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Create AccountAlexandre Bissonnette, who shot and killed six men at a mosque in Quebec City on 29 January 2017, was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 40 years.
At 1:24 p.m., a 25-year-old man who identified as an incel (involuntary celibate), drove a rented van onto the sidewalk on Yonge Street in Toronto’s North York business district. He proceeded to drive south, intentionally running over pedestrians. When he was stopped by police 10 minutes later, 10 people (eight of them women) were dead and 16 were injured. The driver was found guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder.
Toronto recorded its 90th homicide of the year, the most in a single year since 1991.
After pleading guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder, Bruce McArthur was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. The 67-year-old former landscaper took his victims from Toronto’s gay village, dismembered them and hid the remains in yards and planter boxes owned by his clients.
Fredericton police officers Lawrence Robert Costello and
Sara Burns were killed after arriving at the scene of the shooting deaths of Donald
Robichaud and Bobbie Lee Wright. Matthew Vincent Raymond of Fredericton was
later charged with first-degree murder
in all four deaths.
The Guy Paul Morin case was the second major wrongful conviction case to occur in the modern era of the Canadian criminal justice system. The case was riddled with official errors — from inaccurate eyewitness testimony and police tunnel vision, to scientific bungling and the suppression of evidence. Morin had been acquitted of the murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop in 1986, only to be found guilty at a retrial in 1992. He was cleared by DNA evidence in 1995 and received $1.25 million in compensation. In 2020, DNA evidence identified Calvin Hoover, a Jessop family friend who died in 2015, as the real killer.
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Late in the evening on Saturday, 18 April 2020, a 51-year-old man assaulted his common-law wife in Portapique, Nova Scotia. He then began a 13-hour rampage in which he committed multiple shootings and set fire to several homes in 16 locations. Using a vehicle disguised as an RCMP police cruiser and wearing an old RCMP uniform for much of the time, the killer murdered 22 people and injured six others. He was shot and killed by two RCMP officers at a gas station south of Enfield, Nova Scotia, 100 km from where the violence began. It is the worst mass killing in modern Canadian history.
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The BC Coroners Service launched an interactive map showing the location of nearly 200 unidentified remains discovered over the last 60 years. The hope is that the information will lead to tips that will help police identify the remains and the circumstances of their deaths.
The crimes of Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka were among the most horrifying and controversial in Canadian history.
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The following article is a feature from our Vancouver Feature series. Past features are not updated.
A Parks Board gardener, clearing leaves near Beaver Lake, came across a cheap fur coat. Lifting it up, he made a grisly discovery — the skeletal remains of two young children. Dubbed the Babes in the Woods by the press, the sensational, unsolved case remains a haunting piece of Vancouver lore.Beginning at his home in Portapique, Nova Scotia, a man wearing an RCMP uniform and driving a replica police cruiser went on a 13-hour rampage that left 22 people dead and six injured. It was the worst mass killing in modern Canadian history. Concerns were later raised regarding the RCMP’s response to the events and its handling of the manhunt. The federal and Nova Scotia governments later launched a public inquiry into the events.
Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod were found dead by apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a densely forested area in Northern Manitoba. They had reportedly been dead for several days. The Port Alberni men, both 19, had been the subject of an extensive nationwide manhunt that lasted three weeks. They were suspected of murdering American Lucas Fowler, 23, and Australian Chynna Deese, 24, four days before also killing UBC professor Leonard Dyck, 64, in Northern BC. Schmegelsky and McLeod had been formally charged with Dyck’s murder and were the lead suspects in the deaths of Fowler and Deese. The murders had drawn international attention.
Toronto police scrambled to deal with 14 shooting incidents in five different neighbourhoods over the August long weekend. Seventeen people were injured. The violence led to renewed calls for a handgun ban in Toronto, including from Mayor John Tory. Former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, now the minister of border security and organized crime reduction, did not rule out a ban but said that more consultation was required.
Grace Marks, historical figure (born ca. 1828 in Ulster, Ireland [now Northern Ireland]; date and place of death unknown). Grace Marks was an Irish Canadian maid. She was convicted, along with James McDermott, of the murder of their employer Thomas Kinnear, who was killed along with his housekeeper and mistress Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Marks’s trial was widely publicized in newspapers of the day. Her story has also been told in Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings (1853), as well as in Margaret Atwood’s play The Servant Girl (1974) and her novel Alias Grace (1996). The latter was adapted by Sarah Polley into an award-winning CBC miniseries, starring Sarah Gadon as Marks.
Two parents, a grandparent and a daughter were killed and a nine-year-old son was left in serious condition after the family was struck by a pickup truck while walking along the sidewalk in London, Ontario. Police confirmed that the attack was “a planned, premeditated act and that the family was targeted because of their Muslim faith.” (See also Islamophobia in Canada.) A vigil was held in London two days later. The accused was charged with four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. He was also charged with terrorism under section 83 of the Criminal Code. The nine-year-old orphaned boy was released to relatives a week later.
Shortly before 10:00 p.m., a shooter walked into a busy Toronto neighbourhood and began shooting people indiscriminately. He walked along Danforth Avenue, shooting others before exchanging gunfire with police and turning his handgun on himself. The shooter killed 18-year-old Reese Fallon and 10-year-old Julianna Kozis and left 13 people injured. The Toronto Danforth Shooting led to calls for more gun control in Canada.
The Quebec Biker War was an almost decade-long territorial conflict between two outlaw motorcycle gangs in Quebec: the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine. The war centred on control over the narcotics trade in Quebec. It was also driven by intense rivalries and deep-seated animosities between major figures in Quebec’s criminal underworld. (See Organized Crime.) The conflict involved over 80 bombings, some 130 cases of arson and 20 disappearances. More than 160 people were killed and over 200 were injured, including many innocent bystanders.
A month after a suitable jury was selected for the re-trial of Moosehead scion Dennis Oland, a judge declared a mistrial due to improper background checks of potential jurors conducted by a Saint John police officer. Oland’s re-trial, which followed the overturning of his conviction for second degree murder by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in October 2016, began on 21 November 2018, and was conducted by a judge alone.
Minutes before 10:00 p.m. on Sunday 22 July 2018, a 29-year-old man walked into a busy Toronto neighbourhood and began shooting people indiscriminately. He walked along Danforth Avenue, shooting others before exchanging gunfire with police and turning his handgun on himself. The shooter killed 18-year-old Reese Fallon and 10-year-old Julianna Kozis and left 13 people injured. The rampage led to calls for more gun control in Canada.
Between 1978 and 2001, at least 65 women disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Robert Pickton, who operated a pig farm in nearby Port Coquitlam, was charged with murdering 26 of the women. He was convicted on six charges and sentenced to life in prison. In a jail cell conversation with an undercover police officer, Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women. The murders led to the largest serial killer investigation in Canadian history, and Pickton’s farm became the largest crime scene in Canadian history. The case became a flash point in the wider issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. In 2012, a provincial government inquiry into the case concluded that “blatant failures” by police — including inept criminal investigative work, compounded by police and societal prejudice against sex trade workers and Indigenous women — led to a “tragedy of epic proportions.”
Warning: This article contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all audiences.
