by Mark Bourrie
Peter Woodcock
Canada's Youngest Serial Killer
CRIMES CANADA:
True Crimes That Shocked The Nation
~ Volume 11 ~
by Dr. Mark Bourrie
www.CrimesCanada.com
ISBN-13: 978-1523256990
ISBN-10: 1523256990
Copyright and Published (01.2016)
VP Publications an imprint of
RJ Parker Publishing, Inc.
Published in Canada
Copyrights
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For Gary Morris, Wayne Mallette, Carole Voyce, Dennis Kerr and their families.
A Note About Names
The subject of this book has lived with a number of names. I have chosen to call him Peter Woodcock, his birth name, in the early years of his life, although he was also known under his adoptive name of Peter Maynard. In this book, he's called David Michael Krueger from the time that he legally changes his name. David Michael Krueger. Peter Maynard and Peter Woodcock are very much the same person.
TORONTO IS A SINFUL PLACE
Seeley’s Bay is a hamlet on the Rideau Canal, 150 miles east of Toronto. The flow of life is connected to the seasons. In the winter, the community is somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. In the summer, pleasure boaters using the Rideau system bring the place to life. With its woodlands and lakes, Seeley’s Bay is a great place for a boy to grow up. And it would be Irene Mallette’s life-long regret that she didn’t keep her son Wayne in Seeley’s Bay in the late summer of 1956, instead of taking him to Toronto to visit her mother.
The Mallettes – Irene, her husband John, who was about to turn 50, and their sons, Wayne, a playful seven-year-old, Ronnie, 11, Graham, 17, and John, 21, crammed into the family car on Saturday, September 15, 1956 for a quick trip to Toronto in the family’s new car. Back then, before the main expressways in Ontario were built, it took more than four hours to get from Seeley’s Bay to Toronto. The big city was nothing like the sprawling metropolis of more than 5,000,000 people that it is today, but it was still, by far, the largest town in Ontario. The skyline was dominated by the Bank of Commerce building, a Manhattan-style skyscraper that soared 34 stories into the air and was the tallest building in the British Empire. To people who lived in the country, Toronto – even when it was a God-fearing, conservative community where every business was closed on Sundays and people in more sophisticated places called it “Toronto the Good” - could be a frightening place. Irene Mallette was anxious as the cramped car went through town after town along the highways to Toronto. “Toronto is a sinful place,” she told herself.
Wayne Mallette was a blonde, brown-eyed Grade 1 student. His mother described him as delicate. Wayne was likely premature, and his health problems kept him in a Kingston hospital for the first five months of his life. Still, he was active and he liked to play outside.
The family planned to stay at Wayne’s grandmother’s home on Empress Street, near the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. That entire neighborhood is gone, replaced by the Gardiner Expressway and its ramps. In 1956, it was part of southern Parkdale, on the western edge of old Toronto. In late August, the neighborhood was busy with people going back and forth to the Exhibition, but in the fall it was quiet. When the Mallettes arrived in the city, the Exhibition's roads were empty, except for popcorn boxes and candy wrappers tossed by the winds. A few guards patrolled the fairgrounds, watching for kids who might try to break into the vacant buildings or climb the idle wooden Flier roller coaster.
Almost as soon as the Mallettes parked the car, the boys took off in separate directions to play. After supper, the older ones went to a movie. The youngest boy pleaded to be allowed to go with his brothers. “Take me to the movie with you,” he begged. “Please, please!” But the older boys wanted to stay for the second show and told Wayne they would be out too late for his bed time. Instead, Wayne wandered the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, which was shut for the season but, with its ornate old buildings and its empty midway, was still fascinating to a boy from the country.
But the big attraction was the railway line that ran near the neighborhood.
“How he played!,” his mother said. “He loved those trains that just roared by.”
A half-hour after Wayne left, Irene knew something was terribly wrong.
“I sat at that window and looked for him. I knew, I just knew, that something was wrong. It was as if a voice was telling me ‘Wayne’s not coming back'.”
Jack Mallette, the father, went outside and called for the boy. There was no answer. “No, he’s not around,” John said. Irene’s mother Hazel Armstrong called the police. It was 8:15 in the evening. The sun had gone down and, for the Mallette family, a night of horror began.
When the older boys arrived back from the movies two hours after the police were called, Wayne was not with them. Irene was now convinced something was horribly wrong. The police still hadn’t arrived, so Irene called them again, and this time they showed up. Two squad cars came to the door. The police took down a description of the boy, then decided to take John with them as they patrolled the neighborhood.
Soon afterwards, a reporter from the Toronto Star arrived at Hazel Armstrong’s house. Irene Mallette was angry and wanted everyone to know it.
“I never liked Toronto. Mothers here just don’t know the things that can happen to their children. They have no idea. Happy, cheerful little Wayne didn’t know. He had been told about strangers. But what does that really mean to a seven-year-old? Somebody killed Wayne. Somebody killed him and carried him off. I hate this city. But my husband, my sons and I are staying here until we get the person who did this to Wayne. We’re not leaving until we get him.
“I pray God will forgive him. We can’t.”
***
The boy had wandered from his grandmother's yard to the main railway line that still runs through the Exhibition neighborhood. The fence along the track was hidden from the nearby houses by trees, but a path ran right along the inside edge of the chain link. It was a perfect place for boys to hide.
Somewhere near the bushes, Wayne met his killer, a teenager with a beautiful new bike. Wayne told the older boy that he had come to watch the trains. It seemed both of them were railway fans. The boys began talking about the freights and passenger trains tha
t were roaring by on the busy tracks. Then the conversation became more dreadful.
The killer took Wayne to a hidden place just west of the Dufferin Gates where, he told the boy, they could see the trains close-up. Then he tried to get Wayne to play “sex games”. The killer had molested dozens of other children over the previous summer and usually had no problem conning them into taking off their clothes. Wayne was different. He became scared and wanted to run away. The teenager stopped being friendly. He shoved Wayne’s face into the dirt. He kicked the little boy, punched him, bit him viciously on the legs, and shoved trash in his mouth. The killer knew Wayne was dead when he heard his death rattle.
When Constables Smith and Brown found Wayne’s body just after midnight, he was lying on his back and there were still tears on his cheeks.
They called the city coroner, Dr. Morton Shulman, who examined the boy’s body and was sure he was deliberately smothered. Wayne’s body was taken to a forensics lab, where, at 4:45 in the morning, Wayne’s father identified it. Dr. Ward Smith examined Wayne, looking for signs that Wayne had not died in an accident or had suffered from a medical condition. Detective Adolphus Payne of the City of Toronto police force, the lead investigator on the case, stayed at the lab while Dr. Smith did his work. It was obvious to Dr. Smith that Wayne Mallette had been murdered. There were few obvious signs of violence, Wayne was fully-clothed and Dr. Smith found no evidence of sexual assault.
During the first day of their investigation, the police thought the killer might be a "sex deviate", one of the flashers who had recently been frightened out of High Park during a recent police crackdown. They searched the houses that had been vacated to make way for the new expressway. There were false leads, but a few strong ones that police, at first, couldn't believe: sightings of Mallette with a youth who was not much bigger than the murdered child, a skinny kid on a flashy bike.
Behind the Exhibition’s Food Building, a watchman had stopped to talk to a strange-looking youth, a runtish teenager wearing a grey windbreaker who seemed abnormally friendly. He wanted to know if the guard patrolled the bushes along the railway tracks. The guard said that was the job of the city police. The boy asked him, "Do they ever find any bodies in the bushes? What would you do if you found a body in the bushes?"
"I would call the city police," the guard answered.
"Aren't you a policeman?" the killer asked.
"No," the guard answered. The guard asked the teen if he had seen a body.
"No, but I saw a boy run out of the bushes. He looked just like me."
Then the boy got on his bicycle and rode away.
The guard made a mental note of the strange boy: About 14-16 years old, slight build, just over 5 feet, straight dark hair parted to the side and combed over, grey windbreaker, t-shirt that was white with red horizontal stripes, dark pants or blue jeans, well-spoken with a voice that still seemed boyish, with a very nice touring bike.
"An important clue in the case could be held by a boy about fifteen years of age who was seen riding his bicycle at a fast rate out of the CNE grounds by the Princes' Gate. Police think he may have been riding at a full clip because he had seen something that frightened him," the Toronto Star reported.
Detective Payne hoped they could get the teenager to come forward. He issued a statement to the press saying the youth was not wanted as a suspect, just as a witness who might be able to give the police information that might help them find the killer. They didn’t say they had found bike tracks leading from the murder scene. They weren’t clear enough to make plaster casts, but they definitely showed someone had left on a bicycle. “There is little doubt the youth (the guard) was talking to is our boy,” Detective Payne wrote in a memo the night of the murder.
“This youth mentioned that he came from Weston, and said, ‘There’s a coffee waiting for me’ and ‘I have to go up north of Toronto now (or to North Toronto)'.”
Police interviewed all of the kids in the neighborhood. They found a couple of girls who had come across a strange boy on a bicycle several times that summer. Usually, he just stared at them, but he had made lewd suggestions to them. The boy, they said, lived on Maynard Avenue, a small street northwest of the crime scene.
After a full night and day of working on the case, investigators Payne and Bernard Simmons went back to the Empress Street house and told the Mallettes that the coroner’s investigation was finished and they could start planning Wayne’s funeral. The officers then split up, some to talk to juvenile court judges about suspicious boys, some to track down and interview every teenage boy in the neighborhood. Police talked to the parents of every boy, checked alibis, interviewed theatre owners, combed the public washrooms near the crime scenes for clues.
They even came up with another victim. A three-and-a-half-year-old boy named Dennis had been put outside to play on the afternoon of Friday, September 7. The little boy had been allowed to wander into the construction site of the new Gardiner Expressway. His mother could see the boy playing on piles of sand that were left around the construction site. But after about 20 minutes, the child disappeared. His mother started looking for him, but she didn’t call the police. Two hours later, a teenage boy dropped Dennis off, telling the child’s mother that he had found Dennis wandering around High Park.
According to a police report made after Wayne Mallette’s murder, Dennis’s mother “noticed that her son looked dazed and on examining him she found that he had a large bump on the back of his head with fresh abrasions, red areas on both sides of the front of his neck with scratch marks between the reddened areas. On his stomach just above his navel were teeth marks.
“On she and her husband questioning Dennis she found that a boy had come along to Dennis while he was playing and had walked him along the new roadway to some bushes (apparently in High Park) where he tied his hands behind his back with some rope or string; had tied some string around his neck; had punched him on the back.” The attacker had shown Dennis his penis. The young man who had found Dennis and brought him home was not the assailant. The person who hit Dennis and bit him was younger and smaller, about the same size as his cousin, who was about five feet tall. Dennis’s mother took the boy to a nearby hospital on the day of the attack. The doctor had made notes of the boy’s injuries, but detectives did not come across the case until they started investigating Wayne Mallette’s murder.
They also found adolescent girls in the neighborhood played a very strange game. Boys and girls knew how to make each other cough, gag and even pass out by inserting their fingers into the “V” of the neck and pressing against the windpipe. Firefighters were called to a school the week after Labour Day to rescue a fourteen-year-old girl who could not be revived by her friends. When the police questioned the teens, they said they’d learned about the hold from a boy who was a stranger in the neighborhood.
From the start, police knew the killer was a teenage boy. The morning after the murder, police officers went to every high school in the city with a description of the small, round-faced boy and the lovely bike. They also started checking on boys in the Parkdale neighborhood. They seemed convinced the killer was from that neighborhood, even though the suspicious teenager said he was from the northern part of the city. Experts did forensic tests on Mallette's body and were even able to make a cast of the teeth imprints on the boy's legs. With the eyewitness evidence they had, police believed they had a pretty good chance of solving the case. A $2,000 reward, offered five days after the killing, was also expected to help.
***
A few days before Wayne Mallette's murder, fourteen-year-old Ron Moffatt skipped school. That's a normal part of adolescence. So is fear of punishment. Before his parents came home, Moffatt took a blanket and a pillow, went into a crawl space in his family's apartment building basement and hid, sneaking out once in a while to go to a movie. He lived in the cubby hole for four days, long enough that his parents became worried and called the police. The men investigating Wayne Mallette’s death seemed so
sure it was a boy from the neighborhood, and Moffatt lived very close to the home on Empress Avenue where the angry, tearful Mallette family were still staying, waiting for answers.
Ron Moffatt, like the other boys in the neighborhood, used the exhibition site as their playground. He’d even got a job on one of the rides, The Rotor, during the Exhibition. The show was over at Labour Day, when Moffatt had to go back to school. That hadn’t worked out well, and now Moffatt was in trouble for skipping school.
The night of the murder, Moffatt had gone to a movie, then snuck back into the basement. The main features playing at the Metro Theatre, Ulysses and Last Hunt, ran from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. These times would turn out to be very important.
After Wayne Mallette’s body was found, police began to seriously search for the Moffatt boy. Detectives Payne and Simmons began a search of Moffatt’s apartment building. At 12:20 p.m. on Friday, September 21, they searched the basement and found the cubby hole. Moffatt was curled up under a blanket, asleep. The officers loaded Moffatt into the back of a squad car, where the boy sat hunched on the seat, his face buried in his hands. The police asked him why he had been hiding. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to do something or say something about a fight that occurred in the house and my mother and father throwing water at each other.”
Detective Payne corrected him. “It’s what happened at the Exhibition Grounds that we are talking about? Were you down at the Ex?”
Moffatt answered “Yes.”