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

by Mark Bourrie

  Woodcock took him to the foot of Commissioners Street, to an empty waterfront area east of the city port. He choked the child into unconsciousness, took off his clothes, looked at the boy's body, then viciously attacked him. Gary Morris's body was found with bite marks on the neck. The boy had been beaten so hard that he died of a ruptured liver.

  "It was just like all the other mistakes. This time, he died as a result of my activities. I realized it when I heard the death rattle. I went home late in the afternoon thinking, 'my God, this has got to stop'."

  For a couple of days, no one believed Morris had been kidnapped. He had run away from home a couple of times and may have been doing it again when he walked to the St. Lawrence Market. He had wanted to go to the United States to join the circus.

  "There was a big stink, like the Exhibition one, but it was prolonged because they didn't find him for a week or ten days,” the boy’s killer said years later. “The tall grass is what hid him. After that, they cut it down.

  "I was very frightened. I didn't want this to happen again. I didn't want them to die like that. People were getting mad. Toronto was very Victorian, but what didn't help was the circulation war that was still going on between the Toronto Star and the Telegram. If there was an accident and someone was killed, the papers would cover it with big headlines. A story about a murder became huge news."

  Despite Krueger's lies to the contrary, Morris's death was no accident.

  "It is a long time ago, but I still have memories of it. The memories are like a dream to me, and just about as relevant. It's like having the memories of a sixteen-year-old in the mind of a fifty-four-year-old man, but I suppose if I knew what went on in the mind of a fifty-four-year-old grandfather, I would be horrified. But, you know, you can feel what you like after the fact, but that don't change anything."

  No one seemed to notice that the crime so closely resembled the murder of Wayne Mallette. By then, Ron Moffatt was close to his trial date and was being bounced from jails to reform school to psychiatric hospitals.

  Soon, Woodcock killed again. This time, the police couldn't miss, no matter how inept they were.

  WARNING

  The following pages have graphic photos.

  PHOTOS

  IMAGE 1:

  The front page of the Toronto Daily Star on January 22, 1957 shows Peter Woodcock and victim Carole Voyce, 4. At top right, Woodcock (with glasses) leaves court after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. At left are victims Wayne Mallette (top), Carole Voyce (centre) and Gary Morris.

  (Toronto Star File Photos)

  IMAGE 2:

  'X' marks the spot where seven-year-old Wayne Mallette was found under bushes just west of the Dufferin Street Gates into the fairgrounds of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) on September 15, 1956

  IMAGE 3:

  The body of Wayne Mallette as found at the CNE grounds. The victim after being undressed was dressed again by the serial killer, who also defecated near the body before escaping through the fairgrounds.

  IMAGE 4:

  Evidence photo of the vicious bite left behind by Woodcock on the back of Wayne’s leg. Despite the fact that the bite mark would not have matched, another teen suspect was arrested and convicted for the murder while Woodcock went on to kill two more children.

  IMAGE 5:

  The killing of seven-year-old Wayne Mallette in a relatively crime-free and naive 'Toronto the Good' as it was known at the time, was so brutal and unprecedented that many could not even believe it was a murder, let alone imagine the concept of a "serial killer" in the 1950s. Parents routinely let their kids as young as four years old play and roam around the city streets with little if any supervision.

  IMAGE 6:

  The body of the second victim, nine-year-old Gary Morris, was found on October 6, 1956 in the opposite side of the city at Cherry Beach. Despite the similarities in the second murder, police were unfamiliar with the concept of a serial homicide and did not make the connection, a phenomenon known as 'linkage blindness." The term "serial killer" itself would not enter into popular usage until 1981.

  IMAGE 7:

  On January 19, 1957, Woodcock encountered four-year-old Carole Voyce playing in the street near a friends home. He offered her a ride on his bike taking her down into the Don Valley beneath the Bloor Street Viaduct Bridge where he murdered her. Even today, a serial killer's shift from two previous male victims to suddenly a female, would make profilers hesitate before making a link.

  IMAGE 8:

  Portrait of a teenage serial killer. Peter Woodcock mugshot, January 1957. He was seventeen years old.

  IMAGE 9:

  Peter Woodcock psychiatric facility identity photo in 1959 when Woodcock was nineteen years old.

  IMAGE 10:

  July 13, 1991: Police photo of Peter Woodcock - - now known as David Michael Krueger--with blood stains on his shirt a few hours after having been issued his first daypass to go into town and buy a pizza after 34 years of confinement and therapy in a criminal psychiatric facility.

  THE TRAGEDY

  On Saturday, January 19, 1957, Woodcock got up early and did a few chores around the house. He listened to some music, had lunch, walked to a few stores on Yonge Street, and enjoyed the soft air of a thaw that began to melt the thin layer of snow that had blanketed the city since Christmas.

  He went home, wheeled his bike from the porch, and coasted down Yonge Street, past the small stores at Eglinton Avenue, the CHUM building at St. Clair, where disc jockeys were gearing up for the Elvis Presley tour that was starting soon and would bring the King to Maple Leaf Gardens, and down to the Bloor intersection. Woodcock turned left, rode for a while, and stopped at the Danforth Radio Store. Diane Coates, a thirteen-year-old school girl, later told the police that she remembered seeing him in there, and that she had noticed him the summer before in the Jane and Bloor Street areas. There was nothing unusual about Woodcock going into a radio store. In fact, nothing seemed strange that day to anyone who knew him. He was home in time for dinner. After he ate, he went to work at Casa Loma.

  At 3:30 that Saturday afternoon, Carole Voyce was playing with her friend Johnny Auld in front of Johnny's apartment house on Danforth Avenue while their mothers visited inside. Johnny's father, William Auld, could also see them from inside the now-defunct Bain Brothers paint store directly below the apartment, where he was working as a clerk. Woodcock rode up to them on that fabulous bicycle. He was wearing a dark windbreaker and blue slacks. His hair was slicked back and he looked at the children through horn-rimmed glasses.

  "How old are you?" Woodcock asked the little girl, who had long brown hair, a pretty round face, and who stood only three feet high.

  "Four," she replied.

  "And how old are you?" he asked Johnny.

  "Four," the boy replied.

  "How do you like my bicycle?"

  "I think it's swell," Johnny said.

  "Have you ever been to East York?" Woodcock asked the children.

  "No," they answered.

  "Have you ever been to the lake?"

  This time, the children answered "yes".

  "Would you like to go for a ride on my bicycle?"

  "Yes," they both said, and the children walked toward the shiny machine and the pimply-faced boy.

  "I think I'll take you," he said, pointing at Johnny. Then he paused. "No," he said. "I'll take you," and turned to Carole. “Ladies first.”

  Then he took her hand and began walking down Danforth Avenue toward the ravines. He balanced the bike with his other hand. Two minutes later, a woman saw Woodcock riding his bicycle along the slushy street, with the girl balanced on the handlebars. She wore a grey snow suit, red mittens and black boots.

  Woodcock took the girl to the Don Valley ravine near Auld's house. He talked her into going down the hillside. When she wasn't looking, he had slipped his arm around her neck and choked her until she passed out. Then he jammed his fingers into her eyes. As she choked, she ripped her fin
gernails on Woodcock's clothes and tore at the mud with her hands. He stripped off her clothes and examined her body, the way he had peered at the bodies of several other unconscious children. Woodcock stuck his fingers in her vagina, then thrust a stick into her body. This was the blow that killed her.

  Carole's murderer looked around the ravine and became terrified that he was about to be caught. He tried to push his bike up the steep, wet clay bank, back to the road above. When he slipped back down to the murder scene, he went back to Carole's body and kicked her in the head. Woodcock went into the woods, circled around, and came back to look at the child's body yet again. Then he wheeled his bike to a pathway that led back to the road.

  Fred Callum, a railway yard worker, saw Woodcock come up out of the ravine. Other people saw Woodcock, too: a University of Toronto professor who was stopped by the wild-eyed youngster and told: "If there's a murder down there, they'll try to blame it on me." A school mate of Woodcock's saw him ride by. He was hard to miss: few kids rode their bikes in January in the Toronto of the 1950s.

  A few minutes after Woodcock took Carole, her mother came out of the Auld apartment and began looking for her.

  "Where's Carole?" she asked.

  "She's gone for a bike ride with a high school boy," Johnny Auld replied.

  The frantic mother called the police, and within ten minutes, two cops, Alex Busby and Earl Snider, arrived at the Aulds' apartment. Ray Voyce got into the car and began cruising the area, while a description of the missing girl was broadcast to police officers across Toronto.

  Within ninety minutes of the kidnapping, off-duty officers from nearby police divisions were being called in. A search party was organized shortly after dark. TV stations interrupted their programs to broadcast pictures of Carole and to ask for clues. Sixty police officers searched the area where Woodcock took the girl. Police planned to call in five hundred civil defense volunteers, but they weren't needed. The search for Carole Voyce had ended with the three revolver shots that echoed through the Rosedale ravine, below Toronto's wealthiest neighborhood. Constable Ernie Booth found her frozen and mutilated body near the Bloor Viaduct at 11:09 p.m. His shots signaled the end of a missing person search and the beginning of a manhunt.

  Carole's father had searched all evening and was back in a local police station when the police constables at the ravine called in that they had found his daughter's body.

  They drove the shattered man to the crime scene, where he had to share the pain that Jack Mallette had endured in the trees by the lakeshore railway tracks. The coroner and forensic experts were averting their eyes and piecing together the crime that had occurred only a few hours before.

  For the next three days, police cars patrolled the street in front of Johnny Auld's house in case the killer tried to hurt their best witness. The newspapers ran huge headlines, and on the front page of the Toronto Star was a handwritten note from Raymond Voyce that read:

  "To the sick man who did this terrible thing to my little girl. Give yourself up before it happens again."

  Toronto Telegram reporter Doug Creighton, in the paper's main front-page story, called Woodcock a "pimply faced sex maniac" and said police were "personally aroused by a murder vicious beyond description."

  It was the first big test for the city's new Metro force. More than 2,300 police officers in the Toronto area questioned every teenager who resembled a composite drawing made from the description that Johnny Auld and the other witnesses gave them. Cops who were off-duty were called in to help. Teens were stopped as they walked down the street and were questioned in the park. The day after the murder, one boy tried to run away when police stopped him near the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. Dozens of cops swept through the area, so close to the scene of Woodcock's first murder. When they caught the teen, they realized he wasn't the murderer. Another boy matching Woodcock's description was grilled for four hours that Sunday afternoon, until police found a witness who saw him in a record store at the time of the murder. Another youth, a Hamilton, Ontario, university student, was arrested on a train because he looked like the boy in the composite drawing.

  The drawing was bang on. Yet, the boy the police searched for was already in their office. Woodcock, always a welcome visitor at the station near his house, stopped in to see the police the day after the killing.

  "If you're going to do something, the last thing you do is break the patterns that you've set," he told me forty years later, playing the master criminal and, at the same time, underscoring the fact that he was stone crazy by the time he killed Carole Voyce and really had no chance of getting away with that crime.

  Already, police had made the connection between Gary Morris's murder at Cherry Beach and the killing of Carole Voyce. A $5,000 reward was posted. The new Metro Toronto police force finally had its first murder, courtesy of Peter Woodcock, and it had the city on edge.

  Constable Jean Newman, a mother of two, went on TV to beg the parents of the murderer to turn in their son and to promise that he would be given a mental examination. On the Monday morning that Woodcock was arrested, his brother, then a law student at Osgoode Hall, sat reading the Telegram in the Maynard family's living room. He looked at the composite, then looked at Peter.

  "What have you been doing these days?" he asked jokingly.

  "Nothing," said the killer, as he headed out the door to school. Two days after the murder, these were his last hours of freedom.

  ***

  He didn't make it through the day. The two police officers who had questioned him after his March trip to the ravine saw the composite, dug through their files, and pulled out Woodcock's dossier. Within an hour, the police were at Woodcock's school.

  "It was on my mind every day that I could be caught. I was looking over my shoulder every time that I saw a police cruiser behind me. And 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.

  "After I got caught, I explained it all to her and she was just horrified. She had no idea that she had put me under such pressure. But they did stand by me. If I had been released, I think they would have sent me abroad. Mother was from Maryland, and she knew how they took care of children that had been disgraced. My biggest fear before I was captured was that she would find out first. I knew that whatever she said would be at full decibels, conducted at the highest volume."

  The police protected him from "Mother." He escorted them to the place where he killed Carole Voyce, then went back to the police station to be questioned. He babbled on about the other two killings and all of the sexual assaults. Police calmed him down long enough to sign a statement.

  STATEMENT TO POLICE

  January 21, 1957

  "The first time this happened was in March. You already know the details about that, about the girl. And from then until now I have actually attacked many children, even though I loved children as a rule. I have felt sexually inclined to — I won't go into the number of cases, but will say there must have been about 11 or 12 of them before I met the girl, that is for this case. And I took her for a ride, to the viaduct, as you fellows know about it now, where I subdued her, and I don't know what I did, but she was dead before I realized what I had done and that was about it. Do you want to know from the time I left her and so on? You want to know how I subdued her, I suppose. Well, first of all, I choked her. This is very gruesome, I know. Then I stuck my fingers in her eyes. I don't know why I did that. Isn't it awful?

  And then when I tried to clamber up the bank I was frightened by what I did and as I clambered up the little gully there, I slipped and my feet hit her head. Then I left her, circled back on the other side, as you saw my tracks, took one last look and left. And that's all. But it happened so suddenly, I don't know. I can tell you right now that I don't want a trial before a jury. The reason why my parents were not aware of my sickness is because I never told them. I was too ashamed. Do you blame me? I feel relieved now that I have told you the truth because
I was worried. Whatever happens, I don't want to go home tonight. I don't want to face my parents.

  Signed: Peter Maynard."

  "The police treated me with the greatest courtesy. I have nothing (drawing out the word) but the greatest (drawing this word out, too) praise for the police officers who handled my situation and me during the trial. The jail guards teased me about being hanged. That was expected. I knew I was going to hang. As a matter of fact, my lawyer had the greatest difficulty, when the trial opened up, getting me to plead not guilty. Back then, it was a requirement under the law to plead not guilty if you were asking for an insanity verdict. I wanted to go in and say I was guilty of this terrible set of crimes. I wanted to be sentenced to hang. You know, the Diefenbaker government commuted nearly all capital sentences, and I believe, now, that it would have commuted mine. If it had, I would be back on the streets. A commuted capital sentence was twenty years.

  "I was in the Don Jail for about nine days, then I went to the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital. I was in jail with a guy named Peter, a hell of a good guy, who had been caught for the same kinds of things I had done. He died here.