Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (45 page)

Woodcock was born March 5, 1939, in Toronto, Canada. It is unclear whether his young mother, Wanita Woodcock, was a seventeen-year-old factory worker or a nineteen-year-old prostitute—the record is conflicted. An adoption was arranged after his mother was allowed to keep him for a month to breast-feed him. Adoption agency records report that already in that first month, Peter showed feeding problems and cried constantly.
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As an infant he was shunted around numerous foster homes, unable to bond with any of his foster parents. In his first year he cried constantly and slept and ate little. After his first birthday he became terrified of anybody approaching him. He learned to talk but his speech was incoherent, described as strange whining animal noises. He had problems with at least one of the foster placements at around age two—he was treated in an emergency hospital with an injured neck as a result of a beating at the hands of one foster parent.

Peter was finally placed in a stable home when he was three. His new foster parents—Frank and Susan Maynard—were an upper-middle-class couple who had a son ten years older than Peter. Susan Maynard is said to have been a forceful woman with an exaggerated sense of propriety who became very attached to the weird child who had difficulty walking and still screamed when anyone came near.

By age five Peter had stopped screaming at the approach of strangers but remained a weird and lonely child. Other children in the neighborhood refused to play with him and he became a target for bullies. Between ages seven and twelve, Woodcock was treated extensively for emotional problems in Toronto’s renowned Hospital for Sick Children.

His primary problem was a tendency to wander away from home great distances, sometimes staying away several nights. After one search, he was found cowering in some bushes and explained that he was hiding from other children. He killed the family’s pet canary, blaming it on the dog. He tore down window blinds, hacked up his socks, cut his clothing, smashed the radio, and carved crude symbols into the dining room table. He also developed a strange walk in which he would swing his arms forward on the same side he would step forward.

Woodcock says that when he was seven or eight, his mother underwent a transformation after being pushed down a railway station staircase in an attempted purse snatching. After that, he says, she would beat him with a beaded rod.

Peter lived in a vivid fantasy world full of obsessions. One of his primary obsessions was Toronto’s streetcar system and he compulsively rode and tracked the various routes. Decades later, while he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and much of Toronto’s streetcar system had been changed or dismantled, Woodcock could still recall from memory the various routes and their schedules.

Peter was sent to a nearby private school, but the weird child did not do very well there. He made no friends, participated in no games, and remained isolated from other children.

By age eleven, Peter was an angry little boy. A Children’s Aid Society report written when Woodcock was eleven years old describes him as follows:

Slight in build, neat in appearance, eye bright, and wide open, worried facial expression, sometimes screwing up of eyes, walks briskly and erect, moves rapidly, darts ahead, interested and questioning constantly in conversation . . .

He attributes his wandering to feeling so nervous that he just has to get away. In some ways, Peter has little capacity for self-control. He appears to act out almost everything he thinks and demonstrates excessive affection for his foster mother. Although he verbalizes his resentment for other children, he has never been known to physically attack another child . . .

Peter apparently has no friends. He plays occasionally with younger children, managing the play. When with children his own age, he is boastful and expresses determinedly ideas which are unacceptable and misunderstood.

At one point, when the social worker was walking with Woodcock at Toronto’s annual fair—the Exhibition—little Peter muttered, “I wish a bomb would fall on the Exhibition and kill all the children.”

Peter Woodcock was sent to a special school for emotionally disturbed children in Kingston, Ontario, a small town two hours east of Toronto. There, according to Woodcock, he began to act out on strong sexual urges with other children. He says that he had consensual intercourse with a twelve-year-old girl when he was thirteen. When Peter turned fifteen, he was discharged from the school and returned to live with his foster parents. He was reenrolled at the private school, where he remained isolated from the other children.

When Woodcock was sixteen he was sent to a public high school where kids from the neighborhood instantly recognized him and severely tormented him. Six weeks later he was transferred to a private high school. His teachers there remember him as a very bright student who excelled in science, history, and English and frequently scored 100 percent on his tests. While his peers shunned him, many adults liked him for his quick wit and intelligence. He was remembered as charming and able to hold his own in conversations. He was also a frequent visitor to a police station near his home, where he would chat with officers about police work.

Peter Woodcock’s prize possession was a red and white Pee-Wee Herman Schwinn bicycle on which he satisfied his continuing compulsion to wander. He rode the bike to the far reaches of the city, even during the Toronto deep cold winters. He evolved a fantasy in which he led a gang of five hundred invisible boys on bikes called the Winchester Heights Gang. His foster parents were aware of that fantasy and his obsession for the public transit system and compulsion to wander. But nobody knew exactly what the seventeen-year-old Peter did on his long bike rides in the city.

Even today, Toronto is a remarkably crime-free city. With 2.5 million inhabitants it registers roughly fifty-two homicides a year—one a week on average. Back in 1956, the city’s population hovered around the 1 million mark but the city averaged a mere ten homicides a year. Most murders were typically the result of domestic disputes or drunken brawls. Weird and strange unsolved homicides rarely occurred in Toronto in those days. Then on the evening of September 15, 1956, seven-year-old Wayne Mallette went out to play and failed to come home.

His body was found by the police approximately six hours later on the grounds of the Exhibition—the very same one on which Woodcock hoped a bomb would drop and kill all the children. The boy was dressed in a British schoolboy blazer, shirt, and plaid pants. It appeared that his clothing had been removed and he had then been re-dressed. The cause of death was strangulation. His face was pushed into the dirt and two bite marks were found on the body—one on the boy’s calf and the other on his buttock. There was no evidence of rape. Pennies were found ritualistically scattered near the body and the killer had apparently defecated next to the victim as well. Police found faint bicycle tracks near the crime scene. Witness had recollections of a young teenage boy on a bike in the area.

Nine days after the murder, a fourteen-year-old boy, Ronald Mowatt, skipped school and vanished for four days. He was found hiding by police in a crawlspace beneath a staircase with a blanket and pillow. To police, he seemed a likely suspect, and before the night was out he had even signed a confession stating that he had killed Mallette accidentally in a scuffle. Nobody bothered to compare the bite marks to the accused boy’s actual teeth, or if they did in those times before strict rules of discovery, nobody shared the information with the boy’s defense counsel.

Three weeks later, nine-year-old Garry Morris was found dead in a grassy area near the city’s port. The boy appeared to have been strangled into unconsciousness and beaten to death; he had died of a ruptured liver. There was a bite mark on his throat and this time paper clips seemed to have been ritualistically sprinkled near the corpse. Again, the clothing had been removed from the victim and then he had been re-dressed. Witnesses recalled the victim riding off on the front handlebars of a bike ridden by a teenage boy.

To this day there is no rational explanation why the Toronto police did not link the bite marks or the reports of the boy on a bike with the two child murders. Perhaps there was some police misbehavior behind Mowatt’s confession—backtracking might have risked the careers of some senior homicide investigators. Mowatt was quickly convicted of murder in juvenile court and packed off to a reformatory to serve an indeterminate sentence.

On January 19, 1957, Carole Voyce, a four-year-old girl, was approached by a teenage boy on a bicycle while playing in front of her home and offered a ride. She was found dead later that night in a ravine under a bridge. Her clothes had been pulled off and she had been choked into unconsciousness. Her killer had stuck his fingers into her eyes, stripped off her clothes, and inserted his finger into her genitals. Death was caused by a branch pushed through her vagina. Tracks in the snow showed that the killer had attempted to leave the scene several times, but circled back to the victim again. At one point he had kicked her in the head. He was seen by witnesses biking out by a road at the bottom of the ravine.

Still refusing to link the murder to the Mallette killing, the police at least connected the Garry Morris and the Carole Voyce murders. A reward was offered and numerous witnesses came up with a description of the boy and his bike.

Peter Woodcock, in the meantime, continued visiting at the local police station, inquiring how the investigation was coming along. Forty years later Woodcock explained, “If you’re going to do something, the last thing you do is break the patterns that you’ve set. Keep normal routines. It’s only common sense that, if you’re up to something, you don’t draw attention to yourself . . . For me to have stepped out of character by not going into the police station would have been a grave mistake. They expected me to come in on a regular basis, just because I was one of those kids who came in on a regular basis. You don’t do anything to arouse suspicion.”
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In fact, Woodcock had been terrorizing and attacking children in Toronto for the last eleven months. In March the previous year he did, however, attract police attention. Woodcock had taken a ten-year-old girl to the ravine. Woodcock recalled:

I did have plans to cut her up to see what she looked like inside. We got lost in the ravine in the dark and getting out seemed more important. I had a penknife with me. When you’re naïve, a penknife seems enough to kill with. It was a turning point. I was already troubled with my fantasies and dreams. This ten-year-old girl, I did have plans of killing her. It didn’t dawn on me that she would die. Well, I knew she would die, but that would be the extent of it. I wanted to look at the arm, see how the muscle attaches to it. This was going to be a very thorough anatomical lesson, though I don’t believe I would have been able to name a third of the things I would have seen.
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Instead Woodcock and the girl returned home three hours late. Police had been called and came to the Maynard home, but the full extent of Woodcock’s intentions remained hidden. He was scolded but not charged because no apparent harm had come to the girl. Woodcock promised his foster mother not to pick up any more children, but Woodcock says he continued to choke children into unconsciousness, strip their clothes away, and peer at their bodies. None of these crimes seem to have been reported—not a surprise in a conservatively Protestant city like Toronto of the 1950s. It was only in September when he went too far and killed his first victim, Wayne Mallette.

After the Carole Voyce murder, the two officers who had been called during the March episode quickly recalled the boy and his bike. Woodcock was arrested on the second day after the murder and quickly confessed. Revealingly he recalls, “My fear was that Mother would find out. Mother was my biggest fear. I didn’t know if the police would let her at me.”

Woodcock was found not guilty by reason of insanity and packed away into Ontario’s criminal psychiatric system. (The prosecution insisted on keeping Ronald Mowatt, the boy convicted for Wayne Mallette’s murder, incarcerated. He was not ordered released until May 1957, four months after Woodcock’s arrest. The judge scolded him: “All I have to say to you is this. You of course yourself know whether your statement was true or not, if it was not true then you brought it upon yourself, all the trouble you have been in, in connection with this case, all the trouble given your parents, simply because you failed to tell the truth.”)

Woodcock underwent thirty-five years of various forms of psychiatric therapy, including LSD treatments when they were popular in the 1960s. He was pumped full of other personality-breaking drugs: scopolamine, sodium amytal, methedrine, dexamyl.

He was subjected to “dyads”—a personality-breaking therapy in which inmates challenged each other’s belief systems. The inmates referred to these sessions as “The Hundred-Day Hate-In.” Dyads were developed in the late 1950s to early 1960s by a Harvard psychologist and former CIA interrogation and psychological warfare expert, Henry A. Murray. In the 1960s, one of Murray’s volunteer personality-destruction subjects had been a young Harvard student—Ted Kaczynski, the future Unabomber.

Woodcock was not an ideal prisoner. He engaged in homosexual acts and exploited his fellow inmates, who were often less intelligent or less sane than he was. He formed an imaginary gang, the Brotherhood. He convinced inmates that he had contact with the mythical group on the outside. In order to be initiated into the gang, inmates had to perform oral sex on Woodcock and bring him gifts of cigarettes.

Somewhere along the way,
before
the Freddy Krueger movies came out, Woodcock legally changed his name to David Michael Krueger. The reason for his choice of name remains unclear, but his rejection of Woodcock had to do with the many puns being made of the name.