In the autumn of 1999, William Patrick Fyfe drove the 650 kilometers from Barrie, Ontario, to Montreal four times. On October 15, Anna Yarnold, fifty-nine, was beaten to death in her home in Senneville, on the western tip of the island. On October 29, Monique Gaudreau, forty-six, was stabbed to death in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, in the Laurentians. Teresa Shanahan, fifty-five, was stabbed to death in Laval in November, and on December 15, Mary Glen, fifty, was beaten and stabbed in Baie-d'Urfé. A week later the Ontario Provincial Police arrested him as he walked back to his pickup truck after eating at a Husky truck stop near Barrie. It was December 22, 1999.
He was a handyman. The women he killed were alone in their houses in the Montreal area when he turned up, most of them in their middle years; the youngest was twenty-six and the oldest fifty-nine. The killings were random and savage, often with sexual assault and repeated stabbing, and the women were usually robbed. Few of the houses showed any sign of forced entry. In the small Quebec community where he had gone for treatment for drug addiction and then stayed on to counsel others, he was known as generous and full of community spirit, if given to lecturing people about their weight and their habits. The press called him the Killer Handyman.
Fyfe was born in Toronto on February 27, 1955, was raised by an aunt, and in 1958 moved to the Parc Extension district of Montreal. He killed his first victim in 1979, at twenty-four, while out of a Montreal jail on a day pass for a minor offense. The earliest of the killings for which he was convicted came two years later, in 1981: Hazel Scattolon, fifty-two, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in Town of Mount Royal.
The case against him was forensic. Blood from Anna Yarnold was found on his clothing. Shoe prints at the Gaudreau scene matched shoes recovered in Ontario. A ring stolen from Teresa Shanahan turned up among his possessions. At Mary Glen's house, where the name is sometimes spelled Glenn, there was his fingerprint, and DNA on a door frame. That, and close surveillance, was what caught him. His preliminary hearing began on November 6, 2000, with Jean Lecours leading for the Crown. He maintained his innocence until September 21, 2001, when he pleaded guilty in the Quebec Superior Court to five counts of first-degree murder, for Scattolon, Yarnold, Gaudreau, Shanahan and Glen. He was sentenced to life with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years.
Two months later, on November 22, 2001, he confessed to four more killings, the arrangement being a transfer from the Quebec prison where he was serving his sentence to one in western Canada. The four were Suzanne Bernier, fifty-five, murdered in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville district of Montreal on October 17, 1979; Nicole Raymond, twenty-six, found stabbed to death in her apartment in Pointe-Claire on November 11, 1979; Louise Poupart, also reported as Louise Blanc Poupart, stabbed to death at home in Sainte-Adèle in 1987; and Pauline Laplante, forty-four, murdered in Piedmont in 1989. He was not charged with any of them, since he was already serving life, the maximum the law allowed.
A detective who heard the confessions called him "a very, very ordinary man" and said he recounted each killing without emotion, as though describing an old movie. "He was a vicious murderer," said Commander André Bouchard of the Montreal Urban Community police, who defended the deal. "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," Bouchard said. "He got it in English instead of in French, and that's what he asked for." Fyfe's lawyer, Marc Labelle, said his client wanted the prison in Saskatoon because it offered specialized treatment for offenders and because his case had been so heavily publicized in Quebec.
The nine killings leave a gap of almost a decade, from Laplante in 1989 to Yarnold in 1999, that was never explained. Montreal police also suspected him of being the serial rapist known as the Plumber, who carried out a string of violent rapes downtown in the 1980s. He has never been charged with any of those attacks, and investigators in the region have looked at him for other unsolved murders of women since.