In May 1970, two young mothers were shot and killed in small communities north of Toronto, 13 days apart. Doreen Moorby was 34. Helen Ferguson was 37. Both women were married, both had children at home, and the two did not know each other. A province-wide manhunt followed, with more than 3,000 interviews, and then the case went cold.
The man responsible was a Toronto police officer named Ronald Glenn West, who was off duty on both days. He was not among the original suspects. He was found only in the late 1990s, when an Ontario Provincial Police detective who had worked on the first task force reopened the files and used DNA, then still a relatively new forensic tool, to compare evidence preserved since 1970 with a sample from a letter West had mailed from prison. In 2001 West pleaded guilty in both killings and received two life sentences. In February 2022, at the age of 74, he was denied full parole.
West grew up on a farm in Amaranth, a township in Dufferin County northwest of Toronto. He went to Centre Dufferin District High School in Shelburne, where in the mid-1960s he was in Grade 12 with Ann Burke, who later became a journalist and wrote a book about him. Burke has described him as a shy and quiet teenager who avoided eye contact, and she has said that he showed warning signs even as a child. After high school he joined the Toronto police.
Accounts of his years of service differ. CBC News, citing records at the time of his arrest, said he worked as a Toronto police officer from 1968 to 1972. The Canadian Press, reporting on his 2022 parole decision, gave his service as 1966 to 1972, after which he left to pursue work elsewhere.
Doreen Moorby was 34 and lived with her husband and their toddler in a small community north of Toronto: Gormley, according to CBC News, or Caledon, according to The Canadian Press in 2022. She was killed on May 6, 1970.
Helen Ferguson was 37 and lived in Palgrave, north of Toronto. She was killed there 13 days after Doreen Moorby. Her son, then eight, became a witness. One early CBC News report gave her name as Margaret Ferguson and her age as 38; later reporting, including The Canadian Press in 2022, names her Helen Ferguson, 37.
According to The Canadian Press, West chose both women at random. He was off duty both times.
The two deaths set off a large investigation and a manhunt across the province. Police at the time believed that the same person had killed both women.
Investigators conducted more than 3,000 interviews across the province, but no one was charged. Archie Ferguson, a retired commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, told CBC News decades afterward that one of the two cases had stayed in his mind more than any other he had investigated. "And those things stay with you," he said.
The case became one of the oldest unsolved murder files in Canada. The Ontario Provincial Police do not close murder cases, and the evidence gathered in 1970 was kept.
West left the Toronto police in 1972. His family later made its home in Blind River, Ontario. In 1995 police arrested him for a string of violent armed robberies in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and he went to prison for eight years for those crimes. It was while he was serving that sentence that police reopened the 1970 files.
After he went to prison, gun permits in his name from 1969 and 1970 came to light, and the gun they described matched the one used in the killings.
Don MacNeil had been a young Ontario Provincial Police constable on the original task force in 1970. In the late 1990s, by then a veteran officer with the force's Criminal Investigation Bureau, he was assigned to look again at the two killings.
The bullets from 1970 were too damaged to be matched to a specific gun. MacNeil turned instead to DNA, working with specialists at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. The biological evidence from both killings had been preserved since May 1970, long before DNA analysis became a routine part of forensic work. Investigators obtained West's DNA from a letter he had sent from prison to his family, and the profile matched the evidence from both killings.
West, then 52, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder 29 years after the killings, while he was serving time in Joyceville penitentiary on the unrelated robbery case. The Ontario Provincial Police credited MacNeil with the arrest. Police records showed that West had been off duty at the times of both killings.
MacNeil told CBC News that he had spoken with the victims' families after the arrest and that they were satisfied. "They were satisfied and it was the start of their closure," he said. Police released few details at first about how the arrest had been made, and the case had not yet come to court.
In 2001 West pleaded guilty in the killings of Doreen Moorby and Helen Ferguson. He was given two life sentences. According to The Canadian Press, West has been in prison continuously since he entered his pleas.
From 2009 West waived his parole hearings. After legislation made parole reviews mandatory, the Parole Board of Canada held a review in his case anyway. West did not take part.
Before the review, late in 2021, West underwent a psychological risk assessment. It rated him as a moderate-to-high risk to commit further violent offenses. The clinician did not support parole but suggested that the next step would be a move from medium to minimum security. West had given no sign that he wanted such a move.
Correctional Service Canada also recommended against full parole. The board, summarizing the service's view, told West that "you remain unable to fully verbalize your reasons for offending or to demonstrate full victim empathy and recognition of the harm you inflicted."
In its decision dated February 14, 2022, the board denied him full parole. "It is the board's opinion that you will present an undue risk to society if released and that your release will not contribute to the protection of society by facilitating your reintegration into society as a law-abiding citizen," the decision said. West was 74 and was held at a medium-security institution that the board did not name.
Ann Burke, West's high school classmate, learned of the murders in 1999 and began researching them about a decade later. She spent nearly five years on the book that resulted, The Seventh Shot: On the Trail of Canada's .22-Calibre Killer, published in October 2020 by Latitude 46, a publisher in northern Ontario. Burke, who has lived in Innisfil and worked in social services and journalism, drew on documents at the Ontario Provincial Police Museum in Orillia, interviews with people from Amaranth and with former classmates, and conversations with Toronto police officers, some of them retired, as well as profilers and criminology experts. She did not interview West.
The book was launched online on October 22, 2020, with Christine Johnston, curator of the OPP Museum, as a guest. Burke has said she believes West killed the women so that they could not identify him, and she describes him as a man without empathy. She has also said that his first and second wives found him abusive and deeply troubled, and that he was careful not to leave clues, so that no usable DNA evidence existed at the time. In her account, the case resembles that of the Golden State Killer in California: in both, a man who had worked as a police officer went undetected for decades until preserved DNA identified him.
For the families, the arrest came 29 years after the killings, and MacNeil called it the start of their closure. Helen Ferguson's son, eight at the time, had given police their first description of the man they were looking for. MacNeil, who had worked the case as a young constable, returned to it nearly three decades later and saw it through to the arrest.
Mid-1960s: West is in Grade 12 at Centre Dufferin District High School in Shelburne, Ontario.
1966 or 1968: He joins the Toronto police (accounts differ).
1969 and 1970: Gun permits are issued in his name.
May 6, 1970: Doreen Moorby, 34, is killed north of Toronto.
13 days later, May 1970: Helen Ferguson, 37, is killed in Palgrave. A province-wide investigation follows, with more than 3,000 interviews.
1972: West leaves the Toronto police.
1995: He is arrested for a string of violent armed robberies in the Sault Ste. Marie area and later sentenced to eight years.
Late 1990s: Don MacNeil of the Ontario Provincial Police reopens the 1970 cases; DNA from a letter West mailed from prison matches evidence preserved since 1970.
29 years after the killings: West, 52, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder at Joyceville penitentiary.
2001: He pleads guilty in both killings and receives two life sentences.
2009 onward: He waives his parole hearings.
Late 2021: A psychological risk assessment rates him a moderate-to-high risk of violent reoffending.
February 14, 2022: The Parole Board of Canada denies him full parole; he is 74 and held in medium security.