Michael Wayne McGray told anyone who would listen that prison would not stop him. He said he had an urge to kill that went back to his childhood, and that if he were ever given a cellmate he would kill him. He was held first in a super-maximum unit in Quebec, then in a high-security prison in British Columbia, and then moved to Mountain Institution, a medium-security prison at Agassiz. There he was paired with Jeremy Phillips, thirty-three. In November 2010 Phillips was found dead in their cell.
McGray was born in Nova Scotia in 1965. He blamed his urge on the beatings he took as a child. His first known victim was Elizabeth Gale Tucker, seventeen, who was hitchhiking to a new job at a fish plant in Digby when McGray and a friend picked her up near Weymouth on May 1, 1985. They tried to force her to have sex with them, and McGray stabbed her to death. Her body was found in a field about a month later. On November 14, 1987, in Saint John, New Brunswick, he stabbed Mark Daniel Gibbons, a man he later described as an accomplice.
In March 1991 he was let out of Atlantic Institution, at Renous, New Brunswick, on a three-day pass. In Montreal on March 31 he met Robert Assaly, fifty-nine, a retired teacher, at a gay bar, and bludgeoned and stabbed him. The next day he killed Gaetan Ethier, forty-five, another man he met at a gay bar. He stayed out of reach for nearly two months before he was returned to prison.
On February 28, 1998, he killed Joan Hicks, forty-eight, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Nina, in their home in Moncton. He had been looking for victims with another man after a night on cocaine, he said later. A witness identified him and he was arrested the next day. On March 20, 2000, he pleaded guilty to Joan Hicks's murder, while denying that he had killed the child. The charge for Nina was stayed, but a year later he reversed himself and pleaded guilty to her murder too. By then he had confessed to Gibbons, Assaly and Ethier as well, and days after the Nina Hicks plea he pleaded guilty to killing Elizabeth Tucker, a case that had gone unsolved for sixteen years until an RCMP investigation corroborated his account. He received six life sentences, all concurrent.
From prison he wrote to the Crown prosecutor in Moncton and spoke to police and reporters, claiming anywhere from twelve to sixteen killings in Halifax, Saint John, Moncton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Seattle. Most of the people he described were gay men, sex workers and homeless drug users. He said the police could never solve those deaths without him, and asked in return for psychiatric treatment and immunity for two accomplices, one of them a girlfriend he refused to name. The police refused. He claimed the 1985 disappearance of Kimberly Amero from the Atlantic National Exhibition in Saint John and told them where to dig, but they found nothing.
After Jeremy Phillips's death McGray pleaded guilty to his murder and received a seventh life sentence. His confessions reached back into other cases. In July 2019 the Nova Scotia Supreme Court revealed that he had been the prime suspect in the 1995 killing of Brenda Way in Dartmouth, whose throat had been cut. Her boyfriend, Glen Assoun, had spent seventeen years in prison for that murder, always denying it, and his conviction was overturned.