Thursday Thinkpiece: Acts of Darkness: Notorious Criminals, Their Defenders, Their Prosecutors, and Their Jailers

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Acts of Darkness: Notorious Criminals, Their Defenders, Their Prosecutors, and Their Jailers

Author: John L. Hill
Foreword by: Salvatore Caramanna
Publisher: Durvile
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
True Cases Series, Book 13
ISBN: 978-1-990735-75-2 (pbk)
E-book and audiobook also available
6” x 9” | 288 Pages | B/W Photographs
$35 in Canada, $29.95 in US.

Excerpt: “Michael McGray: A Serial Killer in Plain View”

“I’m a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog and lone; I’m a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own; I’m a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep; I love to sit and bay the moon to keep fat souls from sleep.” —Irene Rutherford McLeod

In late 2016, longtime Moncton, New Brunswick, SPCA employee Claude Paquet lost his job and was convicted of willfully causing unnecessary pain, suffering, and injury to an animal. A vicious dog brought into the shelter had bitten Paquet. When the dog attacked, Paquet kicked the dog. He was charged with animal cruelty. Pacquet was represented in court by Moncton lawyer Myer Rabin.

“The dog grabbed Mr. Paquet’s arm, and he just lost it,” Rabin told the court during sentencing. The defence counsel argued there was no intention of cruelty; it was a reflex action. He hoped the judge hearing the case would impose a discharge rather than accept the Crown’s position that the 31-year animal shelter employee should be placed on probation for injuring the black Labrador mix scheduled to be euthanized.

Judge Troy Sweet was unimpressed. “You’re very lucky the Crown wasn’t looking for jail time because I would have given you 15 days for what you did to that poor dog,” said the judge, glaring at Paquet. He added that the SPCA is supposed to be the place where animals find refuge and protection, not more abuse.

Myer Rabin, defence counsel, had faced a far more disturbing vicious dog case six years earlier. The family of Jeremy Phillips retained him to bring suit against the Correctional Service of Canada (CDC)— a case steeped in tragedy.

Thirty-three-year-old Jeremy Phillips had been in good spirits in the weeks leading up to his anticipated release from Mountain Institution in Agassiz, British Columbia, in November 2010. He was nearing the four-year mark of a six-year sentence for aggravated assault, a sentence imposed after an altercation in his Moncton apartment. Statutory release was just weeks away. Phillips had plans. He intended to return to Moncton to care for his mother, who had suffered devastating injuries in a fire and was grieving the recent death of her husband from cancer. But Phillips never made it home.

His killer was his cellmate, 47-year-old Michael Wayne McGray, a man whose acts of darkness were neither hidden nor subtle. In a 2000 CBC News interview, McGray openly embraced his violence. “It’s like a craving or hunger,” he said. “It’s something I have to do… It gets to a point where I can’t control it anymore.”The CBC News interview was a precursor to this tragedy. On being convicted for an earlier murder, McGray commented,

Just because I’m locked in prison doesn’t mean the killing’s going to stop. I mean, I’m almost on the verge right now where I’m going to commit another one. I’m very, very close, and it’s almost inevitable that it’s going to happen again. I can’t control it.

McGray had been convicted of six murders but was proud that his body count numbered sixteen.

As a former Correctional Investigator said, one goes to prison as punishment, not for punishment. To paraphrase what Judge Sweet, the judge in the animal cruelty case, would later say, “[Prison] is supposed to be a place where [prisoners] find refuge and protection, not more abuse.” The Phillips family decided to sue for compensation for Jeremy’s loss. The family retained Myer Rabin to process their claim.

Bringing a lawsuit against McGray would be pointless. He wouldn’t be eligible for parole until he was 72 and still highly likely ever to see release. He had no assets. After all, you can’t get blood from a stone. The deep pockets rested with CSC. Rabin would have to prove that CSC expected that violence would ensue and let it happen. Rabin had scant knowledge of how the prison system operated. He asked me to join him as co-counsel in his lawsuit. I agreed.

Michael Wayne McGray

Like many inmates in federal penitentiaries, McGray did not have a fairy-tale upbringing. He suffered from sexual abuse and was beaten by his father as a small child.

Even before McGray amassed a series of murder convictions, he had built up a sizeable criminal record. His first conviction was on December 21, 1982 in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia for dangerous use of a firearm. He was sentenced to five months imprisonment. In the next ten years, he ran up a string of convictions for theft, forgery, assault, and mischief. The record is strewn with convictions for parole violations and misconduct while supervised. All convictions were in the maritime provinces except for a sentence registered in Provincial court in Brighton, Ontario, where fifteen months was added to his sentence for theft over $1,000 and assaulting a peace officer. He was serving time at Ontario’s Warkworth Institution.

During a 1991 three-day pass from La Macaza, a medium-security prison in Quebec, for the Easter long weekend, McGray went to Montreal and killed Robert Assalay and Gaetan Ethier. He had met up with 59-year-old Assalay in a Montreal gay bar, returned to Assalay’s home, and slew him with a knife. The next day, he met 45-year-old Ethier in another gay bar. Upon returning to Ethier’s home, McGray smashed a beer bottle over Ethier’s head and stabbed him. Police did not suspect his involvement, and he returned to serve his prison sentence without suspicion of having committed homicides.

When McGray was paroled in 1993, he returned to Halifax and hooked up with a girlfriend named Tammy. The two drifted across Canada and into the United States for the next four years, returning to Halifax occasionally. Tammy became pregnant and in February 1995, gave birth to a baby boy. The child died from medical complications three days after being born.

McGray and his girlfriend held down jobs in North Dartmouth. Tammy worked as a maid at a hotel, and Michael worked as a landscaper at a seniors complex. They were renting an apartment on Brule Street in North Dartmouth. McGray became a heavy drinker.

The Halifax authorities received numerous reports of missing persons. They had been warned that Michael McGray had moved to the area. Even though Halifax police maintained a log of missing persons, McGray’s name was never attached to any disappearances, although he was considered a suspect responsible for missing persons.

He had no contact with police until June 10, 1995, when police attended the Brule Street residence where McGray slit his wrists in a suicide attempt. In a note he left, Tammy blamed his depression for losing the child. Tammy had discarded the note but told police her memory of the contents:

It said something like I…It’s not your fault…It’s my fault…blame myself for my son’s death…fer [sic]…stuff I’ve done in my past…and this how [sic] God’s paying me back…

By 1998, Michael and Tammy were living in Moncton, New Brunswick. It was there that Tammy met Joan Hicks, a 48-year-old homeless mother who had travelled from Newfoundland to New Brunswick with her eleven-year-old daughter, Nina. Joan’s goal was unusual—she hoped to marry a prisoner she had been corresponding with by letter.

On March 1, 1998, police were called and advised that Michael McGray had slashed Joan and Nina’s necks. McGray was arrested and admitted to killing Joan but denied killing the daughter. The admission that he killed Nina did not come out until 2001 when he said his denial was on account of not wanting to be branded as a child killer in prison.

For killing Joan and Nina, McGray was sent to the maximum-security Renous Institution in New Brunswick. He spent years in solitary confinement. He had been in solitary since 1998 and concluded that the only opportunity to achieve release into the general population would be to confide in the prison psychiatrist.

In the 2003 letter to the psychiatrist, McGray divulged that he had experienced hearing voices and screams that were getting closer, right outside the window of his cell, and the voices “can bore right into my head.” He also admitted to seeing phantoms. It had him worried. He wrote,

I am really scared of what I am going to see…I am afraid that I am going to see something truly horrifying, and every day, I feel it’s coming closer to revealing itself.

Some would see this letter as a ploy to obtain sympathy and perhaps a release from solitary confinement to a psychiatric hospital. The concept that solitary confinement is torture and can have lasting and permanent effects on those subjected to it was little understood. It was not until the work of such people as Dr. Stuart Grassian of Harvard University, who studied the dehumanizing effects of this abusive treatment, that correctional authorities and the courts were made aware of the damage that it inflicted.

It is not as though McGray deserves sympathy. He was himself motivated by dehumanizing attitudes. The letter sent in 2003 to the institutional psychiatrist talked of his killing “suitable victims.” These included marginalized victims already looked down upon by polite society: sex workers, gay men, and prisoners.

The intensity of McGray’s inner turmoil is caught in one passage from his letter:

Doctor, it’s not that I have an anger problem. I’m sure I do, but I have to hurt people to survive. It’s like food or air. I need it so badly. Sometimes, I feel the only reason to go on living is so that I can kill an inmate someday and have that release again.

McGray took great pains to assure the psychiatrist that any future victim would not be a guard. The “suitable victim” would most assuredly be a fellow penitentiary inmate. He addressed this succinctly:

I do have a hunger and urges, but I have always been able to control them until I found a suitable victim. An inmate may be a suitable victim, but a guard is definitely not!

By the time he was transferred from Renous Institution to maximum-security Kent Institution in British Columbia, he had been convicted of six first-degree murders, including the stabbing death of Elizabeth Gale Tucker, a New Brunswick teenager, and Saint John resident Mark Gibbons. The CSC should have been well aware of his past and the letter written to the psychiatrist at Renous as an indication of his future.

The Phillips Murder

Even with this substantial body of information on file, the case managers at Renous looked kindly on McGray. No doubt, their satisfaction with this inmate was due to his willingness to consult with staff about the wrongdoings of his peers. It is a mortal sin in the penitentiary to “rat” on one’s fellow cons, but McGray enjoyed the favours that breaking the con code bestowed upon him.

A proper reward the CSC managers allowed was a transfer to a medium-security Mountain Institution. The facts surrounding Jeremy Phillips’ death are concisely set out from the presiding coroner’s summary published following the October 2012 inquest:

At 0958 on November 22, 2010, a call for assistance was made to the on-duty Correctional Officer from cell A1 at Mountain Institution in Agassiz, B.C. Two Correctional Officers (CX1 Janzen and CX2 Woods) responded to the cell. They found inmate Mr. Wayne McGray standing at the cell door, requesting that they check on the wellness of Mr. Jeremy Michael Phillips. Mr. McGray claimed that Mr. Phillips had not responded to his earlier attempts to wake him. The officers testified that they entered his cell, attempted to wake Mr. Phillips, and noted that he was ‘cold to the touch and stiff upon turning him’.

The officers immediately summoned medical assistance. Nurse Bonita Hess was working in the adjacent living unit and responded within seconds. Nurse Hess testified that she checked for a pulse, but there was none. She testified that rigour mortis and livor mortis were present and that Mr. Phillips had been ‘dead for a while.’ Other medical personnel, including an on-site physician, responded to assist, but Mr. Phillips was deceased.

Shortly after Mr. Phillips was found, Mr. McGray admitted to correctional staff that he was responsible for the death. He subsequently made the same admission to the police. The jury viewed a warned video statement that was taken by police on the evening of November 22, 2010, wherein Mr. McGray described the sequence of events that led to Mr. Phillips’ death. Mr. McGray alleged that both he and Mr. Phillips jointly hatched a plan to fake a hostage-taking scenario. The intended outcome was that Mr. McGray would be moved back to Kent Penitentiary and Mr. Phillips would get time off at the infirmary or possibly early release.

The findings of the coroner suggest that the murder of Jeremy Phillips was a scam gone wrong. It is not for a coroner’s inquest to assign blame or wrongdoing. However, the coroner’s jury viewed the videotape of McGray’s statement to police, which would cause jurors to suspect the killing was not as genteel as the recorded summary suggests. That recorded interview contains McGray saying the following:

You fuck with me; somebody will fucking pay. They always fucking pay. I’m a sociopath. I’m a serial killer. I shouldn’t be here [at Mountain Institution]. I shouldn’t be in medium. I’m not a medium inmate. I’ve never been. I didn’t have any problem with Jeremy. I didn’t know the guy. It is what it is. It’s just another sentence to me.

The suggestion that Phillips and McGray hatched a scheme to stage a hostage-taking for mutual benefit overlooks the fact that Phillips objected to being “double-bunked” with McGray and had requested that McGray be moved. Is it likely that Phillips could have refused to go along with McGray when McGray dreamed up the hostage-taking plot? Could it be that McGray’s instincts to kill another vulnerable person had taken over?

The Civil Suit

Mayer Rabin commenced a civil suit on behalf of the Phillips family, seeking $11 million in damages for the wrongful death of Jeremy Phillips. He asked me to act as co-counsel in the action—a case that would expose not only McGray’s monstrous violence but the institutional blindness that allowed it to unfold.

Several Mountain Institution inmates were prepared to testify that Jeremy Phillips was a well-liked individual, terrified of McGray, and desperate to be moved out of their shared cell. His requests were met with indifference. He was told to “just suck it up.”

McGray himself had also asked for a cell change. At Kent Institution, he had enjoyed the isolation of a single cell—a privilege befitting his notoriety and danger. Being placed in a two-to-one cell situation was, in his eyes, a humiliation. For a man like McGray, it was a provocation.

His correctional records painted a chilling portrait: a history of brutal violence and a stated desire to kill again, particularly if his victim was another inmate.

These were not hidden impulses. They were documented, known, and ignored. Acts of darkness are sometimes committed in full view, aided by silence, indifference, or misjudgment.

Nothing in McGray’s record suggested rehabilitation. His only currency with Kent staff was cooperation, a shallow indicator of compliance, never of safety. There was no reasonable basis, no logical rationale, for moving him out of maximum-security Kent Institution. But move him they did, and Jeremy Phillips paid for that decision with his life.

The lockdown at Mountain Institution confined inmates to their locked cells throughout the evening in which Phillips had been killed until the following day, when the body had been discovered. Cells are supposed to be checked regularly throughout the day and night to ensure they are occupied by living, breathing bodies. Why had Phillips’ death taken so long to discover? The Department of Justice lawyers had no logical explanation for the missteps taken by Correctional Service Canada staff.

The case was settled by mediation before going to trial. The Phillips family accepted the sizeable settlement and signed a nondisclosure agreement. The public was barred from hearing the amount the Correctional Service had to pay. CSC has never admitted liability, and requests by news outlets as to what has been done to ensure that dealings with dangerous inmates such as McGray never happen again.

The Aftermath

Who should answer when mistakes are made? Should the Minister responsible for overseeing the Correctional Service of Canada be held to account if errors are made? Should the Minister be advised of high-profile prison transfers? Should the Minister have the right to intervene to block transfers approved by officials in his department?

Such questions arose again in 2023 when departmental officials approved the transfer of serial killer Paul Bernardo from maximum-security Millhaven Institution to medium-security La Macaza Institution in Quebec. The sudden and unexpected transfer set off a firestorm of criticism, most notably from the lawyer who had represented the families of Bernardo’s victims.

Despite my involvement in criticizing CSC for the horrendous outcome of the McGray transfer, I could not join the uproar the Bernardo transfer was causing.

The situations between McGray and Bernardo were very different. Bernardo had not killed another person again as an inmate and has never voiced any intentions of doing so. The transfer from an institution where he was receiving little by way of rehabilitative programming to an institution that offered specific treatment was logical.

Of course, as with McGray, mistakes can be made. Upon being criticized, it was reasonable for the Minister to request the CSC review how decisions in the Bernardo case were made and, if made contrary to common sense, re-evaluate the transfer. It would be seriously wrong for a Minister to overrule his departmental officials and put in place a directive that might be more politically popular.

There was an outpouring of emotion that people like Paul Bernardo should be locked away forever in maximum-security institutions. That dehumanizing attitude reflects the same consideration McGray gave to his victims. Suppose a penitentiary inmate remains dangerous even after exposure to rehabilitative programming. In that case, it is appropriate to detain that person in custody at the required security level for as long as necessary.

Mistakes have been and will continue to be made. They should be reviewed, and an admission of their making and what corrective actions will be implemented. It is crucial to recognize that the correctional system’s ability to learn from these errors and improve should be considered a positive aspect of our justice system. A willingness to reassess and correct mistakes shows a commitment to fairness and justice, which is essential in a democratic society.

Furthermore, treating inmates with dignity, even those convicted of heinous crimes, reflects our society’s values and our belief in the potential for rehabilitation. This approach not only upholds human rights but also increases the chances of successful reintegration into society for those who one day may be released. The worst possible outcome is to assume the offender is less than human and act with a vengeance on that account—the treating of inmates as “vicious dogs” rather than as human beings demeaning us all. If the SPCA is a place where vicious animals are supposed to find refuge and protection and not more abuse, as Judge Sweet stated, shouldn’t the same be said of Canada’s prisons?