Case Summary
On September 15, 1956, a seven-year-old boy named Wayne Mallette went missing and was found murdered in a secluded area of Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition (CNE). There were no direct eyewitnesses to the murder, but a security guard on the CNE grounds that evening did have a brief and strange interaction with a teenage boy, who had ridden up to him on a bicycle and proceeded to ask whether anyone had ever found “bodies in the bushes.”1
Working from that description and focusing on teenage boys who had a connection with the CNE, Metropolitan Toronto Police zeroed in on fourteen-year-old Ron Moffatt, who had previously worked there.2 Ron had just recently run away from home following struggles at school, and had the misfortune of doing so right at the time police were looking for boys with a vaguely similar appearance to his own. However, Ron had an airtight alibi: he was at the cinema catching a double feature of “sandals and toga” movies, and had even lingered to help an employee put up letters on the cinema marquee. Ron also did not fit the description of the “strange teenager” reported by the CNE security guard: he did not own a bicycle, and had never learned how to ride one.3
Nonetheless, when police found Ron hiding in a cupboard under the staircase upon searching the Moffatt family home, they took him in for questioning.4 Ron was interviewed by Inspector Adolphus Payne—an already well-known officer who would go on to an illustrious policing career, repeatedly gracing the front page of the Toronto Daily Star—and Sergeant of Detectives Bernard Simmonds, who would later serve as Metropolitan Toronto Deputy Police Chief.5
Insp. Payne and Sgt. Det. Simmonds did not notify Ron’s parents that he had been found. They simply took him to the station to be interrogated, at length, without counsel or an adult guardian present. Ron later reported that the police intimidated and bullied him during the interrogation, threatened him with physical violence, and posed leading questions that filled in details such as the location where Wayne’s body had been found. As a result, he was eventually coerced into making a false confession in which he admitted to murdering Wayne Mallette.6
Ron was charged with Juvenile Delinquency (Murder), an offence under the Juvenile Delinquents Act (1908–1984), which has since been replaced by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Only after his confession was Ron’s mother notified of her son’s arrest and allowed to see him at the police detachment.7
Ron’s judge-only trial commenced on October 23, 1956. Apart from the security guard’s description of “the boy on the bicycle,” two areas of evidence formed the core of the Crown’s case: Ron’s false confession; and forensic evidence from a bite mark analysis expert, who told the court that Ron’s dental impressions matched bite marks found on Wayne’s body.8
Ron was convicted of Juvenile Delinquency (Murder) on December 4, 1956, with a sentence of juvenile custody entered on February 1, 1957. Under the Juvenile Delinquents Act at that time, a juvenile sentence for a crime of this nature meant that Ron would likely remain in juvenile detention until he turned eighteen, at which point he would face life imprisonment or possibly capital punishment (the death penalty was not abolished in Canada until 1976).9
On January 19, 1957, seven-year-old Carol Voyce was found dead in circumstances similar to those of Wayne’s murder, raising the possibility that the wrong person had been arrested and convicted. Toronto police doubled down in the face of public pressure from the Moffatt family and the Canadian news media: rather than admitting to their mistake, police publicly suggested that Ron had inspired a “copycat”, and set about searching for this alleged second person. Ultimately, this led to the arrest of seventeen-year-old serial killer Peter Woodcock (also known as David Michael Krueger), who confessed to having murdered Wayne, Carol, and a second boy named Gary Morris whose case had been unsolved.10
Ron appealed his conviction to the Ontario Court of Appeal. On April 16, 1957, the court quashed Ron’s conviction and ordered a new trial. On May 7, Ron was transferred into Toronto Police custody and then to a Juvenile Detention Centre for the duration of his second trial, which began a week later, on May 13. After a three-day trial, on May 16, 1957, Ron Moffatt was found not guilty, in large part based on testimony from the actual killer, Peter Woodcock. In addition, a different expert in bitemark analysis had testified that the tooth marks left on Wayne’s body did not, in fact, match Ron’s dental impressions.11
The trial judge who acquitted Ron recommended that police refrain from interviewing minors regarding serious crimes without counsel, or at least some adult, present. However, he placed the blame on Ron for having cracked under police pressure: he reprimanded the boy, rather than his interrogators, for “[a]ll the trouble you have been in, in connection with this case, all the trouble given your parents, simply because you failed to tell the truth.”12
In total, from Ron’s arrest date through his acquittal at the second trial, Ron spent approximately eight months in custody. This included: two months of pretrial and trial custody; two months of pre-sentencing custody (one month at the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, and another at a Juvenile Detention Centre); and approximately four months of serving his sentence at the Ontario Training School for Boys (Bowmanville) and at the Psychiatric Unit of the Ontario Reformatory (Guelph).13
The trauma of this experience took its toll on Ron’s mental health. In the years to follow, he would sometimes need to check into psychiatric institutions for periods of care. Many decades later, Ron chose to speak publicly about these long-term effects of his wrongful conviction. As Ron told one reporter, “I was such an emotional wreck. I was traumatized. It took me years and years and years to ever get back to being normal.”14
Today, Ron lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, having lived and worked there for the better part of the past five decades. He is a retired school caretaker and has established a second career for himself as the beloved cartoonist for the Sault Star, Sault This Week, and SooToday papers. He is married and has three children.15