Abstract
This article contributes to criminological research on cultural constructions of serial murderers by investigating the little-known Canadian case of Peter Woodcock. There is a tacit scholarly consensus that news media routinely sensationalize modern serial killers as celebrity monsters. The case of Woodcock aligns with a different theoretical trajectory geared toward explaining the relative obscurity of otherwise “made for primetime” serial murder events. Examining coverage in the local and national press, the article builds on the sparse literature concerned with absences in conventional explanations for how news media participate in the cultural construction of serial murderers. It does so by gleaning insights into the ways in which Woodcock was simultaneously framed as a sadistic sex maniac responsible for killing three young children in the 1950s and a victim of social circumstance owing to his troubled upbringing. Although Woodcock killed before the rise of the serial killer claims-making industry in the 1980s, the article concludes by reflecting on the curious absence of a retroactively reconstructed modern melodramatic storyline in light of the surreal characteristics of the investigation leading up to his arrest and the circumstances that enabled him to gruesomely kill again in 1991.
Off the radar
Canadians are familiar with some of the most recognizable American serial killers: Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, and Aileen Wuornos. On the domestic front, they are also acquainted with the details of crimes committed by notorious serial murderers such as Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, Robert Pickton, and, most recently, Bruce McArthur. Beyond Canada’s short-list of celebrity serial killers, however, very little is known about the approximately dozen other serial murderers that operated in the country since 1950, let alone those who killed before the Second World War.
This article examines media framing of Peter Woodcock, a serial murderer who, at 18 years of age, killed three children over a period of 4 months in the city of Toronto. Following his arrest in January 1957, Woodcock spent more than 30 years in a maximum-security forensic hospital for the criminally insane. In the late 1980s, however, Woodcock was transferred to a medium-security hospital, where he was granted day release under the supervision of a convicted killer and former psychiatric acquaintance. It was then that Woodcock conspired to murder, mutilate, and sexually assault the corpse of a fellow patient.
On the whole, the circumstances pertaining to the murders resembled a sensationalized TV movie melodrama more than a real-life sequence of events. The killing episodes involved a wrongfully convicted teenaged boy who confessed to and was convicted of the first murder; compelling eyewitness accounts of the actual killer in the vicinity of the crimes, a serial murderer who sexually assaulted and bit the bodies of his victims, ample forensic evidence linking Woodcock to the killings, a teenaged serial murderer who frequented police detachments leading up to his arrest, a controversial psychiatric unit that experimented on inmates, and a bizarre joint murder conspiracy involving two criminally insane killers. Yet, in contrast to archetypically “modern” constructions of celebrity serial killers, the case of Woodcock has faded into obscurity.
News media framing of Peter Woodcock is criminologically instructive in several respects. Not only does the case offer a rare methodological opportunity to compare media framing of the same convicted serial murderer across 2 killing periods separated by 34 years. It also affords opportunities to develop theoretical insights into how competing cultural narratives intersected with a set of case-specific features to condition an episodic style of media framing. The latter style of framing not only narrowed the scope and duration of reporting on ostensible connections among the murders, but it also enabled specific kinds of sensationalist speculation about sex perverts and dangerous geographies to flourish while disavowing other, more fruitful lines of investigation. Although Woodcock killed before the rise of the serial killer claims-making industry in the 1980s, the article concludes by reflecting on the curious absence of a retroactively reconstructed modern melodramatic storyline in light of the surreal characteristics of the investigation leading up to his arrest and the circumstances that enabled him to gruesomely kill again in 1991.
Serial killing, media framing, and cultural representation
Owing to a number of unsolved American murder cases in the 1970s, popular interest in serial homicide surged in the last quarter of the 20th century (Leyton, 2005 (1986); Vronsky, 2004). Although serial homicide might be as old as the Stone Age (Vronsky, 2018), American activists campaigning through the 1980s elevated serial murder to one of the most pressing social problem frames of the 1990s (Jenkins, 1994). In fact, American definitions of the serial murder problem became so influential that Soothill (1993) anticipated the social construction of a worldwide serial killer epidemic based on the exploitative rhetoric of disparate interest groups operating in what he conceptualized as an emerging serial killer industry.
Growing international interest in serial murder was bolstered by the commodification of serial killing in popular culture. Over the past three decades, documentaries, biographies, true-crime novels, movies, Internet sites, video games, and works of fiction have contributed to the consolidation of an international business network that Jarvis (2007) described as “Monsters Inc.” The enormous public interest in Hollywood films played an obvious role in encouraging the serial killer sub-genre. Beyond the impact of film, hundreds of novels, Internet sites, and television programs have exploited various aspects of serial murder—the current Netflix show Van Helsing even features a human serial killer-cum-vampire who continues his homicidal exploits in the vampiric world. Possibly most striking of all, Bonn (2014: 193–209) chronicles the interests and activities of serial killer aficionados who collect “murderabilia” ranging from killers’ fingernail clippings and locks of hair to small bags of victims’ burial dirt.
Compared to the extent of popular interest in serial murder, academic inquiry into serial killing has been surprisingly limited (Hodgkinson et al., 2017). To be sure, several comprehensive studies on serial murder are available (Fox and Levin, 2001; Hickey, 2016; Leyton, 2005 (1986); Vronsky, 2004, 2018). Many articles have also examined topics ranging from serial killing and consumer culture (Jarvis, 2007) to feminism’s first serial killer (Pearson, 2007). A reliable citation chain has been established in the academic literature, yet it might be premature to lay claim to a coherent field of “serial killer studies.”
The academic (as well as popular) literature on serial homicide is characterized by a few preoccupations, the first of which hinges on definitions of serial killing. Serial murder is conventionally defined as three or more murders that share common characteristics (so as to distinguish serial from mass and spree killing). Conventional definitions are commonly used to suggest that crimes were committed by the same person, and something of a tacit consensus has been reached that the victims of serial murder are unknown to (male) perpetrators, that crimes are sexually motivated, and that killings are demarcated by a cooling off period that happens between murders (on definitions, see Bonn, 2014; Haggerty, 2009). As critics have pointed out, however, the differences among spree and mass killings, on the one hand, and serial killing, on the other, are not always clear (Fox and Levin, 2001), and conventional definitions (despite having been revised) tend to cast serial killers narrowly as sexually driven white male predators who act alone. In this way, conventional definitional parameters not only influence the putative scope of serial killing/killers, as Jenkins (1994) demonstrates in the US context. They also reinforce popular myths about serial killers by overlooking Black killers, female killers, and those who kill members of marginalized populations (Branson, 2013; Donley and Gualtieri, 2017; Hickey, 2016).
The preoccupation with definitional debates, which is closely associated with attempts to develop and apply typologies of serial murderers, has encouraged a parallel interest in probing the psychological motivations for killing in a serial manner. Explanations based on individual psychological (and biographical) factors understandably appeal to law enforcement agencies and popular consumer entertainment markets. But as Hodgkinson et al. (2017) point out, individualizing and typological accounts not only tend toward a sensational form of voyeurism that plays on a set of (media-fueled) myths about the reasons why people kill. Their popular attraction also conceals the wider social, cultural, and historical contexts that may contribute to both opportunities for and social reactions to serial murder.
Hence, in contrast to the predominant individualizing focus on definitions, motivations, and types of killers, comparatively less has been written on the social and cultural contexts of serial killing (including social reactions to the offense). The early work of Leyton (2005 (1986) stimulated analytical interest in the sociological dimensions of serial murder, with an extra-individual focus on the historical specificity of both killers and their victims. Jenkins (1994), similarly, located the “serial murder boom” in the cultural-political context of the American New Right, with its rhetorical penchant for decadence and persecution (pp. 2–12). More recently, Haggerty (2009) built on these themes by exploring how modernity sets the institutional parameters for what it means to be a serial killer in its distinctive contemporary guise.
Efforts to conceptualize serial killing sociologically have nurtured a niche analytical focus on how news and entertainment media transmit cultural messages about serial murder events. According to Vronsky (2004), news reporting on Ted Bundy marked a transformation in public discourse in the United States, whereby the once-dominant trope of monsters was supplemented by the celebrity-type image of the handsome and charming killer. The influence of mass media on cultural meanings of serial murder has become so profound that Haggerty (2009) lays claim to a symbiotic relationship between serial killers and mass media. Not only has the mass media fostered a culture of celebrity for serial killers, he explains, whereby a field of cultural recognition that was once reserved for heroic or virtuous (i.e. merit-based) individuals has increasingly been filled with extreme killing events. Extensive media coverage on serial homicide also contributes to the formation of killers’ identities and modes of operation.
Linking together the themes of cultural context, historical specificity, monstrosity, and celebrity, Wiest (2016) examines how serial murder has been represented in the United States and United Kingdom news media. She finds that although serial murder cases are regularly featured in both national news sources, monstrosity framing differs across national contexts. In the United Kingdom, serial killers tend to be framed thematically in terms of ‘traditional monsters’—savage and animalistic—and their victims’ stories attract considerable attention. For Wiest, this suggests low value for killers in a culture that tends toward collectivism. In the United States, by contrast, serial killers tend to be framed thematically as ‘fantastic monsters’—celebrity advanced predators who possess extraordinary powers—and their victims receive comparatively little attention. The latter, for Wiest, points to American individualism and the democratizing characteristics of celebrity culture in the United States.
As research on representations of serial murderers develops, it is important to counterbalance criminological understandings of news media celebrity by inquiring into the absence of master thematic frames in serial killing events. There is a small literature on the newsworthiness of serial killings that attributes the absence of celebrated media coverage to victims’ racial and socio-economic characteristics (e.g. Branson, 2013; Donley and Gualtieri, 2017). The case of Peter Woodcock, however, aligns with a different theoretical trajectory concerned with explaining why serial killers who are otherwise “made for primetime” fade into obscurity.
Wilson et al.’s (2010) findings on the obscurity of Trevor Hardy, a British serial killer who sadistically murdered three women in the 1970s, offers a useful starting point to more fully explore news values in serial killing events. Instead of attributing newsworthiness to the social status of victims per se, Wilson et al.’s interviews with journalists who worked on the Hardy murders revealed six case-specific factors that help to explain why the events disappeared from popular and academic writings: (1) disavowal of links among the murders in the period leading up to the trial (compounded by reporting restrictions once charges were laid), (2) regional differences in the newspaper industry, (3) the socio-demographics of the area where the murders occurred, (4) the fact that Hardy was typified as mad rather than bad, (5) no catchy nickname assigned to Hardy, in part based on the absence of a protracted manhunt or identification of a serial murderer on the loose, and (6) the lack of involvement on the part of Hardy’s live-in girlfriend. Not only do Wilson et al.’s findings suggest that celebrity is conditioned by episodic and case-specific, as opposed to thematic and universal, styles of news coverage that tend to restrict rather than nurture the expansion of news reporting on serial murder events. They also intimate that media criminologists should exercise caution when generalizing about cultural representations of serial murder events, both past and present, in the absence of a more fulsome body of empirical, historical, and cross-cultural evidence.
Stranger than fiction
Peter Woodcock was born on 5 March 1939 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Woodcock passed through a sequence of foster homes after he was orphaned at 1-month of age; he found a permanent home when he was of age. Over the next decade, Woodcock was enrolled at several schools for disturbed children. During this time period, he increasingly fantasized about leading a 500-strong group of boys on bikes that he called the Winchester Heights gang (Bourrie, 2016).
On Saturday 7 September 1956, Woodcock (then 17) abducted a 3-year-old boy. His victim was bound by the hands and neck, struck on the head, and forced to look at Woodcock’s penis. When the boy was found wandering around Toronto’s High Park, he had scratches and bite marks above his navel. 1 No police report of the incident was filed until after Woodcock committed his first murder the following week.
On Saturday, 15 September, 7-year-old Wayne Mallette was lured from the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) grounds by a boy whom witnesses described as a pimply faced teenager on a fancy new red bike wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a gray windbreaker. Mallette’s body was found shortly after midnight. After trying to engage Mallette in some kind of sex game (Hendley, 2018), Woodcock shoved his face in the dirt to the point of asphyxiation, bit his legs repeatedly, and undressed and redressed the body. Before leaving the CNE grounds, Woodcock stopped to ask a night watchman if he had ever found a body in the bushes, and to report that he (Woodcock) had seen a boy who looked just like him running from the bushes near the trains.
Owing to eyewitness accounts, dental castings made from the bite marks, and bicycle tire tracks found at the scene of the crime, detectives were confident from the beginning that they were looking for a teen suspect. While interviewing children in the neighborhood, police learned of a strange boy on a bike whom had been making lewd suggestions to young girls over the summertime period (Bourrie, 2016).
Following up on a tip, police arrested 14-year-old Ron Moffett. Moffett was a local teen who frequented the area where Mallette was murdered. Despite the fact that Moffett did not fit the eyewitness accounts of the boy on the fancy new bike (he was neither able to ride a bike not did he wear horn-rimmed glasses), and that casts made of his teeth did not match the bite marks, police coerced a detailed confession from Moffett. Moffett, despite having reliable alibis who submitted sworn statements to police, was charged with and convicted of murder. 2
As Moffett awaited sentencing, Woodcock killed again. On 6 October 1956, Woodcock picked up 9-year-old Gary Morris and rode him to Cherry Beach, a rundown area of Toronto’s eastern shoreline. Morris was choked until he passed out. Woodcock undressed Morris, jumped on him repeatedly, and bit his neck. The body was discovered over a week later, yet connections between the murders of Morris and Mallette were disavowed rather than exploited in the press. In fact, links between the killings went unheeded, even though a friend of Morris’ provided an eyewitness account of the boy on the bike, going so far as to accompany police to a cycle shop to identify the style of bike that Woodcock rode.
On the afternoon of 19 January 1957, Woodcock approached two children on his bike. Four-year-old Carole Voyce agreed to take a ride, after which Woodcock lured her into a nearby ravine. Voyce was choked and sexually assaulted. Woodcock jammed his fingers into her eyes and trust a stick into her body. Following a police search, her frozen body was discovered late that evening.
Over the next 72 hours, police officers conducted random interrogations with teens on the streets of Toronto. In the midst of the manhunt, Woodcock paid a friendly visit to a local police detachment as per his weekly routine. It was not until an artist’s drawing was published in a local paper that Woodcock was apprehended.
Peter Woodcock was found not guilty of the murder of Voyce by reason of insanity and held on Warrant of the Lieutenant-Governor. 3 He was sent to the Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit in Penetanguishene, Ontario, where all of the provinces criminally insane offenders were housed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Oak Ridge’s “Social Therapy Unit” was notorious for using experimental totalizing therapies such as scopolamine-methedrine and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-based disruptive strategies to manifest and ultimately disrupt the alleged inner chaos of psychopaths (Weisman, 1995). Some of the techniques included chaining nude inmates together as a way to force them to empathize with one another. Woodcock spent decades at Oak Ridge before being transferred to a medium-security hospital in Brockville, Ontario in 1989 amid trends toward deinstitutionalization.
In his time at Oak Ridge, Woodcock met a fellow inmate named Bruce Hamill, a patient from 1978 to 1980, before Hamill was transferred to Brockville and eventually released. In 1977, Hamill was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity after he stabbed his neighbor to death dozens of times. In 1988, he was released from his Warrant of the Lieutenant-Governor and his criminal record was expunged.
While in care at Brockville, Hamill began visiting Woodcock (who changed his name to Michael David Krueger) when the latter was permitted visitors. Based on positive progress assessments, Krueger was granted his first 3-hour pass to leave the grounds under the supervision of Hamill. The two men planned to meet a fellow patient (also a former inmate at Oak Ridge) at a secluded site on the grounds of the hospital on 13 July 1991. Krueger and Hamill subdued their victim before mutilating and sodomizing the body. After chopping at the corpse more than 100 times, Krueger walked to a police station where he confessed to the murder. Krueger died in his cell at Oak Ridge on 5 March 2010 at the age of 71.
The Toronto bicycle killer
To understand how Canadian newspaper media framed Woodcock, his victims, and the circumstances pertaining to the first three killings, coverage in two local and one national broadsheet was analyzed. The Toronto Daily Star (hereafter TDS), today widely known as the Toronto Star, was a local newspaper published until 1971. The so-called paper for the people combined a civil libertarian focus on workers’ rights, women’s rights, and social inclusion with a sensational focus on regional crime and deviance. Throughout the 1940s, the TDS was the country’s largest daily (Hayes, 1992). By 1957, daily circulation numbers reached 387,000 until a price increase reduced daily circulation to 316,000. 4
The Telegram was a populist-conservative broadsheet published between 1876 and 1971. From its beginning as a rival to the TDS, the Telegram was influenced by early forms of American-style infotainment. With a strong focus on local issues geared toward middle- and lower-income readers, the Telegram averaged daily circulation numbers of approximately 192,000—making it the third top circulating daily behind the TDS and the Globe and Mail (GM) (Hayes, 1992).
The GM is one of two current-day national dailies. With strong ties to the city of Toronto, the morning daily was oriented toward the educated middle and upper classes. Promoted as a politically independent national newspaper, the GM was at times envisioned as the Canadian equivalent to The Times of London. In practice, the perception of the GM as a highbrow quality morning daily often took the form of critical editorial stances on reporting that appeared in the other two main Toronto dailies (Hayes, 1992).
Coverage between 17 September 1956 and 26 January 1957 was analyzed across the first three murder episodes. All coverage appearing in the Canadian press generally (24 articles) between 13 July 1991 and 31 December 2018 was examined in relation to the final killing. Newspaper articles corresponding to the first three killing episodes were obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers and/or microfilm news reels. Articles that mentioned Woodcock after the final killing were obtained from Lexis-Nexus. Owing to the episodic nature of the coverage, which spanned a period of approximately 1 week for each killing, newspaper articles on the first three killings were coded for number of stories, front page coverage (featured/other), primary focus (family, victims, suspect), the suspect (in the third killing), and visual evidence (photographs and illustrations). The latter is important because photographs/illustrations of victims, offenders, crime scenes, and those indirectly affected by murder provide valuable rhetorical resources for crime news reporting (Greer, 2017). Articles published after 1991 were coded for number of stories, primary signifier (killer, serial killer, monster, insanity), and primary focus (system, Woodcock, victim, other serial killers). In addition to coding the coverage, a qualitative content analysis (Wiest, 2016) was conducted to understand how and why the killings were framed episodically.
Episode 1: the murder of Wayne Mallette
On 15 September 1956, Wayne Mallette joined his family on a weekend trip to visit his grandmother on the western edge of the old City of Toronto (south Parkdale) near the CNE grounds. 5 The CNE’s carnival games and amusement rides attracted large crowds during the month of August, but became vacant by September. Shortly after dinner, Mallette wandered to the main railway line that cut through the CNE. He met a boy on a shiny new touring bike who took him to view the near-by trains. Mallette’s body was found shortly after midnight.
During the sampling period, each newspaper covered the story in equal proportion. As Tables 1–3 illustrate, all three newspapers featured the story; front-page coverage across the papers was accompanied by photographs or illustrations of the victim, the victim’s family members, police detectives, and/or the area where the murder happened exclusively on the first day of coverage. Visual imaginary was more prominent in the local papers, and although police, based on crime scene evidence (eyewitness accounts, dental evidence, bicycle tire tracks leading from the murder scene), were searching for a teenaged suspect from the start, local media reporting was clouded by sensationalized speculation about sex perverts.
Episode 1, Telegram, 17–24 September.
Episode 1, Toronto Daily Star, 17–24 September.
Episode 1, Globe and Mail, 17–24 September.
The signifier of the sex pervert carried considerable cultural currency in the 1950s. Following the Second World War, sex crimes against children emerged as a prominent social problem frame in Canada and the United States. To address the putative problem of sexual perversion, Canadian parliament adopted criminal sexual psychopath legislation in 1948. The latter consisted of a hybrid legal-medical discourse aimed at regulating sexual deviancy. Although there was a popular consensus that sex criminals suffered from a mental disorder rather than criminal indifference to the plight of others (Chenier, 2008), the problematization of sexual deviancy in popular news media routinely scapegoated same-sex erotica.
This is part of the reason why the TDS’s front-page headline on Monday 17 September 1956 prominently announced, “Boy Murdered in CNE Ground Seized While Watching Trains: Seven-Year-Old Boy Choked, Bitten, Murdered.” The ensuing article, which appeared alongside illustrations of, respectively, Mallette and his parents, reported that the victim was seized from behind by the throat, dragged into the bushes, and choked to death by a sex pervert. Based on claims made by police officers and the city coroner, the article speculated that Mallette was killed by one of the sex perverts recently chased from High Park (west of the CNE grounds), owing to bite marks on his body and dirt allegedly found on the underside of his clothes. 6 Tellingly, the first portion of the front-page article briefly mentioned that a 15-year-old boy who was seen riding at a fast rate out of the CNE grounds might hold important clues about what happened, but the focus of the article was trained on recent indecency charges laid against sex deviants in High Park. 7
The front-page of the 17 September Telegram carried the more equivicol headline, “Slaying or Accident? Boy’s Death Mystery,” with a sub-headline reading, “Pervert Suspected But Lad’s Killing May be Mishap.” Bolstered by photographs of Mallette and his four family members taking up a quarter page, the article reported that Mallette was either killed by a sex pervert or died accidently in a scuffle with another boy. Crime experts were cited, declaring that no evidence of foul play had been found. A separate article appearing on the second page (“A Father’s Nightmare!”) detailed John Mallette’s anguish.
The GM began reporting on 17 September under the still more restrained front-page headline, “Mystery Seen as Boy Dies in CNE Bush.” The article, which appeared under a small photograph of the victim, stated that police were uncertain if Mallette was murdered or died as the result of an accident. Owing to differences between local and national reporting styles, the article did not mention sex perverts, alternatively centering on the boy on the bike who could hold important information about what happened. The coverage made no mention of sexual molestation by way of references to disturbed clothing, stating only that a small bruise was found on Wayne’s neck. In keeping with the narrative focus on the family’s plight, however, large photos of Wayne’s father and the crime scene appeared on Page 5.
The tone of coverage in both local newspapers from 18 to 21 September converged around the boy on the bike. On the 18 September, the TDS reported that police were interested in speaking with two boys: one boy who questioned the CNE watchman about bodies in the bushes and a second boy who was seen riding from the CNE grounds. The following day’s coverage focused on confirmation that the bite marks found on Mallette’s body were made by a youth between 13 and 21 years of age. Similar coverage appeared in the Telegram, albeit under the more sensational headline “Youth Killed Boy 7: Throttled, Face Held in Earth.” In both papers, the focus on family members’ anguish, sex deviants, and visuals was abandoned; speculation about a scuffle between Wayne Mallette and the mystery boy became the primary focus.
Following suite, coverage in the GM abandoned visuals and the focus on family member’s anguish. Yet in keeping with its idiomatic orientation, coverage was also indignant toward the local papers. The GM emphasized the baseless accusations about sex deviants, lamenting local coverage that Mallette was the victim of a sex pervert. The remaining coverage in the GM favored the theory that Mallette was accidently killed in a wrestling contest gone bad, even holding out the possibility that Mallette ran into a guy wire.
As the GM challenged the tawdry character of the coverage appearing in the local papers, the latter reported that a terror-stricken 14-year-old boy was being held in connection with Mallette’s murder. Based on information revealed by police, the TDS reported that the boy, who could not be named, became locked in a struggle with Mallette. Reporting indicated that the boy bit Mallette on the legs to loosen his hold. The TDS also reported that the boy spoke to the CNE watch guard before pedaling away to ditch the stolen bike he was riding (the alleged bike was not recovered). An accompanying front-page article focused on the accused’s parents, who drew attention to a sworn statement by another youth who was with their son at the time that the murder happened.
The boy held in connection with Mallette’s murder was Ron Moffatt, a 14-year-old Torontonian who worked at the CNE during the summer of 1956. On Tuesday 18 September, Moffatt ran away from home to avoid punishment for skipping school the previous day. The local papers provided extensive details on how Moffatt hid away in a first-floor basement closest in his family’s apartment building for 4 days. After a reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of Mallette’s killer, a local shopkeeper reported seeing Moffatt, then reported missing, entering the apartment building.
Inconceivably, Moffatt confessed to and was subsequently convicted of the murder. Despite the fact that police records noted that Moffatt explained he was incapable of riding a bike, and that he did not fit eyewitness accounts of the suspect, 8 he was nevertheless driven to the crime scene as part of his confession. The following day, police even took Moffatt to the University of Toronto’s Dental College, where casts of his teeth were made and photographs of marks on his body were taken to compare with the bite marks on Mallette’s body (Hendley, 2018).
Hence, from the first day of reporting, the local papers—and in different ways, the national one—sensationalized the murder. The murder was sensationalized in the local press by juxtaposing images of a potential sex pervert to the anguish felt by family members. Visual images of the victim and the family members were prominent on the first day of coverage in all papers, reinforced by images of police searches and the geographical area. Subsequent days’ coverage, which was informed by incomplete and erroneous police information that culminated in a wrongful accusation of (and confession to) accidental homicide, brought episodic closure to reporting within a week. In light of the circumstances pertaining to the second killing (below), inexplicably abandoned in this narrowing story line was eyewitness accounts of the boy on the bike (neighborhood kids, the watchman), Moffatt’s alibis, the missing bike, and the forensic dental evidence gathered by police.
Episode 2: the murder of Gary Morris
On Saturday 6 October 1956, 9-year-old Gary Morris attended a matinee in downtown Toronto. He returned to his home later that afternoon, accompanied by a friend, William Christie. The two boys were approached by a teenager on a red bicycle outside Morris’ house. Morris accepted an invitation to ride with the teenager to Cherry Beach on the eastern shoreline of Toronto (Hendley, 2018). Morris’ body was discovered 5 days later.
In the period spanning 8–15 October, each newspaper covered the missing person-cum-murder story. As Tables 4–6 illustrate, the newspapers published photographs or illustrations of the victim’s family members, police detectives, the area, and the mysterious bicycle. The use of visual imagery was more pronounced in the local press, and similarities between the murders of Mallette and Morris were subtly downplayed if not explicitly disavowed.
Episode 2, Telegram, 8–15 October.
Episode 2, Toronto Daily Star, 8–15 October.
Episode 2, Globe and Mail, 8–15 October.
On Tuesday 9 October, the front-page of TDS reported on a 9-year-old missing boy who attended a special “retarded-pupils” class at Duke of York School. The article was accompanied by three photographs—of Morris alone, of his parents, and of Morris standing with his two sisters. In the first two paragraphs, emphasis was placed on the fact that Morris lived on Queen Street East in Cabbagetown, noting that the area was notorious for its tragic lost-child cases. The article made no mention of Mallette’s murder (3 weeks earlier), and it even speculated that Morris might have run away to join the circus.
The idiomatic tone changed the following day, exemplified by the front-page headline reading, “HINT BOY SLAIN: Teeth Marks on Throat.” The caption that appeared under three large photographs of Morris suggestively indicated that his body was found approximately 35 feet from the nearest train. The accompanying article zeroed in on teeth marks found on Morris’ neck, yet connections between the murders of Morris and Mallette were disavowed based on claims made by a University of Toronto dental professor who wrongly determined that the teeth marks found on Morris’ neck were not only different than the ones found on Mallette’s body but also made by adult upper dentures. Remarkably, the article noted that a detailed eyewitness account of the bicycle and the 14-year-old boy that Morris rode off with was provided by William Christie. Still, the news item concluded by stressing how the Cherry Beach area is known for undesirables.
Coverage in the Telegram adopted a more sensational stance. Flanked by a large photograph of Morris, the front-page of the 10 October edition dramatically proclaimed, “LOST BOY, 9, MURDERED: False Teeth Slayer Sought: Sadistic Killer Bit Boy Victim.” Citing the results of an autopsy report, the article opened by declaring that Morris was suffocated by a crazed sex pervert who viciously bit his neck. Supporting evidence was offered from the dentistry professor, who not only claimed that Morris was bitten by an adult male with upper dentures but added that the murder resembled a one-and-a-half year old cold-case that traces to Morris’ neighborhood. The remainder of the article, which appeared alongside four large photographs of the crime scene, the lead detective, and Morris’ classmates, described the search as well as sex deviants who frequented Cherry Beach.
In contrast to the local papers, only one photograph of Morris was published in the GM. The morning editions of 8, 9, and 10 October carried descriptive accounts of the murder and the search process. Following the discovery of the body, the GM carried two short articles on Page 5 without any accompanying photographs or illustrations. The GM reported that police compared the murders of Morris and Mallette, and that they speculated that a copycat killing might have occurred because of the teeth marks. Eyewitness accounts of the boy on the bike were downplayed, and Cherry Beach area was problematized.
In the days to follow, the tone of reporting varied across newspapers, but all of the coverage concentrated on the mystery boy who rode the red racing bike. On 11 October, the TDS carried the front-page story claiming that a sadist killed Morris. Sourcing police inspectors, the article speculated that the youth on the bike has some connection with Morris’ death. The cyclist on the red racing bike was described as a teen who wore a windbreaker and glasses. Yet no mention was made of the boy in the CNE case. The article, moreover, reported that impressions taken from the boy held in connection with Mallette’s murder (Ron Moffatt) were used to rule out any connection to the murder of Morris. The article cites police inspectors’ bewilderment that the boy who carried Morris to Cherry Beach had not come forward.
Coverage in the Telegram continued to highlight the dangers of the area where Morris was murdered, the boy on the bike, and the bike itself. An artist’s composition of the suspected youth appeared on the third page, and an illustration of the bicycle with arrows pointing to unique features (fenders, lights) appeared on Page 2. The accompanying three articles provided details of past crimes against children in the east end, noting that police were rounding up “wine hounds” at Cherry Beach. Similar to reporting in the TDS, reporting in the Telegram disavowed links to Mallette’s murder, even carrying a separate story about how Morris’ father did not believe that a youth was involved in his son’s death.
Similar to reporting on the first murder, therefore, coverage of the second murder was sensationalized from the start. Speculation about sex perverts persisted in local coverage, bolstered by pejorative references to the geographical area where the body was found, the neighborhood Morris grew up in, and photographs/illustrations of the victim and the murder scene. Owing to expert primary definitions, what would otherwise seem like obvious parallels between the murders of Morris and Mallette were downplayed, reinforcing the episodic character of the coverage. More bizarre was the dearth of critical and speculative coverage about Ron Moffatt’s arrest. Coverage converged around the boy on the bike, presenting composite illustrations of the rider and the vehicle. Yet doubt and confusion persisted about the role he played.
Episode 3: the murder of Carole Voyce
On Saturday 19 January 1957, 4-year-old Carol Voyce was playing with a friend, John Auld, in front of her apartment complex on Danforth Avenue. Woodcock approached the children on his bike. He rode Voyce to the Don Valley ravine where he strangled her, removed her snowsuit, jammed his fingers in her eyes, sexually assaulted her, and thrust a stick into her body. Voyce’s body was found late that evening.
The murder of Voyce, and the subsequent arrest of Woodcock, was extensively covered in the local press. As Tables 7–9 illustrate, reporting was saturated with visual imagery of the victim, her family members, and friends of the family (in addition to maps, diagrams, and photos of the area). Reporting began on Monday, 21 January. The TDS ran full-page front coverage (four separate stories, accompanied by photographs of Voyce and Auld, as well as a revised illustration of the boy on the bike). The lead story reported that police were appealing to the mother of a teen-aged sex killer suspected of committing two murders. In keeping with the established story line, the article reported that police were checking truant roles, noting that reports of a boy missing from school led to the arrest of Mallette’s murderer. Despite the fact that two eye-witness accounts of the boy on the bike indicated that the youth had a pimply face and wore horn-rimmed glasses (in addition to detailed descriptions of the red racing bike), no connection was made to the murder of Mallette.
Episode 3, Telegram, 21–26 January.
Episode 3, Toronto Daily Star, 21–26 January.
Episode 3, Globe and Mail, 21–26 January.
Reporting in the Telegram similarly consisted of sensationalized front-page coverage on 21 January. The main article (of three) reported that police cruisers were ordered to make spot checks on the homes of Auld and Voyce’s parents in case the sadistic sex maniac returned to the scene of the crime. More vivid details of the crime were reported in the Telegram, alongside a half-page composite illustration of the boy on the bike (headline: “Do You Know This Boy?”) and an adjacent half-page photograph of Voyce (headline: “Carol Voyce, Lovely. So Shy.”). On Page 3 of the same edition, photographs of the murder scene, the parents, the victim and her siblings, a local school bike rack, and Auld and his parents covered three-quarters of the page.
In sharp contrast to the local papers, the GM carried a single front-page article accompanied by one photograph of Voyce. The tone of the coverage was direct, referring to the rape and mutilation of a 4-year-old girl. A caption situated within the article described the suspected youth, and the article drew a link between the murders of Morris and Voyce (failing to mention Mallette). On page 17, eight photographs of the police, the crime scene, and Auld appear.
Woodcock was arrested on the morning of 21 January. The previous day, officers working in the North York police detachment received details of the suspect, including a composite drawing. The details of the case resembled a reported kidnapping incident they investigated the previous June where Woodcock was detained and questioned after he was found with a missing 10-year-old girl. Recognizing the composite drawing of Woodcock, police brought him in for question. Woodcock admitted to riding in the ravine where Voyce was murdered, and, reminiscent of previous claims made to the CNE night watchman, he claimed to have seen a boy who looked just like him racing from the area.
The front page of the 22 January 1957 edition of the TDS carried a headline, “ALLEGE BOY, 17 KILLER” adjacent to large photographs of Voyce and Woodcock. Seven separate articles appeared on the front page, along with a third photograph of Woodcock being escorted by police under a blanket. Yet in contrast to conventional arguments that serial murders, especially when they kill newsworthy victims such as young children, are sensationalized by news media as extra-human monsters, the coverage was sympathetic to both Woodcock and his family members. Woodcock was described as a model child who was fully accepted by his well-to-do foster family. Based on claims made by his family members and sources representing the Children’s Aid Society, he was humanized as a normal child and a lover of music, paintings, birds, and trains who was adjusting well despite being handicapped from infancy.
Coverage in the Telegram adopted a more sarcastic and indignant tone. Under the running head, “He’s Charged With . . . Carol’s Murder,” which was presented on opposing sides of the front-page, the bold headline in the center of the page read, “GARY, TOO? LINE-UP TO DECIDE.” Surrounded by five photographs/illustrations of Voyce, Morris, Woodcock (two), and police officers, the three front-page articles stress Woodcock’s emotional disturbances and imaginary fantasies. The Telegram even published six sequential photographs of models who reconstructed the abduction of Voyce. The first photograph depicts a man wearing a white facemask and glasses approaching a child (also wearing white facemask) on a bike (caption: “1—Friendly Boy Approaches Girl on Danforth Ave”). The subsequent photos (captions: “2—Girl Goes For Ride,” 3—Cycle Along Busy Danforth,” 4—Walk Down Beside Viaduct,” 5—Leave Bicycle, Walk Under Bridge,” 6—He Leaves Along Tracks) eerily depict the sequence of events leading up to Voyce’s murder.
The GM reported the arrest of Woodcock on the front page. In a factual column without any visual imagery, the quarter-page article provided an overview of how he was detained. A second article appeared on Page 5, detailing the 250-man search for the killer. Woodcock was not named in the article, and none of the coverage mentioned Morris or Mallette.
Throughout the rest of the week, the TDS and the Telegram carried articles detailing the anguish of Voyce’s parents and of Woodcock’s foster parents, as well as the reopening of the Mallette Case. The articles drew attention to the wrongful conviction of Ron Moffatt, noting that seven witnesses placed Moffatt at a location other than the murder scene during his trial and that, at the request of Moffatt’s mother, Ron was administered sodium pentothal (truth serum) by psychiatrists (the results were never disclosed to the press). Both papers expressed sympathy for the families, and the Telegram ran a serious of articles on sex deviation, early detection, and the importance of a cure.
Compared to coverage in the local press, however, reporting in the GM was negligible. Notably, the 26 January edition carried three editorial columns under the shared headline reading “The ‘Pre-Trail’ of Peter Woodcock.” The editorials target the Telegram and the TDS for customarily trying a suspect prior to legal trail: We admit the useful function of the press in helping the police in apprehending a suspect by widely publicizing the description of the man sought. We admit the useful function of the press in publicizing the trial of a man accused of a crime. . . However, we do not admit that the press serves any useful function in smearing a man once apprehended, in describing him in intimate detail in close association with the Crown evidence and in putting his family into the pitiless glare of publicity by identifying him in every conceivable way—address, church school, friends, past biography and the like.
The editorials noted that the police were not entirely blameless in enabling unrestrained libelous sensationalism, and that if Woodcock was found not guilty his life could be ruined. The editorials each concluded that Woodcock could never receive a fair, unbiased trial in Toronto.
Almost famous
Woodcock was found not guilty on account of insanity and sent to the Oak Ridge Psychiatric Hospital, where he resided for the next 34 years. Caught up in trends toward psychiatric deinstitutionalization, Woodcock was transferred to the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital in 1989. Part of deinstitutionalization involved permitting patients to receive visitors and short day-trips into the community under the supervision of an approved escort.
The first and only community visit that Woodcock (by then known as Krueger) took was on 13 July 1991. Under the supervision of Bruce Hamill, the conspirators lured fellow patient Dennis Kerr to a remote location on the hospital grounds. Kerr was murdered and his corpse was mutilated and sexually assaulted. 9
Newspaper coverage on the final killing was unexpectedly minimal—surprising not least because the killings committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Holmoka were being reported in the Canadian press in June 1991. As Table 10 indicates, only 24 news items referenced Woodcock/Krueger between July 1991 and 31 December 2018 (14 between 1991 and 2006). Of the three articles that were published in 1991, the final killing is used as an entry point to discuss an earlier 1991 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that ordered Parliament to develop new legislation for detaining people found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. Carole Voyce is the only victim mentioned from the first killing period, and Woodcock’s/Krueger’s impoverished background is derived from news reporting in January 1957.
Episode 4, Canadian Press, 13 July 1991–31 December 2018.
Media reporting in 1992 (four articles) was set off by a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Kerr family. The articles were indexed to the administrative negligence that led to the murder-mutilation, but the primary focus was trained on unique details of Krueger’s psychopathology. Specifically, during his time at Oak Ridge, Krueger’s fantasies about the Winchester Heights Gang morphed into delusions about something he called The Brotherhood or The Praetorian Guard (the latter refers to the elite Roman Army). Representing himself as a field representative for the Guard, Krueger recruited Hamill to join the imaginary organization. The initiation ritual required to gain entrance was twofold: first, oral sex performed on the recruiter and second, murdering someone while sodomizing them.
The first time that Krueger as referred to a serial killer was in a 1994 segment of the Toronto Star (Bourrie, 1994). Author and journalist Mark Bourrie, while researching By Reason of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story (Bourrie, 1997), provided a comprehensive overview of the killing episodes in the context of a corner’s jury into the decision to permit community visits. Three years later, Bourrie penned two other another special segments for the Toronto Star, where he continued to link Krueger with other serial killers. In other words, conceptualization of Woodcock as a “mad” serial killer came from the emerging Canadian true crime genre rather than the mainstream press.
Krueger was not mentioned in the Canadian news media again until March 2010, when Mark Bourrie wrote an obituary of sorts on “the serial killer they couldn’t cure.” The special segment provided an overview of Woodcock’s/Krueger’s killing career, accompanied by images of his three victims in the 1950s. Three articles appeared in the Canadian press in 2012. The first mentioned Woodcock/Krueger in relation to the publication of Mellor’s (2012) Cold North Killers, a true-crime compellation of Canadian serial killer. The other articles linked Woodcock to serial killer Russel Maurice Johnson, an inmate at the Brockville Hospital who had requested transfer to a community hospital. In 2014, Woodcock/Krueger received passing mention in three news articles written about the serial homicides committed by Cody Legebokoff, one of Canada’s youngest serial killers at age 24. Finally, a retrospective appeared on Woodcock in the Toronto Star in 2017 for no apparent reason, where he was mentioned among other Toronto-based serial killers when Bruce McArthur was arrested for killing five men (and burying their remains in flowerpots).
Suffice it to say, the post-1991 media framing of Krueger was underwhelming. Woodcock was increasingly conceptualized as a serial killer after 1994, categorized as one among several Canadian serial murderers. Although Krueger’s profile was elevated mainly by the emerging true-crime genre, he remains almost famous—discussed in the small Canadian true-crime literature, yet unambiguously obscure in relation to the likes of Canada’s celebrity serial murderers.
Conclusion
The criminological literature concerned with media representations of serial murder events pivots on a tacit consensus: namely, that news media sensationalize modern serial murderers thematically by casting them as variations on celebrity monsters (Wiest, 2016). In some national-cultural contexts, the thematic master framing of serial killers tends to take the form of traditional monsters who are typified by animalistic features. In other contexts, serial killers are thematically framed as fantastic monsters who are typified as possessing extraordinary powers. Not only is there a glaring absence of historical work on how news media framed serial murder cases prior to the 1970s, however. There is also a dearth of empirical evidence to support the contemporary consensus.
Accordingly, the present study responded to Wilson et al.’s (2010) call for further investigation into the interaction between serial killing and news media. By identifying a set of features unique to the Woodcock/Krueger case, the analysis demonstrated how newspaper media framed the killings (especially that last one) is at odds with conventional criminological characterizations of serial murder events. In keeping with “modern” representations of serial killing/killers, newspaper media demonstrated a clear interest in sensationalizing the first three murders. They did so by harnessing the regional trope of sex deviants to make sense of the killings, reinforced by a series of photographs, illustrations, and stories detailing family members’ anguish. Although there were important idiomatic differences between local and national newspapers, case-specific idiosyncrasies conditioned an episodic style of reporting that narrowed the scope and duration of the coverage.
The episodic style of framing poses a number of implications for how media criminologist understand the relationship between news values and the serial killing claims-making industry. As Iyengar (1991) says about the framing of broader political events, episodic news frames focus on discrete (even private) experiences by presenting portraits of single events. He contrasts episodic frames to thematic ones: news frames that focus on long term (public) trends and are issue- rather than event-driven. The distinction is important for Iyengar because different styles of media framing pose implications for how a given problem is understood and the kinds of solutions that are pursued.
In the case of Woodcock/Krueger, episodic news framing was conditioned by a set of case-specific features that posed real-life implications for the investigation. By disavowing ostensible connections among the murders, the news media’s role in finding the actual killer was profoundly diminished. In other words, by portraying the murders in terms of discrete episodes, the preferred solution to the problem of two remarkably similar child murders was to attend to sex deviants and dangerous geographies. The latter form of sensationalism was not only enabled by the episodic style of news framing, especially after the second murder. It also helped to reinforce that mode of reporting.
Beyond the specific details of the killings committed by Woodcock/Krueger, the study provides at least three important insights into the ways that criminologists have hitherto explained the interaction between serial killing and news media. The first insight concerns interactions among news values and local contexts. Wilson et al.’s study of English news values in the Hardy case identified a number of case-specific factors to explain why the events disappeared from popular and academic writings. Although features of news reporting in the 1970s cannot be seamlessly grafted onto the Woodcock/Krueger case, they serve as a valuable starting point to glean further insights into the importance of episodic news framing in the social construction of serial murders.
The second insight, then, concerns the absence of thematic framing in serial murder events. Wiest’s (2016) findings provide a critical (and curiously rare) set of empirical insights into some of the nuances found in serial murder representations across US and UK news media outlets. Rather than singularly casting serial murderers as sensationalized predators defined by their undifferentiated monstrosity, Wiest demonstrated how cultural meanings embedded in news media representations vary across national and cultural contexts. Wiest’s findings signal is a need for further research on the homogenization of the celebrity monster images. In a similar way, the present study’s findings on the episodic framing of serial murder events point to the need for further research on how news values articulate in relation to historical as well as contemporary media frames.
Hence, the third insight concerns the importance of conducting historical and contemporary empirical research on media framing of serial murder events (and at least in the present study, connections between historical and contemporary frames). In the Canadian context alone, the scholarly silence on media framing of serial murderers is astounding. Not only is there virtually no scholarly attention focused on killings carried out by obscure serial murderers ranging from Woodcock/Krueger to Cody Legebokoff (a teen killer who murdered four women between 2009 and 2010). There is also very little scholarly research on Canada’s celebrity serial killers—especially Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo.
In pursuing future research in its historical and contemporary guises, two (potentially connected) lines of inquiry could prove fruitful. The first pertains to the relationship between media framing, serial killing, and mental illness. Mental illness did not play a central role in the initial framing of Peter Woodcock, but it was a recurring feature of framing after 1991 (albeit subsumed under the emerging trope of a “mad” serial killer). It is not possible to conclude that the dearth of coverage on the final killing resulted from the foregone conclusion that Woodcock’s/Krueger was insane. Yet by drawing comparisons to other mentally ill killers—such as Beverly Allitt, the so-called Angel of Death— valuable insights could be generated.
Related, the second line of potentially fruitful future research pertains to cultural context in the framing of serial murder events. The Woodcock/Krueger case presented the rare opportunity to compare killings committed by the same serial murderer over a 34 year period. In the absence of interviews with the few journalists who wrote about the final killing, our understanding of why the newsworthiness of the sensational killing event was low remains incomplete and speculative. Still, one explanation is that journalists consulted the textual record from the ‘50s and reproduced the same media logic. The data Point in this direction. Moreover, notwithstanding the efforts of true-crime writers, the bizarre details of the final killing—which in relation to the earlier circumstances of Woodcock’s crimes is made for prime time—has done little to encourage the reconstruction of a modern melodramatic storyline. Similar to the case of Trevor Hardy, then, the Woodcock killings raise doubts about the circumstances that allow serial killers to have newsworthiness and ascend to the status of modern celebrities. At the same time, it calls out for future research—comparatively, cross-culturally, and historically.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
