The killers among us: Delving into the minds of cold case murderers

I asked if he feared getting caught, after he had murdered a man and woman in cold blood with an aluminum baseball bat in an apartment on King Street East in Hamilton.

You always wonder, but then you start feeling safe," said Carl Hall. And a part of you is thinking, wow, you got to do something most people don't get to do' ... I know that's an odd statement to make."

Hall smiled, and I scribbled a note in my pad: Smile/pride/sick."

This was years ago, during an interview in old Kingston Penitentiary.

The morning after the double-murder, Hall had watched TV news coverage of the deaths of Charlisa Clark and Pasquale Del Sordo, and out of curiosity walked to where police had strung crime scene tape around the building.

He then returned to work and lived with what he had done for nearly two years.

Other killers remain at large much longer: Hamilton police list 42 unsolved homicides on their website dating back to 1972; 15 of them since 2000.

It's unknown how many of the perpetrators live in the city, but in some cases police have a good idea who they are.

Unsolved" can be a misnomer, according to Hamilton Det. Sgt. Dave Oleniuk. He said unproven" is more accurate, when police have a strong suspect but lack one piece of the puzzle to lay a charge - perhaps simply a statement from someone close to the killer who has remained silent.

People who knew the victim may also have had contact with the perpetrator, because about 85 per cent of murder victims have some type of personal relationship with their killer.

The narrative is often no secret to the players involved," Oleniuk said.

Whether a killer avoids detection can depend on how well they live with murder.

Each one is different and has their own idiosyncrasies," said former Hamilton homicide detective Paul Lahaie. Some of them don't think twice about what they did and move on. Others worry about future consequences."

What kind of lives do the killers lead, who murdered Joe Melo and Audrey Gleave in 2010? Or the one who strangled Patricia Paraszczuk to death in 1980 in her Montclair Avenue home and staged it to look like a suicide? Or the one who abducted and killed four-year old Cindy Williams in 1973?

Do these men - statistically they are almost always men - resemble the protagonist in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment," suffering the rest of their lives tormented by memory of their dark sin?

Or do they feel little more than one might when reflecting upon an aggravating moment from the past?

Oleniuk said younger men who kill seem most adept at living with what they did.

There is a certain type of young man who can rationalize and dehumanize a victim to a self-satisfactory degree," he wrote in an email. They are emboldened by their power and sense of justification at the time - but may later be haunted by it."

This was the experience of a Hamilton man who was recently released from prison on parole, after serving 18 years for second-degree murder. (He spoke to The Spectator on the condition his name not be published, citing concern that his name in print would reopen wounds for the victim's family.)

When he was 19, he bludgeoned a man to death with a piece of lumber. Over the course of his incarceration, he says he ultimately felt remorse and wished he could trade his life for the victim's. He sent the family of the victim a written apology. He doesn't know if they received it but he's glad he wrote it.

But at the time that he killed, he felt nothing. He said that was because he grew up with violence and law-breaking in the youth gang culture.

I never had much emotional attachment to what I did," he said. At that age I was cold and callous."

He evaded arrest for five months, and believed he would slip police just like the bad guys seemed to do on mafia-themed movies and TV shows he loved.

I thought I was smart but I was a 19-year-old kid, and I wasn't smart."

Now he's 39, and says that while he doesn't consciously play back the night of the murder, he also never goes a day without feeling the weight of what he did.

I committed a horrible act. I wear that every day."

And then there are people who carry the burden of being a suspect in a homicide, despite never having been charged or convicted.

Michael Lavoie is the rare example of a suspect whose name is known publicly, because Hamilton police have in the past named him when referencing the case of Sheryl Sheppard, a 29-year-old woman who disappeared in 1998 soon after Lavoie proposed to her.

In December 2008, The Spectator published a story quoting a Hamilton police officer who said Lavoie was at the top of the list" of suspects.

In response to a recent email from The Spectator, Det. Sgt. Peter Thom confirmed that Lavoie remains a suspect.

Lavoie has never spoken publicly about it.

In a podcast several years ago about the cold case, the host, filmmaker Dave Ridgen, is recorded confronting Lavoie outside his Hamilton home early one morning.

You're Mike Lavoie?" Ridgen asks.

I don't know, am I?" Lavoie says.

Ridgen says he wants to interview him about Sheppard, and Lavoie responds: Absolutely not ... Get off the property."

One possibility is that Lavoie has information about the case, another is that his name has been unfairly tarred by police all these years.

All that remains are old details about the case that can be interpreted a number of ways: that on the day Sheppard was reported missing, according to police Lavoie visited four bars showing her picture around, as though conducting his own investigation; and that two days later, The Spectator reported, Lavoie was rescued by police from a car he left running inside a storage garage in an apparent suicide attempt.

A family member of Lavoie's sent me his Facebook address - it is not under Lavoie's real name - but Lavoie did not respond to questions I sent him.

B.C.-based criminal profiler James Van Allen said those who have committed murder devote much of their lives to staying under the radar.

Depending on their discipline, they won't get close to neighbours, or make new friends, and are secretive with spouses," Van Allen wrote in an email. During one investigation, we watched a suspect eat his lunch at work every day in his car by himself, and at the end of the day take his straws and napkins home to burn in a barrel, so no samples of his DNA were left."

There is no standard protocol for when Hamilton police conduct surveillance of a suspect for an unsolved murder. It happens most commonly in the months following a homicide, but well down the road may be renewed by a tip from the public, or if a detective reopens a file and checks up on persons of interest."

A personal cause" killer - one who has murdered for financial gain, or to make a political statement of some kind - is best able to keep it together and avoid capture.

Conversely, a perpetrator may unravel in part due to substance abuse. That was the case with Sam Pirrera, a crack addict who murdered a woman in his home on the east Mountain in 1999. Pirrera had the cold deliberation to dismember the victim, and planned to dispose of the body parts, but became mentally unwound and could not keep his secret. Later, he was also charged with killing his first wife eight years earlier.

Van Allen believes it is the rare killer who is overcome with guilt, because at one point they felt justified to commit murder. If they were all wracked with guilt there would be lineups at police stations to give confessions."

There is no shortage of literature on what makes a killer: the factors can include such things as genetics, and also childhood trauma and socialization where violence becomes a logical extension of their lives.

U.S. psychologist James Garbarino calls it legitimization of aggression," and war zone mentality," in which a man feels morally justified to respond violently to perceived threats, or engage in a pre-emptive assault; get them before they get you."

That description seems to fit Jeremy Hall (no relation to Carl), one of Hamilton's most notorious criminals, who killed Billy Mason because Hall believed it was necessary payback.

But it was not feelings of guilt, or drug abuse, or letting down his guard that led to Hall's arrest.

He avoided capture more than four years by watching his back and speaking to friends in code.

It was, rather, his paranoia, in combination with that war zone mentality, that did him in. When Hall threatened a man with a .357 Magnum - a man he believed was ratting him out to police - it ultimately led to his arrest and conviction for second-degree murder.

Garbarino writes that we often view murderers as evil people so damaged they can't possibly live among us. But most killers are untreated traumatized children who are controlling the actions of the scary adults they have become."

The existence of killers at large like Hall, or those who wield violence with firearms in drug-related gang wars or mafia hits, might not arouse much fear in the general public. These are, as police officers often put it, targeted" homicides.

And, indeed, it is the rare perpetrator who strikes again: less than one per cent of them are serial killers.

But the notion of murderers living freely who fall outside these categories, who have committed deeply depraved acts, seems more disturbing.

For example, the one who murdered Gleave likely knew the retired teacher, who lived alone in the country with two German shepherds. Her home was at the end of a long laneway off Indian Trail road near Ancaster; hardly the place for a random drive-by attack.

Detectives believe the killer either sexually assaulted Gleave, or staged the scene to look like it. She had been stabbed, and at least one other weapon used, and an item of her clothing was taken from her. Her body was found in the garage, that was accessible by a code pad.

It is a 10-year-old cold case. And all too recent.

Oleniuk said that long ago, people usually attributed the actions of the most sadistic killers to satanic or supernatural forces.

Three hundred years ago we would have stuffed (sex killer) Paul Bernardo's mouth with garlic and put a stake through his heart," he said, adding that he would include Hamilton's Shane Shakeshaft in the same dark category.

Shakeshaft raped and murdered his victim in her apartment on Forest Avenue, and was convicted of second-degree murder in 2018.

Oleniuk believes the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 were a historical turning point, when superstitions about killers began to be replaced by the notion that those who behave like monsters are not driven by evil spirits, but rather have personalities lacking fundamental empathy or a conscience.

In that vein, Shakeshaft was assessed by a psychiatrist as criminally responsible" for his unspeakable violence, his actions determined to not be the result of mental illness, but rather by his own free will.

Gary Chaimowitz, a forensic psychiatrist at St. Joseph's Healthcare who assesses individuals for criminal responsibility, says the vast majority of those who commit murder are not mentally ill, but kill as a conscious, intentional act, either through premeditated criminal motivations or in the heat of a moment.

In homicides where mental illness is a factor - such as a psychotic episode - he says treatment can allow these individuals to come to terms with what they have done, and that it can be a deeply traumatic experience.

Sometimes the victim was very close to them, and they actually care about the person. So having that insight can actually be quite devastating."

Chaimowitz says those with sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies - which he says are personality types, not mental illnesses - tend to feel no remorse over murder.

They may regret what they did, in terms of the inconvenience of trying not to get caught, but they generally are not going to struggle with having taken a life."

It might be overstating it to say Carl Hall suffered a crisis of conscience during his months on the lam after murdering Clark and Del Sordo in June 2000.

Still, something drove him to confess what he did, to a man at a drug rehabilitation centre he was attending.

I did something horrible," Hall said to the man one night, broadly describing having killed a man in an apartment, and that when he saw a woman witnessing what he did, I knew what I had to do."

During his interview with me in Kingston Pen, Hall said he just felt like he had to get it off my chest."

But he had also meant to blur details sufficiently that it wouldn't lead police to him.

Hall miscalculated. His loose lips - and forensics that detected his thumbprint on the rubber grip of a baseball bat - led to his arrest.

And then, on the first day of his second-degree murder trial in 2007, Hall, in tears, told his lawyer he wanted to change his not-guilty plea to guilty.

Who knows, perhaps Hall had something in common with Dostoyevsky's tortured protagonist.

I asked him about TV shows and movies he enjoyed. He cited Dexter," about a vigilante serial killer who targets victims who are themselves criminals.

I asked Hall, did he identify with the lead character?

Yeah, a bit, but I never killed anyone who deserved it," he replied. That's the problem."

Jon Wells is a Hamilton-based reporter and feature writer for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jwells@thespec.com