Michael Wayne McGray was born in Nova Scotia in 1965 into a violent household and spent his childhood in and out of care. He drifted across Canada and into the United States, working casual jobs and accumulating convictions.
Between 1985 and 1998 he killed people in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec and, by his own account, in Seattle. The victims established were Elizabeth Gale Tucker, Mark Daniel Gibbons, Joan Hicks and her eleven-year-old daughter Nina, Robert Assaly and Gaetan Ethier. He stabbed most of them. There was no consistent victim type, which he said himself was deliberate.
He was arrested in 1998 and pleaded guilty, receiving life with no parole for twenty-five years on March 20, 2000. He then gave a series of prison interviews claiming sixteen killings and describing an urge he said he could not control, and warning that he would kill again if he were ever housed with anyone.
He was nonetheless transferred to Mountain Institution, a medium-security prison in British Columbia, and given a cellmate. On November 22, 2010 he strangled Jeremy Phillips there. He pleaded guilty to first degree murder in 2013.
The Correctional Service of Canada reviewed how a man who had repeatedly said he would kill a cellmate came to be given one. The case is cited in Canadian corrections as a failure of risk assessment rather than of custody.