Rampage (42 page)

By the age of ten, it seems clear that the “devil” was winning. Victor began to feel the urge to murder strangers. He kept these compulsions a secret, hunting game instead of humans, and clubbing cats and dogs as an outlet for his aggression. According to his own estimates, he slaughtered hundreds of “nice little tanned squirrels.” Killing made him feel good, “like it makes any sportsman happy.”
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He once beat a young boy mercilessly, but was never caught.

On rare occasions, angels would appear, admonishing him to stop hurting animals, and informing him not to make plans because “only God could.” Victor recalled witnessing the devil savage his guardian angel, and even found himself wielding a sword against a smaller female seraph. In a particularly bizarre twist, he remembered asking the angels not to tell his parents about his rebellion, but upon returning home, was harshly punished by his parents. Considering neither Robert nor Stella ever mentioned speaking with any celestial tattle-talers, we can only surmise that Victor’s recollection of the incident was dramatically skewed by his mental illness.

Aside from his occasional truancy, Victor caused few problems for his teachers in high school; the police were another matter. Between 1961 and 1964, he broke into a Leask store twice to pilfer firearms. Following each burglary, the tapping sound in his head began, lasting for weeks. When his neighbour discovered stolen ammunition on the second occasion, the seventeen-year-old Hoffman was handed a two-year suspended sentence, and spent twenty-four hours in jail.

Exiting his teens, Victor’s psychological problems deepened. He began to faint and have “fits.” The devil appeared more often now, hounding him to sell his soul or suffer a million deaths. Alternatively, he received messages from God and his angels pledging to whisk him away to heaven if he slayed his ebony Mephistopheles. At age eighteen, Victor caught the devil, but its overpowering stench forced him to free the creature. A year later, he tried to shoot it out of the air like a clay pigeon, but to no avail. Finally, he ensnared the beast in a net, robbing it of its magical powers, but Victor’s guardian angel betrayed him. Rather than opening the pearly gates, the treacherous seraph restored the devil’s magic, and used its judo skills to wrestle Victor to the ground. The devil then absconded with one of Hoffman’s prized shiny stones. Poor Victor — as if fighting celestial beings wasn’t difficult enough, they were now conspiring against him and training in advanced Japanese throwing techniques. Given these circumstances, is it any wonder he was driven to murder?

By the age of twenty-one, Victor Ernest Hoffman was a babbling recluse. Holed up in the family farmhouse with his parents and brother, Allan, he was increasingly given to emotional outbursts, ranging from senseless laughter to explosions of rage. On the morning of May 27, 1967, he walked into a hayfield and began firing his .303 rifle wildly into the air. When his mother ran to stop him, he proclaimed, “I shot the devil!” Thankfully, Stella convinced him to hand her the weapon, which she placed in her room. Victor drove off, and while he was out, the Hoffmans hid their firearms. He returned that afternoon and asked to speak with his pastor. Pastor Post arrived shortly after, and the two had a conversation in private. The one sentence Stella Hoffman could make out was Victor confiding, “I’d like to kill Mom.” Concerned, the next day Robert and Stella had Victor committed to the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital, where he was found to be “schizoid … in the state of acute schizophrenic reaction.”
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On the advice of the examining psychiatrist, Hoffman voluntarily signed himself in for an extended period. During his stay, he informed the doctors of the pig-faced demon who had appeared to him on no less than twenty occasions, and explained that he had been trying to shoot the entity with his rifle. Hoffman showed signs of both mental and physical illness (having recently been exposed to a chemical farming product), and declared himself unfit to work. With regards to the latter, he couldn’t have been more correct. Over the next month and a half, he was observed talking and laughing to himself, masturbating daily, and suffering from insomnia. Though he generally complied during psychiatric examinations, Hoffman displayed a flat affect, responding only with vague, emotionless answers. He stated that the devil had punished him by replacing his brain with that of a girl named Denise, causing him to question whether he was male or half female. The loathed Denise now sought to steal his body for her own, spurring Hoffman’s wish to become an “eternity death.”*
*

When the doctors explained that the angels and the devil were simply hallucinations, Hoffman argued that he had been able to touch them; in fact, he had even ripped the blouse off a female angel. Diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia resulting in “severe social handicaps,” he was prescribed anti-psychotic medication, therapy, and twelve sessions of electro-shock therapy. The results of the ECTs are listed in Table 9.

Table 9: Pre-Massacre Electroshock Therapy Results for Victor Ernest Hoffman

Though it is obvious that Victor was still living in a dangerous world of make-believe, a psychiatrist eventually telephoned Robert Hoffman and informed him that his son was “schizophrenic but not ‘too bad,’” and that possibly in “a year or two [he’d] be just as good as ever.”
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On July 26, 1967, Victor was released into the custody of his parents, who were given the charge of tracking his medication. Victor was obstinate, claiming that the tranquilizers gave him a sore back, and spent most of his time sleeping. Deep down, he knew that something terrible was going to happen. Before he had been discharged from the hospital, Victor claimed a young patient had predicted he was going to murder someone with three weeks of his release. He reasoned that, like himself, the boy must have experienced visions of future events. Victor Hoffman certainly remained preoccupied with violence — imagining himself murdering his family and former schoolmates. The tipping point finally came on August 8, when he stopped taking his medication. Within three days, Victor found himself slouched over his tractor, gazing listlessly over the blond hayfields into a world of delusion. He deliberated killing his brother, but when he expressed his desires to his friends, they remarked that he wasn’t “the type” to commit murder. Victor was having trouble sleeping now, and by August 12, was considering homicide as a means to strengthen his bonds with the devil.

In the twenty-four hours leading up to the Shell Lake Massacre, Victor had spent the day summer-fallowing the fields on his tractor. He had fallen asleep on the sofa at around 9:30 p.m. on August 14, and was sent to bed two hours later by his parents. Waking at 3:00 a.m., he found himself unable to get back to sleep, and went to work in the garage. After an hour or so, he tired of the labour, and began pacing. Suddenly, he was overcome by a strange sensation in the right side of his skull: a feeling of immense pleasure coupled with a strong compulsion to kill. Packing his .22 rifle into the back of his truck, Victor gassed up his Plymouth, and hit the road. As he chased stars across the Saskatchewan night, he saw a hawk swoop down to land on a pole, and considered shooting it. Instead, he drove past farmhouse after farmhouse, the urge to kill building with every home he passed. As the sun rose over the prairie, he pulled into the driveway of an unknown residence, and approached the door with his rifle.

Thy Will Be Gun

Dawn came, opened up like a wound, bleeding streams of light across the endless prairie sky. In a white five-room farmhouse west of Shell Lake, Jim and Evelyn Peterson sat on the edge of their bed, readying themselves for their day. As baby Larry suckled gently at Evelyn’s breast, the bucolic silence was broken by the sound of tires in the yard, and the slamming of a car door. Jim was likely confused, since he had expected Wildrew to drop by early to help empty the feed bins, but certainly not at sunrise.

“Who is it?” Jim hollered. The door swung open, and a young blond man entered carrying a .22 -calibre pump-action rifle. Jim rose to grapple the intruder, but the rifle roared, spitting four bullets into his belly. At once, the quiet country home was shaken by screams. Then, as soon as he had appeared, the gunman left. Terrified, the Peterson children — Mary, Pearl, Jean, William, and Colin — sat trembling in their bedroom, while Evelyn remained in her own chamber, clutching baby Larry to her chest. Seconds later, the maniac re-entered and fired three more times into the dying farmer. He strode over Jim’s body to where his daughter Dorothy cowered on the living-room cot. The eleven-year-old could only close her eyes and scream as the barrel of the rifle exploded into her head. Marching into the bedroom off the living room, the gunman spotted the huddled children.

“Don’t shoot me, I don’t want to die!” one of them screamed. Ignoring their pleas, he began firing into their faces at point blank range. Blood spattered the walls and drenched the sheets, as his targets flopped around like fish in a barrel. In the opposite bedroom, Evelyn Peterson managed to squeeze through the window with Larry in her arms, but the gunman heard them. With almost supernatural speed, he climbed past the bloodied children, slipped out their window, and took aim at Evelyn from the hip. The rifle fired four times, dropping her and baby Larry into the husky grass. Continuing indoors, the gunman finished off the wounded children one by one, before returning outside to execute the baby. With his grim task complete, Victor Ernest Hoffman retrieved seventeen bullet casings, along with two wallets containing $7, then departed, leaving Saskatchewan’s worst mass murder in his wake.

Questions and Confessions

On August 21, 1967, Victor Ernest Hoffman was charged with the capital slaying of James Peterson. He was removed to the University Psychiatric Hospital in Saskatoon to be assessed by department head Dr. Donald McKerracher, who was presented with the task of determining if Hoffman was fit to stand trial. During two days of interviews from August 23 to 24, the accused informed Dr. McKerracher that if Mr. Peterson “had talked quiet and told me I was wrong, it would have been all right. He could have helped me and I wouldn’t have killed him, but he tried to stop me.” In this belief, Victor Ernest Hoffman had never been more deluded. “I was a little scared when I shot him, but I wasn’t sorry,” he added.

If I had had someone to talk to, I wouldn’t have committed murder. I could talk to Mr. X, a patient at North Battleford. I told him I would commit murder, he told me not to do it. I knew when I left I would commit murder.… I feel guilty. I am scared I will spend the rest of my life in prison. I will never see the outside world again.… I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how I started to do it. My mind was blank, it was kill, kill, kill.
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Hoffman concluded that the devil had tricked him into a life of imprisonment, but could offer no rational explanation as to why he had been specifically targeted. Ultimately, Dr. McKerracher diagnosed Hoffman schizophrenic, but deemed him fit to stand trial. Considering the accused expressed his wish to die, the timing was less than fortuitous: as of December 1966, capital punishment in Canada was strictly reserved for convicts who had murdered on-duty police officers or prison guards. Hoffman’s capital murder charge was thus changed to two counts of non-capital murder for the deaths of James and Evelyn Peterson. His preliminary hearing was set for October 24. Judge J.M. Policha appointed G.E. Noble, a tall, grey-haired attorney who had been practising law for eighteen years, to act in Hoffman’s defence. A meticulous and strategic thinker, Noble privately concluded that the Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford had “really boobed” in discharging Hoffman, and would never admit its mistake. If he sent his client back to that institution to be examined by the same psychiatrists who had released him, their findings would undoubtedly be biased. Instead, he had Hoffman transported to Saskatoon where he was examined by private psychiatrist Dr. Abram Hoffer. He spent the first day completing a diagnostic test, and the second being interviewed. Victor told Dr. Hoffer that he did not consider himself guilty of his crimes, because he was following the devil’s instructions. Nor did he believe that God was angry with him. Strangely, Hoffman felt more remorse for the burglaries he had committed in his teens, as he believed theft to be thoroughly sinful. Hoffman had expected an important visit from the devil in February 1968. He had not seen his diabolical master in quite some time.

In his final report, Hoffer recorded that, in his experience, he had “not run across any patient who had quite as many different perceptual changes.…” Furthermore, he noted that Victor had recently scored ninety-nine on the Hoffman-Osmond Diagnostic test, which measures a schizophrenic patient’s perceptual disorders. Comparatively, his score upon leaving the hospital in North Battleford had been a meagre sixty-five, implying that he had still been insane when he had left the institution three weeks before the murders. Like his colleague Dr. McKerracher, Hoffer diagnosed Victor Hoffman as suffering from a “very serious form of paranoid schizophrenia” over a minimum period of ten years. From a legal and psychiatric standpoint, Hoffman had been completely insane at the time of the Shell Lake Massacre.