Peter Woodcock was a teen killer, serial killer and certified psychopath needless to say he was one scary individual. In this article on My Crime Library we are going to take a closer look at Peter Woodcock aka David Michael Krueger.
Peter Woodcock Childhood
Peter Woodcock was born David Michael Krueger in Peterborough Ontario to a seventeen year old woman who would give him up for adoption when he was a month old. Peter would bounce from foster home to foster home whose foster families noted he seemed to refuse to bond with anyone.
As Peter Woodcock aged he was still showing unusual behaviors for a toddler as he appeared to fear everyone. Around this time it became apparent that he suffered from abuse in at least one of the homes.
By the age of three Peter Woodcock would be placed in a stable home who would bring Peter to the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto to help the poorly adjusted child for extensive treatment over the years.
By the age of eleven Peter Woodcock was still performing poorly in social setting and was constantly being bullied by his peers.
By the time Peter Woodcock was twelve years old he was sent to a school for emotionally disturbed children. The school which required its students to live on premise noted that Woodcock would act aggressively towards other students in a sexual manner.
By the time Peter Woodcook was fifteen he would be discharged from the special school and sent to a private school in which he was soon to be bullied again by his peers. Peter would try his luck in a public high school however but again he would be bullied. His teachers would note as a bright student who excelled in most students and aced a high number of his tests.
Peter Woodcock First Murders
Peter Woodcock was seventeen years old when he murdered a seven year old boy in Toronto. According to court documents Peter Woodcock would lure the seven year old boy out of site and would murder the child.
A month later Peter Woodcock would murder a nine year old boy. Peter would find the nine year old boy then carried him off on his bike to another neighborhood where the boy was beaten to death.
Two months later Peter Woodcock would murder a four year old girl. The little girl was carried off again on Peter’s bike and she would die from internal bleeding after Woodcock shoved a stick into her vagina.
Peter Woodcock Arrest And Trial
Peter Woodcock was seen riding his bike away from the last victim. A sketch composite was created and posted on newspapers in the areas. A few weeks later Toronto police would pick him up and Woodcock would confess to the three murders.
Crown Prosecutors decided to only charge Peter Woodcock with the last murder. After a four day trial Peter would be found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental hospital, Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre.
Peter Woodcock would spend the rest of his life in the mental hospital and was only released on a single day pass in which he murdered another person.
Peter Woodcock Last Murder
Peter Woodcock would remain as a patient at the maximum security hospital for decades before being moved to a standard mental hospital in Brockville Ontario.
On July 13, 1991 Peter would be signed out of the hospital by a former patient, The patient Bruce Hamill had been convinced by Woodcock that if he helped Peter murder a fellow patient than he would be accepted into an alien brotherhood that would solve Hamill problems.
Bruce Hamill, under instruction from Woodcock, would go to a hardware store where he would purchase a plumbers wrench, knives, sleeping bag and a hatchet. Bruce would then sign Peter out of the hospital. The two men would then head to a wooded area and when the victim showed up he was ambushed by Woodcock and Hamill. The two men would then walk to a nearby police station and confess.
Again Peter Woodcock would be found not guilty by reasons of insanity and sent back to the maximum security mental hospital. Peter Woodcock would die there on his seventy first birthday.
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The last time he killed someone, Peter Woodcock was nearly blind and could barely hear. When he first started, as a teenager, he favoured children – three in Toronto in the space of four months – but later engineered a man’s slaying that shook the embattled Ontario forensic psychiatry system.
Woodcock, a small, pudgy man with tiny hands, weak arms, an extremely vivid fantasy life and a talent for manipulation, died Friday – his 71st birthday – at the Oak Ridge division of the Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre.
The facility was his home for most of his 53 years in custody.
Born to a 17-year-old Peterborough factory worker who gave him up for adoption, Woodcock spent the first three years of his life being bounced from one foster family to another. In at least one of those homes, he was physically abused: He arrived at a hospital emergency ward with a twisted neck.
His luck seemed to change when he was adopted by a wealthy family living near Yonge St. and Lawrence Ave. They spent money on therapists, private schools and bikes for the chubby little boy.
When Woodcock hit puberty, he began using his bike to travel around Toronto, fantasizing about leading a gang and, in reality, molesting children in Parkdale and Cabbagetown.
Woodcock killed his first victim, 6-year-old Wayne Mallette, at the CNE grounds on Sept. 16, 1956. Another boy was soon arrested and convicted of Mallette’s murder and was serving time in a youth detention centre when Woodcock was finally caught.
His second victim was 9-year-old Gary Morris. Woodcock picked him up in Cabbagetown three weeks after Mallette’s murder and strangled him at Cherry Beach. On Jan. 19, 1957, he killed Carole Voyce, 4, under the Bloor Viaduct. A very accurate police drawing of Woodcock, which ran on the front page of the Star, cracked the case.
Woodcock arrived in Penetang just as psychiatrists began trying to find ways to cure psychopathic offenders. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was fed LSD. He participated in something called “The Hundred Day Hate-In,” where psychopaths were jammed into a room together to force them to develop empathy. He was given powerful drugs and lived in a giant, dark artificial womb for several days.
These treatments did not work. Woodcock was transferred to less restrictive institutions, eventually arriving at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital. Staff indulged his passion for trains by taking him to the Smiths Falls Railway Museum, and took him to see Silence of the Lambs.
At the same time, Woodcock, who had legally changed his name to David Michael Krueger, had rekindled a relationship with Bruce Hamill, an Ottawa killer who had been released from Penetang and was working as a security guard at the Ottawa courthouse.
Woodcock convinced Hamill an alien brotherhood would solve his problems if he helped kill another Brockville inmate, Dennis Kerr.
On July 13, 1991, Hamill went to a hardware store, bought a plumber’s wrench, hatchet, knives and a sleeping bag, then went to the Brockville hospital and signed out Woodcock on his first publicly escorted day pass. They lured Kerr to a secluded spot and butchered him.
Hamill took a handful of over-the-counter sleeping pills and waited for the aliens to come. Woodcock went to the town police station and confessed.
The murder generated a coroner’s inquest and many calls for a revamping of the system that determines whether mentally ill offenders are well enough to be released.
Woodcock was taken back to Penetang, where he spent the final 18 years of his life. In his later years, he was a frail-looking man who followed Toronto news closely, listened to short-wave radio broadcasts, and made a quiet life for himself behind the barred doors and double locks of the Penetang institution. He had no family: his death was reported to his lawyer by another serial killer.
In the years after Kerr’s murder, he was the focus of a biography and several documentary films. In his careful, soft-spoken voice, he sometimes tried to explain why he killed, but he never came up with rational reasons.