In May 1970, thirteen days apart, two young mothers were raped and shot to death in their own homes in the countryside north of Toronto. Both were nurses married to schoolteachers, both were killed in the daytime while their husbands were at work, and each had a child in the house. Doreen Moorby, thirty-four, was killed on May 6. Her home is placed at Gormley in some accounts and in Caledon in others. Her husband came home that night and found her on the floor; she had been sexually assaulted and shot with a .22-caliber gun, seven times by one account and in the back of the head and the back by another, and their twenty-one-month-old son was found pinned underneath her, unharmed. Helen Ferguson, thirty-seven, was home in Palgrave with her son, Dale, nine or eight by different accounts, who was sick with mumps. A car pulled into the driveway and Dale heard his mother answer the door. She told him to stay in his room while she helped a man with a sick child. Then he heard three shots, and he saw the killer leave. She had been shot once in the back of the head and twice in the back.
The women did not know each other or the man who killed them. The hunt that followed ran across the province and took more than three thousand interviews, and then the case went cold. The Ontario Provincial Police task force that hunted him for years came to suspect that he might be a police officer. He was. Ronald Glenn West, twenty-three, was a constable with the Metropolitan Toronto Police, where he served until 1972 (his start is given as 1966 in the Parole Board's account and as 1968 elsewhere), and he had been off duty both times. He resigned in 1972 and for years was all but invisible. When he surfaced in 1988 he was living in Blind River, on the north shore of Lake Huron, with his two sons, and his neighbors believed he had interests in a diamond mine near Wawa and a gold mine in Timmins.
His undoing began with a pawn shop. In June 1995 he sold stolen jewelry at a shop in Sudbury using his own identification, and the store's security camera recorded him doing it. It was the first of the robberies that brought him down. In the Sault Ste. Marie area he had been answering items advertised for sale, tying up the sellers and beating them before robbing them, some of them elderly people and women. He was convicted of a string of those robberies and sentenced to eight years; one report dates his imprisonment from 1998. While he was in prison his family sold the house in Blind River, and the new owners, renovating, found an envelope hidden in a wall. It held permits in his name from 1969 and 1970 for a .22-caliber revolver, the kind of gun used to kill both women.
Don MacNeil had been an Ontario Provincial Police constable on the original 1970 task force. The Provincial Police never close a murder case, and in 1997 he was handed the two again. The bullets were too damaged to match to any gun, so he turned to DNA, working with specialists at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, and the DNA, which investigators recovered from a letter West had mailed from prison to his family, matched semen preserved from both crime scenes. In August 1999, about four years into his robbery sentence, West was charged in Joyceville penitentiary with two counts of first degree murder. His fellow prisoners there had not known they were living with a former police officer. He was moved to Kingston Penitentiary and placed in protective custody. Accounts of the second victim differ on small points; one early report named her Margaret and gave her age as thirty-eight.
On August 7, 2001, West, then fifty-four, was brought from his cell at Kingston Penitentiary to the courthouse in Brampton and pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting and killing Doreen Moorby and Helen Ferguson. Justice Casey Hill of the Superior Court of Justice accepted his pleas to non-capital murder, as the offense was defined in 1970, and sentenced him to two concurrent life terms. Because of the law in force when the crimes were committed, he became eligible to apply for parole after ten years rather than twenty-five. Asked whether he had anything to say, West replied, "No, your honour." MacNeil, recently retired as a detective inspector, was in the courtroom to see the case closed.
Investigators looked hard at whether there had been others. Within days of his arrest he was named as a suspect in a 1991 roadside killing near Blind River, where a man who said he was a police officer had knocked on the door of a motorhome at one in the morning, robbed a retired couple from Lindsay and shot them, killing Jackie McAllister, fifty-nine, and wounding her husband, Gord; a twenty-nine-year-old man from Elliot Lake who drove up was shot dead in his car. Ottawa-area police said they were also reviewing unsolved killings of elderly people in eastern Ontario between 1975 and 1987. West was never charged with any of these, and the Blind River killings remain unsolved. In prison he hinted to police that there was more to his story, and the journalist Ann Burke, who had gone to high school with him, argued in her 2021 book The Seventh Shot that he may have been involved in other murders north of Toronto around 1971 and 1972. None of it has been proven.
West became eligible to apply for parole but never did, and he waived his right to parole hearings from 2009 on. After changes in the law made reviews mandatory, the Parole Board of Canada held one anyway, and he did not take part. Late in 2021 a psychological risk assessment had rated him a moderate-to-high risk to commit further violent crimes and an average risk to reoffend sexually. The Correctional Service did not recommend release, telling the board that he remained unable to fully explain why he had offended or to show full empathy for his victims and recognition of the harm he had done, and the clinician suggested that the next step, if any, would be a move to minimum security. In a decision dated February 14, 2022, when he was seventy-four, the board denied him full parole, finding that he would present an undue risk to society if released. He was then held at a medium-security institution the board did not name, and he remained in prison serving his life sentence.