Montreal was all about hockey the weekend Michael McGray decided he was overdue for a killing and conned Quebec prison officials into setting him free on a three-day pass.
On that Easter weekend in 1991, the Habs were facing off twice against the Nordiques. Hockey great Guy Lafleur was saying goodbye to the game for good. A stranger could sit and talk playoffs with just about anyone, which all fit nicely into Mr. McGray's plan, a court heard yesterday: Accept a few, friendly drinks from a lonely patron in a gay bar, and get squired home to watch the game, where they'd be alone with the kitchen knives before his victim thought better of it.
Mr. McGray got out on Good Friday. By Easter Monday, he'd managed to kill twice, and skip town. He did it purely for pleasure, leaving only with a bottle of alcohol and a change of clothes. The police never even knew he'd been there -- until he started talking nine years later and made the claim that he is Canada's worst serial killer.
Mr. McGray confessed to the Montreal slayings last fall, persuading investigators that he was telling the truth by offering up the details he says he likes to savour. He knew things only the killer would have known -- about the wooden lamp used to bash in the first victim's head, or the bus map he checked for directions afterward.
The gory specifics were recited yesterday by Crown prosecutor Jean Lecours in a Montreal courtroom where Mr. McGray pleaded guilty, against the advice of his lawyer, to two counts of first-degree murder.
Mr. McGray caught the attention of police agencies across the country after he was arrested in March, 1999, in connection with the deaths of a Moncton mother named Joan Hicks and her 11-year-old daughter, Nena. He eventually pleaded guilty to slashing the mother's throat, but he has always denied killing the little girl. During his months in custody, however, Mr. McGray began to make extraordinary claims to police -- suggesting he'd killed as many as 16 people in 15 years.
The killing rampage began, he eventually said, in 1985, when he killed a young girl hitchhiking near Dibgy, N.S. He has since claimed a sweep of unsolved homicides from Halifax to Vancouver.
In those early police statements, Mr. McGray offered startling details about two unsolved 1991 homicides in Montreal, high-profile because they had sparked fears that the city's gay community was being targeted by a serial killer.
He was charged in connection with those deaths last fall, and then in January with a fourth homicide in Saint John -- the 1987 stabbing of an acquaintance after a botched taxi robbery. He has since told reporters he can provide the police with details of many other killings but won't co-operate unless he is granted a number of conditions, including immunity for two other people who knew of his crimes.
After being so chatty with police last year, and again with reporters last month, Mr. McGray didn't have much to say yesterday. He's gained weight and has a thicker beard since he appeared in Moncton a month ago -- when he pleaded guilty to his first murder charge. "I'm already doing 25 [years]" he told the judge politely yesterday when she explained that he'd be sentenced to two more counts of life in prison, "so it doesn't change anything."
Mr. McGray has said in previous interviews that he doesn't expect ever to get out of jail. He says that while drifting across North America, he killed 16 people in more than a decade.
He claims to have killed mainly strangers -- prostitutes whom he enticed with drugs or gay men he picked up at bars, many whose names he didn't bother to learn. "It was just unbelievable how easy they tried to take you home, a total stranger," he said in a interview last month. And it was never about sex, he has said; he selected victims because they were vulnerable.
So it went with Robert Assaly, a 59-year-old retired school teacher who made the fatal mistake of taking him home that Easter Saturday night in 1991, the Crown said yesterday. Mr. McGray passed out on the couch and when he woke in the morning, Mr. Assaly was getting dressed in the bedroom. He carried a butcher's knife into the room, and ordered the other man to lie down. Mr. Assaly laughed at him, he told police -- he must have thought it was a joke. Mr. McGray beat him over the head with a wooden lamp and stabbed him in the throat 16 times.
Mr. McGray took a bottle of alcohol and hopped a bus downtown, already prowling for his next victim. That man was Gaetan Ethier, 49, who invited Mr. McGray back to his bachelor apartment to watch the game. After Mr. McGray turned down his advances, Mr. Ethier passed out. Mr. McGray sat up the entire night, he told police, and at 6 a.m., he took a knife off a rack in the wall and sliced the other man's stomach open.
Mr. Ethier fought back, "which gave a big thrill to the accused," the Crown said, and Mr. McGray punched him and smashed a beer bottle over his head, and then fatally stabbed him in the throat.
This was the scene detectives found a few days later. Mr. McGray was already in New Brunswick; he was not sent back to prison until late May, when he was caught by police in Saint John.
Nine years later, investigators would ask him: Did he give those two men his name, when he met them at the bar? "I think so," Mr. McGray said. "Because, anyway, I knew I was going to kill them."
Erin Anderssen