legere was convicted on charges pertaining to his escape, and sentenced to an additional nine years. His trial for the murders began with an indictment in November of that year. Legere's trial featured the first Canadian uses of DNA fingerprinting to convict rather than exonerate; in November 1991, Legere was convicted of the murders committed while he had been at large.
Present
In 2015, Legere was transferred from the super-maximum security penitentiary (the "SHU", in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec) to the Edmonton Institution in Alberta.
In 1996, the city of Fredericton shut down its old jail, and in 1999 the building was repurposed into a science museum; the cell in which Legere was held during his 1991 trial is now used for an exhibit on DNA fingerprinting.
8. William Patrick Fyfe (5 – 9-25)
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| (William Patrick Fyfe) |
William Patrick Fyfe (born February 27, 1955) is a Canadian serial killer convicted of killing five women in the Montreal area of Quebec, although he claims to have killed four others. He allegedly killed his first victim in 1979 at age of 24.
A.K.A.: "The Killer Handyman"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape
Number of victims: 9 - 25
Date of murders: 1979 - 1999
Date of arrest: December 22, 1999
Date of birth: February 27, 1955
Victims profile: Hazel Scattolon, 52 / Monique Gaudreau, 46 / Anna Yarnold, 59 / Teresa Shanahan, 55 / Mary Glenn, 50 / Suzanne-Marie Bernier, 62 ??? / Nicole Raymond, 26 ??? / Louise Poupart-Leblanc, 37 ??? / Pauline Laplante, 45 ???
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Status: Sentenced to life in prison on September 21, 2001
Early life
Billy Fyfe was born in Toronto, Ontario. He was raised by an aunt and moved from Central Canada to Montreal (Parc Extension) in 1958. He lived as a normal child, although friends did have suspicions about the boy as he grew up. As an adult, he worked as a handyman.
Murders
DNA evidence on the door frame at Mary Glen's house led police to charge Fyfe for the murders. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) arrested him on 22 December 1999, while he was returning to his pick-up truck after eating at a Husky Truck Stop near Barrie, Ontario. He has confessed to only a portion of the crimes he is suspected of committing.
Fyfe's preliminary hearing began on 6 November 2000. Jean Lecours was the crown prosecutor heading up the case against Fyfe. He is now serving a life sentence in a psychiatric hospital in Saskatchewan[citation needed]. The four last victims he admitted to only after being incarcerated.
He is also suspected by Montreal Police of being the serial rapist commonly known as "The Plumber" who was responsible for a string of violent rapes during the 1980s in downtown Montreal.
Known victims
● Hazel Scattolon, a 52-year-old woman who was stabbed to death and sexually assaulted in March 21, 1981.
● Monique Gaudreau, a 46-year-old woman who was found dead in October 1999 in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec.
● Anna Yarnold, a 59-year-old woman who was found dead on October 15, 1999 in Senneville, Quebec.
● Teresa Shanahan, a 55-year-old woman who was stabbed to death in November 1999 in Laval, Quebec.
● Mary Glenn, a 50-year-old woman who was beaten and stabbed on December 15, 1999 in Baie-d'Urfé, Quebec.
● Suzanne-Marie Bernier, a 62-years-old woman who was stabbed and sexually assaulted October 17, 1979 in Cartierville, Montreal ???
● Nicole Raymond, a 26-years-old woman who was stabbed and sexually assaulted on November 14, 1979 in Pointe-Claire, Montreal ???
● Louise Poupart-Leblanc, a 37-years-old woman who was stabbed and sexually assaulted on September 26, 1987 in Saint-Adèle, Laurentides ???
● Pauline Laplante, a 45-years-old woman who was stabbed and sexually assaulted on June 9, 1989 in Saint-Adèle, Laurentides ???
7. Robert Pickton (6 – 49)
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| (Robert William "Willie" Pickton) |
Robert William "Willie" Pickton (born October 24, 1949) of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada, is a former multi-millionaire pig farmer and serial killer convicted in 2007 of the second-degree murders of six women. He was also charged in the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; however, these charges were stayed by the Crown in 2010. In December 2007, he was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years – the longest sentence then available under Canadian law for murder.
During the trial's first day of jury evidence, January 22, 2007, the Crown stated he confessed to 49 murders to an undercover police officer posing as a cellmate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even 50, and that he was caught because he was "sloppy".
A.K.A.: "Willie"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Dismemberment - Pig farmer
Number of victims: 6 - 49
Date of murders: 1995 - 2001
Date of arrest: February 2, 2002
Date of birth: October 26, 1949
Victims profile: Sereena Abotsway, 29 / Mona Lee Wilson, 26 / Andrea Joesbury, 22 / Brenda Ann Wolfe, 32 / Marnie Lee Frey, 25 / Georgina Faith Papin, 35
Method of murder: Strangulation with a piece of wire - Shooting
Location: Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada
Status: Sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years – the longest sentence available under Canadian law for murder
Background
By 1992, Robert William Pickton and his brother David owned a Port Coquitlam farm. Worker Bill Hiscox called it a "creepy-looking place", noting that it was patrolled by a 600-lb. (270 kg) boar, one of the few actual pigs on the farm. "I never saw a pig like that, who would chase you and bite at you," he said. "It was running out with the dogs around the property." He later described Pickton as a "pretty quiet guy, hard to strike up a conversation with," whose occasionally bizarre behavior, despite no evidence of substance abuse, would draw attention. Pickton's only vehicle was a converted bus, with deeply tinted windows, to which he was emotionally attached.
The Pickton brothers gradually neglected the site's farming operations. They registered a non-profit charity, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, with the Canadian government in 1996 as aiming to "organize, co-ordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups." Its events included raves and wild parties featuring Vancouver prostitutes and gatherings in a converted slaughterhouse. These events attracted as many as 2,000 people. Hell's Angel members were known to often frequent the farm.
On March 23, 1997, Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of prostitute Wendy Lynn Eistetter, whom he stabbed several times during an altercation at the farm. The victim informed police that Pickton handcuffed her, but that she escaped after suffering several lacerations, disarming him, and stabbing him with his weapon. Pickton sought treatment at Eagle Ridge Hospital, while Eistetter healed at the nearest emergency room. He was released on C$2,000 bond, but the charge was dismissed in January 1998. Months later, the Picktons were sued by Port Coquitlam officials for violating zoning ordinances – neglecting the agriculture for which it had been zoned, and having "altered a large farm building on the land for the purpose of holding dances, concerts and other recreations." The Picktons ignored the pressure from the officials and held a 1998 New Years party, after which they were faced with an injunction banning future parties; the police were "authorized to arrest and remove any person" attending future Piggy Palace Good Times Society events at the farm. The society's non-profit status was removed the following year, for inability to procure financial statements, and it subsequently disbanded.
Murders
Over the course of the next three years, Hiscox noticed that women who visited the farm eventually went missing. On February 6, 2002, police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms at the property owned by the brothers. After they were taken into custody, police obtained a second court order to search the farm as part of the BC Missing Women Investigation. Personal items (including a prescription asthma inhaler) belonging to one of the missing women were found at the farm, which was sealed off by members of the joint RCMP–Vancouver Police Department task force. The following day Pickton was charged with storing a firearm contrary to regulations, possession of a firearm while not being holder of a licence, and possession of a loaded restricted firearm without a licence. He was later released and was kept under police surveillance.
On February 22, Pickton was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. On April 2, three more charges were added for the murders of Jacqueline McDonell, Diane Rock and Heather Bottomley. A sixth charge for the murder of Andrea Joesbury was laid on April 9, followed shortly by a seventh for Brenda Wolfe. On September 20, four more charges were added for the slayings of Georgina Papin, Patricia Johnson, Helen Hallmark and Jennifer Furminger. Four more charges for the murders of Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving and Inga Hall were laid on October 3, bringing the total to fifteen, making the investigation the largest of any serial killer in Canadian history. On May 26, 2005, 12 more charges were laid against him for the killings of Cara Ellis, Andrea Borhaven, Debra Lynne Jones, Marnie Frey, Tiffany Drew, Kerry Koski, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks, Angela Jardine, Wendy Crawford, Diana Melnick, and Jane Doe (unidentified woman) bringing the total number of first-degree murder charges to 27.
Excavations continued through November 2003; the cost of the investigation is estimated to have been $70 million by the end of 2003, according to the provincial government. As of 2015 the property is fenced off, under lien by the Crown in Right of British Columbia. In the meantime, all the buildings on the property had been demolished. Forensic analysis proved difficult because the bodies may have been left to decompose or be eaten by insects and pigs on the farm. During the early days of the excavations, forensic anthropologists brought in heavy equipment, including two 50-foot (15-meter) flat conveyor belts and soil sifters to find traces of remains. On March 10, 2004, it was revealed that Pickton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public; the province's health authority later issued a warning. Another claim was made that he fed the bodies directly to his pigs.
Preliminary inquiry
A preliminary inquiry was held in 2003, the testimony from which was covered by a publication ban until 2010. At the inquiry, the fact that Pickton had been charged with attempted murder in connection with the stabbing of prostitute Wendy Lynn Eistetter in 1997 was revealed. Eistetter testified at the inquiry that after he had driven her to the Port Coquitlam farm and had sex with her, Pickton slapped a handcuff on her left hand and stabbed her in the abdomen. She stabbed Pickton in self defense. Later, both she and Pickton were treated at the same hospital, where staff used a key they found in Pickton's pocket to remove the handcuffs from the woman's wrist. The attempted-murder charge against Pickton was stayed on January 27, 1998, because the woman had drug addiction issues and prosecutors believed her too unstable for her testimony to help secure a conviction. The clothes and rubber boots Pickton had been wearing that evening were seized by police and left in an RCMP storage locker for more than seven years. Not until 2004 did lab testing show that the DNA of two missing women were on the items seized from Pickton in 1997.
In 1998, according to Vancouver police detective constable Lori Shenher, Shenher learned of a call made to a police tip phoneline stating that Pickton should be investigated in the case of the disappearances. According to Shenher's account, described at length in her 2015 book about the case, she struggled to attract sufficient police resources and attention to the case until a 2002 search of Pickton's farm by the RCMP.
In 1999, Canadian police had received a tip that Pickton had a freezer filled with human flesh on his farm. Although they interviewed Pickton and obtained his consent to a search of his farm, the police never conducted one.
Trial
Pickton's trial began on January 30, 2006 in New Westminster. Pickton pleaded not guilty to 27 charges of first-degree murder in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The voir dire phase of the trial took most of the year to determine what evidence might be admitted before the jury. Reporters were not allowed to disclose any of the material presented in the arguments. On March 2, one of the 27 counts was rejected by Justice James Williams for lack of evidence.
On August 9, Justice Williams severed the charges, splitting them into one group of six counts and another group of twenty counts. The trial proceeded on the group of six counts. The remaining 20 counts could have been heard in a separate trial, but ultimately were stayed on August 4, 2010. Because of the publication ban, full details of the decision are not publicly available; but the judge has explained that trying all 26 charges at once would put an unreasonable burden on the jury, as the trial could last up to two years, and have an increased chance for a mistrial. The judge also added that the six counts he chose had "materially different" evidence from the other 20
The date for the jury trial of the first six counts was initially set to start January 8, 2007, but later delayed to January 22. On that date, Pickton faced first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Frey, Abotsway, Papin, Joesbury, Wolfe and Wilson. The media ban was lifted and for the first time Canadians heard the details of what was found during the long investigation: skulls cut in half with hands and feet stuffed inside; the remains of one victim found stuffed in a garbage bag, and her blood-stained clothing found in Pickton's trailer; part of another victim's jawbone and teeth found beside Pickton's slaughterhouse; and a .22 calibre revolver with an attached dildo containing both his and a victim's DNA. In a videotaped recording played for the jury, Pickton claimed to have attached the dildo to his weapon as a makeshift silencer.
As of February 20, 2007, the following information has been presented to the court:
● During Pickton's trial, lab staff testified that about 80 unidentified DNA profiles, roughly half male and half female, have shown up on evidence.
● The items police found inside Pickton's trailer: A loaded .22 revolver with a dildo over the barrel and one round fired, boxes of .357 Magnum handgun ammunition, night-vision goggles, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a syringe with three millilitres of blue liquid inside, and "Spanish fly" aphrodisiac.
● A videotape of Pickton's friend Scott Chubb saying Pickton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield washer fluid. A second tape was played for Pickton, in which an associate named Andrew Bellwood said Pickton mentioned killing prostitutes by handcuffing and strangling them, then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to pigs.
● Photos of the contents of a garbage can found in Pickton's slaughterhouse, which held some remains of Mona Wilson.
In October 2007, a juror was accused of having made up her mind already that Pickton was innocent. The trial judge questioned the juror, saying "It's reported to me you said from what you had seen you were certain Mr. Pickton was innocent, there was no way he could have done this. That the court system had arrested the wrong guy." The juror denied this completely. Justice Williams ruled that she could remain on the jury since it had not been proven she made the statements.
Justice James Williams suspended jury deliberations on December 6, 2007 after he discovered an error in his charge to the jury. Earlier in the day, the jury had submitted a written question to Justice James requesting clarification of his charge, asking "Are we able to say 'yes' [i.e., find Pickton guilty] if we infer the accused acted indirectly?"
On December 9, 2007, the jury returned a verdict that Pickton is not guilty on 6 counts of first-degree murder, but is guilty on 6 counts of second-degree murder. A second-degree murder conviction carries a punishment of a life sentence, with no possibility of parole for a period between 10 and 25 years, to be set by the trial judge. On December 11, 2007, after reading 18 victim impact statements, British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Justice James Williams sentenced Pickton to life with no possibility of parole for 25 years – the maximum punishment for second-degree murder – and equal to the sentence which would have been imposed for a first-degree murder conviction. "Mr. Pickton's conduct was murderous and repeatedly so. I cannot know the details but I know this: What happened to them was senseless and despicable," said Justice Williams in passing the sentence.
British Columbia Court of Appeal
The B.C. Court of Appeal rendered judgment in June 2009 on two appeals, one brought by the Crown (prosecution) and the other brought by the defence.
Crown appeal
On January 7, 2008, the Attorney General filed an appeal in the British Columbia Court of Appeal, against Pickton's acquittals on the first-degree murder charges. The grounds of appeal relate to a number of evidentiary rulings made by the trial judge, certain aspects of the trial judge’s jury instructions, and the ruling to sever the six charges Pickton was tried on from the remaining twenty.
Some relatives of the victims in the case were taken aback by the announcement of a Crown appeal, especially because Attorney-General Wally Oppal had said a few days earlier that the prosecution would likely not appeal. Although Pickton had been acquitted on the first-degree murder charges, he was convicted of second-degree murder and received the same sentence as he would have on first-degree murder convictions. The relatives of the victims expressed concern that the convictions would be jeopardized if the Crown argued that the trial judge had made errors. Opposition critic Leonard Krog criticized the Attorney-General for not having briefed the victims’ families in advance.
Oppal apologized to the victims’ families for not informing them of the appeal before it was announced to the general public. Oppal also said that the appeal was filed largely for “strategic” reasons, in anticipation of an appeal by the defence. The prosecution’s rationale was that if Pickton appeals his convictions, and if that appeal is allowed, resulting in a new trial, the prosecution will want to hold that new trial on the original 26 charges of first-degree murder. But the Crown would be precluded from doing so unless it had successfully appealed the original acquittals on the first-degree murder charges, and the severance of the 26 counts into one group of six and one group of twenty.
Under the applicable rules of court, the time period for the Crown to appeal expired 30 days after December 9, when the verdicts were rendered, while the time period for the defence to appeal expired 30 days after December 11, when Pickton was sentenced. That is why the Crown announced its appeal first, even though the Crown appeal is intended to be conditional on an appeal by the defence. If the defence had not filed an appeal, then the Crown could have withdrawn its appeal.
Defense appeal
On January 9, 2008, lawyers for Pickton filed a notice of appeal in the British Columbia Court of Appeal, seeking a new trial on six counts of second-degree murder. The lawyer representing Pickton on the appeal was Gil McKinnon, who had been a Crown prosecutor in the 1970s.
The notice of appeal enumerated various areas in which the defense alleged that the trial judge erred: the main charge to the jury, the response to the jurors’ question, amending the jury charge, similar fact evidence, and Pickton’s statements to the police.
Decisions of the Court of Appeal
The British Columbia Court of Appeal issued its decisions on June 25, 2009, but some parts of the decisions were not publicly released because of publication bans still in place.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the defence appeal by a 2:1 majority. Because there was a dissent on a point of law, Pickton was entitled to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, without first seeking leave to appeal. His notice of appeal was filed in the Supreme Court of Canada on August 24, 2009.
The Court of Appeal allowed the crown appeal, finding that the trial judge erred in excluding some evidence and in severing the 26 counts into one group of 20 counts and one group of 6. The order resulting from this finding was stayed, so that the conviction on the six counts of second degree murder would not be set aside.
Supreme Court of Canada
On June 26, 2009, Pickton's lawyers confirmed that they would exercise his right to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The appeal was based on the dissent in the British Columbia Court of Appeal.
While Pickton had an automatic right to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada based on the legal issues on which Justice Donald had dissented, Pickton's lawyers applied to the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal on other issues as well. On November 26, 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada granted this application for leave to appeal. The effect of this was to broaden the scope of Pickton's appeal, allowing him to raise arguments that had been rejected unanimously in the B.C. Court of Appeal (not just arguments that had been rejected by the 2-1 majority).
On July 30, 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision dismissing Pickton's appeal and affirming his convictions. The argument that Pickton should be granted a new trial was unanimously rejected by the Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Although unanimous in its result, the Supreme Court split six to three in its legal analysis of the case. The issue was whether the trial judge made a legal error in his instructions to the jury, and in particular in his "re-instruction" responding to the jury's question about Pickton's liability if he was not the only person involved. Writing for the majority, Madam Justice Charron found that "the trial judge's response to the question posed by the jury did not adversely impact on the fairness of the trial". She further found that the trial judge's overall instructions with respect to other suspects "compendiously captured the alternative routes to liability that were realistically in issue in this trial. The jury was also correctly instructed that it could convict Mr. Pickton if the Crown proved this level of participation coupled with the requisite intent."
Mr. Justice LeBel, writing for the minority, found that the jury was not properly informed "of the legal principles which would have allowed them as triers of fact to consider evidence of Mr. Pickton’s aid and encouragement to an unknown shooter, as an alternative means of imposing liability for the murders." However, LeBel J. would have applied the so-called curative proviso so as not to overturn Pickton's convictions.
Reaction and aftermath to the court proceedings
Discontinuance of prosecution of other counts against Pickton
B.C. Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie announced that the prosecution of Pickton on the 20 other murder charges would likely be discontinued. "In reaching this position," he said, "the branch has taken into account the fact that any additional convictions could not result in any increase to the sentence that Mr. Pickton has already received."
Families of the victims had varied reactions to this announcement. Some were disappointed that Pickton would never be convicted of the 20 other murders, while others were relieved that the gruesome details of the murders would not be aired in court.
Vancouver Police Department management review of investigation
In 2010, the Vancouver Police Department issued a statement that an "exhaustive management review of the Missing Women Investigation" had been conducted, and the VPD would make the Review available to the public once the criminal matters are concluded and the publication bans are removed. In addition, the VPD disclosed that for several years it has "communicated privately to the Provincial Government that it believed a Public Inquiry would be necessary for an impartial examination of why it took so long for Robert Pickton to be arrested." In August of that year, the VPD released the Missing Women: Investigation Review.
VPD apology
At a press conference, Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard of the VPD apologized to the victims' families, saying "I wish from the bottom of my heart that we would have caught him sooner. I wish that, the several agencies involved, that we could have done better in so many ways. I wish that all the mistakes that were made, we could undo. And I wish that more lives would have been saved. So on my behalf and behalf of the Vancouver Police Department and all the men and women that worked on this investigation, I would say to the families how sorry we all are for your losses and because we did not catch this monster sooner."
The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
After Robert Pickton lost his final appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry chaired by Wally Oppal was called to examine the role of the Vancouver police and the RCMP in the disappearances and murders of women in the Downtown Eastside. Families of the missing and murdered women have been calling for public hearings since before Pickton was arrested and eventually convicted of six murders. The Commission's final report submission to the Attorney General was dated November 19, 2012 and was released to the public on December 17. During the inquiry, lawyers for some of the victims' families sought to have an unpublished 289-page manuscript authored by former police investigator Lori Shenher entered as evidence and made entirely public. Several passages were read into the inquiry's record but Commissioner Oppal declined to publicize the entire manuscript.
Transfer to penitentiary
During a court hearing on August 4, 2010, Judge Williams stated that Pickton should be committed to a federal penitentiary; up to that point he had been held at a provincial pretrial institution.
Stay of final 20 murder charges
Pickton had faced a further 20 first degree murder charges involving other female victims from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. On February 26, 2008, a family member of one of the 20 women named as alleged victims told the media that the Crown had told her a trial on the further 20 counts might not proceed.
On August 4, 2010, Crown prosecutors stayed the balance of the pending murder charges against Pickton, ending the prospect of any further trials.
The 20 charges were formally stayed by crown counsel Melissa Gillespie shortly after 4 p.m. during a British Columbia Supreme Court hearing at New Westminster.
Most (but not all) of the publication bans in the case were lifted by the trial judge, James Williams of the British Columbia Supreme Court, after lawyers spent hours in court going through the various complicated bans.
On August 6, 2010, various media outlets released a transcript of conversations between an RCMP undercover operator and Pickton in his holding cell. While the RCMP censored the undercover officer's name throughout most of the document, his name was left uncensored in several portions of the document that the RCMP released to the public. This uncensored version was available to the public, through Global News, CTV News, and the Vancouver Sun, for about an hour before being pulled and re-edited. It is not known the extent of the damage this mistake caused the undercover officer.
Victims
On December 9, 2007, Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women:
● Count 1, Sereena Abotsway (born August 20, 1971), age 29 when she disappeared in August 2001; her foster mother reported her missing on Aug. 22, 2001.
● Count 2, Mona Lee Wilson (born January 13, 1975), age 26 when she went to her doctor on Nov. 30, 2001, and was reported missing that night.
● Count 6, Andrea Joesbury, age 22 when last seen in June 2001 and was reported missing June 8, 2001.
● Count 7, Brenda Ann Wolfe, age 32 when last seen in February 1999 and was reported missing on April 25, 2000.
● Count 16, Marnie Lee Frey, last seen August 1997 and reported missing on Dec. 29, 1997.Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case #98-209922.
● Count 11, Georgina Faith Papin, last seen in January 1999 and reported missing in March 2001.
More victims
Pickton also stood accused of first-degree murder in the deaths of twenty other women until these charges were stayed on August 4, 2010.
● Count 3, Jacqueline Michelle McDonell, 23 when she was last seen in January 1999. Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case # 99-039699.
● Count 4, Dianne Rosemary Rock (born September 2, 1967), 34 when last seen on October 19, 2001. Reported missing December 13, 2001.
● Count 5, Heather Kathleen Bottomley (born August 17, 1976), 25 when she was last seen (and reported missing) on April 17, 2001.
● Count 8, Jennifer Lynn Furminger, last seen in 1999.
● Count 9, Helen Mae Hallmark, last seen August 1997. Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case #98-226384.
● Count 10, Patricia Rose Johnson, last seen in March 2001.
● Count 12, Heather Chinnook, 30 when last seen in April 2001.
● Count 13, Tanya Holyk, 23 when last seen in October 1996.
● Count 14, Sherry Irving, 24 when last seen in 1997.
● Count 15, Inga Monique Hall, 46 when last seen in February 1998. Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case # 98-047919.
● Count 17, Tiffany Drew, last seen December 1999.
● Count 18, Sarah de Vries, last seen April 1998.
● Count 19, Cynthia Feliks, last seen in December 1997.
● Count 20, Angela Rebecca Jardine, last seen November 20, 1998 between 3:30- 4p.m. at Oppenheimer Park at a rally in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case # 98.286097.
● Count 21, Diana Melnick, last seen in December 1995.
● Count 22, Jane Doe – charge lifted; see below.
● Count 23, Debra Lynne Jones, last seen in December 2000.
● Count 24, Wendy Crawford, last seen in December 1999.
● Count 25, Kerry Koski, last seen in January 1998.
● Count 26, Andrea Fay Borhaven, last seen in March 1997. Vancouver Police Missing Persons Case # 99.105703.
● Count 27, Cara Louise Ellis aka Nicky Trimble (born April 13, 1971), 25 when last seen in 1996. Reported missing October 2002.
As of March 2, 2006, the murder charge involving the unidentified victim has been lifted. Pickton refused to enter a plea on the charge involving this victim, known in the proceedings as Jane Doe, so the court registered a not-guilty plea on his behalf. "The count as drawn fails to meet the minimal requirement set out in Section 581 of the Criminal Code. Accordingly, it must be quashed," wrote Justice James Williams. The detailed reasons for the judge's ruling cannot be reported in Canada because of the publication ban covering this stage of the trial.
Pickton is implicated in the murders of the following women, but charges have not yet been laid (incomplete list):
● Mary Ann Clark aka Nancy Greek, 25, disappeared in August 1991 from downtown Victoria.
● Yvonne Marie Boen (sometimes used the surname England) (born November 30, 1967), 34 when last seen on March 16, 2001 and reported missing on March 21, 2001.
● Dawn Teresa Crey, reported missing in December 2000. Crey is the main subject of a 2006 documentary film about murdered and missing Aboriginal women in Canada, entitled Finding Dawn.
● Two unidentified women.
After Pickton was arrested many people started coming forward and talking to police about what was going on at the farm. One of these witnesses that came forward was Lynn Ellingsen. Ellingsen claimed to have seen Pickton skinning a woman hanging from a meat hook years earlier; she did not tell anyone about this out of fear for her life. Additionally, Ellingsen admitted that she blackmailed Pickton about the incident on more than one occasion.
The victims' children filed a civil lawsuit in May 2013 against the Vancouver Police Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Crown for failing to protect the victims. They reached a settlement in March 2014, where each of the children was to be compensated $50,000, without an admission of liability.
August 2006 'Pickton Letters'
In August 2006, Thomas Loudamy, a 27-year-old Fremont, California resident, claimed that he had received three letters from Robert Pickton in response to letters Loudamy sent under an assumed identity.
In the letters, Pickton allegedly speaks with concern about the expense of the investigation, asserts his innocence, quotes and refers to the Bible, praises the trial judge, and responds in detail to (fictional) information in Loudamy's letters, which were written in the guise of Mya Barnett, a 'down on her luck' woman.
The news of the letters' existence was broken by The Vancouver Sun, in an exclusive published on Saturday, September 2, 2006, and as of that date, neither law enforcement nor any representative of Pickton has verified the authenticity of the letters. The Sun, however, has undertaken several actions to confirm the documents' authenticity, including:
● Confirming that the outgoing stamps are consistent with those of the North Fraser Pretrial Centre (NFPC), where Pickton is being held;
● Confirming through a representative of Canada Post that the outgoing stamps are not forgeries; and
● Confirming that the machine (identifiable with a serial number included in the stamp) used to stamp the envelopes is the machine used by the NFPC.
Loudamy claims not to have kept copies of his outgoing letters to Pickton, and as of September 4, 2006, no information on their existence has been forthcoming from Pickton or his representatives.
Loudamy has a history of writing to accused and convicted criminals, in some instances under his own identity (as with his correspondence with Clifford Olson), and in others in the guise of a character he believes will be more readily accepted by the targets of the letters. Loudamy, an aspiring journalist, claims that his motivation in releasing the letters is to help the public gain insights into Pickton.
2015 filming
In 2015, a film with the working title of Full Flood began production in Vancouver by CBC-TV. Based on Stevie Cameron's book On The Farm it was to use the life experiences of Pickton's victims for a fictional story about women in the Downtown Eastside who became victims of a serial killer.
2016 autobiography
In 2016, a book claimed to have been written by Pickton and titled Pickton: In his Own Words went up for sale and initiated controversy, critical petitions and actions by government to prevent Pickton from profiting from the work.
Pickton was described as getting his manuscript out of prison by passing it to a former cellmate who then sent it to a retired construction worker from California named Michael Chilldres — who typed it up and is credited as the author of the 144-page book. Provincial Solicitor General Mike Morris and an online petition on Change.org each sought to remove the book from sale on Amazon.com. Premier Christy Clark expressed interest in introducing new legislation similar to laws in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Ontario to prevent criminal profits from such books. Colorado publisher Outskirts Press ceased publication of the book and asked Amazon to remove it from their site after finding out that although Chilldres had his name on the book cover, the author was actually an incarcerated criminal.
6. Russell Maurice Johnson (7 – 7+)
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| (Russell Maurice Johnson) |
Russell Maurice Johnson (born 1947), dubbed the Bedroom Strangler, is a rapist and serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered several women in the late 1970s in London, Ontario and Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murders of three women in 1978, and is incarcerated at the Oak Ridge maximum-security facility of the Mental Health Centre in Penetanguishene, Ontario. He has confessed to seven additional murders and 17 attacks.
He would often watch his victims sleep for hours before attacking them. He worked in an auto factory during the day and bouncer by night. He would stalk potential victims, climbing up to 13 stories on the sides of buildings to attack them. He is currently awaiting transfer to the Brockville, Ontario Mental Health Centre Medium Secure Forensic Unit.
A.K.A.: "The Bedroom Strangler"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape
Number of victims: 7 – 7+
Date of murders: 1973 - 1977
Date of birth: 1947
Victims profile: Mary Hicks, 20 / Alice Ralston, 42 / Eleanor Hartwick / Doris Brown, 49 / Diane Beitz, 23 / Luella George, 22 / Donna Veldboom, 22
Method of murder: Strangulation - Stabbing with knife
Location: London, Ontario and Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Status: Found not guilty by reason of insanity, February 1978. Incarcerated at the Oak Ridge maximum-security facility of the Mental Health Centre in Penetanguishene, Ontario
Russell Johnson
One of the most alarming cases in Canada's criminal history, Johnson literally got away with murder four times.
In the 1970s, the cities of London and Guelph in the province of Ontario, were hosts to four cases of women found dead in their homes with no suspicion of foul play. What transpired to be four undetected murders took place over a ten-month period, and in each case the victim apparently died peacefully in her sleep.
The first of the four was twenty-year-old student Mary Hicks, found dead in bed in London on 19 October 1973; she was in a natural sleeping position and there were no obvious marks of violence on her body. A pillow partly covering her face was not considered suspicious. As there was no sign of forced entry into her apartment, Miss Hicks' death was attributed to suffocation caused by a reaction to a prescription drug
One month later, Alice Ralston, forty-two years old, was found dead in bed in her Guelph apartment; again there was no visible sign of violence. Miss Ralston was known to have suffered from hardening of the arteries, and this was thought to have caused her untimely death.
On 4 March 1974, Eleanor Hartwick died at her home in London and, as in the case of Alice Ralston, her death was put down to a reaction to prescription drugs.
It was not until August that the last of the deaths was reported, this time of forty-nine-year-old Doris Brown. On this occasion a pathologist found minor abrasions and some blood in her throat and rectum, but the police were not called in to investigate, and death was certified as from pulmonary edema.
Then a killing occurred about which there could be no doubt. On 31 December, Diane Beitz was found strangled with her own brassiere in her apartment in Guelph. She had been sexually assaulted after death.
In April 1977, Louella Jeanne George was strangled and robbed of some jewellery and underwear which were later found dumped in a garbage can a few blocks away.
Finally, twenty-two- year-old Donna Veldboom was found strangled in her apartment just a short distance from the previous murder site. This time the victim had been slashed in the chest with a knife.
When police investigating the killing of Donna Veldboom compared a list of tenants of the apartment block with details of sexual deviants on record, the name Russell Johnson emerged. Johnson had also once lived in the building where Louelia George had been strangled. Further inquiries established a number of non-fatal sexual assaults on women by Johnson, both before and after he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital diagnosed as a compulsive sex attacker.
At his trial in February 1978, Johnson was charged with the Beitz, George and Veldboom murders, and found not guilty by reason of insanity; he was committed to the maximum-security wing of the Ontario Mental Health Centre.
Following the trial, police authorities published a complete dossier on the crimes admitted by Johnson, including the four 'natural' deaths.
"The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers," by Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg.
5. Michael Wayne McGray (7 – 18+)
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| (Michael Wayne McGray) |
Michael Wayne McGray (born July 11, 1965) is a Canadian serial killer. He was convicted for killing 7 individuals but claims to have killed 11 others. McGray is serving concurrent life sentences of 25 years with no parole.
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: He wants psychiatric treatment for "demons" he says sent him on a 15-year coast-to-coast killing spree
Number of victims: 7 - 18+
Date of murders: 1985 - 1999
Date of arrest: October 1999
Date of birth: 1965
Victims profile: Elizabeth Gale Tucker, 17 / Mark Daniel Gibbons (cab driver) / Joan Hicks, 48, and her daughter Nina, 11 / Robert Assaly, 59 / Gaetan Ethier, 45
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife
Location: Canada/USA
Status: Sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years on March 20, 2000
Early life
McGray was born in Collingwood, Ontario, but was raised in Argyle, Nova Scotia.
Crimes
On 1 May 1985, he murdered Elizabeth Gale Tucker in Digby County, Nova Scotia, while he was nineteen; his victim was a 17-year-old hitchhiker. Gregory George Ashford had been interviewed previously in connection with this murder. In 1987, McGray killed Mark Gibbons, an alleged accomplice in a Saint John robbery.
The National Parole Board expressed concern in 1995 about McGray's problems with anger and substance abuse. The board also expressed concern that McGray disappeared for more than a year while on parole, "which clearly indicated a serious breach of trust and a blatant disregard for conditions of release."
On 29 February 1998, McGray was arrested for the murder of Joan Hicks and her 11-year-old daughter Nina in Moncton, New Brunswick, which occurred the day before. He later confessed to stabbing in 1991 Robert Assaly and Gaetan Ethier, whom he met at a gay bar in Montreal while on a three-day pass from prison. He pleaded guilty on 20 March 2000 to the murder of Joan Hicks.
McGray claims to have killed 11 other victims in Halifax, Saint John, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Seattle. He claimed that he will provide information to the authorities on these killings in exchange for specific demands being met.
In May 2001, McGray was charged with a sixth murder, the 1985 killing of Nova Scotia teenager Elizabeth Gail Tucker. This charge occurred as a result of several interviews he gave the previous year; as a result of the interviews, police across the country re-opened cold files.
McGray blamed his urge to kill on beatings he received as a child, and warned he would kill again if he didn't received proper treatments.
In November 2010, following a transfer to the Mountain Institution medium-security prison in Agassiz, B.C., McGray killed again by murdering his cellmate Jeremy Phillips, 33. The Crown prosecutor related that McGray claimed that Phillips invented a false hostage taking scenario where McGray would tie him up, and Philips would then be brought to an infirmary; McGray complied with the plan, and then strangled Philips, killing him. Lawyers of the victim's family doubted the claims, as Phillips was going to be released on parole soon, while two inmates related that Phillips had had his request to escape McGray turned down by prison officers. A resulting coroner's inquest recommended that serial killers be housed in single cells. The Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Institution, which was reputed to be the highest-security prison in Canada, housed McGray in 2012.
4. Gilbert Paul Jordan (8 – 10)
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| (Gilbert Paul Jordan) |
Gilbert Paul Jordan (December 12, 1931 – July 7, 2006), known as the "Boozing Barber", was a Canadian serial killer who is believed to have committed the so-called "alcohol murders" in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
He was also the first Canadian to use alcohol as a murder weapon. Jordan, a raging alcoholic himself, stalked Native prostitutes in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, paying them to drink heavily with him.
Once his victims passed out, Jordan continued to pour liquor down their throats, eventually killing them. Jordan served six years for manslaughter and died in 2006.
A.K.A.: "The Boozing Barber", "The Alcohol Murders"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Alcoholic - Rape
Number of victims: 8 - 10
Date of murders: 1965 - 1987
Date of arrest: October 23, 1987
Date of birth: December 12, 1931
Victims profile: Women (Native American prostitutes)
Method of murder: Alcohol poisoning
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Status: Sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1988, but that was reduced to nine years on appeal. Released 1994. Died on July 7, 2006
Background
Jordan, a former barber, was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women between 1965 and 1988; he was the first Canadian to use alcohol as a murder weapon. Jordan's lengthy criminal record started in 1952 and includes convictions for rape, indecent assault, abduction, hit and run, drunk driving and car theft.
In 1976, Jordan was examined by Dr. Tibor Bezeredi as part of a court proceeding. Dr. Bezeredi diagnosed Jordan as having an antisocial personality, defined by Dr. Bezeredi as "a person whose conduct is maladjusted in terms of social behaviour; disregard for the rights of others which often results in unlawful activities".
Background
Jordan, a former barber, was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women between 1965 and 1988; he was the first Canadian to use alcohol as a murder weapon. Jordan's lengthy criminal record started in 1952 and includes convictions for rape, indecent assault, abduction, hit and run, drunk driving and car theft.
In 1976, Jordan was examined by Dr. Tibor Bezeredi as part of a court proceeding. Dr. Bezeredi diagnosed Jordan as having an antisocial personality, defined by Dr. Bezeredi as "a person whose conduct is maladjusted in terms of social behaviour; disregard for the rights of others which often results in unlawful activities".
Killings
In 1965, Jordan was said to begin serial killing. He is considered a serial killer as he was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women, but was only convicted in the manslaughter death of one woman. His victims were Aboriginal women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Typically he would find women in bars, and buy them drinks, or pay them for sex and encourage them to drink with him. When they passed out, he would pour liquor down their throats. The resulting deaths were reported as alcohol poisoning and police paid little attention, because some of his victims were alcoholics. Although the newspapers often described the women as prostitutes, not all were involved in prostitution. Jordan was known for drinking more than 50 ounces of vodka each day.
The first woman known to have died by alcohol poisoning while in Jordan's company was in 1965. As would become a pattern, a switchboard operator named Ivy Rose was found naked and dead in a Vancouver hotel. Her blood alcohol level was 0.51. No charges were laid.
Court proceedings show "he sought out approximately 200 women per year for binge drinking episodes covering the period from 1980 to 1988. He was also looking for sexual gratification." Further, the Crown provided evidence that Jordan was linked to the deaths of six other Aboriginal women. Similar fact evidence showed Jordan had been with the following women at the time of their death:
● Mary Johnson, November 30, 1980, at the Aylmer Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .34
● Barbara Paul, September 11, 1981, at the Glenaird Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .41
● Mary Johns, July 30, 1982, at 2503 Kingsway (his barbershop) Blood alcohol level: .76
● Patricia Thomas, December 15, 1984, at 2503 Kingsway (his barbershop) Blood alcohol level: .51
● Patricia Andrew, June 28, 1985, at 2503 Kingsway (his barbershop) Blood alcohol level: .79
● Vera Harry, November 19, 1986, at the Clifton Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .04
Investigation
On October 12, 1987, Vanessa Lee Buckner was found naked on the floor of the Niagara hotel after a night of drinking with Jordan. There is some debate regarding the victim. Some sources indicate that she was a white woman, not a heavy drinker, nor was she a prostitute. However, in official court records describe Ms. Buckner death as the result of Jordan "...supplying a lethal amount of liquor to a female alcoholic, who died as a result". Ms. Buckner had recently lost custody of her newborn baby, who had been born with a drug dependency. She "was an alcoholic and a taker of various kinds of drugs." Jordan's fingerprints were found and linked to Ms. Buckner's death. A month after her death, another woman, Edna Shade, was found dead in another hotel.
After being questioned, Jordan had not been charged with any crime related to Ms. Buckner's death. However, police initiated surveillance on Jordan. Between October 12 and November 26, 1987, police watched him "search out native Indian women in the skid row area of Vancouver. On 4 different occasions they [the police] rescued the woman involved before she too became a victim". Those women were:
● Rosemary Wilson, November 20, 1987, at the Balmoral Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .52
● Verna Chartrand, November 21, 1987, at the Pacific Hotel, Blood alcohol level: .43
● Sheila Joe, November 25, 1987, at the Rainbow Hotel, Blood alcohol level: unknown
● Mabel Olson, November 26, 1987, at the Pacific Hotel, Blood alcohol level: unknown
According to the court records, police listening outside the hotel rooms heard Jordan say such things as:
"Have a drink, down the hatch baby, 20 bucks if you drink it right down; see if you're a real woman; finish that drink, finish that drink, down the hatch hurry, right down; you need another drink, I'll give you 50 bucks if you can take it; I'll give you 10, 20, 50 dollars, whatever you want, come on I want to see you get it all down; you get it right down, I'll give you the 50 bucks and the 13 bucks; I'll give you 50 bucks. I told you that. If you finish that I'll give you $75; finish your drink, I'll give you $20 ..."
Convictions and arrests
This similar fact evidence was important in the 1988 trial. Jordan was tried before a judge alone. Justice Bouck found Jordan guilty of manslaughter in the death of Ms. Buckner. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but that was reduced to nine years on appeal.
Jordan served six years for the manslaughter conviction. After his release, he was placed on probation which restricted him to Vancouver Island. In June 2000, he had been charged with sexual assault, assault, negligence causing bodily harm and administering a noxious substance—alcohol. In 2000, Jordan attempted to change his name to Paul Pearce. At the time, a name change in British Columbia did not require fingerprinting or a criminal check. After the loophole was closed, he dropped the application.
Jordan was arrested again, in 2002 for breach of probation because he was found drinking, and in the presence of a woman while in possession of alcohol. He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in jail, followed by three years probation and strict conditions.
However, on August 11, 2004, he was arrested in Winnipeg for violating that probation order for an incident at the York Hotel in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, August 9, 2004. He had been identified as being a party to binge drinking with Barb Burkley. Ms. Burkley was a long term resident of the hotel and had a serious drinking problem. Ms. Burkley was taken to the hospital by her friend and hotel employee, Cathy Waddington, after finding Ms. Burkley in very bad condition. Ms. Waddington identified Jordan as being there, but he was acquitted of those charges in 2005. Upon his release, police issued a public warning.
Jordan died in 2006.
Police warning
On February 3, 2005, the Saanich Police Department issued an alert warning the public to be cautious of the recently released Jordan:
JORDAN, Gilbert Paul, age 73, is the subject of this alert. JORDAN is 175cm (5'9") tall and weighs 79kgs (174lbs) [sic]. He is partially bald with grey hair and a grey goatee. He has blue eyes and wears glasses. JORDAN is currently in the Victoria area but has no fixed address. JORDAN has a significant criminal record including manslaughter and indecent assault of a female. He uses alcohol to lure his victims. JORDAN's target victim group is adult females. JORDAN is subject to court ordered conditions including:
- Abstain absolutely from the consumption of alcohol.
- Not to be in the company of any female person or persons in any place where alcohol is being either consumed or possessed by that person or persons.
If you observe the subject in violation of any of the above conditions please call the Saanich Police Department at 475-4321, 911 or your local police agency. If you have questions concerning the public notification process please contact the BC Corrections Branch at 250-387-6366.
Cultural impact
Jordan was the subject of the 1997 Canadian television program Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science in an episode called "Dead Drunk". The program described the forensic work used to convict him in 1988.
A dramatization, The Unnatural and Accidental Women was written by Vancouver playwright Marie Clements and performed in, among other places, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto (2004). In the play, the writer focused on the story of the victims in an attempt to redress the failure of the news media to do so.
Marie Clements later wrote a script for the movie Unnatural & Accidental which premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.
Jordan and his crimes served as inspiration for the first several episodes of Da Vinci's Inquest. The crime series, set in Vancouver, portrayed a serial killer using alcohol as a murder weapon and stalking prostitutes. The portrayal departed from the facts by having the killer die before he could be arrested; he was murdered by one of his victims' brother, tipped to his identity by a detective.
3. Clifford Olson (11 – 11+)
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| (Clifford Robert Olson, Jr.) |
Clifford Robert Olson, Jr. (January 1, 1940 – September 30, 2011) was a convicted Canadian serial killer who confessed to murdering 11 children and young adults between the ages of nine and 18 years in the early 1980s. Olson scored 38/40 on the Psychopathy Checklist.
Olson was apprehended whilst trying to pick up two girls in his van. A search was carried out on the vehicle and a notebook was found which contained the address of Judy Kozma, one of his earlier victims. Olson was taken into custody and charged with eleven murders although it was suspected that he may have been responsible for more than this. He eventually pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced by Justice Mckay to eleven concurrent life sentences.
He died on September 30, 2011, at the age of 71.
A.K.A.: "The Beast of British Columbia"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Mutilation
Number of victims: 11 – 11+
Date of murders: 1980 - 1981
Date of arrest: August 12, 1981
Date of birth: January 1, 1940
Victims profile: Christine Weller, 12 / Colleen Daignault, 13 / Daryn Johnsrude, 16 / Sandra Lynn Wolfsteiner, 16 / Ada Anita Court, 13 / Simon Patrick James Partington, 9 / July Kozma, 14 / Raymond Lawrence King Jr., 15 / Sigrun Charlotte Elisabeth Arnd, 18 / Terry Lyn Carson, 15 / Louise Simonne Marie Evelyn Chartrand, 17
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife / Hitting with a hammer / Strangulation
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Status: Sentenced to life in prison on January 1982. Died in prison on October 2, 2011
Murders
Christine Weller, 12, from Surrey, British Columbia, was abducted on November 17, 1980. Her body was found more than a month later on Christmas Day; she had been strangled with a belt and stabbed repeatedly. On April 16, 1981, Colleen Marian Daignault, 13, vanished. Five months later her body was found. On April 22, 1981, Daryn Todd Johnsrude, 16, was abducted and killed; his body was found less than two weeks later. On May 19, 1981, 16-year-old Sandra Wolfsteiner was murdered, and 13-year-old Ada Anita Court was murdered in June 1981.
Six victims followed in quick succession in July 1981. Simon Partington, nine, was abducted, raped and strangled on the second day of the month. Judy Kozma, a 14-year-old from New Westminster, was raped and strangled a week later. Her body was discovered on July 25 near Weaver Lake. The next victims were Raymond King II, 15, abducted on July 23, raped and bludgeoned to death; Sigrun Arnd, an 18-year-old German tourist, raped and bludgeoned two days later; Terri Lyn Carson, 15, raped and strangled on July 27; and Louise Chartrand, age 17, the last victim identified, who died on July 30.
Arrest and plea bargain
Olson, who had an extensive criminal history, was arrested on August 12, 1981, on suspicion of attempts to abduct two girls. By August 25, Olson had been charged with the murder of Judy Kozma. He reached a controversial deal with authorities, agreeing to confess to the 11 murders and show the RCMP the location of the bodies of those not yet recovered. In return, authorities agreed that $10,000 for each victim was paid into a trust for his wife, Joan, and then-infant son, Clifford III. His wife received $100,000 after Olson cooperated with the RCMP, the 11th body being a 'freebie'. In January 1982, Olson pleaded guilty to 11 counts of murder and was given as many concurrent life sentences to be served in Canada's super-maximum security Special Handling Unit in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, which houses many of the country's most dangerous criminals. Olson was a dangerous offender, meaning it was very unlikely he would ever have been released from prison.
Parole application
At his sentencing January 14, 1982, the trial judge remarked, "My considered opinion is that you should never be granted parole for the remainder of your days. It would be foolhardy to let you at large."
In 1997, Olson was denied parole, for which he applied under Canada's "faint hope clause," which allowed a parole hearing for convicts who had served at least 15 years.
Canadian law allows inmates convicted of first-degree murder to apply for parole after serving a minimum of 25 years. Olson's second parole hearing, on July 18, 2006, was also denied. Olson made many bizarre and false claims, including that the United States had granted him clemency for providing information about the September 11 attacks and that the hearing had no jurisdiction over him because of that. Under Canadian law, Olson was then entitled to make a case for parole every two years.
Olson was once again refused parole in November 2010.
Old Age Security pension controversy
Controversy developed in March 2010 when the media disclosed that Olson was receiving two federal government benefits from Canada while imprisoned, a total of $1,169.47 monthly. Olson was eligible to receive the Canadian Old Age Security (OAS) pension. All persons who meet residency requirements as to length of time in Canada are eligible to receive this pension at age 65, and Olson turned 70 on January 1, 2010. Olson was also eligible to receive the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), awarded to pensioners with low income. The money in question was being held in trust for Olson.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation testified before the federal standing committee for Human Resources Development to have MPs pass Bill C-31, which would terminate pension benefits for prisoners. The organization also presented the government with 46,000 petition signatures requesting that Olson no longer receive the benefits. Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked government officials to look into the issue; on June 1, 2010, the government moved to terminate Olson's payments, calling the fact that he had been receiving them "outrageous" and "offensive." In September 2010, Olson sent one of his Old Age Security cheques to a Sun Media reporter, Peter Worthington, with a note asking him to forward the cheque to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's campaign for re-election.
Illness and death
In September 2011, media reports indicated that Olson had terminal cancer and had been transferred to a hospital in Laval, Quebec. He died on September 30, 2011, at the age of 71.
2. "Highway of Tears" Killer (18 – 43)
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| (Sign on Highway 16 warning girls not to hitchhike) |
The Highway of Tears murders is a series of murders and disappearances of mainly aboriginal women along the 720 km (450 mi) section of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada from 1969 until 2011. Highway 16 is northern British Columbia's east-west corridor, extending from Jasper in the east to Prince Rupert in the west. This route is a section of the Trans-Canada Yellowhead Highway, also known as the "Park-to-Park Highway", which spans across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. There are numerous municipalities and twenty-three First Nations communities that border the Highway of Tears. The region is plagued with poverty and lack of public transportation, forcing its occupants to turn to hitchhiking as a form of transit. Police list the number of Highway 16 victims at nineteen, but estimates by aboriginal organizations range into the forties, largely because they include women who disappeared a greater distance from the highway. Thirteen of the nineteen victims were teenagers while ten out of the nineteen victims were women of aboriginal descent.
To date, only one murder has been solved, for which serial killer Cody Legebokoff was convicted, although American serial rapist and suspected serial killer Bobby Jack Fowler, who died while imprisoned in the United States for other crimes, is a suspect in many of the murders. Authorities have persons of interest in several other cases, but insufficient evidence to press charges.
Victims: 16 - 40+
Span of killings: 1969–2011
Country: Canada
Location(s): Prince George, British Columbia, Prince Rupert, British Columbia
Investigation and suspects
In 2009, police converged on a property in Isle Pierre, in rural Prince George, to search for the remains of Nicole Hoar, a young tree planter who went missing on Highway 16, on June 21, 2002. The property was once owned by Leland Vincent Switzer, who is currently serving a prison sentence for the second-degree murder of his brother. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also searched the property for the other missing women from the Highway of Tears; however, no further actions followed the investigation.
On September 25, 2012, the RCMP announced a link between the murders and deceased United States criminal Bobby Jack Fowler. His DNA was found on the body of Colleen MacMillen, one of the presumed victims. Investigators first compiled a DNA profile of the perpetrator in 2007, but technology available at the time did not yield a strong enough sample. New technologies allowed police to re-examine the DNA in 2012, leading to the identification. Fowler is also strongly suspected to have killed both Gale Weys and Pamela Darlington in 1973. The RCMP believe that he may have also killed as many as ten or possibly even twenty of the other victims. Several of the murders took place after Fowler's arrest in June 1995.
Canadian serial killer Cody Legebokoff was convicted of one of the murders in 2014.
Despite identifying Fowler as the killer in these cases, investigators are doubtful that they will ever solve all of the murders. They do have persons of interest in several other cases, but not enough evidence to lay charges.
B.C. government email scandal
On October 22, 2015, Elizabeth Denham, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, published a 65-page report outlining how B.C. government officials had "triple deleted" emails relating to the Highway of Tears. In her report Access Denied, Denham describes the act of "triple deleting" as transferring an email to the "deleted" folder on a computer system, deleting the email from the folder and then overriding the backup that admits the system to retrieve deleted items. By deleting these files, Denham states the government had breached the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Denham became aware of the scandal in May 2015 after she received a letter from Tim Duncan, the former executive assistant to Transportation Minister Todd Stone. Duncan claimed that as he was responding to a FOI (Freedom of Information) application, ministerial assistant George Gretes ordered for Duncan to search his records for any files pertaining to the Highway of Tears and missing women. Once the files were located, Duncan testified that Gretes ordered for them to be deleted. When Duncan hesitated, Gretes allegedly took the keyboard and "triple deleted" all of the emails relating to the Highway of Tears. According to Denham, Gretes originally denied this claim but later admitted to the triple deletion during a second police interview. Denham states that Gretes—who resigned from his job in October 2015—would have then lied under oath. A year earlier in the summer of 2014, a team from the Transportation Ministry toured Highway 16 and conducted numerous meetings with Aboriginal leaders and communities. The significance of this project was to produce safer travel solutions for women living along Highway 16, many of whom had turned to hitchhiking as a way of transportation. In November 2014, the NDP made the FOI request seeking all government files pertaining to missing women, the Highway of Tears and meetings arranged by the ministry: the report Duncan would later respond to. Despite a two-month tour and multiple meetings, the B.C. government claimed the FOI request produced no files relating to the Highway of Tears. According to Denham's report, these records did exist until government officials destroyed them in order to "skirt freedom of information laws". In Access Denied, Denham called upon the RCMP to further investigate the triple deletion of government files. In November 2015, Vancouver lawyer Mark Jetté was appointed as special prosecutor within the RCMP investigation. Jetté will act as the RCMP's independent legal advisor as well as administer an independent assessment of the evidence. He will also pursue any criminal charges that may be found appropriate.
Project E-PANA
In 2005, the RCMP launched project E-PANA which focussed upon the unsolved murders and disappearances of young women along Highway 16 throughout the past thirty-seven years. E-PANA sought to discover if there was a single serial killer at work or a multitude of killers operating along the highway. The unit investigated nine cases in 2006, but by 2007 its caseload had doubled to eighteen. The victims involved within the E-PANA investigation followed the criteria of being female, participating in a high risk lifestyle, known to hitchhike and were last seen or their bodies were discovered within a mile from Highway 16, Highway 97 and Highway 5. In the 2009/2010 year, E-PANA received over five million dollars in annual funding but has since dramatically declined due to budget cutbacks; receiving only $806,109 for the 2013/2014 year. In 2013, Craig Callens, the RCMP Deputy Commissioner, warned that further budget reductions from the provincial government would greatly affect the Highway of Tears investigation. A 2014 Freedom of Information request stated that the task force had dropped from seventy officers to twelve officers over the past few years. E-PANA is responsible for solving the murder of sixteen-year-old Colleen MacMillen, who was killed in 1974 by the now deceased American serial killer Bobby Jack Fowler. E-PANA now considers Fowler a suspect in the murders of two other highway victims, Gale Weys and Pamela Darlington, both of whom were killed in the 1970s. In 2014, investigations by E-PANA and the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit brought murder charges against Garry Taylor Handlen for the death of twelve-year-old Monica Jack in 1978. E-PANA is still actively investigating the remaining unsolved cases although it is unlikely that all the murders and disappearances will be solved.
Racism
Some critics argue that the lack of results arising from this investigation is the result of systemic racism. This was also believed to be an issue in the case of Vancouver's missing women and the Robert Pickton murders. The issue of systemic racism in these cases is explored in Finding Dawn, the 2006 documentary by Christine Welsh whose film includes a section on the Highway of Tears victim Ramona Wilson, including interviews with family and community members. Often overlooked in reports on the Highway of Tears is the fact that over half of the missing women are First Nation.
Activists argue that media coverage of these cases has been limited, claiming that "media assign a lesser value to aboriginal women". Furthermore, despite the fact that these disappearances date back as far as 1969, it was not until 2005 that Project E-Pana was launched, investigating similarities between the cases. In addition, the individual case which has received the most media and police attention thus far is that of Nicole Hoar, a Caucasian woman who disappeared in 2002. Hers was the first of the Highway of Tears cases to be covered in The Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, and Edmonton Journal. Gladys Radek, a native activist and the aunt of victim Tamara Chipman, "believes that if it weren’t for Hoar, the police would have invested less effort in investigating cases, and the media would have done little, if anything, to inform the public about the tragedies along the road."
Recommendation reports
Poverty and a lack of public transit has forced many disadvantaged Aboriginal women to turn to hitchhiking as a cheap means of transportation along Highway 16. Many of the Highway of Tears victims were last seen or reported to be hitchhiking before their disappearances. In March 2006, various Aboriginal groups hosted a two-day Highway of Tears symposium at the CN Center in Prince George. In attendance to the event were the victim's families and over 500 Aboriginal leaders from across British Columbia. Shortly thereafter, the Highway of Tears Symposium Recommendation Report was issued with 33 recommendations to improve public transit, deter hitchhiking, and prevent violence towards Aboriginal women. Some of the recommendations from the report include a shuttle bus operation along Highway 16, improved educational, health and social services for Aboriginal people as well counseling and mental health groups organized by Aboriginal workers. These propositions are part of a long-term recommendation to directly confront the issue of First Nations intergenerational poverty. The Highway of Tears Symposium Recommendation Report was endorsed by B.C. inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal in his 2012 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry recommendations. Oppal's public inquiry report into the Robert Pickton case demanded urgent transportation improvement along Highway 16. Like the Highway of Tears Symposium Recommendation Report, Oppal's report also suggested implementing a shuttle bus service along Highway 16 to deter young women from hitchhiking.
On November 24, 2015, the First Nations Health Authority and B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure held the Northern Transportation Symposium in Smithers, British Columbia. The symposium included Aboriginal communities and municipalities along Highway 16 and focussed on the issue of medical and non-medical transportation in those regions. Discussions included and expanded upon the 2006 Highway of Tears Symposium Recommendation Report and the 2012 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry recommendations. In June 2016 Transportation Minister Todd Stone announced that as the result of collaboration across local communities, a bus service would become available along Highway 16. The project will be joint funded by the federal government and the government of British Columbia.
Popular culture
One of the victims found alongside the highway, 16-year-old Ramona Wilson, was a subject of a 2006 documentary film by Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh, entitled Finding Dawn. Welsh's documentary highlights the tragic reality that Aboriginal women face today; in the past 30 years, an estimated 500 Aboriginal women have gone missing or have been murdered in Canada. Welsh uncovers the social, economic and historical factors that contribute to this grim statistic. Finding Dawn honours the women whose lives were lost and instills hope within a deeply wounded culture. The film can be accessed online on the Nation Film Board web page.
In March 2014, a documentary was released by Canadian filmmakers Matthew Smiley and Carly Pope named Highway of Tears. The 80-minute documentary is narrated by Canadian-born actor Nathan Fillion and was featured in numerous film festivals since its release. Highway of Tears raises awareness about the notorious stretch of highway and those women who have seemingly been silenced. In a 2014 interview with CBC, Smiley reveals that during the editing of the film "over 400 [missing and murdered indigenous] women were estimated to be missing and or murdered across Canada. By the time we premiered the film, the number was over 600 in March of 2014, then the numbers increased to 900 and now over 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women across Canada. We cannot turn a blind eye to this."
In 2015, the online newscast VICE produced the mini series Searchers: The Highway of Tears. The program highlights the story of various Aboriginal women who have disappeared along the Highway of Tears and brings attention to the family, friends and detectives fighting for justice. VICE also offers numerous online articles pertaining to the Highway of Tears murders and disappearances.
CBC's flagship news program The National has aired fourteen short episodes about Canada's Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women. All episodes can currently be found online at The National's YouTube channel under the playlist Canada's Missing & Murdered Aboriginal Women.
An episode of the series 48 Hours about the Highway of Tears murders aired on November 17, 2012.
Lorimer Shenher was nominated for the B.C. Book Prize for his memoir, That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away (Greystone). Shenher writes from the perspective of a former reporter and the first police detective to be assigned to the case of the missing women, they also cover the highly problematic police culture in detail.
1. Earle Nelson (22 – 25)
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| (Earle Leonard Nelson) |
Earle Leonard Nelson, known as "the Gorilla Man," (May 12, 1897 – January 13, 1928) was an American and Canadian serial killer.
"I only do my ladykillings on Saturday nights"
Earle told the police after his arrest.
Nelson was an odd-looking man, with the receding forehead, protuding lips, and huge hands that led to his nickname, 'The Gorilla Murderer'. Executed by hanging in Winnipeg, Canada, on January 13, 1928.
A.K.A.: The Dark Strangler, The Gorilla Man, Charles Harrison, Adrian Harris
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Necrophilia - Mutilation
Number of victims: 22 - 25
Date of murders: 1926 - 1927
Date of arrest: June 10, 1927
Born: Earle Leonard Nelson, May 12, 1897, San Francisco, California, US
Died: January 13, 1928 (aged 30), Vaughan Street Jail in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Victims profile: Women (mostly landladies)
Method of murder: Strangulation
Location: USA / Canada
Status: Executed by hanging in Winnipeg, Canada, on January 13, 1928
Early life
Nelson's mother and father both died of syphilis before Nelson reached the age of two years. He was subsequently sent to be raised by his maternal grandmother, a devout Pentecostal.
Around the age of 10, Nelson collided with a streetcar while riding his bicycle and remained unconscious for six days afterward. After he awoke, his behavior became erratic, and he suffered from frequent headaches and memory loss.
Criminal activity
Nelson began his criminal career early, and was sentenced to two years in San Quentin State Prison in 1915 after breaking into a cabin he believed had been abandoned. Later, he was committed to the Napa State Mental Hospital after behaving oddly and erratically during a short stint in the United States Navy. He managed to escape three times from the mental hospital before staff stopped trying to find him.
Nelson began committing sex crimes when he was 21 years old. In 1921, he attempted to molest a 12-year-old girl named Mary Summers, but was thwarted when she screamed and attracted help.:31 He was committed once again to the Napa State Mental Hospital. After several escapes and attempted escapes, he was released from the institution in 1925. He started his killing spree early in 1926. He killed his first victim, Clara Newman, on February 20, 1926, and two weeks later killed his second, Laura Beal.
Nelson's victims were mostly landladies, whom he would approach on the pretext of renting a room. He often studied his worn Bible, using it to keep his victim at ease and off-guard. Once he had gained their trust, he would kill them (almost always by strangling) and sometimes engage in necrophilia with the corpse. He would often hide the body, leaving it under the nearest bed.
Capture and trial
Nelson was arrested twice in Canada, where his murder spree ended. He was first arrested on June 16, 1927, in Wakopa, Manitoba, not long after murdering two women: Nelson's final victims were 14-year-old Lola Cowan, murdered on June 8, 1927, and a housewife, Emily Patterson, whose husband discovered her body on June 9, hidden underneath their bed.
He was incarcerated in a local jail in Wakopa after giving police the alias "Virgil Wilson". He escaped from jail that same evening. However, he made the mistake of trying to catch the same train that was transporting members of the Winnipeg police. He was then recaptured and arrested again the next morning by an officer from the Crystal City, Manitoba, police department.