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

by Mark Bourrie

  During the day, the boy indulged his urge to wander the city and he developed a fetish for public transportation. "Toronto back in the forties and fifties was an exciting place to grow up," he said one winter day in Penetanguishene, when the roads to the isolated institution deep in the Ontario snow-belt were barely passable. "I went to the Santa Claus Parade in 1946 or 1947 and watched it go down University Avenue. When it was over, we walked to Yonge Street, where there was an even more fantastic parade: all these streetcars, which had been made to wait at the intersections until the parade was over. I was fascinated. They were so exotic. I spent about an hour on Yonge Street with Mother and watched all the streetcars on the side streets until they vanished, and there were just the Yonge cars running up and down.

  "Everything seemed bigger, those red and green streetcars on their tracks, one right after the other, all filled with people. I used to sneak on them, and the drivers soon got to know me. I would go all the way down to Queen, then take another streetcar that looked similar but a little different, and head on out to see where it went. When it got to the end of its line, I would take another streetcar. One time I got lost, at the age of four, and ended up in Port Credit, watching the Credit River flow by. Just to the north were empty fields. So I invested a nickel and called home. It was then I had my first encounter with the police, a couple of nice, friendly men dressed in blue."

  The Maynards took these travels seriously and tried to get the staff at the Hospital for Sick Children to do something about the boy's wandering. And all of his trips away from home were not nearly so romantic or carefree. Several nights, he never came home, and one time his parents searched all evening and found him hiding in the neighborhood, cowering under bushes. He said he was hiding from other children and that he wanted to stay out where God could protect him.

  Strange things began happening inside the house, too.

  One day, Susan left the house for twenty minutes and came back to find her canary dead. Peter had laid it out on the piano, surrounded by candles. He told his mother that the family dog had killed the bird. She was mortified by the murder of the canary and scared that Peter would burn the house down. Other times when he was left alone, he tore down the window blinds, chopped up all of his socks, carved symbols into the dining room table and smashed a radio. He liked to sit alone and cut his clothing.

  Of course, to David Michael Krueger, the strange behavior was someone else's fault:

  "After I was six, seven or eight, Mother hit me with a beaded rod. Mother underwent a marked change in her personality. Something mysteriously happened. They were in New York, and my brother, who was ten years older than me and so was a teenager, was looking after me. He was out with his friends and had left me alone. I went all across the city, going on all of the streetcar routes. When Mother came home, she was brought into the house on a stretcher. In whispers, they told me Mother was pushed down the stairs in Grand Central Station by a drunk who tried to get her purse. She came home with a concussion. We had to be very quiet, very considerate.

  "She was allowed to do whatever she wanted, yell, scream or cry at us, but we were not allowed to answer back. My brother started doing the normal teenage thing, staying out. Then the beatings started for me.

  "There were good times, too. I remember on my ninth birthday, she took me aside at the celebration and said 'You're nine years of age. When you're outside, you represent the family. When people see you, they will judge the rest of us by how you behave. So be on your best behavior. Remember, we trust you'."

  That last story doesn't fit with the psychiatric record. In fact, anything good that he says about his childhood should be taken with a healthy ration of cynicism. Nothing in his files suggests he was anything but a weird little kid looking at the world through pop-bottle-bottom glasses.

  Whether or not he was a trusted ambassador of the affluent Maynard family, Woodcock was on the move. He started tracing all the streetcar lines on maps that he kept in his bedroom, exploring neighborhoods, climbing through ravines. There was only one place he wouldn't go: Regent Park, which was then the toughest part of Toronto.

  ***

  When he wasn't physically wandering around the city, he was travelling mentally. At school, he chewed pencils and stared out the window. He created fantasy worlds where he was the all-powerful leader.

  "It was safer being by myself. I got picked on because I was smaller, uncoordinated. I used to walk crab-like. Even as a teenager, in the Sea Cadets, I would find myself walking with my right arm and right leg coming out together."

  Lots of bright, awkward kids are picked on and labeled nerds by their school mates. Very few of them become killers. Woodcock did not kill by lashing out at his tormentors. Instead, he found much younger, weaker, poorer children.

  The Maynards and the Children’s Aid Society knew Peter had problems. They tried to shelter him from other kids, but the only thing that could have worked would have been a decision to pull him out of school and teach him at home or have him institutionalized with other damaged children. Instead, the Maynards decided to give him the benefits of a private school education.

  The first one was near the Maynard home. Waycroft School had a very small student body, but it didn’t matter. Any group of children was likely to cause Peter trouble. He wouldn't play games or try to make friends. Sometimes, he came home very disturbed, and he had a couple of bouts of twitching that each lasted two weeks. It was obvious he needed more help than any regular school could give.

  As Woodcock became more strange, his foster mother became more protective.

  One day, as she sat in a small, grim office at the Hospital for Sick Children, she turned to Dr. Hawke, a psychologist, and said, "I think Peter would do better if we legally adopted him."

  Hawke looked at her, turning a greenish shade of white, and said, "For God's sake, woman, don't do that. You don't know what the future holds."

  Susan Maynard did give up on the idea of adopting Peter, but she kept looking for a place that could help him. Even though he was still a ward of the Children’s Aid, she was willing to pay for the best institutions. The better ones, in the United States, were full, so she tried the schools for disturbed children in Toronto, looking for one that she thought could help Peter.

  "One place should have been called Stalag II. It was run by two British ex-Marines who had undergone a sex change," Krueger says. The other schools seemed no better, so Susan began travelling the province to find a place in the country that could help her boy.

  In 1950, when Woodcock was eleven and Susan was busy with her search, Peter was sized up by a Children's Aid Society social worker. He was being considered for a school for disturbed children in Kingston, Ontario. Children's Aid enshrined this description in its records:

  "Slight in build, neat in appearance, eyes bright, and wide open, worried facial expression, sometimes screwing up of eyes, walks brisk and erect, moves rapidly, darts ahead, interested and questioning constantly in conversation. Peter's main interests appear to be walking his dog, riding his bicycle and attending the Salvation Army meetings. At the Exhibition, he wanted most to see the Canadian Armed Services in Action - the show’s planes, tanks and anti-aircraft equipment. He attributes his wandering to feeling so nervous that he just has to get away. In some ways, Peter has little capacity for self-control. He appears to act out almost everything he thinks and demonstrates excessive affection for his foster mother. Although he verbalizes his resentment for other children, he has never been known to physically attack another child. He becomes angry with adults, especially when he feels misunderstood. He seems to handle his fears by avoiding — for example, staying inside when there are other children on the street...

  "He kisses the mother two or three times on each departure ...

  "Peter apparently has no friends. He plays occasionally with younger children, managing the play. When with children his own age, he is boastful and expresses determinedly ideas which are unacceptable and misunderstood.
Recently, Peter was to be included in a Club on the street to raise money for the Red Cross. He wanted to have a Dog and Cat Club and when turned down, he told the boys he liked animals a lot better than boys, thereby immediately losing his place in the club."

  The boy, only eleven years old, was already sending out danger signals. When a Children’s Aid social worker who was helping with the assessment walked with him through the crowded Canadian National Exhibition grounds on an August day, Peter turned to him and said, "I wish a bomb would fall on the Exhibition and kill all the children."

  ***

  Eventually, the Maynards and the social workers settled on a solution. The Children's Aid Society sent him to Sunnyside Children's Centre in Kingston. The fearful, thin but somewhat friendly child fit into the routine of this special school for disturbed children, the same way he fit in with the inmates of the hospital for the criminally insane for so many years. He preferred reading to any kind of physical activity. When adults weren't around, he played sexual games with the other kids. At summer camp in 1952, he spent his time in the wilderness walking around with armloads of books. When counselors found him lying on the side of the road, he told them that he just wanted to see how the underside of cars looked. On quiet days, he sat on a curb with a watch and a Kingston bus schedule, making sure the transit system was running efficiently.

  The Kingston school wanted to discharge him when he was fourteen, which was the normal age for release, but social workers thought he was not ready to be on the loose again in Toronto. He talked too much about The Winchester Heights Gang, an imaginary group of boys that Woodcock led on adventures. In real life, he was caught fondling an eleven-year-old girl.

  The years in Sunnyside were the best times of his life, he says. He missed Toronto, but he wasn't picked on by other kids at the Kingston school. The new horn-rimmed glasses that he was fitted out with when he was fourteen made him look even more geeky, but he still fit in much more easily with the Sunnyside kids. The staff trusted him to go on his bicycle, and it was in Kingston that his fetish for transit punctuality reached full bloom. He began collecting schedules and watching to see if the city buses ran on time. Woodcock shared a bedroom in an old mansion with three other children.

  Despite the progress that Woodcock had made, nearly everyone involved knew that returning Woodcock to the Maynard home in September 1954 was a mistake. He was sent back to Waycroft, the private school, where he tried to fit in by joining the glee club and the drama club.

  After a year at Waycroft, he went to Lawrence Park Collegiate, where kids who recognized him from public school started picking on him again. Six weeks after the school year began, he wanted out. Some of the students pushed him down an embankment and broke his bike. They ripped the Sea Cadet badges that he had earned in Sunnyside off his jacket. Three days later, he started at Bloordale College School, a small private institution, as a Grade 9 student. He stayed there, miserable, until Grade 11, "when the police mercifully put an end to my education and my career."

  A new, wonderful white and red three-speed bicycle, which replaced the one broken by the Lawrence Park students, was evolving into the centerpiece of Peter's fantasy world. He led the “Winchester Heights Gang” of five hundred invisible but obedient boys as he pedaled for miles across Toronto and the farmland north of the city, which, in those days, began close to the Maynard home.

  "When I was living at home, especially in my teenage years, I rode my bike everywhere. You can go places on a bicycle that people on foot would need a long time to get into.”

  And, he said, there were always bigger, tougher, and very real bullies in pursuit, despite the phantom presence of the Winchester Heights Gang.

  "I would go tearing down the Humber River, often doing forty miles an hour, with people hollering, 'Hey, kid, you're going to lay her down'. I would ride along the lake, just outside the break-wall all the way through to the Western Gap and come back in on Parliament Street. I would make that trip in half an hour, from Eglinton to the Humber, or sometimes I would just take off up the Don River."

  When he wasn't riding, he was stopping adults on the street to ask questions and trying to get to know every streetcar conductor in the city. At home, he watched the Mickey Mouse Club and fantasized that the Winchester Heights gang was doing some of the same things that Mickey's friends did. But he had no friends his own age, only the TV, the radio, and his classical music records. That summer, he got a job parking cars at Casa Loma, a giant mansion that is one of Toronto's busier tourist attractions. No one except Peter knew what he was doing on those long bicycle trips.

  ***

  The awful dreams of murder and rape started in February 1956.

  At the same time, a new, "alien" self seemed to enter Woodcock's body. That was the way he saw the strong attraction that he was developing for small children and the vicious fantasies he had, day and night, about killing them. Every time he saw a child, he wondered what its private parts looked like. When he led the invisible Winchester Heights Gang, they went on much more evil missions.

  Woodcock began acting on his new urges by playing sex games with small children, bribing them with rides on his wonderful bike. At first, there was no violence:

  "I was afraid of blood. There were so many people who were willing to come with me that I felt, 'why should I have bothered going on to the next phase'."

  "I wanted to go on to the next phase (of criminality) in March of '56. There was a ten-year-old girl. I did have plans to cut her up to see what she looked like inside. And that was the incident, plus the way that it was responded to, that laid the groundwork for the tragedies. We got lost in the ravine in the dark, and getting out seemed more important. I had a pen knife with me. When you're naive, a pen knife seems like enough to kill with.

  "It was a turning point. I was already troubled with my fantasies and dreams. This ten-year-old girl, I did have plans of killing her. It didn't dawn on me that she would die. Well, I knew she would die, but that would be about the extent of it. I wanted to look at the arm, see how the muscle attaches to it. This was going to be a very thorough anatomical lesson, though I don't believe I would have been able to name a third of the things I would have seen.”

  Nothing seemed to go right. The rendezvous was late because Woodcock had dawdled, there was only about an hour of daylight left, and he didn't want to get lost in the ravines in the dark. The stream valleys in central Toronto are a confusing series of steep hills, and this murder failed because Woodcock didn't know them as well as he thought. It took a lot longer than he had expected to get to the place that Woodcock had chosen for the murder. Woodcock and the girl looked for a better scene for the murder, then became afraid of being lost. After wandering around for three hours, they decided to climb out of the ravines and wait for another chance.

  The girl's parents had become worried and they talked to the police about Woodcock, but nothing came of the expedition until Woodcock was arrested almost a year later. The police did visit the Maynard house, setting off Woodcock's foster mother. She threatened to ground him for the rest of his life because of the scandal of having a police car parked in front of the house.

  "Okay," said Woodcock, "I'll kill myself, if it will make it easier for you to hold your head up with the neighbors. If you don't want me to kill myself, I think I'll just go up to bed because I've got to go to school tomorrow."

  He went up to his room. His parents followed and sat on the edge of the bed, where the fight continued. After a few minutes, Mother stormed out of the room. Woodcock's foster father stayed behind.

  “Don't pick up any more children," he said quietly.

  A couple of months later, after the spring floods ran through the ravines and the new leaves hid the river valleys and kids' play forts, Woodcock started travelling the city on his bike. His attacks became more violent. He would choke children until they passed out, peer over their bodies, then leave them to wake up, alone and naked, in a park or ravine. Many of them never told the
ir parents.

  Two weeks after he killed Wayne Mallette, Woodcock was given a Rorschach ink blot test by the Children's Aid Society that showed he had a large amount of cold-blooded hostility. His mother later said he should have seen a psychiatrist, but instead, she protected him, he would say later, "from Society". Woodcock slid in and out of his dream world, kept watch on the streetcars, and supervised the construction of the expressway that was built through the scene of his first murder.

  ***

  That fall, while managing to hold a Saturday job at Casa Loma, Woodcock went out every weekend to molest children. He was working up to another killing. The teen was becoming more ferocious than most adult serial killers, barely waiting for the intense publicity of his last homicide to subside before attacking again.

  Only three weeks were to pass from the time Wayne Mallette died until Woodcock killed Gary Morris, a nine-year-old boy from an impoverished downtown neighborhood. Again, Woodcock had left his upper-middle class home to kill a child from a poorer part of the city.

  Woodcock had picked the scene in advance. It was Cherry Beach, a neglected piece of Toronto shoreline east of the city's docks. Woodcock met Morris at the St. Lawrence Market and talked the boy into going for a ride on what should have been one of the most famous bikes in the city. One of Morris's friends saw him go and later gave a description of Woodcock to the police, but they couldn't solve this murder.

  "I believe he lived on Sackville (in Regent Park). I ran into him in the St. Lawrence Market. He was wandering around, and he liked the bike. I was always on the prowl for someone, and since he was so interested in the bicycle, he seemed like a good catch. He was small, only nine years old. I asked if he wanted to go for a ride, and he said 'sure'. He rode on the bar, sidesaddle. I had better control of the bike that way. Cherry Beach was about a mile away. I knew Toronto well, and I had several of these parts picked out."