Peter Woodcock killed three young children in Toronto between September 1956 and January 1957, when he was 17. He confessed to all three after his arrest, and his trial for the last killing ended in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. He was never convicted of any crime. He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric custody, much of it at Oak Ridge, the maximum-security division of the provincial psychiatric hospital at Penetanguishene, on Georgian Bay. While there he legally changed his name to David Michael Krueger.
Two parts of his story have outlived him. The first is the boy who was blamed for his first killing: a 14-year-old who confessed under police pressure, was convicted in juvenile court and spent almost eight months in custody before he was cleared. The second is what happened in July 1991, when Woodcock was given his first day pass in 34 years. Within about an hour, he and a former Oak Ridge patient who had been allowed to escort him killed a fellow patient, Dennis Kerr, in a grove on the grounds of the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. He died in custody in 2010.
Woodcock was born in 1939. His mother kept him for about a month before he was placed in foster care, according to the psychologist Katherine Ramsland's 2016 summary of Mark Bourrie's book on the case. He moved through several foster placements and was turned away from them because of his behavior.
At about the age of three he was taken in by a well-off Toronto family who meant to keep him permanently. A Toronto Star photograph of January 22, 1957, shows the family's house on Lytton Boulevard in north Toronto, captioned as the home of the Maynard family, "where young Peter Woodcock lived as foster son." The caption added that he had been given everything the family could offer. Ramsland's summary describes him as a child with no friends, physically uncoordinated and bullied by other children.
Wayne Mallette was seven years old. On September 15, 1956, he wandered onto the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, which were closed and deserted at the time. There he met a teenager with a bicycle. Ramsland's account says Woodcock drew the boy in through a shared interest. Wayne was later found dead on the grounds. Ramsland gives his age as six; CBC News and Nate Hendley's book on the case give it as seven.
A night watchman told police he had seen a teenage boy on a bicycle near the grounds before the body was found, and that sighting would give Hendley's book its title, The Boy on the Bicycle. CBC News reported in 2018 that investigators found marks on the child that they attributed to an adolescent.
The police were looking for a teenager on a bicycle. They found a 14-year-old boy, identified here by his initials, R.M.
R.M. had argued with his parents and run away from home around the time of the killing, and his parents had reported him missing. He had once worked at the Exhibition grounds, which drew detectives' interest. On Friday, September 21, 1956, six days after the killing, officers found him asleep in a closet in the building where his parents lived in downtown Toronto. He thought he was being picked up for skipping school.
At the station he was held for hours in a small room with two detectives. In interviews he gave to CBC Radio in 2018, he said they used a good-cop, bad-cop routine and threatened violence, though none was used. His parents were not told for hours that he was being questioned, and he did not know he could ask for a lawyer. By his later account, he was handcuffed to a desk. He confessed. "You'll tell them anything," he told CBC News in 2018.
Three days after his arrest he appeared in juvenile court charged with the murder. Because he was a juvenile, his name was kept out of the newspapers, and press accounts used invented names for him. Several witnesses said he had been at the Metro Theatre, a cinema on Bloor Street, at the time of the killing, miles from the Exhibition grounds. He also had problems with balance and could not ride a bicycle or skate. The juvenile court judge nonetheless found that he had been at the grounds and convicted him of juvenile delinquency, the form a finding of guilt took for a child under the Juvenile Delinquents Act. He was sent to juvenile detention, where, he later said, he feared he would be sent back to Toronto and executed when he turned 18.
He was in custody for just under eight months. His case went back to court only after Woodcock was arrested for the later killings and confessed to this one as well. A prominent lawyer fought for his release, and an appeal succeeded in the summer of 1957. He was acquitted at a new hearing. The judge who acquitted him did not apologize; instead, R.M. later said, he scolded the boy for having confessed. CBC Radio reported that the judge also criticized the way his confession had been taken and recommended that police stop questioning minors without a parent or lawyer present.
R.M. moved away from Toronto and built a long life elsewhere in Ontario. He told reporters in 2018 that his parents bore the worst of it: they sold furniture to pay his legal bills, faced the contempt of their neighbors and lost nearly everything, and his mother never spoke of the case again. He struggled for years to hold a job and spent periods in psychiatric hospitals. He kept the story from his own children until they were in their thirties. He never received an apology or compensation. In 2018 he agreed to have his story told in Hendley's book and used the attention to call for a rule that no young person be questioned by police without a guardian present.
The wrongful conviction mattered for more than one family. While the police considered the Exhibition killing solved, the person responsible was still free.
About three weeks after Wayne Mallette's death, Woodcock killed a nine-year-old boy in Toronto. He strangled and beat him. The third child was a four-year-old girl, killed in January 1957, about four months after the first killing. The publisher's summary of Bourrie's 2016 book describes the three victims together as two boys and a girl between the ages of four and nine, and states that Woodcock was 17 when he killed them.
The sources read for this account do not record the names of the second and third children, and this account does not describe the attacks further.
The arrest followed within days of the third killing. By January 22, 1957, the Toronto Star had identified Woodcock and photographed the Maynard family home. Woodcock confessed to all three killings, including the one for which R.M. was already in custody. Ramsland's review records that the earlier wrongful arrest had stalled the investigation and left him free to kill again.
In a documentary interview recorded decades later, Woodcock spoke calmly about killing the two boys and the girl and said he had done it "to correct a balance." When the interviewer reacted with unease, he answered that the material was not meant for sensitive listeners.
Woodcock was tried only for the last of the three killings, that of the four-year-old girl. In 1957 the court found him not guilty by reason of insanity. That verdict is an acquittal on the ground of mental illness, not a conviction. In practice it meant detention with no fixed end: he was sent to Oak Ridge, the maximum-security division of the psychiatric hospital at Penetanguishene, and he would remain in psychiatric custody for the next 53 years. He was never tried for the deaths of Wayne Mallette or the nine-year-old boy. His confession to the Exhibition killing, though, was what cleared R.M.
Many of the men held at Oak Ridge had been accused of serious crimes such as rape and murder, the Canadian Press reported. CBC's The Fifth Estate, looking back on the hospital in 2021, named Woodcock among the best-known patients it ever held. Ramsland's review notes that after the verdict he was placed in a treatment program, and that he took part in therapy sessions for psychopaths.
His first two decades there coincided with the most controversial period in the hospital's history. In 1965 the psychiatrist Elliott Barker arrived at Oak Ridge and founded a therapeutic community in its Social Therapy Unit, in which patients acted as therapists to one another. CBC reported that the programs combined patient-led encounter groups with coercive methods. Patients were given LSD (supplied by the federal Department of Health), scopolamine, methamphetamine and strong alcohol. In the Total Encounter Capsule, groups of usually naked patients were locked for days in a small windowless room with the lights always on. A program called MAPP (Motivation, Attitude, Participation Program) forced men to sit for hours in rigid positions under strict rules, with discipline enforced by other patients. Barker's successor, Gary Maier, a recent medical graduate rather than a psychiatrist, took over the programs; CBC reported that his tenure ended after he gave LSD to an entire ward. The programs ended at Oak Ridge in 1983.
Former patients sued in 2000. On June 1, 2017, Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice found that three of the programs amounted to physical and mental torture. "It is an inexcusable breach of fiduciary duty for a physician to torture a patient," he wrote, the Canadian Press reported. After a trial of almost ten weeks, Justice Edward Morgan ruled on June 25, 2020, in Barker v. Barker, that Barker, Maier and the province of Ontario were liable to 28 former patients, who had been held at Oak Ridge at various times between 1966 and 1983. He found that the programs had no therapeutic value and that the degradation of patients "was part of the design." In February 2021 he awarded damages of about 9.6 million dollars. The Court of Appeal for Ontario upheld the core findings in July 2022, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal in March 2023.
Woodcock was not a party to that lawsuit, and the sources read for this account do not say which of the programs he went through or when. One of the 28 plaintiffs named in the 2020 judgment is a Bruce Hamill. A man of that name escorted Woodcock on his 1991 day pass (see below); the court record read for this account does not say whether the two are the same man.
At some point during his years in treatment Woodcock was allowed to change his name legally, and he became David Michael Krueger. Later, a staff member who had worked with him said that what she saw in the data from the psychopath therapy sessions showed the treatment had made the men's criminal behavior worse, not better, Ramsland wrote.
By 1991 Woodcock was a patient of the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital in eastern Ontario. On July 13, 1991, after 34 years in a criminal psychiatric facility, he was given his first day pass. Hospital staff allowed another man, Bruce Hamill, to escort him. According to the publisher's description of Bourrie's 1997 book, Hamill had killed before and had been released after years of treatment at Oak Ridge.
The plan for the day, according to the summary of Bourrie's 2016 book, was a trip into town for ice cream at a Dairy Queen. Within the first hour of the pass, Woodcock and Hamill killed a fellow patient of the Brockville hospital, Dennis Kerr, in a grove on the hospital grounds. Ramsland, summarizing Bourrie, wrote that both men took part in the killing. This account gives no further detail of the attack.
Woodcock, whose eyesight was very poor, then walked to a nearby police station and gave himself up. Hamill was found unconscious from drugs beside the body. The killing made national news in Canada. In the documentary interview Ramsland describes, Woodcock later spoke coldly about this killing too.
Dennis Kerr was a patient of the same hospital. None of the sources read for this account gives his age, his family or what brought him to Brockville.
Woodcock was returned to maximum-security psychiatric custody. The legal outcome of the 1991 case for each man was not found in any source read for this account. Whether Woodcock was found unfit to stand trial, not guilty by reason of insanity or not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder for the 1991 killing is not recorded in the sources opened.
The sources read also do not describe any public inquiry or inquest into how the day pass was granted. Bourrie's 1997 book examines how the killing came about and how Woodcock manipulated psychiatrists, lawyers and fellow patients, according to its publisher.
Woodcock spoke at length to outsiders. The journalist Mark Bourrie interviewed him many times for By Reason of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story, published in Toronto by Hounslow Press in 1997. A reviewer in the Canadian Book Review Annual wrote that Bourrie had originally meant to write about the psychiatric system but became involved with Woodcock himself, and that the most compelling part of the book was its account of how that association affected Bourrie and his family. The book quotes Woodcock at length, including his remark, "I grew up here," and his comment that his personality reflected the influences of the place.
Woodcock also appeared, under the name David Michael Krueger, in a documentary titled The Mind of a Murderer, about a treatment program for violent psychopaths at a Canadian psychiatric hospital. It is in that film that he described the Toronto killings as an attempt "to correct a balance."
Bourrie returned to the case in Peter Woodcock: Canada's Youngest Serial Killer (2016), part of the Crimes Canada series edited by Peter Vronsky and R. J. Parker. Nate Hendley's The Boy on the Bicycle (Five Rivers, 2018; updated edition, Dundurn, 2021) tells the story of R.M. and the wrongful conviction, drawing comparisons with the better-known Steven Truscott case. It was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award.
Woodcock died in custody in 2010, on his 71st birthday, after 53 years in Ontario's psychiatric system. He was never released.
Found by a court (not a conviction): the killing of the four-year-old girl in January 1957, for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Admitted but never tried: the killings of Wayne Mallette and of the nine-year-old boy in 1956. A juvenile court wrongly convicted R.M. of the first of these; that finding was overturned on appeal in 1957 and he was acquitted.
Not established in sources read: the legal outcome of the 1991 killing for either Woodcock or Hamill, and whether any inquiry examined the granting of the pass.
Details that vary between sources: Wayne Mallette's age (seven in CBC reports and Hendley's book, six in Ramsland's review); the year of the Brockville killing (1991 in the publisher's summary of Bourrie's 2016 book and in Ramsland's review; "summer 1993" in the publisher's description of his 1997 book, which is an error, since the 2016 summary gives the exact date of July 13, 1991); and the length of R.M.'s custody (just under eight months in most reports; one CBC report says he was released a year later). CBC's The Fifth Estate in 2021 described Woodcock as having been "convicted" of murdering three children; that is wrong, since the 1957 verdict was not guilty by reason of insanity.
1939: Peter Woodcock is born in Ontario; he is placed in foster care after about a month.
About 1942: at about age three, he is taken in by a well-off foster family in north Toronto.
September 15, 1956: Wayne Mallette, 7, is killed on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto.
September 21, 1956: R.M., 14, is picked up by police, questioned alone and confesses; he is charged three days later and is convicted of juvenile delinquency.
Fall 1956: about three weeks after the first killing, a nine-year-old boy is killed in Toronto.
January 1957: a four-year-old girl is killed in Toronto.
January 1957: Woodcock, 17, is arrested and confesses to all three killings; the Toronto Star photographs his foster family's home on January 22.
1957: found not guilty by reason of insanity of the girl's killing; committed to Oak Ridge, Penetanguishene.
Summer 1957: R.M.'s appeal succeeds; he is acquitted after almost eight months in custody.
1965 to 1983: the Social Therapy Unit programs run at Oak Ridge.
During his treatment: legally changes his name to David Michael Krueger.
July 13, 1991: on his first day pass, from the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, he and Bruce Hamill kill fellow patient Dennis Kerr; he gives himself up to police.
1997: Mark Bourrie's By Reason of Insanity is published.
2010: Woodcock dies in custody on his 71st birthday.
2016: Bourrie's Peter Woodcock: Canada's Youngest Serial Killer is published; Katherine Ramsland reviews it.
June 1, 2017: Justice Perell finds Oak Ridge programs amounted to torture.
2018: R.M. tells his story publicly; Hendley's The Boy on the Bicycle is published.
June 25, 2020: Barker v. Barker liability judgment.
July 2022 and March 2023: the Court of Appeal upholds the core findings and the Supreme Court of Canada refuses leave.