WARNING: This story contains disturbing details
To visitors, Woodstock is often touted as a charming Ontario town with historic buildings, a tight-knit population of about 39,000 and an annual summer dairy festival.
For locals, the community is in the midst of troubling times.
In 2009, eight-year-old Tori Stafford was abducted from her Woodstock elementary school, raped and murdered. The trials of Michael Rafferty and Terry-Lynne McClintic, who were both convicted, have long weighed on the town.
Earlier this year, five Woodstock teenagers committed suicide in what the Canadian Mental Health Association called a “suicide contagion.” The string of tragedies caused hundreds of high school students to stage a walkout in June.
The community’s latest shock came Tuesday when police linked the deaths of seven elderly Woodstock residents to former nurse and accused serial killer Elizabeth Wettlaufer, who has been charged with eight counts of first degree murder. Another patient was allegedly killed in London, Ont.
Family members of some of the deceased told CTV News that police investigators informed them that Wettlaufer allegedly used insulin to kill patients who angered her. Sources say Wettlaufer allegedly confessed to the killings while undergoing addiction treatment for narcotics at a Toronto psychiatric hospital.
The shocking allegations, which have yet to be proven in court, have once again thrust Woodstock into the national spotlight for tragic circumstances.
“I think we just seem to not be able to catch a break,” former Woodstock mayor Michael Harding told CTV Kitchener.
The town’s small size compounds the tragedies. Caressant Care Long Term Care Home, where seven victims lived, is located across the street from Tori Stafford’s elementary school and the high school where a security camera captured her last image.
“This is where the camera on this school caught that fuzzy image of Tori being walked down with the girl in the puffy white coat,” Harding said, standing across from the nursing home.
The timing of the charges, Harding says, doesn’t give residents much time to breathe after the final chapter of the Stafford case.
“Monday of this week started with Rafferty’s (trial) concluding after seven years. And then on Tuesday, to hear this horrendous story.”
Locals expressed sadness and concern after hearing of the charges against Wettlaufer, who lived in an apartment building in town.
“It’s so hard to believe, really, to fathom that somebody could decide I’m going to end someone’s life, that they decide they’re going to play God,” said Woodstock resident Deborah Park.
Others said it’s hard to find someone in town who didn’t know one of the victims.
“When you read the list of folks, even if you don’t know the people, we’re a small enough community, so you know of the people,” a resident told CTV Toronto.
Investigation just beginning
Police could have a long and complicated investigation ahead of them as they seek to determine if the suspect was connected to any other deaths, a former Toronto police investigator said.
“What they have to do now is obviously go back … to the nursing homes and reinvestigate every death of any patient that she was caring for and go through the same process again,” Mark Mendelson, now a private investigator, told CTV News Channel.
Mendelson said he was not surprised by reports that Wettlaufer allegedly confessed to the killings.
“I don’t think it surprised anyone who’s ever investigated a homicide before. It was the only place this information could’ve come from,” he said. “Whether she disclosed to a worker at CAMH or whether she had disclosed to a friend or a co-worker, the information had to come from her because they had the specifics of the names and the ages of the deceased.”
During his time as a police investigator, Mendelson said, it wasn’t unusual for individuals to contact authorities and confess to a crime.
“It happens. People do confess to murders without being investigated directly. I’ve had it happen to me in homicide (investigations) where people called and said, ‘I have killed somebody,’ and it was a murder that we didn’t know about. And they took us to the murder, and for whatever reasons go on in their minds, they decide that now is the time to get that burden off their conscience,” he said.
The Ontario Provincial Police have said that no bodies will be exhumed for the investigation, a fact that Mendelson said is not surprising.
“Many of these bodies would’ve been embalmed, and what does the embalming process do to the drug? So they may not have been able to find the insulin in the body anyway, and we also don’t know how many of them were cremated – in which case you’ll find nothing,” he said.
Wettlaufer is scheduled to appear in court by video on Nov. 2.
With reports from CTV Toronto and CTV Kitchener
