Peter Woodcock: Canada's Youngest Serial Killer (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 11)

by Mark Bourrie

  They went straight to police headquarters in downtown Toronto. The officers asked the boy when he’d last been at school. Moffatt, it turned out, had been skipping school since the previous Monday. He said he was good at art. He’d had a few odd jobs, washing cars, being a pin boy at a bowling alley, working on a ride at the Exhibition.

  They talked about the night of Mallette’s murder. The investigators became convinced they had the right young man.

  “Just a minute, Ron,” Payne said. “The way this thing is going now, it’s only fair to let you know that you are going to be charged with murder.”

  Moffatt began to say something. Payne stopped him, then read a pre-printed caution about his rights. Moffatt began to talk very quickly, and Simmons began writing it all down.

  The detectives molded the boy into the murder suspect they were looking for. They even played out their scenario on the front page of the Toronto Star:

  “Police have learned that the boy and Wayne became locked in a struggle in the bushes, the latter getting a grip on the older boy. The suspect is reported to have bitten him twice to loosen Wayne's hold, then grabbed him by the neck and held him face downward until he died of suffocation.

  "He felt the boy's body go limp, knew he was dead and then became frantic.

  "He pedaled away on a stolen bicycle after speaking to a CNE guard. It is reported the bicycle was found after the boy's arrest in a spot along the railway tracks near Fort York armouries. He abandoned it after riding it out the gate and north to Strachan Avenue."

  It was damning stuff. Of course, the Moffatt's parents denied it and gave an alibi for their son. The police should have listened. Moffatt was five inches taller than the boy who had been seen around the CNE grounds. He wore black loafers, not running shoes. For the last four days, he had been wearing a pink silk shirt, not a white t-shirt. His windbreaker was rust-colored, not grey. He did not have a bike.

  But, after some prodding, he confessed.

  Moffatt said he was planning to hang around the empty exhibition grounds. He wandered around the band-shell and earned a bit of change helping a man unload a truck. He sat around for a bit, then a boy came up to him and started teasing.

  “I told him to go away and he wouldn’t pay attention to me, he kicked me, I got up and started to fight with him, I got my arm on his neck and I put too much pressure on, I got up and I spoke to him and he didn’t answer. I was scared so I moved his body, then I took the bike and headed for the Princes’ Gate. A watchman seen me near the Pure Food building and I started talking to the watchman and that’s when I asked him if he had seen a boy on a bike… ride out from the bushes that looked like my twin or something like that.

  “I said what would happen if you found a dead person lying around here, and he said he would contact the police. By that time we were near the Strachan Gate and he pointed the way out and said ‘that’s the way out’ and I left him. I went behind the armouries near the railroad track and that’s where I put the bike there, amongst a bunch of small trees… I went to Johnny’s Restaurant and had something to eat.”

  The next day, according to the confession, Ron Moffatt went to school. He was worried about the description that was broadcast on the radio.

  Moffatt supposedly offered to take the detectives on a tour of the crime scene. Before he left, Moffatt told his mother he had killed Wayne Mallette. “Tell me what happened,” she said to Ron, who was sitting in a chair, sobbing. “Did you do it?”

  “I did,” he answered.

  “Do you mean you killed that boy at the Ex?”

  “Yes,” Ron answered.

  “Oh, why did you have to do that?”

  “I don’t know, we got into a fight,” Ron answered.

  Then he went to the Exhibition grounds. The detectives drove him to the place where Wayne Mallett’s body was found, then showed Moffatt the place where he had talked to the watchman. The police drove Moffatt to the University of Toronto’s dental school, where casts were made from his teeth. Detective Payne asked why Moffatt had bit Wayne Mallette. Making a biting motion, he said, “I just get a feeling. It seems like I like to bite flesh.” The officers asked Moffatt if he had bit Dennis, the little boy found in High Park. Moffatt said he wasn’t sure. He might remember if he saw a picture of the boy.

  At about the same time, a neighbor wrote a note to police, saying he had given the tip that led to Moffatt’s capture, and asking for that $2,000 reward.

  ***

  “Basically, the police wrote the confession,” Moffatt, now a retired school caretaker in Northern Ontario, said in 2015. “They played ‘good cop-bad cop’ and beat the confession out of me. They filled in anything that I got wrong. Then they took me to the crime scene and showed me around. That was supposed to be part of the confession. The police told the newspapers I showed them the crime scene, which wasn’t true.” Still, police wrote long, detailed memoranda about the tour of the Exhibition grounds, including the crime scene. Taken on their face value, the documents filed by the police show detailed, damning evidence supposedly given up by Moffatt that seemed to prove his guilt.

  There were quite a few other problems with the prime suspect. For one thing, he couldn’t ride a bike, and one thread that connected all of the eyewitness accounts of the Mallette disappearance was that the suspect was riding a very nice bicycle.

  “I couldn’t ride a bike,” Moffatt said, almost sixty years after he was arrested. “I was a boxer in high school. I got hit in the ear and I have a bad sense of balance. The cops found a bicycle and said I stole it.”

  And he had an alibi.

  “A friend of mine was an usher in a theatre on Bloor Street. At the time of the murder, I was sitting with his girlfriend. The police said I had time to sneak out, ride a bike down to the Exhibition grounds, commit the murder and get back.”

  Witness after witness – other movie-watchers, staff at the theatre, friends of Moffatt’s, confirmed he was at the theatre. He’d even stayed behind to help change the letters on the movie sign. The last movie ended at 9:30, more than an hour after the first phone call to the police reporting Mallette missing, and almost certainly well after the watchman and the killer had spoken to each other. It took some time to change the sign letters, so Moffatt was almost certainly at the theatre until well after 10 p.m. The people who had seen Moffatt were all willing to testify at the trial, but nothing they said could trump that confession.

  Once they got the “confession,” the detectives closed the case and packed Moffatt off to reform school. His trial was held just over a month after the murder, but it was more of a formality than anything. John Mallette, Wayne’s father, was left angry and frustrated, and wrote letters to the police demanding the name of Ron’s father so he could go after him.

  “They used to tell me at the Church Street juvenile detention centre, ‘you know, when you’re 18, they’re going to hang you.’” Moffatt did things that didn’t help his own case. In the early months of 1957, he and another teen escaped from the Bowmanville reform school east of Toronto. They were caught and put on a starvation diet. During the day, they had to clean a terrazzo floor with a toothbrush. At night, they slept on the same floor with just one blanket. Soon afterward, Moffatt was sent to the Guelph Reformatory, a tough jail for adults. He was too young to be placed in the general population. Instead, Moffatt was housed in the jail’s psychiatric ward, awaiting sentencing.

  “I was terrified. I was supposed to be a child killer. I expected to be in serious danger. But the guys in there took me under their wing. They seemed to know that I was not guilty. When I was told that my appeal would be heard by the court, they cheered. The police brought me back to Christie Street. One of the mean old guards said ‘You’ll never get out.’”

  But he did. The real killer, Peter Woodcock, had been caught and was eager to confess to Wayne Mallette’s murder. “I went to court the next day and was acquitted. The whole weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders.”

 
Moffatt wonders to this day whether he would have spent decades in jail if Woodcock had not been caught. Although he spent less than a year in custody, Moffatt’s youth was ruined.

  “After I was acquitted, I ended up at the psychiatric hospital in Toronto, and later on at the psychiatric hospital in Whitby.

  “As soon as I was acquitted, the Crown (prosecutor) jumped up and said there would be no compensation. My parents said they wouldn’t go to court for it. They couldn’t afford it. They had already sold all the furniture to pay the lawyer. They had disconnected their phone because they got so many threatening calls.

  “I can understand that. People thought their son was a child killer. Even after I was acquitted, a lot of people thought there had to be more to it, that I was guilty somehow. We all just wanted to put it behind us.

  “I was an emotional wreck until I was in my mid-20s. I had to get out of it on my own. I worked, read. I was a history buff. I kept the secret to myself. My first wife eventually told our kids what happened after they grew up. To me, it was 100 years ago. I met a psychiatrist who said he couldn’t believe that I was OK. He thought for sure I would live the rest of my life in a psychiatric ward.”

  Instead, he raised two children, worked all his life, and now draws political cartoons for a local news web site.

  THE MAKING OF A TEENAGE SERIAL KILLER

  The real killer read all about Moffatt’s arrest with considerable interest, and some anger, too. He didn't want someone else taking "credit" for one of his crimes. There were so many clues in the Mallette murder that pointed to him. Even the front page headline in the Toronto Star, "Boy Murdered in CNE Grounds Seized While Watching Trains" should have set off a few alarm bells in the killer’s adoptive family, who were so well aware of the teenager’s railway and streetcar fetish.

  It’s not clear why Ron Moffatt confessed to the murder of Wayne Mallette. Probably, as he says, he was forced to do it. The police officers who investigated this case some six decades ago are long gone, so they can’t defend themselves. The written record they left behind is either an intricate and very believable series of false confessions or a collection of police reports that were very carefully crafted to frame Moffatt.

  The real seeds of Wayne Mallette’s murder were sown in the months before the beginning of World War II. On March 5, 1939, in a ward of a Toronto hospital, a strange, fussing baby was born out of wedlock. It didn’t stay with its mother for long: Children’s Aid social workers were beginning the task of disposing of it. The child was named Peter by his mother Juanita. She was either a seventeen-year-old factory worker or a nineteen-year-old prostitute from eastern Ontario. Either way, she was supposed to have been active and attractive. His father was alleged to be a nineteen-year-old soldier, and the records make it appear that World War II brought them together. Again, the written record is misleading. A little math shows Juanita Woodcock got pregnant in 1938, many months before Canada began mobilizing for the war.

  Four years later, she gave birth to another baby, a girl, who was adopted and, according to a report by social workers, led a normal life. Until at least the 1990s, she never found her long-lost brother, if she’d looked for him at all.

  Juanita breastfed Peter for a month, then scooped him up and put him in a foster home. He screamed constantly and he wouldn’t eat. The baby’s crying never stopped, so the Children’s Aid moved him from one set of foster parents to another. He never slept, he never ate, and no one could stand to be near him. The Children's Aid’s social workers were used to moving babies from home to home. At the time, it was the agency’s policy to frequently switch foster homes because they didn’t want the temporary “mothers” to get too attached to the babies. The troubling, unnerving behavior lasted all of that first year. The various foster parents tried different diets to try to get the baby to gain weight, but nothing worked and he became more bizarre.

  As a toddler, he was terrified of anyone who came near him. He learned to talk when he was approaching two years, but the speech was incoherent. It wasn't ordinary baby talk. People described it as a series of strange whining noises. He was an odd baby growing up in homes of people who didn’t want him. Some of the foster families were uncaring, cold and brutal. Since the foster families weren't allowed to adopt him or even get to know him well, they basically kept their distance and looked after Peter for the money that Children’s Aid paid them. Once, the weird baby was brought into a hospital emergency ward with a twisted neck, the result of a beating by one of the foster parents. His clinical file is much too silent about this period in his life, but Krueger's memory of years of neglect and abuse is credible:

  "When I was put up for adoption, I was bounced around from place to place. I was ignored for long periods of time, left to lie in darkness. Hardly anyone ever picked me up, held me or things like that. This happened in foster homes and other institutions. There was no attempt at bonding," he says. Finally, when he was three years old, he was sent to his last foster home. Frank and Susan Maynard were an upper-middle-class couple with a son of their own who lived in one of the better sections of what was then northern Toronto, the Yonge Street-Lawrence Avenue area. Throughout the war, the Maynards had taken in orphaned and poor children until permanent homes were found for them. Why they ended up hanging on to Woodcock is a mystery. Likely, they just felt sorry for him. There was room in the Maynards' spacious home for one more child. The house is gone now and a church stands on the site, but pictures of the place show that it was one of those ample, three-story Edwardian homes built on a shady, quiet street. Frank Maynard was an accountant who seems to have fit well with the image of the stereotypical father of the 1940s and 1950s. His son, George, was ten years older than the little boy who had come to live with him. George and Peter were never very close. George saw Peter as just one of a string of kids passing through, and by the time the Maynards decided to keep Peter, George was a teenager. When the killings started, George was a university student. He went on to become a successful lawyer.

  In some ways, Peter settled into the household quickly, growing very conscious of his new middle-class standing. In fact, a sense of class snobbery developed faster than most of his other social instincts. He looked down on the poorer people of Toronto, families like the ones he had stayed with in his earlier foster homes. This class consciousness would play out in Woodcock’s crime patterns. There's no record of Woodcock harming kids in wealthier neighborhoods of the city. He always committed his crimes in the poorer parts of town.

  Most of his views on class seem to have come from his new foster mother, Susan Maynard. She was a plump, short woman from a wealthy Maryland background. Susan comes across as a tyrant in most conversations with Krueger, and there's no doubt that she was forceful, with an overly-developed sense of what was proper. Still, she must have had a tremendous amount of charity, strength and patience to deal with the baby that she had taken into her home. In all of the records kept on the family, there was never a suggestion that she wanted to give her weird child back, and she had many chances. She also had many reasons. Peter still screamed any time a stranger approached and he looked like a child with rickets. For Susan, raising Peter was a full-time job. She became attached to Peter and defensive, insisting to skeptical doctors and friends that her damaged little toddler was improving.

  "I have several earliest memories," Krueger says. "One is being carried by my foster mother, backwards and forwards across the living room. I was around three years of age. The radio was playing. Probably it was classical music. It was in music that I defined my emotions as a child because it could be joyous or sad."

  Next door, Frank Maynard built a skating rink for the two boys on a vacant lot.

  Peter wished they had stayed in that house, but when he was ten, they moved to Lytton Boulevard, to the place which later became notorious as the home of Peter Woodcock, child killer. It was a spacious house, with a large sunroom and an attached garage. The Maynards and their foster son settled into a comfortable, s
ubstantial home with antique gaslights that still worked.

  ***

  Gradually, people began agreeing with Susan that Peter seemed to be getting better, at least physically. He had stopped screaming around strangers. At the same time, by the age of seven, he was already developing the pool of knowledge that he draws on for his fantasy world. He had a sharp memory for details and developed a strong vocabulary. Learning things gave him something to do to fill his time. He was usually alone: other kids thought he was strange and wouldn't play with him. Being small, weak, strange and homely, he was a natural target for bullies. Throughout his life, he would always be an outsider and vulnerable to physically stronger people, and his fear and resentment would be the fuel that fed his cruel inner world.

  For five years, starting at the age of seven, Woodcock was treated for his behavior problems by doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children. The entire family needed help coping. The Maynards were well into middle age and the strain of looking after this strange boy was causing trouble in their home. Peter’s problems had overwhelmed the family and taken over Susan Maynard's life. She stopped being centered on her own son and her husband and now focused all of her time and strength on her damaged foster son. Her time was organized around their frequent trips to the hospital.

  When they weren't downtown seeing specialists, the mother and boy were home at their comfortable house, with its overstuffed furniture, its knickknacks and mementos. On a mantel, there was a set of Indian War-vintage army knives Susan brought with her from her childhood home. Krueger remembers the snow falling outside the house's bay windows, the blinking Christmas lights, Susan coming in to light the gaslight in his room. She warned him never to turn the gaslight off, only down, so that gas fumes couldn't leak. There was a little electric light over his bed so he could read, and Krueger used it every night.