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Halifax police said they will charge Michael Wayne McGray -- who has already been convicted of four murders -- with the 1985 murder of Elizabeth Gail Tucker. McGray's lawyer in Moncton, N.B., said he had heard his client will be charged in the case, but didn't know how McGray would plead. The body of Tucker, 17, was found near Digby, N.S., after she disappeared while hitchhiking to her job at a fish plant. In an interview in March, McGray claimed he stabbed her repeatedly, then dumped her body. The source said it's possible another person will be charged in the death, which McGray said was the first in a 15-year-long killing spree that spanned the country and ended in 16 murders.
McGray, a 34-year-old Nova Scotia-born drifter who has claimed responsibility for 16 slayings across North America, just pleaded guilty on to the 1987 stabbing death of Mark Gibbons of Saint John, N.B. He received a life sentence, which will run concurrent to the life sentences he's already serving for the first-degree murders of a woman in Moncton, N.B., in 1998, and two men in Montreal in 1991.
Like his fellow Canadian killer Clifford Olson, Michael Wayne McGray said he'll prove he committed sixteen murders if he is granted certain demands. Though, swearing that they would not be played like in the Olson fiasco, Halifax authorities said "No deal" to the request. McGray, serving a life sentence in Renous, N.B., for the 1998 first-degree murder of a Newfoundland woman, said he wants three things before he tells police how he killed at least 16 people. McGray said he doesn't want any of his accomplices charged, he doesn't want to be charged for the alleged crimes, and he wants psychiatric treatment for "demons" he says sent him on a 15-year coast-to-coast killing spree. Given the chance, the suspected serial killer added, he would murder a guard, a prisoner or anyone else who could quench what he describes as a searing hunger to kill.
McGray's claims of killings in Halifax, Saint John, N.B., Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Seattle have caused police to sift through their unsolved homicide files looking for links. So far, there have not uncovered any evidence that confirms his deadly allegations. McGray claims to have killed a prostitute and a gay man in Seattle sometime in 1995-96 and three gay men in Montreal. The homicidal drifter added that he could lead Toronto police to the body of a 50-year-old alcoholic he buried in a west-end park.
Like many other serial killers his alcoholic father beat him regularly. Within years he was being shunted from one group home and reform school to the next, eventually landing at a school for boys in Shelburne, N.S., where he says he was sexually and physically abused. "I used to kill animals and get in fights all the time at school," McGray said, "It was like a hunger."
On March 21 McGray confessed to 11 slayings while he was being transported from one prison to another. The prisoner mentioned the other killings after he was charged in the death of a woman who he allegedly killed in her Moncton apartment two years ago. "I believe it happened in conversations with a police officer transporting him from the federal penitentiary in Renous to Moncton," said McGray's Moncton lawyer, Wendell Maxwell.
The new 11 cases he has claimed responsability for don't include the Moncton killing, or four other deaths he has been charged with. McGray, who is 35, is also charged with the 1991 deaths of two gay men in Montreal and the 1987 fatal stabbing of Mark Daniel Gibbons, a cab driver. In court McGray pleaded guilty to slicing the throat of Joan Hicks in Moncton and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. |
