Virginia Coote, left, was killed in 1994. Peter Dale MacDonald, seen right in this 1998 file photo, is charged in Ms. Coote's death and that of two other women killed in 1997.
A convicted sex killer, already serving time for a man's murder and charged earlier this year with a woman's slaying, now stands accused of killing three Toronto women in the 1990s and dumping their bodies along the city's west-end waterfront.
Peter Dale MacDonald, a 52-year-old from Prince Edward Island, was arraigned Thursday on three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Julieanne Middleton, 23, Virginia Coote, 33, and Darlene MacNeill, 35, all of whom were prostitutes in Toronto's Parkdale area.
The killings of the women and discoveries of their bodies in Lake Ontario in 1994 and 1997 sent waves of fear through the city's sex trade and raised the spectre of a serial killer on the loose, but police were unable to positively link the cases at the time. An unspecified break in recent months confirmed Mr. MacDonald as the suspect, Toronto police announced Thursday.
"Today the Toronto Police Service cold case squad arrested a serial killer," said Staff Inspector Mark Saunders, head of the homicide squad, who cited help from police in other jurisdictions in the 16-year investigation.
That arrest was made at the Kingston Penitentiary, where Mr. MacDonald had already been serving a life sentence for the April, 2000, second-degree murder of James Campbell, 63. Mr. MacDonald met the 63-year-old retiree in a Toronto park, then strangled him as they had sex at the man's Parkdale apartment.
In January this year, meanwhile, police in Windsor, Ont., re-laid a charge of second-degree murder against Mr. MacDonald in the death of Michelle Charette, 40, in July, 2000. Mr. MacDonald had been accused in 2001, but the charge was dropped. The charge was reinstated based on new evidence.
Mr. MacDonald, described in court documents as "an admitted alcoholic with a lengthy criminal past," hails from a small rural community near Summerside. The Guardian newspaper in Charlottetown named him one of the island's "most notorious criminals" in May, 1997, less than six months before Ms. MacNeill's body was retrieved from Lake Ontario.
The newspaper, citing National Parole Board records, wrote that Mr. MacDonald's criminal record began with a break-and-enter in 1975 and escalated to armed robbery, assault and forcible confinement. Statutory release provisions meant authorities had to free him despite previous repeated parole violations and officials' view that he was a "high risk to re-offend."
Mr. MacDonald, according to the article, had been granted mandatory release in Toronto in April, 1996, but within days headed to PEI in violation of his parole, prompting federal officials to warn police there that an "extremely dangerous" offender might be headed their way. He was re-arrested in Charlottetown, but freed on another mandatory release program in the spring of 1997.
Relatives of Ms. Middleton, who was discovered July 7, 1994, welcomed news of the Toronto charges but still struggle with their loss.
"It's hard because I never had a mom to tell me what's wrong or right," said Justin Middleton, 22, who was just 6 when he lost his only parent. It fell to his grandfather, Sherman Middleton, to raise him.
"We had to wait 16 years to get some kind of closure, and it's still not a full closure, but we got an answer anyhow," said the elder Mr. Middleton, who has visited his daughter's grave weekly all these years, often asking her who killed her.
"All I want to hear is the truth and some comforting words for her," he said.
Comfort was in short supply on the day Mr. Middleton learned of his daughter's death. Two days after seeing a television newscast of a body pulled from Lake Ontario, he and his wife, Joyce, went to a police station to report her missing. Unbeknownst to them, detectives were already en route to their home to deliver the news.
"It was like someone just took a stake and drove it into my heart," he said, adding that Ms. Middleton had, only days earlier, told him, "I want to make a change in my life. Things haven't been going too good."
Wendy Babcock, a former sex worker and now law student who has spent years advocating for safer conditions for prostitutes, called the new Toronto charges "a relief," especially for the families of the dead women.
"Hopefully the court won't downplay the sentence because of who these women are, which has happened in the past," said Ms. Babcock, who runs a Parkdale-based group for women in the sex trade.
At Thursday's news conference, Staff Insp. Saunders said "there was never a moment that the Toronto Police Service ever took this investigation lightly; in fact, I will tell you that we put a tremendous amount of resources into this particular case to reach this conclusion."
Ms. Babcock, however, said Canada's anti-prostitution law, struck down recently, made many sex workers reluctant to report violence. She said she knows three women who had their Achilles tendons cut by a man in Parkdale about two years ago, but none reported the crimes to police out of fear of prosecution.
"Perpetrators know this," she said. "They don't start out killing, but the more they get away with it, the more they escalate to killing."