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

by Mark Bourrie

  "The Don Jail was dismal, but then, it was jail. If you offended, you ended up in jail, and jail was not a Sunday school picnic. The guards would push me down, and sometimes an inmate would make a grab for me through the bars. Even the doctor booted me in the ass several times for what I had done. It sounds terrible, but people thirty-seven years ago would understand it. The Toronto Psychiatric Hospital was a haven of peace and quiet after that."

  The funeral for Carole Voyce was held on the Wednesday after her murder. She wore a new pink dress with long sleeves. Her grandfather, Ernest Voyce, picked out the dress and paid for it.

  Meanwhile, prosecutors wrote an indictment for first-degree murder. By then, police, psychiatrists and prosecutors agreed that Peter Woodcock was insane.

  "You really don't know your own life until you've been on trial for murder. You learn pretty fast what people think of you. I don't recommend it. When I stood trial, the death penalty was there, on the books, and it was being used. A trial becomes like a game between the Crown and the defence. The judge just sits like a big referee up there,” Woodcock said one afternoon over a cheeseburger in the Oak Ridge visitors’ center.

  About seventy-five people, mostly elderly downtown Toronto residents with a few days of free time on their hands, sat in the old City Hall courtroom and watched Woodcock as he rose in the prisoner's box. The boy, now eighteen, pleaded "not guilty" in a loud, clear voice. Court was adjourned for a few minutes while Woodcock's lawyer, John Brooke, and prosecutor Arthur Klein met in the chambers of Ontario Supreme Court justice W.F. Spence. Likely, the three men put the last touches on an agreement on the outcome of the trial: not guilty by reason of insanity. Back then there was only one fate for murderers acquitted by reason of insanity on a murder charge. Woodcock would be shipped off to Penetanguishene for the rest of his life. First, though, the formalities of the trial had to be carried out.

  Once the jury was sworn in, Judge Spence issued a warning:

  "May I stress that your sole duty is to bring in a verdict based on the evidence presented here. There was a terrific amount of publicity in this case. Sweep from your mind everything except that which you hear from the witness box. This is a difficult duty for you."

  Klein, of course, was unlikely to have problems winning the case, since Woodcock had been a cooperative prisoner who had spent the winter eagerly telling the story of his crimes to anyone who asked about them. The law requires two things to be proven in an insanity defence: that the person on trial committed the crime, and that he did not understand the nature and consequences of his action.

  Back then, when a sentence to Penetanguishene was effectively life imprisonment, prosecutors usually agreed to an insanity verdict if one or two respected psychiatrists said the prisoner was unaware of the nature and consequences of his actions because he had a mental disorder. These days, they resist because they worry an insanity verdict is a ticket back to the street.

  Many people had come forward to say they had seen him on Bloor Street and around the viaduct that afternoon. The secretary, the railroad watchman, the professor who had been stopped by the crazy young man, the schoolboy who was washing his car had all received subpoenas.

  After four days, the trial was over, and the judge wrote out his verdict:

  IN THE SUPREME COURT OF ONTARIO

  Thursday, the 11th day of April, 1957

  BETWEEN

  The Queen and Peter Woodcock

  The Accused, Peter Woodcock, having on the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th days of April, 1957, been brought before this court sitting with a jury at the City of Toronto in the County of York in the Province of Ontario, charged with murder and a jury empanelled having found that the accused was not guilty on account of insanity

  This Court doth order that the accused, Peter Woodcock, be kept in strict custody in Toronto Psychiatric Hospital in the said County of York, until the pleasure of His Honour the Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Ontario shall be known.

  Wishart G. Spence, J.

  The beautiful cream and red bike, with all of its bells and whistles, was rolled out of the courtroom by a bailiff. It was later given to an orphanage, where, hopefully, its riders never learned its back story.

  No one who had been in that courtroom in the spring of 1957 would have guessed that Woodcock would get the chance to kill again. He was destined for what was then called the hospital for the criminally insane in Penetanguishene. The institution, called Oak Ridge, had never released a murderer.

  PLAN X

  In time, nearly everything that the jury heard about Woodcock would be glossed over by social workers and psychiatrists, and time would dim the public's memory of his crimes. Time, however, never changed the viciousness in Woodcock or took away his thirst to hurt anyone he could overpower. Time and psychiatric therapy never dulled the power of the fantasies that ruled his life. In fact, his treatment would teach him how to con weak men like Bruce Hamill, to bend them to his will, and to make them become his hands, his eyes, his ears, when he killed again.

  Woodcock arrived at Penetanguishene at 11:00 a.m. on April 20, 1957: Good Friday. A form filled out by the hospital's staff showed he had normal temperature, pulse and respiration. He was five feet, five and a half inches tall (he shrank somewhat over the years, and his poor posture made him look even shorter when he was in his fifties and sixties), weighed one hundred and five pounds, had hazel eyes and black hair. He was clean, with no noticeable vermin. He carried with him an electric razor and a nail file, which were turned over to the hospital bursar for safekeeping. In Woodcock's suitcase was a bathrobe, three Bibles, a suit, a pair of eyeglasses, a handkerchief, and some street clothes.

  Less than a month after Woodcock arrived at Oak Ridge, he was taken back to Toronto. Finally, justice was about to be done for Ron Moffatt, the boy who had been jailed in the dreadful Guelph Reformatory for the murder of Wayne Mallette. A few days before the hearing, three men had come to see Woodcock: his lawyer, John Brooke; a Mr. Hartt, who was the lawyer for Moffatt; and a Metro police officer, all of whom wanted to be sure that Woodcock would testify to his guilt. There was some foot-dragging by Oak Ridge officials. Some of them believed that Woodcock might be confessing to a crime that he had read about in the newspapers.

  For a week, Woodcock was in Toronto, staying at the old Queen Street asylum. At the end of a short hearing in one of Toronto's City Hall courtrooms, Moffatt was finally set free. He had spent almost a year locked up for a murder he didn't commit, and for about half of that time the authorities knew that he was innocent.

  Moffatt's mother told newspapers that her son had been through hell: drug treatments by doctors who believed he was lying about his innocence; a trial that ended in a miscarriage of justice; months locked up as a child murderer, at the bottom of the Guelph reform school pecking order.

  After a hearing with lawyers for Ron Moffatt and Ontario prosecutors in the chambers of the Chief Justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal, Moffatt’s conviction was quashed and a new trial ordered. The prosecutors realized they had the wrong suspect and Moffatt was freed three weeks later from the tough Guelph Reformatory west of Toronto. Judge Stewart, who made the final order, remarked briefly on the strange confession that had done so much to convict Moffatt:

  “I have suggested to the police that in all cases where statements are being taken from juveniles, there should be present either the parents, or one of the parents, or some other disinterested person such as a minister, priest or teacher; if they are not available, at least some other person not connected with the police, and I would suggest that practice is advisable and if it were followed it would be unlikely to have a situation arise as did arise from this particular case.

  “In the case of Peter Woodcock, he was a person declared to be of unsound mind, but on the evidence presented I have held that he was a competent witness. While there are some discrepancies in his statement, the evidence of Dr. Spence (the psychiatrist who examined Woodcock) is consistent with Woodcock’s
statement and is inconsistent with the confession of Ronald Moffatt. Consideration of the evidence as a whole leaves me with reasonable doubt, in fact, I must say, a substantial doubt as to the guilt of Ronald Moffatt. He is entitled to the benefit of that doubt and I therefore find him not guilty of the offence for which he has been charged.”

  The judge told Moffatt to stand up.

  “I have found you not guilty of the charge laid against you, the charge to which you confessed to the police, and the evidence here you swore what you told the police that you committed this crime and gave a good many details in connection with it, and the story you said was untrue. All I have to say to you is this. You of course yourself know whether your statement was true or not. If it was not true then you have brought it upon yourself, all the trouble you have been in, in connection with this case, all the trouble given your parents, simply because you failed to tell the truth.

  “I hope you will, at least, learn this from this trial, and you will never forget it, and whatever trouble you get into, and you may have some temporary advantage by telling something untrue, but it will always be to your advantage to tell the truth, and if you are in the wrong, take your punishment.”

  At the end of the hearing, Moffatt was given back to his sobbing parents. In 1957, that was as much as he or his family could hope for.

  The Mallette family, confused and angry that a mentally-ill man’s testimony had freed a boy who had confessed to Wayne’s killing, went back to Seeley’s Bay, swearing they would never again set foot in Toronto. “I wonder if they think Wayne committed the crime himself,” John Mallette wrote to the Toronto police. “It looks very much that way. No one guilty.”

  ***

  Author's Note - Going back over Woodcock's file, I saw lingering doubts among some of his therapists that Woodcock committed the Mallette murder. At times, Woodcock himself seemed unclear in his interviews with psychiatrists. He would sometimes act as though he didn't trust his memory and say that, since he worked Saturday nights at Casa Loma, he might not have been able to commit the crime. If that was so, then, perhaps, another killer might have gone free.

  One day in the summer of 1996, when Krueger phoned me to chatter about something trivial, I decided to ask him if he killed Wayne. He was in a rather jovial mood, happier than he had been in several weeks. The hospital had issued an edict earlier in the summer that he quit telling jokes to other patients. That rule had been lifted.

  So, did he kill Wayne Mallette?

  "Oh, yes," he said.

  Why did he bother helping Moffatt get out of jail?

  "I was really angry that he was taking credit for something I did. It had bothered me since he was arrested, but I couldn't exactly come forward, could I?"

  ***

  The summer and early fall of 1957 was a time of adjustment for Woodcock, and things didn't always go well. In the first spring, he was lonely and worried. No one who had committed murder, he was told, was ever released from Oak Ridge. Within weeks, though, he began feeling safe, despite his tiny size. Many of the other inmates, out of pity or lust, were kind. During the summer, he enjoyed the attention paid to him by four homosexual inmates who courted him and quarreled with each other. By October, however, he was depressed. He managed to get about a half meter of copper wire from an electrical cord, tie it into knots, and insert it deep into his penis. Attendants rushed to the screaming boy's room to find him lying on his cot, bleeding. They tried to pull the wire out, but it wouldn't budge. The next morning, when the Oak Ridge doctor arrived, he was given the task of removing the copper strip. Woodcock was given a "whiff of anesthesia," according to his medical report, and the doctor gave the wire a stiff pull. Woodcock spent the rest of the day in a cold bath.

  Oak Ridge staff tried to cover up the self-mutilation. When Susan Maynard came to visit a few days later, she saw that Peter was unwell, but he told her that he had the flu. The institution's staff supported the lie, saying that a cold virus was wafting through Oak Ridge's wards.

  Still, Susan Maynard worried. Just after Woodcock's first Christmas in Oak Ridge, she sent a plaintive letter to his psychiatrist. For the next ten years, there was a steady stream of correspondence, but by the late 1960s, it tapered off. Krueger doesn't know what happened to Susan Maynard and the rest of his foster family.

  By the late fall of 1957, Woodcock's groin had healed. He broke out of his funk and became one of the busiest homosexuals on his ward, constantly in trouble for being in other men's cells.

  Through the next couple of years, he developed the routine that he loved so very much: time with his friends, a few hours listening to radio, and working in the Oak Ridge library or kitchen. Woodcock always shied away from physical labor, and even in the library, where he could look through books all day, he was known as a slacker. He was more enthusiastic when he worked for the Oak Ridge newspaper, The Quill, and he liked to run the projector on movie nights. He liked to feel everything, like the buses, was running on schedule.

  Ten years into his stay, after dozens of sexual relations, obsessions, run-ins with staff, and little acts of defiance and craziness, he was described in a report as a patient always looking for other inmates to have sex with, a braggart who expected other patients to be impressed by his crimes, but who, at the same time, told staff he felt remorse. His work in the typing and print shop was sloppy. He had full privileges, including the right to send and receive letters and have visitors, but few of either came for Woodcock. In the summer of 1967, he became obsessed with yet another patient, Steven Jones, who had spent time hanging around with the hippie crowd in Toronto's Yorkville counter-culture colony. The object of Woodcock's desire didn't share Peter's enthusiasm.

  Woodcock followed the young man around "like a puppy," according to a social worker's report. Other inmates wanted the new patient, too. Woodcock reacted by sending them anonymous threatening letters. This was not a bright move by a small, nearsighted inmate without many friends. At least one fight broke out, which ended when Woodcock grabbed something sharp and cut a patient who was trying to restrain him.

  The next year, his affections had settled on someone else. David Lesperance seems to have returned Woodcock's feelings, the two of them going so far as to agree to "Plan X," a suicide pact. When the guards found out about Plan X, Woodcock ended up shackled and locked in a strip safe-room, a cell with nothing in it but a cement slab to sleep on and an untearable denim blanket for warmth. Later, he was transferred to intensive therapy, and, by late summer, was back in his old cell.

  Lesperance returned to Woodcock's ward a few months later. Desperate now, Woodcock took what little money he had and bought mod clothes. He let his hair grow long and tried to act like a hippie. It was no use: by Christmas, Lesperance had taken up with another inmate. Woodcock schemed to kill them both.

  Soon, however, he got bored with that plan and found new things to do. There was too much going on around him. At the end of the 1960s, the counterculture had arrived at Penetanguishene. A crack had opened in the doors of Oak Ridge. Killers were starting to be released, and the place was becoming much more interesting for the inmates who were still inside. Inmates were fed a smorgasbord of hallucinogenic drugs. They didn’t cure psychopaths, but they certainly broke up the boredom. Then, through the 1980s, cash-strapped governments began to look at ways of clearing out expensive psychiatric institutions. In 1992, Woodcock – now Krueger – had been locked up 35 years. It was time for him to go. His first day pass escort would be another killer, Bruce Hamill.

  KNIGHT OF THE PRAETORIAN GUARD

  The Ottawa neighborhood of New Edinburgh is the kind of place where most Canadians would like to live. The shady streets are clean and safe. The Rideau River, fringed with parks and spanned by a lovely antique bridge, runs along the edge of the neighborhood. There's a strong sense of community, which shows itself in the support that New Edinburghers give to their churches and schools.

  The Rideau Hall estate, home of the Governor General, marks the ea
stern boundary of the community. In the northwest corner, near the gates to Rideau Hall, is the Prime Minister's mansion at 24 Sussex Drive.

  MacKay Street runs along the edge of the Rideau Hall estate, connecting to Sussex Drive less than a block from the Prime Minister's house. On the east side, the Governor General's residence is enclosed by a handsome wrought-iron fence. On the west side of the street, Bruce Hamill grew up in a little white-framed house, set back from the street. It's an ugly place. The house is pinched in between a much nicer home to the north and a duplex to the south. Most of the front yard is a driveway graveled in black mine slag.

  The house backs on to a laneway. These little roads run behind most New Edinburgh houses. They give the local kids a safe place to learn how to ride their bikes and are easy shortcuts through the neighborhood. Kitty-corner to the back of the Hamill house is a ninety-year-old school. Bruce Hamill is one of its less-successful graduates, and he chose it to be the scene of his first murder.

  Bruce Waldemar Charles Hamill was born on November 27, 1956. His mother was thirty-two, his father forty-seven. Fairly quickly, the Hamills realized Bruce had behavioral problems. He was born with a temporal lobe abnormality, which shows up on EEG and CAT scans. Through his childhood and teen years, Wally and Gertrude Hamill sheltered Bruce and tried to pretend that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. If he got into trouble, they blamed his friends. If he was in a fight, it was never his fault. They had found a psychiatrist for him, but the Hamill family did not believe he was dangerous. Sometimes, he had violent fits at home and lashed out at the family, but they told themselves his anger was just part of life for a young man who had trouble fitting in.