On the night of July 16, 1977, Donna Veldboom, twenty-two, was strangled in her apartment in London, Ontario. The man who killed her lived in the apartment below. He stabbed her, which he had not done before, and then, as with the others, washed her body, tucked her into bed and cleaned the bloody sheets. Later that month the police arrested him, Russell Maurice Johnson, a clerk at an automotive store and a weightlifter who worked for Ford of Canada at Talbotville. He was charged with three murders. Then he began to talk.
Johnson had stalked women to their apartments, waited until he thought they were asleep, and climbed the outside walls of the buildings, sometimes many stories up, to get in. Sometimes he watched them sleep first. He raped and suffocated or strangled them and arranged them neatly in their beds, and several of the deaths had been recorded as natural. Mary-Catherine Hicks, twenty, a university student in London, was found in the autumn of 1973 with no sign of a struggle, and her death was put down to a prescription drug interaction. Alice Ralston, forty-two, in Guelph that autumn, was thought to have died of arteriosclerosis in her sleep. Eleanor Hartwick, twenty-seven, was found in the summer of 1974 apparently dead of natural causes. Doris Brown, forty-nine, was found by her daughter on the morning of August 9, 1974, in her second-floor Guelph apartment, her death listed as unexplained.
Diane Beitz, twenty-three, was found in Guelph on New Year's Eve 1974 by her boyfriend, James Britton, who had become engaged to her the night before. She had been strangled with a brassiere, her hands tied behind her with a nylon stocking, and raped after death. Johnson had been visiting his father in Guelph, and knew of her because his former wife had lived in her building. On the night of April 14, 1977, he climbed to the fourth-floor balcony of Luella George, twenty-three, and raped and killed her; her jewelry and underwear were found in a trash can between her apartment and his.
He had checked himself into the London Psychiatric Hospital in 1969 and been diagnosed as a sexual deviant, and he told Police Inspector Robert Young that he would not have killed the women if he had been properly treated. At his trial before the Supreme Court of Ontario he pleaded not guilty to the murders of Beitz, George and Veldboom and then, to the surprise of the court, admitted four more killings and eleven assaults on women who survived. He spoke of an uncontrollable urge to rape and kill. Because he showed no grasp of the gravity of what he had done, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined indefinitely at the mental health center in Penetanguishene, now the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care.