Ronald Glenn West

Victims

2 convictions, for the 1970 murders of Doreen Moorby and Helen Ferguson - up to nine further deaths investigated and never charged

Years active

1970

Location

Ontario, Canada

Method

Shooting

Status

Convicted of the 1970 murders of Doreen Moorby and Helen Ferguson and given two life sentences. He has never been charged in the other cases investigated against him. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, six years after the killings he was convicted of. A CANADIAN LIFE SENTENCE NEVER EXPIRES. First-degree murder carries a mandatory twenty-five years before the Parole Board of Canada may even consider release; second-degree carries ten to twenty-five, set by the judge. Passing that date is not release, and anyone who is released remains on parole for the rest of his life and can be returned to prison at any point. THE DATE OF HIS CONVICTION AND HIS INELIGIBILITY PERIOD ARE NOT RECORDED HERE. He is 79, and on any reading of the rules his eligibility date passed long ago.

Ronald Glenn West was born around 1947 and joined what was then the Metropolitan Toronto Police in 1968, serving as a constable at 53 Division in midtown. He left the force in 1972, according to the record voluntarily and to seek other employment.

On May 6, 1970, Doreen Moorby, a nurse, was raped and shot dead at her home at Gormley, north of Toronto, with her twenty-one-month-old son in the house. Thirteen days later Helen Ferguson, also a nurse, answered her door at Palgrave and was shot once in the head and twice in the back. Her nine-year-old son Dale was in his bedroom and was not harmed. He saw the man wipe the door for fingerprints before driving away, and the description he gave produced the composite sketch that ran in the papers for years. Both women were killed with a .22 calibre handgun, and the press called the unknown man the .22-Calibre Killer. A Toronto mechanic falsely confessed to a priest, which cost the investigation a good deal of time.

West left Ontario, spent three years in western Canada, served short jail terms for a run of break-ins at medical offices, and was convicted of possessing handguns and a throwing knife. He returned to Ontario in 1975.

In 1995 he committed a series of violent robberies. Police watched his house for forty-eight hours from a boathouse next door and arrested him, and the search of the property found nothing of note. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years. What broke the case was the next tenant, who found a cache hidden in the bathroom: stolen jewellery, photographs, and an old registration certificate for a .22 calibre handgun. DNA comparison then linked him to both 1970 scenes.

He was arrested at Joyceville penitentiary in August 1999, aged fifty-two, and held in a private cell at Maplehurst because as a former officer he could not safely be placed on a unit. He was convicted of both murders and given two life sentences.

He was investigated for a good deal more and charged with none of it. Ottawa-Carleton police looked at him for the Ottawa Valley killings, six people murdered in their rural homes in the triangle between Ottawa, Morrisburg and Cornwall between 1975 and 1987. He was also named as a suspect in a double murder at a rest stop near Blind River in 1991, an area he was living in at the time, a case that is still open and still argued over. None of it has been established, and this entry does not treat any of it as proved.