Rampage (41 page)

While riding a New York City commuter train, Colin Ferguson, a thirty-five-year-old unemployed African-American, suddenly opened fire on his fellow passengers with a 9-millimetre pistol, killing six and wounding nineteen. Ferguson insisted on his right to act as his own attorney, rejecting both the opportunity for psychiatric assessment and the insanity plea. Instead, he built his case around a group of conspirators who had been working against him since he arrived in America at the age of twenty-four. In his opening statement, the delusional Ferguson explained that a Caucasian man had stolen the loaded weapon from his bag while he lay sleeping, and had committed the murders. This was also the same individual who had wrestled him to the ground — a claim proven by the fact that the man had seized his firearm. Continuing, Ferguson argued that acting president Bill Clinton should be forced to testify, and the only reason Ferguson had been charged ninety-three times was because it was 1993. If the year was 1925, he would only have twenty-five charges against him. Throughout the trial, Ferguson consistently referred to himself as “my client,” and claimed to have spoken with a mysterious defence witness named Raul Diaz who had allegedly seen an Asian man insert a microchip into the sleeping Ferguson’s skull. Completely contradicting his earlier theory of a white gunman, Ferguson then insisted that the Asian man had activated him to commit the murders using a remote control. Unsurprisingly, no Raul Diaz ever emerged to corroborate this claim. Found guilty, Ferguson may very well be an example of a Psychotic mass murderer.

More recently, schizophrenic Jared Loughner developed an overwhelming hatred of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords when, at a 2007 political function, she failed to adequately answer his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” By the end of 2010, Loughner had dropped out of college and purchased a 9-millimetre Glock pistol. At 4:12 a.m. on January 8, 2011, Loughner posted a bizarre farewell on his MySpace page:

Goodbye friends. Please don’t be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven’t talked to one person who is literate. I want to make it out alive. The longest war in the history of the United States. Goodbye. I’m saddened with the current currency and job employment. I had a bully at school. Thank you. P.S. Plead the fifth!

Less than six hours later, Loughner shot nineteen attendees at one of Gifford’s constituent meetings in Tucson. Six died, while thirteen were wounded, including Congresswoman Giffords, who was left in critical condition.

Like Loughner,
Victor Hoffman
represents a Canadian mass murderer driven to kill by schizophrenia.

Other Psychotic mass murderers in this book:
Wolodymyr Danylewycz

   
      
Victor Hoffman

The Shell Lake Murderer

Victims:
9 killed

Duration of rampage:
August 15, 1967 (mass murder)

Location:
Near Shell Lake, Saskatchewan

Weapon:
.22 Remington rifle

Blood Harvest

The morning of August 15, 1967, was a hot one. Six and a half kilometres west of Shell Lake, Saskatchewan, Wildrew Lang’s truck puttered along the dusty path connecting his farm to the 1.6-kilometre half-section of land that belonged to his neighbours, the Petersons. Wildrew and Jim Peterson had a long, hard day of work ahead of them — they planned to transfer fifty bushels of wheat from feed bins to his truck, then drive it to the grain elevator in Shell Lake. The Peterson’s seventeen-year-old daughter Jean was a promising athlete, and Jim had decided to use the money to pay for her track and field camp in Dundurn, a small community south of Saskatoon. Not one to dawdle, Wildrew pulled his truck up to his neighbour’s makeshift granary, and got to work. When Jim failed to appear by 9:00 a.m., Wildrew trudged over to the house to investigate. The homestead felt like a ghost town — there was no playful clamour from the eight Peterson children, and when the family dog, Skippy, came to greet him, his normally friendly disposition seemed muted. Upon reaching the front door, Wildrew’s guard went up faster than a burning hayfield. The lifeless body of Jim Peterson lay just inside the entrance, covered only by shorts and coagulating blood. Wildrew raced over to the Peterson’s 1957 station wagon, turned the keys in the ignition, and floored it all the way to Shell Lake. After a few minutes, he reached the town, and telephoned the Spiritwood RCMP.

Corporal Barry Richards was the first respondent on the scene. Stepping past Jim’s bullet-ridden remains, he found eleven-year-old Dorothy dead on the living room cot, and proceeded to the adjoining bedroom. Beneath their blood stained Rolling Stones and
Bonanza
posters, thirteen-year-old Mary, five-year-old William, and two-year-old Colin lay shot to death on their mattress. Miraculously, four-year-old Phyllis Peterson remained physically unharmed. Wedged between seventeen-year-old sister Jean and Pearl, nine, the child was burying her face in the bed, as if trying to escape the horror by forcing herself into a dream. She maintained her stunned silence as Richards lifted her from the bloody linens and drove her to the safety of her neighbours’ farmhouse. The shaken corporal stopped by Shell Lake to request backup, then returned to the Peterson home, where he was joined by a Dr. Michaud from Spiritwood. Around the rear of the home, they discovered the bodies of Jim’s wife, Evelyn Peterson, and her baby son, Larry, under an open window, bringing the total slain to nine. Powder burns on the victims’ flesh indicated that each had been shot through the head at close range.

Backup soon arrived from the Battleford RCMP, and the arduous task of processing the crime scene commenced. Among the clues were two bloody footprints on the linoleum floor, bearing a diamond on the sole and a
V
shape on the heel, along with several used .22 -calibre cartridges. Both were promising leads. In the meantime, a seemingly motiveless killer remained on the loose, and local families feared they might be next to fall prey to his deadly urges. The
Regina Leader-Post
would later dub the evening of August 15 the “Night of Fear,” as concerned citizens slept with their lights on and firearms at their sides.

Faced with immense pressure to bring the Shell Lake Murderer to justice, the RCMP began an aggressive, pro-active investigation strategy. Seventy-five police dogs searched the area surrounding the Peterson farmhouse for evidence, while eight Mounties crawled through the grass from dawn to dusk. Roadblocks were erected, and locals encouraged to report any suspicious vehicles to the authorities. It wasn’t long before the RCMP’s forensic laboratory in Regina determined the footwear to be one of 1,800 pairs of Taiwanese-made rubber boots, distributed by a company in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Ballistics experts examined the cartridges and narrowed the number of potential gun models down to three. There was speculation that, given the scope of the massacre, there had actually been two killers involved. Some expressed disbelief that one person could execute nine people without any of them escaping. Lead investigators Inspector Brian Sawyer and Staff-Sergeant Ronald Sondergaard disagreed. They speculated that the Shell Lake Murderer was a local man with a history of mental illness. The Petersons were honest, hardworking folk with no real enemies. Robbery did not appear to be a motive, nor was there evidence to suggest sexual assault. To Sawyer and Sondergaard, madness seemed the only sane conclusion.

It would turn out to be a remarkable feat of offender profiling. On August 17, a farmer walked into the Shellbrook RCMP detachment and proclaimed, “My neighbour’s son just got out of the mental hospital and he likes guns and is a good hunter.” The man in question was Victor Ernest Hoffman: a twenty-one-year-old former patient at a North Battleford asylum, who had been released into his parents’ care three weeks prior to the murders. Acting on the tip, Corporal Charles Nolan and five officers drove out to the Hoffman residence in the nearby village of Leask to interview the suspect. They spotted a pair of red-trimmed, red-soled black rubber boots on the stoop — identical to the ones worn by the Shell Lake murderer. Nolan asked Victor’s father if the family had a .22 rifle, and he confirmed that they indeed had a Remington. When the farmer retrieved the weapon from the back seat of his grey 1950 Chrysler Plymouth, the officers noted that it was actually a composite: a Remington barrel fixed to a Winchester stock. Nolan had the items sent to forensics, and within twenty-four hours the lab technicians confirmed what he already suspected: Victor Ernest Hoffman and the Shell Lake Murderer were one and the same.

Hoffman was arrested on August 19 while mowing his field. A search of the bushes within three kilometres of the property yielded two empty wallets, both belonging to the Peterson family. That same day, 1,500 onlookers gathered at God’s Acre cemetery in Shell Lake to watch as nine murdered members of the Peterson family were lowered into a mass grave. Meanwhile, Victor Hoffman cracked after a mere fifteen minutes of interrogation, confessing to all nine murders:

“Okay, I killed them. I tried to change the rifling on it [the Remington]. I should have burned the house, then you would not have found those cartridges. I didn’t want to shoot anymore. The one I left didn’t see me … after it got just about daylight, I saw this house on the left side of the road. I just drove in there and started shooting.”
[67]

“Have you ever wanted to do anything like this before?” the police interviewer asked.

“No, just those few minutes there; it just popped into my mind, just like that, do you think I could get rid of it? No, sir; I just went and done it anyway.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell us, Victor?”

“Just that I know I’m sick in the head; but I can never kill again, I know that.”

For many residents of the Shell Lake area, it was enough to know that the killer was safely behind bars. Their only desires were to continue working the land and raising livestock in peace. But for the various police investigators, attorneys, judges, jury members, and psychiatrists working the case, it was crucial to establish a closer understanding of the man who had engulfed their respective worlds. Who was Victor Ernest Hoffman, and what had driven him to nearly exterminate two generations of the Peterson family?

The Devil Made Me Do It

Growing up the fifth of seven children in a farming village seventy kilometres north of Saskatoon, Victor Ernest Hoffman had always been a strange, introverted boy. The Hoffmans were a devout Lutheran brood, claiming German descent on Robert’s side and Ukrainian on Stella’s. Like most other families in the area, they practised mixed farming, cultivating cattle and hay. Despite their determined work ethic, Sundays in the Hoffman household were strictly holy days, and Victor and his siblings attended the local church frequently. This religiosity would later shape the character of his mental illness.

In the eyes of his family, Victor was a “normal” if somewhat shy child, with nothing irregular in his development. By nine months he was walking, and his first words followed shortly after. He was responsible, worked hard around the farm, and was adept at problem solving. When asked in the years following the Shell Lake massacre about his son’s childhood, Robert Hoffman replied:

He was just as smart as the rest of the boys. He used to work here and fix bicycles for our neighbour’s boys and what they couldn’t do, he could. But the police and the detectives, they had it written that ever since childhood he was on the mental side. He was not … It [Victor’s sanity] went just like that! [snaps his fingers] There were about three weeks when I knew there was something badly wrong, he got worse and worse, and finally we took him to Prince Albert. It was the first time we had taken him to a doctor for mental illness.
[68]

Contrary to his father’s claims, Victor admitted that around the time he started primary school at the age of six, he began receiving visits from a hallucinatory devil. The creature stood roughly six feet six inches tall, with jet black skin, porcine features, and a long tail. Victor also witnessed angels fighting with the devil, and felt like God and Lucifer were vying for his soul. Often, he would awake in the middle of the night to the sound of drums pounding faster and faster. During the daylight hours, these auditory hallucinations manifested as a continuous tapping, as if Morse code were being transmitted to him from the abyss. Victor also reported instances where clammy disembodied hands drifted through the air to seize his neck and torso. The fact that this not-unintelligent child failed both grades three and nine indicates that psychosis was affecting his concentration profoundly from an early age. In an interview with F.H. Kahan following the murders, Victor described sitting down to eat breakfast one morning when he heard the devil’s voice beckoning from outside. Following the calls, he came face to face with the ebony beast, standing naked in the yard. The devil promised Victor riches beyond his wildest dreams if he bowed before him. Suspicious, Victor resisted at first, before finally dropping to one knee. He reasoned that by doing so, he might become half as wealthy and retain his soul. When financial success did not follow, he attributed this to his refusal to submit fully to Satan’s requests.