A forklift driver near Forest, Ontario, saw the girl climb into the truck at about half past one on the afternoon of June 15, 1976, and he knew the truck. It was a 1975 pickup belonging to a Strathroy company that collected dead animals from farms and roadsides, and when the Ontario Provincial Police asked the company's owner who had been driving it that day, he gave them a name: Christian Magee. The girl was Susan Lynn Scholes, fifteen. Her brother had dropped her off in Forest to buy batteries before she hitchhiked out to her parents' cottage at Hillsboro Beach on Lake Huron. A farmer found her body the next afternoon. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled into unconsciousness and stabbed in the throat and chest.
Magee was twenty-seven, a local man, born Christian Herbert Harold Magee in 1948 and raised in Strathroy in what accounts of the case describe as an emotionally and physically abusive home. He had dropped out of high school and drank. He was arrested that June, and the investigation that followed tied him to two more deaths and two attacks that the women survived, spread over twenty-seven months and a few miles of southwestern Ontario west of London. The papers called him the Mad Slasher.
The first was Judith Barksey, nineteen. On the evening of March 1, 1974, she was walking home in Strathroy with takeout from a pizzeria when he came up behind her, threw her to the ground and cut her throat. He sexually assaulted her as she lay dying and took what money she had. A man on his way to his mailbox found her the next morning, the pizza box, the soft-drink bottles and a chocolate bar lying beside her. Years later, in interviews at Oak Ridge, Magee said he had seen her by chance, followed her for four blocks and made up his mind in that distance to rape her. "I talked myself into it," he said. When she turned around, he said, he realized she knew him and could identify him, and decided he had to kill her. "I was out of reality when I killed her."
On November 3, 1974, he picked up Sylvia Holly Jennings as she hitchhiked outside London, drove her to an isolated road near Mount Brydges, beat and sexually assaulted her, choked her unconscious, fractured her skull with a bottle and left her by the road. She lived. So did Rosalie Winters, eighteen, whom he attacked in June 1975 as she walked to Alexandra Park; he strangled her unconscious and left her at the roadside.
Patricia Jenner, nineteen, knew him. On October 20, 1975, at her home in Mount Brydges, she let him in when he knocked, and police later found photographs scattered around the room and concluded she had been showing him pictures. Her baby daughter, Rachel, was asleep in her crib upstairs. He pushed her to the floor and tore at her clothes, then stopped; when she began to dress again he strangled her with a black bootlace until she was unconscious and cut her throat with his jackknife. Her husband, Denys, found her on the kitchen floor at five o'clock. The baby was unharmed. An elderly neighbor had seen a man with shoulder-length dark hair pull into the driveway in a light-colored, late-model Oldsmobile.
He was tried in 1977 and found not guilty by reason of insanity, the verdict then available under Canadian law. The psychiatric evidence described a personality disorder with sexual sadism, including fantasies of torture, necrophilia, cannibalism and dismemberment. Because there was no conviction, there was no sentence. He was committed instead to Oak Ridge, the maximum-security division of the provincial psychiatric hospital at Penetanguishene, and his detention came up for review each year before the Ontario Review Board.
By the mid-2000s he had learned to read, and he talked, a reporter who interviewed him wrote, about his "mental health condition" in the language of the psychiatrists who had treated him. "The reality is I'll always have the problem," he said, "but now I can recognize the symptoms and take preventative measures, stop myself, before it happens again." In January 2006 UPI reported that he wanted to apologize to his victims' families. Later that year the Review Board ordered him moved from Oak Ridge to a medium-security unit at CAMH, the addiction and mental health hospital in Toronto, a decision the press reported as a step toward his freedom.
The hospital at Penetanguishene appealed. On May 16, 2006, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, in a decision by Justice Eleanore Cronk, set aside the Board's order and sent the case back for a new hearing, holding that the requirement to choose the least onerous and least restrictive disposition had to be weighed together with the other factors the Criminal Code requires, public safety among them. The Magee decision is now cited as a leading case in Canadian forensic psychiatry. The outcome of the rehearing, and where Magee has been held since, have not been publicly reported.