by Mark Bourrie
Dennis was a skinny young man, somewhat younger-looking than his twenty-seven years, who was something of a jailhouse lawyer and a musician of moderate skill. Dennis believed Krueger had inherited a lot of money, and Kerr was supposed to borrow five hundred dollars to buy a set of used drums from a music store in Kingston. Krueger had spelled out exactly what the payments were to be, the rate of interest, and the collateral.
Kerr didn't know Krueger saw him as a "roaring street punk", a little thug who was better off dead. From Kerr's point of view, Krueger was just another horny old kiddy diddler on the hunt for men who looked like boys. Most of the other patients at Brockville felt the same way about Krueger. He was far down on the institution's social scale.
Kerr was introduced by Krueger to Hamill.
“Mr. Kerr, I'd like you to meet my good friend Bruce Hamill. Bruce, this is Dennis. In an hour, we'll be back with the money for you, Dennis. I just have to go back to my room to get it," Krueger said.
Kerr began to walk away.
Turning to Hamill, Krueger said in a stage whisper, "Dennis needs some money to buy a set of drums. We'll just give it to him, then we'll go into town."
Hamill flushed and Krueger chortled. They hurried back into the hospital, filled out the papers for the second escorted pass, this time lasting three hours. Hamill folded Krueger's day pass slip and stuck it in his pocket. Instead of heading into the town, they made their way to sumac grove, knowing that Kerr would soon be there to meet them.
Kerr arrived on time, not knowing that the bushes around him were salted with weapons. Hamill stood among the trees, but Krueger lay hidden in the bushes. As Kerr opened his mouth to ask where Krueger and the money was, he heard a slight yelp. Krueger, reaching for the pipe wrench, had sliced his finger on a pull tab from a pop can. Undeterred, Krueger raised the wrench and slammed it down on Kerr's head. Kerr turned to Krueger, cried out, "What did you do that for?" and slumped down, dying.
"I could barely lift the thing, let alone swing it," Krueger said, two years later. "I did manage to do it, and I got Dennis in the head. I hit him again, after he asked his little profound question, this time from the front, and he fell down, but not without a struggle. He struggled nearly the whole time. He seemed to be afraid to die."
Hamill and Krueger fished the knife and the hatchet out of their hiding spots and began stabbing and hacking at Kerr. The attack was part murder, part dissection. The killers sexually assaulted and mutilated Kerr. Krueger poked at the body, got close to hear the death rattle, and looked carefully at the vicious wounds that he and Hamill had inflicted.
"I wanted to see if Dennis had a death rattle. They really do exist. I sat next to his body for about an hour. When he died, I heard a sound like a deep snore that came from the middle of his body. That was the death rattle. Then I saw something like a mist that came from his mouth and went up towards the sky. I know it was his spirit."
Meanwhile, Hamill began his ritual. He and Krueger, both drenched in blood, sodomised Kerr's dead body, then began to chant. When Hamill was finished, he took the pills in the Nytol pack, walked a few paces from the corpse, and lay down in the sleeping bag. Within minutes, he was asleep. Krueger kept vigil over Kerr, still poking and peering at the body. When Hamill was finally out cold, Krueger walked up to him, pulled the sleeping bag down to look at Hamill's nude body, then began running the blade of the knife over Hamill's chest, down his stomach, and gently over the sleeping man's testicles. Krueger thought for a moment as he caressed Hamill's body with the knife. He was tired. This was enough.
Krueger used a pair of binoculars and a white cane to find his way to an Ontario Provincial Police station about five kilometers from the murder site. He walked up to the front counter and asked to speak with the officer in charge.
Very calmly, he spoke to Sergeant Terry Bowerman.
"I want to turn myself in. I've committed a horrible crime and I deserve to spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary," he told Bowerman.
"What have you done?" Bowerman asked Krueger. Bowerman looked over the counter at Krueger's bloody clothes.
“I killed someone. I didn't do it alone. There's another person involved. He's still there. He's a very dangerous man."
Bowerman called in Detective Sergeant Dave Bishop, a homicide expert. Bishop and two Brockville city police constables took Krueger back to the grounds of the psychiatric hospital. With Krueger squinting to see the path to the sumac grove, they set out to find Kerr's body. It was dark and raining when they arrived. Biting insects tormented the searchers. When they approached the hospital's power house, in an area of dense bush, Krueger told them they were near the scene. Soon, they found Hamill naked, thrashing around in the trees, tormented by bugs.
"Are you here to take me?" Hamill screamed. "I'm ready. I've done everything you want. Where do I go? Is your vehicle here?" he asked.
The police ordered Hamill to lie down. Instead, he ran toward Krueger and the four officers. Crazy from the drugs, confused and covered with bug bites, Hamill flew into a psychotic rage. For several minutes, he fought with the police before they were able to handcuff him and put him in a cruiser. Krueger took the two detectives down the trail to Kerr's body. They found Kerr about 200 meters from where they had tackled Hamill.
No police officer is so hardened that he could see something like the Kerr crime scene without being sick. The body was gutted. Kerr's head had been nearly severed from his torso. The little enclave in the sumacs was sticky with the young man's blood.
"It's such a shame," Krueger said. "Such a tragedy".
The police called for help from other detachments and radioed for an ambulance. Bowerman and another officer took Krueger back to the station. It took several hours for the police to take a couple of bizarre statements from Krueger and Hamill.
Hamill, still psychotic, was taken straight to the protective custody unit of the Brockville jail. Krueger stayed and talked with the police, spinning a tale that horrified the officers working the evening shift. Later, at a local hospital, Krueger got stitches for his cut hand, but he didn't take a shower until he was finally taken to the Brockville jail. During his time in the city police lockup, he masturbated in full view of the police. He kept doing it at the hospital, and through the night at the county jail. In all, police later recounted that Krueger masturbated at least six times in the first ten hours that he was in custody. Finally, he went to sleep, to be awakened a few hours later by a smell that he cherishes, and that he had missed for so long.
"Comes the morning, I wake up, and they're serving bacon and eggs because it's Sunday. I haven't had bacon and eggs in something like five years. And I thought to myself, 'fancy this, all I had to do to get bacon and eggs was commit murder. You literally have to kill somebody if you want a good breakfast in this system'." And, as he wolfed down his greasy fried eggs, his bacon and coffee, those last words of Kerr's kept going through his mind, stimulating him again and again.
"What did you do that for?"
The answer lay far away, long before Kerr was even born, in the mind of a very strange boy who prowled the streets of Toronto on a marvelous red three-speed bike. The boy who rode it back in the 1950s, like the dumpy little man, only killed on Saturdays.
THE LAST ACT
On March 5, 2010, Krueger was found dead in his cell in Oak Ridge. It was his 71st birthday. One more time, he made the front page of the Toronto Star as “the serial killer they couldn’t cure.” Very soon afterwards, Oak Ridge itself was gone, torn down and replaced by a new, more humane institution.
In the end, nothing was Krueger's fault.
Not the killings of the kids. Wayne Mallette, Gary Morris and Carole Voyce died in a series of “accidents,” which were “tragedies” for all the people involved. And accidents can happen to anyone. Dennis Kerr was killed at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital in 1992 in an act of mercy, not an act of rage and lust. And, after all of those killings, the courts had said Peter Woodcock, or David Michael Kru
eger, was not guilty by reason of insanity. Not guilty. Didn't do it. Accident. Incident. Tragedy. Never a crime committed by this strange little man on people who deserved no harm.
And with Bruce Hamill, it's the same. Poor Mrs. Wentzlaff was stabbed to death near the door of a school in Ottawa in what the principal who knew better called an “accident.” It happened because Hamill had an organic brain disease, not because Hamill was a miserable young man with a taste for heavy drugs and a weird attachment to his mother. When he helped Mike Krueger kill Dennis Kerr, it was that brain disease at work again. Not guilty by reason of insanity. Not culpable. Fished in.
That's the way Krueger told it. Could have happened to you or me or anyone who had been dealt a bad hand by fate. But he was not like you and me. Something awful lived inside that man. As I left Oak Ridge visitors' centre one day, Krueger looked at a Childfind poster of missing kids. He smiles, points, and says, "that one, that one, and that one."
Peter Woodcock was guilty.
About Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation
This is a multi-volume twenty-four book collection, (one per month, each approximately 100 to 180 pages) project by crime historian Dr. Peter Vronsky and true crime author and publisher RJ Parker, depicting some of Canada’s most notorious criminals.
Crimes Canada: True Crimes that Shocked the Nation will feature a series of Canadian true crime short-read books published by VP Publications (Vronsky & Parker), an imprint of RJ Parker Publishing, Inc., one of North America's leading publishers of true crime.
Peter Vronsky is the bestselling author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters and Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters while RJ Parker is not only a successful publisher but also the author of 18 books, including Serial Killers Abridged: An Encyclopedia of 100 Serial Killers, Parents Who Killed Their Children: Filicide, and Serial Killer Groupies. Both are Canadians and have teamed up to share shocking Canadian true crime cases not only with fellow Canadian readers but with Americans and world readers as well, who will be shocked and horrified by just how evil and sick “nice” Canadians can be when they go bad.
Finally, we invite fellow Canadians, aspiring or established authors, to submit proposals or manuscripts to VP Publications at [email protected].
VP Publications is a new frontier traditional publisher, offering their published authors a generous royalty agreement payable within three months of publishing and aggressive online marketing support. Unlike many so-called “publishers” that are nothing but vanity presses in disguise, VP Publications does not charge authors in advance for submitting their proposal or manuscripts, nor do we charge authors if we choose to publish their works. We pay you, and pay well.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, proof-readers, and cover artist for your support:
- - Mark Bourrie
Aeternum Designs (book cover), Bettye McKee (editor), Dr. Peter Vronsky (editor), RJ Parker Publishing, VP Publications, Lorrie Suzanne Phillippe, Marlene Fabregas, Darlene Horn, Ron Steed, Katherine McCarthy, Robyn MacEachern, Kim Jackson, Lee Knieper Husemann, Kathi Garcia, Vicky Matson-Carruth, Amanda Hutchins, Linda Bergeron
Books in the Crimes Canada Collection
* * *
An exciting 24-volume series collection, edited by crime historian Dr. Peter Vronsky and true crime author and publisher RJ Parker.
VOLUMES:
(URL LINK ON NEXT PAGE)
Robert Pickton: The Pig Farmer Killer by C.L. Swinney
Marc Lepine: The Montreal Massacre by RJ Parker
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka by Peter Vronsky
Shirley Turner: Doctor, Stalker, Murderer by Kelly Banaski
Canadian Psycho: Luka Magnotta by Cara Lee Carter
The Country Boy Killer: Cody Legebokoff by JT Hunter
The Killer Handyman by C.L. Swinney
Hell's Angels Biker Wars by RJ Parker
The Dark Strangler by Michael Newton
The Alcohol Murders by Harriet Fox
View these and future books in this collection at:
rjpp.ca/CC-CRIMES-CANADA-BOOKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Bourrie, PhD (History) has been a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994. He previously taught media history and journalism at Concordia University. Mark is the author of eleven books. The most recent, Kill the Messenger: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, was placed on the Globe and Mail list of top 100 books of 2015. The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in The Second World War reached No. 6 on Maclean’s magazine’s bestseller list in 2011, and Fighting Words: Canada’s Best War Reporting, was published last fall. Bourrie has won several major media awards, including a National Magazine Award, and has been nominated for several others. His journalism has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, and most of the country’s major newspapers and several magazines including Toronto Life and Ottawa magazine. He is also a consultant on propaganda and censorship at the Canadian Forces Public Affairs School.
“If you enjoyed reading this book, please take a moment to leave a brief review on Amazon, Goodreads and any other market. Your feedback is very important to the author and publisher.”
Thank you,
Mark Bourrie
RJ Parker / Peter Vronsky (VP Publications)
CONTACT INFORMATION
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Table of Contents
Start
TORONTO IS A SINFUL PLACE
WARNING
THE TRAGEDY
STATEMENT TO POLICE
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF ONTARIO
PLAN X
KNIGHT OF THE PRAETORIAN GUARD
INITIATION DAY
About Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation
Acknowledgments
Books in the Crimes Canada Collection
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CONTACT INFORMATION
