MULTIPLE MURDERERS IN CANADA

                                                  

Canada doesn’t have many multiple murders in its history however there have been serial killers and mass killers in Canada that the people in Canada were eventually faced with.

In the past, such killers were originally hanged however the death penalty was no longer enforced in Canada from 1963 after the hanging of two men in the Toronto jail in 1962. Bill C-64 was enacted ny parliament in 1976 resulting in the total abolition of the death penalty in Canada.

Since then, anyone convicted of first degree murder would be sentenced to 25 years in prison before they could be eligible to apply for parole. Then the law was amended making it possible to  apply for parole after serving 15 years but there was such an outcry against that happening so the murders have to serve the full 25 years in prison before they can apply for parole.

On December 2, 2011, the Protecting Canadians by Ending Multiple Murders Act was enacted. This Act ensures that individuals who are convicted of committing multiple murders serve their parole ineligibility period consecutively. This means that the number of years allocated by a judge to be served without parole is now served one 25-year period after another, not concurrently. This means that judges are now able to impose consecutive 25-year parole ineligibility periods. The government’s rationale is to allow one period of parole ineligibility for each victim, for offenders convicted of more than one first or second-degree murders.

However, under the new legislation, it is not mandatory for a judge to impose consecutive parole ineligibility periods for offenders convicted of multiple murders. The individual judge maintains discretion in these cases. The judge may consider the character of the offender, the nature and circumstances of the offence, and any jury recommendations before deciding on whether to impose consecutive 25-year parole ineligibility periods.

First-degree murder and two categories of second-degree murder carry a mandatory life sentence with a 25-year parole ineligibility period. The second remaining category of second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence with a 10 to 25 year period of not being eligible for parole.

In order to be sensitive to families and loved ones of victims, judges are required to state in writing or orally the basis for their decisions to either impose, or not impose, consecutive parole ineligibility periods for offenders convicted of multiple murders.

Under the previous system, individuals convicted of multiple murders served their period of parole ineligibility concurrently. This meant that they were eligible to apply for parole after serving just one period ranging from 10 to 25 years, depending on their sentence. For example, Clifford Olson killed eleven children in Canada but was eligible for parole after serving 25 years of his first-degree murder sentence. However because he was also sentenced to life in prison, he was not released after serving 25 years in prison. He died several years later in prison.

Elizabeth Wettlaufer was a nurse in the Province of Ontario in Canada. She murdered eight of her patients in a nursing home. She pleaded guilty to all eight murders and the trial judge chose to give her one sentence of 25 years only for killing all eight of her patients.  She will also serve 10 years for each attempted murder, and seven years for each aggravated assault she committed against some of her patients. However, the judge also sentenced her to life in prison. That means that she is unlikely to ever be released from prison until she dies of old age. The judge actually told her that.

Mathew Raymond of Fredericton, New Brunswick in Canada was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two Fredericton police officers, Const. Robb Costello, 45, and Const. Sara Burns, 43, as well as 42-year-old Donnie Robichaud and his girlfriend, Bobbie-Lee Wright, 32.  The 48-year-old killer was accused of firing down upon four people from his apartment window with a rifle, killing the  two civilians as they loaded a car for a trip and two police officers who responded to the scene,

If he is sentenced on four counts of first degree murder, he will receive four consecutive sentences of 25 years in prison. That means he will be sentenced to 100 years in prison. Since he is already 48 years old, he would be eligible to apply for parole in the year 2166.  Yeah and the moon is made of cheese. In any case, he won’t get out of prison until he dies.  Did you hear it? That sound was one of my crocodile tears hitting the floor.  

Om December 8^th, 2017 in a news conference, the Toronto Police Service told the public that they had no evidence of a serial killer operating in the Gay Village in downtown Toronto, Canada’s largest city. That statement was obviously a premature.

On Jan. 18, 2018: Police arrest McArthur after investigators observe a man entering his Thorncliffe Park apartment in the morning. When officers forcibly enter the apartment to arrest McArthur, they find the man in restraints. It is believed the man went to McArthur's seeking a sexual encounter.

McArthur was then charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Esen and Kinsman, even though the men's bodies hadn’t  yet to be found. In a news conference, police revealed that Kinsman and McArthur had been in a sexual relationship for some time.  As time moved on, there were five more bodies found one in a ravine and other in gardens he prepared for his customers.

He hasn’t been tried as of the time that this article was published but sure as God made little apples, he will be sentenced to eight consecutive sentences of 25 years each. That will be a sentence of 200 years. 

He is 67 years of age at the time of the publishing this article in my blog so he will be eligible to apply for parole when he is 267 years of age which will be in the year 2218 unless of course, he dies first which is obviously likely.

Canadians, Dellen Millard and Mark Smich killed together more than once. Almost a year after they were charged with the death of Tim Bosma whose remains were found at Millard's Waterloo Region farm , the were  facing an additional first-degree murder charge in the death of 23-year-old Laura Babcock, who went missing in the summer of 2012 Both men were convicted of both victims. They were sentenced to two consecutive sentences of 25 years in prison. Then Millard was convicted of murdering his father. That added to him another consecutive 25-year sentence to the other two consecutive sentences.  Now he is charged with murdering his mother. If he is convicted, he will be in prison for as many as 200 years if he lives that long which of course isn’t going to happen.

Many years ago, a man in the United States shot to death a young man and his sweetheart who were walking on a highway in one of the States. After he was arrested and placed in a jail, he murdered another man in the jail. The trial judge sentenced him to a thousand years for each of the deaths. He appealed the sentence saying that being sentenced to three thousand dollars for killing three persons is ridiculous. The court of appeal agreed. They reduced the sentence to fifteen hundred years. 

There is an opposite situation where the sentence of a multiple killer was only twelve years in prison. In 1980 while I was addressing the UN Congress held in Caracas on capital punishment, I told the delegates that there was a Peruvian man who confessed to murdering over three hundred children over a period of many years. I said that he would be sentenced to only 12 years in prison. He was released from prison 12 years later. How did I know that was all he would serve in prison? It was because that was the maximum sentence murders would receive in Peru. 

Admittedly, hanging these murderers would be cheaper since the cost of each prisoner a year is a little over a quarter of a million dollars. That means that if the 48-year-old killer in Fredericton lives to 88 years of age, it will cost the taxpayers as much as ten million dollars to feed and house that particular killer.

It was right for the Canadian parliament to abolish capital punishment. I played a small part in that decision. A member of Parliament contacted the first director of Ontario Legal Aid for information about a man who was hanged after he was represented by a lawyer who had previously been determined to be insane.  I found the transcript of the lawyer’s sanitary trial. I also found evidence that the police who arrested the man for the murder of a five-year-old girl later admitted to her parents that they charged the wrong man with her murder. 

I was quoted by a member of the parliamentary debates re the abolition of capital punishment when I said in my report, “There is nothing worse that a country can do to one of its citizens than to hang that person for a murder he didn’t commit.” I was told that my report swung the vote in favour of abolishing capital punishment in Canada. The late Diefenbaker who was a former prime minister told me that he called his caucus together after he read my report to discuss my report with its members. Forty-two members of the House of Commons and the Senate wrote me a letter to thank me for my contribution. One of them wrote that my report would be on his desk when it came for him to vote for the abolishment of capital punishment.

There are times however when certain killers should be executed. They are serial killers, mass killers, killers who torture their victims to death and terrorists. This is what I said at the United Nations Crime congresses I attended in Caracas in 1980 and in Milan in 1985.  Why should the taxpayers pay a million dollars to house each of these human scum when the money would be better used for other purposes? As long as it is established beyond any doubt that they committed such murderous crimes in which heir victms were murdered by them, hang the bastards.