On a late summer day in Toronto, seven-year-old Wayne Mallette, a young boy, vanished from the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. It was September 15, 1956, and the fairgrounds were largely deserted. The following day, his body was discovered in a secluded area. The brutal nature of his death sent a wave of fear through the city and marked the beginning of a series of tragic events that would claim more young lives and lead to a profound miscarriage of justice.
Wayne had been
lured from the exhibition grounds, strangled, and beaten. His clothes had been removed and then put back on his body. The initial investigation by the Metropolitan Toronto Police was under immense pressure to find the person responsible. Their focus quickly and intensely narrowed on a 14-year-old boy named Ron Moffatt, who had recently run away from home and had a loose connection to the CNE. Despite having a solid alibi—he was at a movie theatre at the time of the murder and didn't even know how to ride a bicycle, a key element in the killer's approach—Moffatt was subjected to a relentless interrogation without a parent or lawyer present. Police coerced a false confession from the teenager, and he was subsequently charged and convicted of murder as a juvenile delinquent.
While an innocent boy sat in custody, the real killer remained free to prey on other children. Less than a month after Wayne's death, nine-year-old Gary Morris was lured to an industrial area and murdered. A few months later, in January 1957, four-year-old Carole Voyce was abducted and killed, her body left in a ravine. The similarities in the cases finally forced police to acknowledge they were hunting a serial predator. Descriptions of a teenager seen with Carole on a red bicycle ultimately led them to 17-year-old Peter Woodcock.
Woodcock, who had a deeply troubled and abusive childhood, confessed to the murders of Wayne, Gary, and Carole. He described in detail how he had used his bicycle to wander Toronto, find his victims, and carry out the killings. Following Woodcock's confession, Ron Moffatt's wrongful conviction was finally addressed. His conviction was quashed in April 1957, and after a new trial where Woodcock himself testified, the murder charge was stayed, and Moffatt was released.
At his own trial in April 1957, Peter Woodcock was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was diagnosed as a psychopath and ordered to be indefinitely committed to the Oak Ridge division of the Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre, a maximum-security psychiatric facility. For decades, he remained institutionalized, even legally changing his name to David Michael Krueger.
The story took another dark turn 34 years later. In 1991, during his first unsupervised release, Woodcock murdered a fellow patient from the psychiatric facility, Dennis Kerr. This act confirmed that the years of treatment had been ineffective. He was returned to the institution, where he remained for the rest of his life. Peter Woodcock, the man responsible for the death of Wayne Mallette and at least three others, died of natural causes in the facility on his 71st birthday, March 5, 2010. His death closed the final chapter on a series of crimes that not only took the lives of innocent children but also stole the youth of a wrongly accused boy.
