by Mark Bourrie
Bruce's emotional problems were just part of the strange dynamics of the Hamill household. Gertrude Hamill liked to believe that the world mistreated her entire family. She rose to the task of protecting her son from the outside world, even telling him not to take pills prescribed by his psychiatrist. Gertrude Hamill became a life-long victim, blaming the government, the city, her neighbors, and any other outsiders who crossed her, for her troubles. Her son saw himself as her protector.
As a teenager, Bruce's rages became more frequent. By Grade 10, he was buying street drugs from the dealers in downtown Ottawa. He had a few odd jobs and, when he turned eighteen, spent a summer in the militia. After he got home, Hamill became more violent. A few months after he left the army base at Petawawa, Hamill went to visit a homosexual friend. They smoked marijuana and drank until the gay man passed out. Hamill raised a knife over the man's exposed back, then ran the blade along his back, side and stomach. He wondered what it would feel like to plunge the blade in. This time, Hamill stopped himself.
Just after Christmas, he beat a twelve-year-old boy to a pulp because the youth said something that Hamill took to be an insult. And, two weeks before he finally did kill someone, Hamill had gone to Ottawa's Lisgar Collegiate at the end of a school day to stab a student who had insulted him three years before. For days, Hamill had worked himself into a rage thinking about what the boy had said to him. The youth couldn't remember Hamill, had no idea why the man chased him around the school yard with a knife, and was lucky to get away alive.
Hamill's rage finally focused on Betty Wentzlaff, a fifty-eight-year-old janitor. She and her husband George had lived next to the Hamills for twenty-one years and had gone out of their way to be friendly with them. The Wentzlaffs had no children, so they gave some of their time to the Hamills. Gertrude and Wally had invited Betty and George to their 25th anniversary party and the families often visited each other. Things between the neighbors were fine until Gertrude Hamill decided that she wanted the Wentzlaff house for her daughter. In her mind, the Wentzlaffs had no choice but to sell. When they refused, Gertrude Hamill began building a hatred-filled fantasy world with Betty Wentzlaff at the centre. Bruce watched his mother become fixated on Betty. While she would only complain about Mrs. Wentzlaff, Bruce was willing to act.
On the night of February 28, 1977, Gertrude Hamill called Betty Wentzlaff to ask her, once again, to sell her house to Bruce's sister. During the phone call, Bruce's mother shouted at Wentzlaff. She screamed that the neighbor was being unreasonable, that she wasn't grateful for the friendship she had been shown by the Hamills.
Bruce's mother was crying when she hung up the phone. Bruce decided he would fix the problem. He left the house, saying he was going to see a movie. Walking the streets of the village, along the outer fence of the Governor General's estate and back towards MacKay Street, Bruce became more enraged. He thought about his mother, who had stayed loyal to him through the bad months. In his mind, Mrs. Wentzlaff became the persecutor of his family. She had deliberately set out to ruin the Hamill family and make his mother unhappy. He decided Betty Wentzlaff had to die.
For four years, Wentzlaff had worked as a part-time cleaner at Crichton Street School, just behind her house. Hamill followed her to work at about 5 a.m. In the darkness, Betty saw him climbing the fence behind his house and running after her. She tried to get into a side door of the school to escape, but Hamill caught up to her. He stabbed Betty twenty-seven times before scurrying back to his home.
Betty Wentzlaff was found dead about 6:45 a.m. by school superintendent Jean-Guy Charette, just three feet from the back door of the school. He thought she had fallen and hit her head on the ice. Charette ran inside the school, called police and found a blanket to cover her. When the police arrived and rolled her over, Charette and the police officers could see Wentzlaff had been stabbed in the upper abdomen and chest. Hours later, Charette was still crying in his office when a reporter phoned him."She was like a mother to everyone. Even the school children called her Betty," he told a reporter.
Police were baffled by the Wentzlaff murder. She had no enemies that anyone knew of. The more they learned about Betty Wentzlaff, the angrier and more determined the investigators became.
"It's just senseless," one detective told a local reporter. "How could a guy like that sleep at night, knowing what he has done? He has got to be crazy. He stabbed an old woman like that so many times."
Police quickly ruled out robbery, since Wentzlaff still had a small amount of money in her pocket. There was also no sign of sexual assault. At first, they believed she may have surprised an intruder in the school, but there was very little evidence to go on. Ice covered the ground at the murder scene, so there were no footprints. In the end, it was legwork, knocking on doors, that led them to suspect Hamill.
On Thursday morning, two days after Wentzlaff's murder, while Wally and Gertrude were shopping at the local IGA, police arrested Bruce. Once they had him in handcuffs, they searched the house, finding the knife that had been used to kill Betty. When Bruce's parents arrived home from the store, Bruce had been taken away, but the search was still going on. The police drove Wally and Gertrude to the police station and let them sit with their son in an interrogation room.
"They've charged me with murder," Bruce told his mother. "And I did it."
***
Reporters crowded into a press conference later Thursday to learn about Hamill. Staff Superintendent Tom Flanagan told them: "We've recovered a number of things and taken them into our possession."
"Are you still looking for the knife?" a reporter asked.
"No," Flanagan answered. "We are no longer looking for a weapon."
The police praised the people of New Edinburgh for the dozens of tips that investigators received but were coy about how they had narrowed the search to Bruce Hamill.
"We knocked on virtually every door," Flanagan told reporters. "The whole police force was involved. The lack of evidence and the viciousness of the attack on Mrs. Wentzlaff made it a tough murder that had to be worked on in a very tough way."
Gertrude Hamill was more forthcoming with Kit Collins, an Ottawa Citizen reporter who knocked on her door just after noon. Wally Hamill was sitting in the kitchen when Gertrude ushered Collins inside the gloomy home.
"I had a premonition something was wrong," Wally told Collins.
"I didn't," Gertrude said. "Bruce went to a movie Monday night, then went for a pizza on Rideau Street. When he got home, we sat in the living room and ate it while we watched the late show. And in the morning, I didn't hear anything. Bruce usually slept until noon when he wasn't working. I woke up about six, the first time, then I got up at eight. Bruce was already up and dressed. We had a half a grapefruit each. Bruce said he had trouble sleeping."
Gertrude said she had no suspicions until she came home from the IGA and found the police rummaging through her house.
"My head feels like it wants to blow, but if that's the way that he's got to get help, okay. But he was getting help in the first place."
That afternoon, the pews of St. Luke's Lutheran Church in New Edinburgh were filled with about a hundred mourners. George Wentzlaff sat with his wife's mother. Six of Betty's brothers and sisters were nearby. The rest of the mourners were teachers and students from Crichton Street School, where the flag still flew at half mast.
***
In the fall of 1978, Hamill was taken to Oak Ridge for assessment. Dr. Russell Fleming interviewed Hamill several times and came to the conclusion that the killer was legally sane at the time he stabbed Betty Wentzlaff.
Hamill tried to come across as a tough city kid who wouldn't let someone push around his family.
"I believe that if you fight people, they leave you alone. Mrs. Wentzlaff was a low-class, stupid woman who thought she could just push us around," Hamill told Dr. Fleming.
"What did you think about on the night of the murder?" Dr. Fleming asked.
"I thought about killing her. I didn'
t think about anything else. Like, I didn't think that I would get caught or anything. Afterwards, I was scared like hell. I knew that I did it, but I couldn't realize that I'd done it. Does that make sense? I saw my whole life go in front of me, thinking about the future."
"Your future?" Fleming asked.
"Yes," Hamill replied.
He stared out the window of the Oak Ridge ward sunroom for a few minutes, not saying anything.
"I don't remember what she looked like, even."
Hamill's tough exterior was starting to wear thin. He wanted Dr. Fleming to know why he committed the crime, that he had flipped out dozens of times over the years.
"If something had been done for me, if the medication had been stronger, maybe it wouldn't have happened. I guess I have a bad temper. My emotions go nuts on me. I can't go to prison. I wouldn't last a second. People waste away there like in a warehouse. If they send me here, I would work really hard. I'd even let them do surgery. I don't want to go to prison," he said.
***
Hamill's trial began Monday, January 9, in Ottawa’s old courthouse. For a little more than a week, psychiatrists would argue over the young man's sanity.
Dr. Selwyn Smith, head of forensic psychiatry at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, the city's main psychiatric institution, testified Mrs. Wentzlaff's murder was premeditated but the reasons behind it were irrational. He explained how the family was dysfunctional, how Bruce's mother saw herself as a victim, and her son as a protector. Bruce's brain damage was described, and Dr. Smith said it was difficult to treat. Drugs and, perhaps, surgical therapy could be effective, he said.
Under cross-examination by Crown prosecutor Andrejz Berzins, Dr. Smith stood by his conclusions and testified Bruce belonged in a psychiatric institution.
"Couldn't a penitentiary offer Mr. Hamill adequate care?" Berzins asked.
"That's a pious hope," Dr. Smith answered.
Other psychiatrists testified that Hamill didn't understand the nature and consequences of his crime. Although Hamill knew killing Wentzlaff was wrong, "he didn't feel it was wrong," said Dr. Frank Chalke, a consulting psychiatrist at the Royal Ottawa Hospital. “Originally, I felt that he did know. He planned on doing it. He formed the intention to do it.”
Dr. David Bulmer, a psychiatrist at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, testified that Hamill's strange behavior at the time of the murder was evidence that he was having an epileptic fit brought on by his brain damage. The night before the killing, Hamill took a "sick pathological step in thinking that the something that had to be done was that she should be shot down. It would not have occurred to him that there were other ways of dealing with the situation."
Yes, Dr. Bulmer admitted under cross examination by prosecutor Berzins, Hamill was aware that he was stabbing Mrs. Wentzlaff and that she was going to die, "but at the time, he did not know that what he was doing was wrong."
Afterwards, he realized the wrongness of his actions but felt they "were not part of himself. Something had happened to him he felt was beyond his control. While he's undergoing a discharge, Bruce doesn't have the ability to make any meaningful choices."
Berzins fought the insanity defense, accusing Dr. Bulmer of trying to absolve Hamill of his responsibility for Wentzlaff's death by blaming his diseased mind, but Dr. Bulmer argued forcefully that Hamill really did lose touch with reality when he had his fits.
The day after Dr. Bulmer testified, the eleven men and one woman on the jury retired for two hours before delivering their verdict that they found Hamill not guilty by reason of insanity.
He stayed at Oak Ridge from January 1978 until December 1980, then was transferred to Brockville. At that institution, he was given day passes and gradually prepared for release. In March 1983, Hamill was freed. Five years later, he was discharged from his Warrant of the Lieutenant-Governor, the court order issued after the insanity verdict.
Nine years after killing Betty Wentzlaff, Hamill had no criminal record. He would, according to institutional policy, make a fit escort for Krueger on his first citizen-supervised day pass.
Meanwhile, Krueger was getting escorted trips all over Ontario. He visited a railway museum. He went to see Silence of the Lambs. Psychiatrists in Belleville, where Krueger now lived in a psychiatric hospital, thought they were seeing real progress. He was ready, they believed, to be escorted into the community by one of his friends.
INITIATION DAY
It was hot and muggy on Saturday, July 13, 1991, when Bruce Hamill, a physically and mentally twisted young man, rode the elevator down from his eighth floor apartment in suburban Ottawa and headed for a bus stop. A few minutes later, he was on his way to the capital's modern black steel and glass railway station. As the bus carried him closer to the train terminal, he could see the Peace Tower and the neo-Gothic Parliament Buildings rising above the office blocks of downtown Ottawa.
The House of Commons was a place where he had always wanted to work, but he couldn't get a security clearance. The RCMP and CSIS don’t usually give those out to murderers. Instead, Hamill found a job at the county courthouse and a seniors' home, places where criminally insane killers met whatever criteria existed for security guards. The judges, lawyers and elderly people had no idea what was going on in the mind of the man who was paid to guard them. When they did learn more about Bruce Hamill, the people who had known him during his short career as a security guard would shudder with dread.
The Ottawa train station is not a busy place, so it didn't take Hamill, who was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with “ACE”, very long to buy a ticket to Brockville. He had no baggage, except for a pipe wrench that he had wrapped in newspapers and put into two shopping bags. With a bit of a limp, he walked through the sliding doors of the station to the waiting train, a milk-run that stopped at the towns of the Ottawa Valley, the villages along the St. Lawrence River, and the small cities on the north shore of Lake Ontario before reaching Toronto five hours later. By late morning, he was travelling through the fields and woods of the flat land that lies between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, through little Ottawa Valley towns like Smith’s Falls.
He spent the hour of the trip trying to keep straight everything Mike had told him. Any deviation in the plan would cause it to fail. It wasn't just the outcome of the plot that was important. It was the ritual that mattered. If the timing was wrong, all of this would be for nothing.
As the train rolled through the countryside, which was still lush from the spring's heavy rains, Hamill thought about the problems he was having at home. His Philippines-born wife had begun to rebel over the visits to Brockville and, rightly, suspected Hamill was seeing a male lover. The Hamills had a baby girl that was adding strain to a marriage that was already explosive. The rage that had caused Hamill so much trouble in his life was building again. The fights were becoming more vicious. In recent weeks, Hamill had stopped talking at least to his wife. Now his inner thoughts were becoming more bizarre, and Mike was shaping and directing them.
***
Hamill had been seeing Mike Krueger since 1989, but this visit was to be special: Krueger had been given his first day pass off the grounds of a psychiatric institution in thirty-five years. The Brockville hospital's staff thought Hamill and Krueger were going downtown to the Dairy Queen and for a walk along the St. Lawrence River. Then they were supposed to go to a Swiss Chalet. They would buy a pizza to take back to the hospital and spend the evening together. They, however, had other plans.
From the Brockville train station, Hamill limped down the main street until he found the town's Canadian Tire store. Its staff thought he looked weird as he lugged a heavy wad of newspaper through the air-conditioned aisles of the store. He stopped at the counter where guns and hunting knives were sold and spent more than an hour with a bored clerk, examining every blade, looking for just the right one. Then, taking much less time, he found a cheap hatchet and a sleeping bag.
"How will you be paying for that?" the store clerk asked as Hamill dropped h
is purchases on the counter with a clunk.
Hamill handed the woman a MasterCard. He stayed silent as she put it through the scanner. The card was valid. Hamill signed the paper that the clerk put in front of him while the woman stuffed everything into a big plastic bag.
"Can I put that in, too?" she asked, pointing at the newspaper-swaddled wrench.
"Sure," Hamill said.
The next stop was the town's drug store, where Hamill bought a pack of Nytol, a brand of over-the-counter sleeping pill. Then, after lugging his bag of weapons for about twenty minutes in the building heat, he stopped in a grove of trees, pulled everything out of the Canadian Tire bag and repacked the knife, hatchet and pipe wrench inside the sleeping bag. Ten minutes later, shortly after two in the afternoon, he was at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. He walked up to the receptionist at the front door, dropped the sleeping bag with its cargo of weapons on her counter, and told her he had arrived to escort Mike Krueger on a walk on the grounds.
A few minutes later, Krueger arrived from K-ward on the second floor of the hospital. He was dressed in a checkered shirt and a pair of shorts, his thinning hair cropped into a brush cut. Krueger was a short man with bandy legs and a pot belly. His face was forgettable, with small, piggy eyes, an average-sized nose, and poor bone structure. In proportion to his small body, his head seemed over-large. Krueger's hands were small, like those of a ten-year-old boy's. His skin was pale. That day, like most others, he probably had bad breath, and he squinted because of his lousy eyesight. He was also hard of hearing, although his deafness was rather selective.
Hamill signed Krueger out on what would be the first of two day passes. The Brockville institution has a large tract of land. Part of the grounds are lawns and gardens, but the acres of woods held more attractions for busy homosexuals like Krueger and Hamill, who had dubbed the forested part of the hospital lands "Procreation Park". In the weeks before this visit, they had picked out a special place in a sumac grove. Lugging the sleeping bag and its lethal contents, they headed for the shrubs. Within a few minutes, they had hidden the weapons along the trail through the bushes. On the way back to the hospital, they ran into another Brockville patient, Dennis Kerr. He was the person they were looking for.