William Patrick Fyfe pleaded guilty to murdering five women in the Montreal area and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole for 25 years. The women had been killed over about 18 years, starting in 1981, according to the Canadian Press. Police said most of them were stabbed to death and some were beaten and sexually assaulted.
About two months after the pleas, Fyfe confessed to four more killings of women, the earliest in 1979. He made the confessions as part of an arrangement that moved him out of Quebec to a prison in Western Canada. He was not charged with the four killings. He was already serving life, the maximum sentence the law allows, and police said there would be no further trial.
To one detective, quoted by The Globe and Mail, he was "a very, very ordinary man." He had worked at odd jobs with his hands and, by the police account, he had gone to unusual lengths to stay out of the public eye.
Fyfe was born in Ontario. The Globe and Mail reported that he was 46 when his further confessions were announced. He worked at a string of odd jobs because he was skilled with his hands, the newspaper said, among them installing swimming pools and working on road crews. His mother lived in Barrie, Ontario.
Police who dealt with him described him as stubborn and coldly manipulative. Commander André Bouchard of the Montreal Urban Community police said Fyfe did not behave the way serial killers usually do. "Usually, serial killers love the publicity and when they're caught they're all over the place," Bouchard told The Globe and Mail. Fyfe, by contrast, avoided attention. Bouchard said he had listened to the recordings of Fyfe's interrogations looking for some underlying cause for what he had done and had found none, and he said that Fyfe appeared to know that what he did was wrong.
Little is on record about his life before the killings. The Globe and Mail said police had told it that the first killing he described took place in 1979, while he was out of a Montreal jail on a day pass; he had been held for a minor offense. What that offense was, and how long he was held, has not been reported.
The Globe and Mail named all nine women in the police account, with their ages and home communities, grouped by period.
From 1979 to 1989: Suzanne Bernier, 55, of Montreal; Nicole Raymond, 26, of Pointe-Claire; Louise Blanc, 37, of Sainte-Adèle; Pauline Laplante, 44, of Piedmont; and Hazel Scattolon, 53, of the Town of Mount Royal.
In 1999: Anna Yarnold, 59, of Senneville; Monique Gaudreau, 45, of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts; Teresa Shanahan, 55, of Laval; and Mary Glen, 50, of Baie d'Urfé.
The women were between 26 and 59 years old. Each was at home alone when Fyfe appeared, according to the police account given to The Globe and Mail. CBC News reported that he posed as a plumber to get into the homes of women who lived alone.
Beyond their names, ages and towns, little has been made public about the women's lives: their work, their families, the people who mourned them.
Fyfe was arrested near his mother's home in Barrie in connection with the death of Mary Glen, who was killed in Montreal's West Island, The Globe and Mail reported. Investigators then used DNA evidence to charge him in the deaths of four more women. A Globe and Mail report on his later confessions said he had been convicted largely on DNA evidence.
CBC News reported that detectives caught him after finding his thumbprint at one of the crime scenes. Which force made the arrest, and how investigators first identified him as a suspect, has not been reported.
Prosecutors had been preparing for a long trial, CBC News reported. Instead, in September, Fyfe pleaded guilty to killing five women around Montreal. The Canadian Press, in a report printed by The Globe and Mail, said he admitted killing five women in the Montreal area over a period of 18 years that began in 1981. He received a life sentence and must serve 25 years before he can apply for parole.
The judge, the lawyers in court, the degree of murder and the five victims count by count have not been reported. The Globe and Mail later reported that the charges had begun with Mary Glen's death and grown, with the help of DNA, to include four more women.
On the day of the pleas, Bouchard told reporters that Fyfe might be linked to other unsolved deaths. Montreal police had told forces outside Quebec when Fyfe had been in their areas and asked them to check their homicide files for those periods. "Unfortunately, for the time being, we have no proof but everybody is co-operating," Bouchard said, according to the Canadian Press.
About two months after the pleas, police announced that Fyfe had admitted four more killings of women, cases that had not been solved. Television news reports said he made the admissions in exchange for a transfer out of Quebec to a prison in Saskatchewan, The Globe and Mail reported. CBC News reported that he was moved to a corrections center on the Prairies on a Thursday, and that police did not expect to lay any new charges.
Police said the four women had been killed in the years before 1990. The Globe and Mail gave the period of the confessed killings as beginning in 1979; CBC News put the four deaths between 1978 and 1989.
Police said the detail of his accounts convinced them that he was telling the truth. "You couldn't invent those details," Bouchard told The Globe and Mail. The newspaper described Fyfe as speaking without emotion, as though he were recounting an old movie.
A lawyer, Claude Archambault, told CBC News that the Crown's aim in accepting confessions of this kind was to resolve old cases, including ones that might be hard to prove. "The Crown wants to close the files, to know who killed whom," he said.
Police insisted that the arrangement did not reduce Fyfe's punishment. "He was a vicious murderer," Bouchard said. He argued that a cell was a cell wherever it was. "I don't know the difference between an eight-by-eight-foot cell in Western Canada [and] an eight-by-eight-foot cell in Quebec," he told The Globe and Mail. Fyfe, he said, had chosen a prison where English was spoken.
Fyfe's lawyer, Marc Labelle, told the newspaper that his client wanted to serve his sentence in Saskatoon because the prison there offered specialized treatment for offenders and because his case had received heavy publicity in Quebec. "It's for a question of safety," Labelle said. He compared the move with the request of another of his clients, Karla Homolka, to serve her sentence in Quebec rather than in Ontario, where her crimes were committed. "It's a way of keeping inmates with difficult cases in safer conditions," he said.
Fyfe insisted on being flown out of Quebec before the police held their news conference about the confessions, The Globe and Mail reported.
The police account left a gap of about 10 years between the confessed killings of 1979 to 1989 and the killings of 1999. Investigators said the gap troubled them. "There are gaps. We won't close [the case] until we close the gaps," Bouchard told The Globe and Mail. "Anything is possible. It's possible he's killed other women."
CBC News reported that some detectives believed he might have killed more than the nine women he had admitted killing, given his violent history and the gaps in his record. No further charges against him have been reported.
The Globe and Mail noted that, with nine admitted killings, Fyfe was not officially Canada's worst serial killer. That distinction, it said, was held officially by Clifford Olson, convicted in 1982 of killing 11 children, though the ranking was disputed.
The four killings Fyfe confessed to after his sentencing were never tried. They rest on his own admissions and on the police statement that his accounts matched the evidence. In law he stands convicted of five murders, not nine.
The years differ between reports. CBC News said the five women in his pleas were killed between 1981 and 2000, while the Canadian Press gave a period of 18 years beginning in 1981, and The Globe and Mail listed all of the most recent killings under 1999. CBC News dated the four confessed killings from 1978, while The Globe and Mail said they went back to 1979.
Which five women the pleas covered has not been made public. The Globe and Mail said he was first arrested over Mary Glen's death and then charged in four more deaths, without naming the other four counts.
Montreal police said they were looking at whether Fyfe could be linked to other unsolved deaths of women, inside and outside Quebec. No such link was announced.
1979: The first killing Fyfe later confessed to, by the police account; he was out of a Montreal jail on a day pass at the time.
1979 to 1989: Four killings of women he later confessed to (CBC News dates them from 1978).
1981: The start of the period covered by his guilty pleas, according to the Canadian Press.
1999: Anna Yarnold, Monique Gaudreau, Teresa Shanahan and Mary Glen are killed, according to the dates in The Globe and Mail.
After Mary Glen's death: Fyfe is arrested near his mother's home in Barrie, Ontario; DNA evidence leads to charges in four more deaths.
September: He pleads guilty to killing five women in the Montreal area and is sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years.
About two months later: He confesses to four more killings and is flown out of Quebec to a corrections center on the Prairies; police say no new charges will be laid.