Michael Wayne McGray told reporters in 2000 that he had killed 16 people across North America. Police could confirm far fewer. Through guilty pleas between 2000 and 2011 he was convicted of seven murders: a teenage hitchhiker in Nova Scotia in 1985, a man in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1987, two men in Montreal in 1991, a mother and her 11-year-old daughter in Moncton in 1998, and, in 2010, the man who shared his prison cell in British Columbia.
His case left marks well beyond his own sentences. The killing of his cellmate led a British Columbia coroner's jury to recommend that people serving time for multiple murders should not be made to share cells. And in 2019, documents released in the wrongful conviction case of Glen Assoun showed that an RCMP analyst had pointed to McGray as a possible suspect in a 1995 Halifax killing for which Assoun spent almost 17 years in prison.
McGray was born in Collingwood, Ontario, and his family moved to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, while he was still a child, The Globe and Mail reported in 2000. He was the second youngest of six children, and his father was a welder. The Canadian Encyclopedia, in an entry by Edward Butts, says he grew up in Argyle, near Yarmouth.
The story of his childhood is largely his own. He told the Globe that as a teenager he was placed in a group home, where he was physically and sexually abused. The Canadian Encyclopedia records his account that his father, whom he described as an alcoholic, beat him, and that he was abused at a reform school for boys in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. He said he killed animals and fought at school, and that he was fascinated as a boy by true crime stories about serial killers. By 16 he was on his own, he said, a teenager who smoked marijuana, drank and was full of rage.
As an adult he drifted. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes a criminal lifestyle with repeated spells in prison, and says he once vanished for more than a year while on parole. In 2000 the Globe described him as a drifter from near Yarmouth. When he began confessing, his mother and several of his siblings in Yarmouth issued a statement through a lawyer. They said they had had little contact with him and "knew almost nothing of the life he chose to lead," and they offered their sympathy for any loss of life he had caused.
The first killing for which McGray was convicted took place on May 1, 1985, near Weymouth, in Digby County, Nova Scotia. Elizabeth Gale Tucker was 17 and came from Dartmouth. She had left her mother's home to take a job at a fish plant at Church Point, according to The Globe and Mail; the Canadian Encyclopedia gives the job's location as Digby. She was hitchhiking when she disappeared.
She died of stab wounds. A hunter found her body months later; the Globe reported in 2000 that she was found about a month after she went missing, while its 2001 report of the guilty plea said five months. McGray was 19. The case stayed unsolved for 16 years.
Her family went on marking her birthday each year. In 2001 her mother, in a written statement, said she rarely left her home and had feared for the safety of her other children. "It's an experience no mother should have to go through," she wrote. Her stepmother told the Globe that the charge against McGray brought relief because the family had wondered for years who was responsible.
In November 1987 McGray stabbed Mark Daniel Gibbons in Saint John, New Brunswick. He later described the killing as following a botched robbery of a taxi driver, and the Canadian Encyclopedia says Gibbons had been his accomplice in that robbery. The Globe reported that he was charged with the Saint John killing after he began talking to police, and he later pleaded guilty to it.
In 2000 Saint John police also linked McGray to an older death: the stabbing of James Lloyd Beyea, 43, on April 13, 1986. Police believed McGray had been in the city around that time, and his name appeared as a suspect in the case file. While he was in jail on an unrelated assault charge, he was alleged to have spoken about the killing to another inmate; when questioned, he denied it, and no one was charged. Detectives reopened the case in 2000. McGray was never charged in Beyea's death.
In 1991 McGray was serving a sentence in Quebec. The Halifax Examiner says it was a robbery sentence at La Macaza, a medium-security prison; Xtra, the Toronto-based magazine, described the prison as a minimum-security penitentiary in the Laurentians. He told the Globe he had deceived prison officials into granting him a three-day pass, and he was released on Good Friday.
He went to Montreal and met two men in the city's gay village. On the Saturday night of the Easter weekend, March 30 to 31, he killed Robert Assaly, a 59-year-old retired schoolteacher, with whom he had been staying. The next morning he killed Gaetan Ethier, who had invited him to watch a hockey game; the Montreal Canadiens played the Quebec Nordiques twice that weekend. Ethier's age is given as 45 by Xtra and the Halifax Examiner and as 49 by the Globe. Both men were stabbed, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. Detectives found Ethier's body a few days later.
McGray did not return from his pass. The Halifax Examiner says he was at large for 21 days; McGray himself told the Globe that he was caught in Saint John in late May. Police did not know he had been in Montreal at all. The two killings stayed unsolved, and they fed fears in the city that someone was targeting gay men. A Montreal activist, Michael Hendricks, had pressed police since 1991 to consider that possibility.
Joan Hicks was originally from Newfoundland and had moved to Moncton about three months before she died, the Globe reported. She lived there with her 11-year-old daughter, Nina. (Some Globe reports spell the girl's name Nena; CBC News, the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Halifax Examiner and the Globe's 2001 report use Nina.)
In 1998 McGray killed them both. Police acting on a tip from an informant found the mother and daughter dead, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. Joan Hicks had been stabbed and Nina had been strangled. McGray later said that he and another man had been looking for someone to kill after using cocaine. He was arrested in 1998 and charged with both deaths.
He pleaded guilty to murdering Joan Hicks in 2000 and received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years. At first he denied killing the girl. "I've killed a lot of people," he told the Globe, "but I never hurt a child." The charge in Nina's death was stayed. Later he reversed himself: days before his plea in the Tucker case, he pleaded guilty to the 1998 murder of the 11-year-old girl, CBC News reported.
After his arrest McGray was held at Atlantic Institution, the maximum-security penitentiary at Renous, New Brunswick. He was kept in segregation, away from other prisoners, from 1998, according to the Halifax Examiner and the Globe.
From there he began to talk. He wrote to the Crown prosecutor in Moncton and spoke to police, the Canadian Encyclopedia says, in an effort to improve his prison conditions. About a year and a half after his arrest, CBC News reported that Codiac RCMP were holding a possible serial killer: McGray, then 34, had talked while awaiting trial about other killings, and police said details he gave could be checked in Montreal and Saint John. Montreal police planned to charge him in the deaths of Assaly and Ethier, and New Brunswick police were reopening old murder files.
In March 2000 he gave interviews from Renous. He told the Globe he would confess to as many as 12 killings and could give details of 16 deaths in all, across 15 years of travel that took him to Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa and Saint John. He said most of his victims were strangers: gay men he met at bars and sex workers he lured with drugs and money. He said he chose them because they were vulnerable, not for sexual reasons. "They'll never solve these cases," he said, "without my help."
He set conditions. In return for details he wanted treatment, no further murder charges, and immunity for two people he said had known about his crimes, one of them his girlfriend of five years. Investigators refused to negotiate. He gave statements on some cases anyway, he said, "to give them a little incentive." He told the Globe he was not insane and had always known what he was doing, and that he heard his victims' voices, especially at night. To CBC News he described the urge to kill as "like a craving or hunger."
He underwent a 60-day psychiatric evaluation, the Canadian Encyclopedia says. The assessment found that he had a severe form of Tourette syndrome and linked it to his urge to kill.
McGray was due in a Montreal courtroom on April 25, 2000, only to set a date for a preliminary hearing on two charges of first-degree murder. Instead he pleaded guilty to both, against the advice of his lawyer, who had asked for a psychiatric evaluation. He told the Quebec Superior Court that he had little to lose because he was already serving a life sentence. "I'm already doing 25, so it don't change nothing," he said, as Xtra reported it.
The Crown prosecutor, Jean Lecours, told the court that McGray had set out to "kill someone for kicks." McGray said he had enjoyed the first killing and still felt the urge to kill, which led to the second. Asked whether he had given the two men his real name, he said he thought so, and added that he had known he was going to kill them. He received two more life sentences, concurrent, with no parole for 25 years.
Toronto police compared McGray's movements with the city's unsolved killings and found no links, a detective told Xtra. Hendricks, the activist, said he believed McGray might be responsible for two other killings of gay men in Montreal in 1991. Neither case was charged against him.
The break in the Tucker case came in late 1999, when a prisoner told police that McGray had described the killing to him, the Globe reported. McGray himself spoke about it in his March 2000 interview: he said that he and a friend had picked her up while she was hitchhiking to her job. RCMP Sergeant Wayne Noonan said police spent a year checking evidence and trying to verify McGray's claims. "We had to corroborate some of the things that were said and try to find witnesses and evidence," he said. Police forces across Canada had reviewed cold files after McGray's statements, the Globe added, without being able to substantiate them.
McGray was charged with first-degree murder in Tucker's death 16 years after she died. Days after his guilty plea in the Nina Hicks case, he pleaded guilty in Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax, at a hearing of about 30 minutes before Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy. The Crown prosecutor was James Burrill and the defense lawyer Wendell Maxwell. McGray received a sixth life sentence and was ordered to give a DNA sample to the RCMP.
"Michael Wayne McGray is one of those mysteries, perhaps even to himself," Kennedy said. "It would appear to be an evil mystery." The judge said rehabilitation was doubtful and that McGray should be kept locked up to protect the public. By then McGray had pleaded guilty to six murders: Tucker, Gibbons, Assaly, Ethier, Joan Hicks and Nina Hicks. His lawyer said only one active case involving him remained, and that McGray would speak with a Saint John prosecutor about it.
None of McGray's other claimed killings led to a charge. In 2000 he told the Globe that he had buried a man in High Park, Toronto, in 1997, killed several homeless people in Toronto, stabbed two sex workers in Vancouver in the mid-1990s without knowing whether they lived, and killed two people in Seattle, a man in Calgary and a woman in Ottawa. He also claimed an earlier killing of a gay man in Montreal. Seattle-area police said they had no unsolved cases matching the victims he described there.
He also once confessed to the disappearance of Kimberly Amero, 15, who vanished from a fair in Saint John in September 1985, two days before her 16th birthday. The Canadian Press reported in 2018 that he had told police where she was buried, and that a thorough search there found nothing. Her disappearance remained unsolved in 2018.
In his letters, McGray kept returning to the idea of killing again. In a letter of May 13, 2003, to a prison psychiatrist, later filed in the Assoun court case and published by the Halifax Examiner, he wrote that he heard voices almost every day and had begun to see figures. He said he had "very little insight into why I killed," that he did not kill for money or sex, and that it had been five years since his last killing, the longest stretch since he was 17. His urges were stronger than ever, he wrote. He had been put in segregation after threatening to kill a guard; he said he would never harm a guard, but that a fellow inmate could be a "suitable victim."
McGray was later moved across the country to Kent Institution, the maximum-security prison at Agassiz, British Columbia, after an earlier spell in a super-maximum unit in Quebec, CBC News reported. In 2010 he was transferred to Mountain Institution, a medium-security prison next to Kent in the upper Fraser Valley, about 140 kilometers east of Vancouver.
The transfer was his own request. He had applied to move to a lower-security prison, but he twice refused to go after learning that he would have to share a cell, according to evidence at the later coroner's inquest, reported by The Canadian Press. One assessment placed him in the medium-security range, but "just barely." When the move was approved, officials had not received information that he had recently beaten another inmate. At Mountain he was on a waiting list for a cell of his own.
He was placed with Jeremy Phillips, 33. Phillips was serving a six-year sentence for aggravated assault. CBC News described him as being from Moncton; CTV News said he was from Nova Scotia. He had reportedly asked to be moved out of the shared cell because he feared for his safety, and another inmate testified at the inquest that Phillips had been worried about his cellmate. Prison officials told the inquest that a thorough assessment had found it safe to house the two men together.
McGray killed Jeremy Phillips in their cell on November 21, 2010. The cause of death was strangulation, the Canadian Encyclopedia says. Guards did not notice that Phillips was dead until McGray told them, and Phillips had been lying dead for hours. A guard later testified that it was hard to see through the cell window with a flashlight. Five guards were disciplined for failing to notice.
Less than 24 hours after the killing, McGray confessed to police. He claimed that Phillips had come up with a plan for a fake hostage-taking, which Phillips believed would get him out of the cell and into the prison infirmary. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls the claim unlikely, since Phillips was due for parole within weeks. In the recorded interview, McGray called himself a psychopath and blamed federal corrections officials for moving him. "I don't know why they made the mistake of putting me here," he said. "It's a mental health issue." He also said: "I had a hiatus for 15 years and I just couldn't hold back any more."
The RCMP charged him with first-degree murder. Corporal Dale Carr said there was "no concern for public safety," since McGray would remain in custody for the rest of his life. About a year after the killing, in 2011, McGray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received another life sentence.
British Columbia's chief coroner called an inquest to look at inmate safety. It opened in Burnaby in October 2012 before a jury of three men and two women, who watched the video of McGray's statement to police. The Canadian Press reported that McGray repeatedly described himself as a sociopath in the video and said he would kill again. A corrections officer at Mountain whose job included checking that cellmates were compatible told the jury he had never seen any behavior that concerned him.
Phillips's mother told the inquest she was mystified that staff could place her son with someone "so evil," and said the person who made the decision should be fired, CTV News reported.
The jury's recommendations were reported on October 31, 2012. People serving time for multiple murders should be kept in single cells unless there was evidence that sharing was "safe and practical." Wardens should be allowed to set aside waiting lists to move dangerous offenders into cells of their own. Staff should receive all information about a prisoner before a transfer was approved. The recommendations of Mountain Institution's internal investigation should be applied across the country. And the Correctional Service of Canada should look at technology that detects body heat and review its policy on flashlight brightness.
The Correctional Service said it had already made significant changes to its procedures after Phillips's death and welcomed the jury's advice. It said about 19 percent of its inmates, 2,780 people, were double-bunked. Tim Veresh of the John Howard Society said the service's procedures for assessing cellmate risk appeared not to have been followed in this case.
Phillips's parents sued the Correctional Service of Canada for reckless indifference and negligence, and the suit was settled out of court in 2012, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. After the killing McGray was moved to the super-maximum-security institution at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, where the Halifax Examiner reported he had been held since 2012.
Brenda Way was killed in Halifax on November 12, 1995. Her former boyfriend, Glen Assoun, was convicted of second-degree murder on September 17, 1999, after a 36-day trial, and sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 18 and a half years. No physical evidence tied him to the killing. He always said he was innocent. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on April 20, 2006, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear a further appeal on September 14, 2006.
In 2003 an RCMP constable, Dave Moore, had used the force's ViCLAS analytical database. His work led him to consider McGray, and another man with a record of sexual assaults, as suspects in Way's death. His analysis of welfare payments placed McGray in the area where Way lived and worked, The Canadian Press reported. Moore's superiors told him to stop working on the file, and his notes went missing while he was on vacation; most of the material was later erased or destroyed. The information was never given to Assoun's defense, even though his appeal lawyer had asked the Crown for exactly this kind of material. When the Court of Appeal heard the case in 2006, it discounted theories about McGray for lack of evidence.
Assoun was released on bail in November 2014, after almost 17 years in prison, while the federal Justice Minister reviewed his conviction. A Justice Department lawyer, Mark Green, wrote an 82-page report in August 2014 that was key to that release. Green found evidence that McGray had lived within a few blocks of where Way was killed, and Innocence Canada provided affidavits from two inmates who said McGray had confessed to killing her. A woman who had testified at the trial about an attack on her had since identified McGray as her likely attacker, Green wrote.
On March 1, 2019, the Justice Minister, David Lametti, ordered a new trial, finding a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice had likely occurred. Justice James Chipman of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court declared Assoun innocent on March 1, 2019, after the Nova Scotia Crown dropped its case, The Canadian Press reported. In July 2019, after The Canadian Press, CBC and the Halifax Examiner went to court, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court released Green's report in full. Nova Scotia's justice minister, Mark Furey, called the case "a miscarriage of justice."
An RCMP internal review found that the files had been deleted for "quality control purposes," against policy but without malicious intent, and blamed a single junior officer. Assoun died in June 2023, at 67, upset that the investigation into the lost evidence had stalled, his lawyer said. A British Columbia watchdog that had agreed to investigate dropped the case in April 2023, and in January 2024 Nova Scotia's Serious Incident Review Team was looking for another police oversight agency to take it on. The documents released in 2019 pointed to McGray as a possible suspect in Brenda Way's killing; he was never charged in her death.
McGray is serving life sentences for seven murders. The Halifax Examiner has reported him held at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Institution in Quebec, described as the highest-security prison in Canada, since 2012. In the Phillips case the RCMP said he would remain in custody for the rest of his life.
The number of killings. McGray claimed 16 killings in Canada and the United States, and at times offered to confess to 12. Courts accepted his guilt in seven deaths. Police in Toronto and Seattle said they found nothing to match his claims there, and forces across Canada could not substantiate them after reviewing their files.
Nina Hicks. He at first denied killing the 11-year-old girl and told a reporter he had never hurt a child; he later pleaded guilty to her murder.
Brenda Way. RCMP analysis, inmate affidavits and a witness's later identification pointed to McGray as a possible suspect, but none of this was tested in court against him.
Kimberly Amero. He confessed to her disappearance, but a search found nothing, and her case remained open in 2018.
James Lloyd Beyea. Saint John police linked McGray to the 1986 killing and reopened the case in 2000; he was never charged.
The 1991 escape. Accounts differ on whether the Quebec prison he left on a pass was medium or minimum security, and on how long he was at large: 21 days, according to the Halifax Examiner, or until late May, by McGray's own account to the Globe.
Born in Collingwood, Ontario; family moves to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, during his childhood.
May 1, 1985: Elizabeth Gale Tucker, 17, is killed near Weymouth, Nova Scotia.
April 13, 1986: James Lloyd Beyea, 43, is killed in Saint John; police later link McGray to the case (no charge reported).
November 1987: Mark Daniel Gibbons is killed in Saint John, New Brunswick.
March 30 to 31, 1991: on an Easter pass from a Quebec prison, McGray kills Robert Assaly and Gaetan Ethier in Montreal.
November 12, 1995: Brenda Way is killed in Halifax; Glen Assoun is later wrongly convicted.
1998: Joan Hicks and her daughter Nina, 11, are killed in Moncton; McGray is arrested and held at Renous.
September 17, 1999: Assoun is convicted of second-degree murder.
Late 1999: a prisoner tips police about the Tucker killing.
March 2000: McGray tells reporters he has killed 16 people.
2000: he pleads guilty to the murder of Joan Hicks; the charge in Nina's death is stayed.
April 25, 2000: guilty pleas to two counts of first-degree murder in Montreal.
2000 to 2001: guilty pleas to the murders of Gibbons, Nina Hicks and Tucker; the Tucker plea brings his sixth life sentence.
May 13, 2003: letter to a prison psychiatrist describing his urges.
2003: RCMP Constable Dave Moore's analysis points to McGray as a possible suspect in Way's killing.
2010: McGray is transferred from Kent Institution to Mountain Institution, Agassiz.
November 21, 2010: McGray kills his cellmate, Jeremy Phillips, 33.
2011: guilty plea to first-degree murder; another life sentence.
October 2012: coroner's inquest in Burnaby; the jury recommends single cells for multiple murderers (reported October 31).
2012: McGray is moved to Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Institution, Quebec.
November 2014: Assoun is released on bail.
March 1, 2019: a new trial is ordered for Assoun; the Crown drops the case and he is declared innocent.
July 12, 2019: the federal report naming McGray as a possible suspect is released.
June 2023: Glen Assoun dies at 67.