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seemed to like her, e
and everyone seemed to know her.
Her father, I think, had a lot to do with that,
because they were very close.
[Pastor Kevin Rogers] The body had been found.
We knew that there was an active search for her.
We pretty much knew in--
at a gut level, that's got to be her.
[Frederick] One piece of evidence that they did collect
was a cigarette butt very close to her body.
[Trevor Wilhelm] So the undercover officer
picked up the cigarette butt that he had discarded.
Not long after we received it, there was a hit.
So in a strange twist, the DNA they collected in Windsor
actually tied him to an unsolved murder in Toronto.
[Det. Sgt. Mike Davis] I go to the cells.
He's lying down.
I told him that he was going to be charged
with first degree murder.
He just looked at me
and said, "Yeah, yeah,"
and lay back down and went back to sleep.
Welcome to Crime Beat. I'm Antony Robart.
In the summer of 2000,
a woman vanishes in Windsor, Ontario.
But as investigators dig deeper into her disappearance,
they uncover a string of other crimes,
all leading back to one man.
Here now is "She's Still Gone."
[somber music playing]
[Frederick] It was a day not unlike any other.
Extremely hot, and it was humid.
It was raining on and off.
[Trevor] It's sweltering, typical Windsor summer,
a heat wave, it's over 30 degrees.
It's hot, it's sticky.
A guy is walking his dog near the Ford factory
on Drouillard Road in Ford City.
It's a patch of roughly an acre,
overgrown, waist-high weeds, you know, trees.
But there is a path that goes through there,
and this guy walking his dog finds the body.
So he reports it to Ford security guards.
The police are called.
[Frederick] When we arrived at the scene,
there was a-- a lot of activity already.
Patrol officers were there
containing and managing the scene.
Forensic identification officers were there.
Command post and other detectives
were already there prior to our arrival.
There was, in our minds, a female of slight build
who has been in the elements for a lengthy period of time.
The scene itself was one quadrant of an intersection
between Trenton and Drouillard Road.
And that quadrant is a vacant or abandoned field.
I think there was a little bit of homelessness going there,
but mostly it was a path, a walkway from one corner
to the opposite corner, which was a bus stop.
The body was found not far off the path.
So in my eyes, it would have been difficult
to imagine somebody walking by it on the path
and not seeing it.
It was just odd to me
that it had never been reported until it was.
But when I saw the body, it could have been easily missed
because it was badly decomposed.
Basically, skin over bone and some hair...
and naked except for a bra.
The position of the body
definitely caused suspicion in our view.
The female was on her back.
Her legs were bent,
and her bra was unclasped.
So we felt that there was foul play almost immediately.
[Trevor] Windsor back in 2000 was,
you know, not much unlike what it is now.
There was crime, typical, you know, break-ins, robberies,
odd shooting or violent crime.
We didn't, we-- you know,
we averaged a couple of murders a year maybe.
So it was front page news when it happened.
When they found the body, it was badly decomposed,
had very little evidence to offer.
So Windsor Police, you know, they started basically
a shoulder-to-shoulder search through this abandoned lot.
And they find some evidence,
and they don't really say much about it at the time.
[Frederick] We're looking for any type of evidence
or something that may seem unusual.
And we found some peculiar items next to the body.
One was a pile of her clothes,
or what we surmised to be her clothes,
fairly neatly folded,
and a stick on the other side of her
close to her body.
So we didn't know the significance
of those items at the time.
Police, you know, later said it was staged
to look like a sexual assault.
We would take those types of details and hold them back.
We wouldn't report on them
because those things only the suspect would know.
One piece of evidence that they did collect
was a cigarette butt very close to her body.
The clothes, the stick, the cigarette butt
are seized and bagged
and put into evidence for further analysis
through the Centre of Forensic Sciences.
[tense music playing]
So the first steps of any investigation like that
is to confirm the identity of the person.
That was not so easily done
because there was no forms of identification with the person
and the decomposition.
Immediately, we follow our data bank and we find out,
is there missing persons in this neighbourhood?
The uniformed officers are already talking
with neighbours that show up asking,
is there someone that they know is missing?
It would have been a few days before the time of autopsy,
but the rumors on the street and the information
that people were sharing on the street among neighbours
was that it was Michelle Charette.
[Trevor] Michelle Charette
was this diminutive 40-year-old woman
who lived in Windsor's Ford City on Drouillard Road.
And on July 25th, 2000,
her sister saw her near St. Clair College
and then she disappeared.
That was the last time anyone saw her.
Michelle was reported missing on July 31rd
by her father, George.
When he first learned from his other daughter
that Michelle was missing, he attended her residence,
which was on the second story of a couple of businesses.
And what did he find was a mailbox
stuffed full of envelopes and paper and mail.
And it was overflowing.
So he knew that she had not picked up the mail
in a long time.
So George called the police
and the police used force and opened up the door.
And there was nothing inside that would suggest
that there had been violence perpetrated there
or that she had been living there for the last few days.
[Trevor] So weeks pass and it starts to get publicity.
The Windsor Star starts writing about it,
but no one can find her.
It's a mystery.
Her dad starts to wonder if she got abducted.
She used to go outside of her apartment
and smoke a lot on Drouillard Road,
which at the time was kind of a rough neighbourhood.
So he immediately started to wonder,
did she go for a smoke and someone kidnap her?
She also spent a lot of time
trying to help people who were, you know, less fortunate
or had problems with the law or whatever.
So another concern he had
was that maybe someone she was trying to help
did something to her.
Back in 2000,
Drouillard Road was a pretty rough neighbourhood.
A lot of transient people. There was some drug use.
There was prostitution.
It had been down on hard times after the Ford plant closed.
Houses that were abandoned,
abandoned businesses here and there.
And this is where Michelle was living at the time.
Because of the total circumstances
surrounding her death,
plus the neighbourhood in which she was in,
it wouldn't be unusual to think
that someone in the neighbourhood
was responsible for Michelle's demise.
And sure enough, it was within a few hours
of the canvas beginning
that we got the name of a suspect.
♪
Welcome back.
Three weeks after Michelle Charette went missing,
Windsor police discover her remains
in a field just a block from her home.
Staged to look like a sexual assault,
the scene contains almost no evidence.
So officers begin canvassing the neighbourhood.
And within hours,
they've got the name of a potential suspect.
We now return to "She's Still Gone."
[somber music playing]
[Trevor] So Michelle was 40 years old,
one of six siblings from a Windsor family.
[Frederick] It was evident to us very early on
that Michelle was the type of person
that befriended everyone,
didn't care what your stripes were in life.
Everyone seemed to like her.
And everyone seemed to know her.
Her father, I think, had a lot to do with that,
because they were very close.
[Trevor] Michelle was a-- a member of several churches
and spent a lot of time doing [indistinct],
trying to help people who'd been down on their luck
or in trouble with the law.
[Rogers] Yeah, I don't remember the exact time
that I first met her,
but there was a genuine warmth about her.
[indistinct] we should move over one spot.
She had a warm smile, warm eyes,
a compassionate heart.
She really did care about people in the margins.
She wanted to see
people discover a relationship with God.
But during church services and community meals,
she'd be here and she'd participate.
If we were tidying up or something, she'd pitch in.
When we were serving community meals...
if she could help clean up, she'd do that.
She would come to our worship services.
And I have memories of her
just with her eyes closed and singing quietly.
And-- and she was-- she was connected there.
She didn't talk a lot about her background or her family.
We knew her as a loner,
discovered that she had a deep-rooted faith in God.
But in a bit of a troubled package,
she had some boundary issues
around-- around men.
At that time, we had a big old hotel bar
that we were meeting in while we were renovating it.
And she would often come here through the day.
And there'd be different work projects going on.
You know, sometimes we had to say,
"No, you can't come freely and go everywhere you want.
This is a work site."
And we have residential apartments upstairs.
And she'd wander upstairs and knock on people's doors.
And we'd say, "No, you can't do that."
The other thing, she moved onto the street.
And she had a second-floor apartment above a building.
And two o'clock in the morning,
she'd be sitting out on the sidewalk
in this rough neighbourhood in a lawn chair...
by herself, you know, going out to have her smoke.
And didn't seem to have a good regard for,
I should probably be careful.
Too open.
She was-- she was vulnerable.
Once it was reported that a body had been found
you know, at least a couple of weeks had gone by.
And we knew that there was an active search for her.
We pretty much knew in--
at a gut level, that's-- that's got to be her.
As a community, we were in shock.
This was, you know, on our doorstep.
She lived literally across the street.
Where her body was found is one block away.
The police came around.
And there were several people connected to the church
that they interviewed
to try and piece together what happened.
[Frederick] As a result of the autopsy,
we were able to determine
the cause of death being strangulation.
And that it was Michelle through the dental records.
People, when they learn something like that,
they want to talk about the person.
She was a super friendly, likable person.
And that's why so many people came forward.
You have to understand, this is not a neighbourhood
where people readily assisted police in investigations.
They would kind of be tight lipped and that sort of thing.
But not so with Michelle.
[Trevor] So very early in the investigation,
the name of Peter Dale MacDonald comes up.
Peter Dale MacDonald
was originally from Prince Edward Island.
But he was a drifter.
[Frederick] He was suspect at the time of the canvas
because of the fact that we determined
he knew her, he was with her
perhaps on the last day she was seen alive,
and he had a propensity for violence.
The canvas, the interviews with neighbours,
all pointing fingers in one direction.
[Trevor] At the time of Michelle's death,
he was living in Windsor,
but had been coming back and forth
between Windsor and Toronto.
He was a man with a long criminal history,
a violent history.
Some people in the neighbourhood knew this.
And very quickly after Michelle's body was found,
a couple of people that knew him suggested to police
that they look in his direction.
[Frederick] The couple owned a small diner.
And Peter lived and used their facilities
while he had been in Windsor.
So he would dine at their restaurant.
He lived in one of their rooms that they had above the diner.
And they were not hesitant to say that Peter,
to them, was intimidating.
He was violent.
He was new to the neighbourhood.
All of these things came forward
from others as well on the street.
Day three or four of the investigation,
I had occasion to stop in at the diner
where the elderly couple was.
As I was speaking with them,
they're very friendly, very cautious now
because of the fact that Peter was named as a suspect
and he hadn't been arrested.
There was no one else in the restaurant,
and I was talking to them over the bar.
I looked down the-- to my left,
and Peter was walking into the restaurant.
And he sat down on a stool right beside me,
and he could have reached out and touched me.
He didn't say a word.
I said to him, "Peter, get up and walk out,
or you're going to go to jail."
You know, he stared at me for a few seconds,
and then he just got up and-- and walked out.
You know, never knowing who I was,
but knowing I was a police officer,
to have the nerve to do that, like, incredible.
Peter's motive there was to impress upon those two
that he's still out of custody
and that he's-- can intimidate them
or-- and bully them whenever he wants.
Don't be cooperating with the police
because I'm still here.
That's the way I read it.
We had limited alternatives,
and Peter was a-- a big guy
with a propensity for violence, serious violence.
Murder is one thing, but it's murder
by brute strength and physicality.
There's not a lot of people that will do that.
He seemed to be on the run, showing up here
with no other family members or connections to the city.
We kind of felt that he was-- he was the guy.
We wanted to develop quickly
a solid evidence
that either eliminated him as a suspect
or gave us the grounds to arrest.
[intriguing music playing]
[Deputy Chief Frank Providenti] The detectives at that time
requested that the Mobile Surveillance Unit
follow Mr. MacDonald
to see what his behaviour and his activity was,
as well as obtaining a DNA sample if we could get one,
in case there is something to compare it to
from the crime scene.
MacDonald was very erratic.
He'd go from place to place. He didn't go to work.
I never followed him to his house.
He would just walk around in the downtown area.
There were times where we would just leave him at Jackson Park.
He would just stay there at night,
and we would just pick him up the next day.
So on the day that I was assigned
to follow Mr. MacDonald,
I relieved the day shift surveillance unit
at this location right here,
which is 880 Victory in the town of LaSalle.
Mr. MacDonald exits the LaSalle address
and gets into a late model pickup truck,
which turns out to be stolen,
and we follow him into the Windsor area.
We followed Mr. MacDonald to the liquor store.
He grabbed a bottle of liquor and then made his way
to a bar on the West End called Hurricanes.
We pulled into the parking lot...
watched him park his truck,
and ultimately we went inside and had a seat next to him.
He was talking to another person,
and I just started to get into the conversation.
I had probably a couple beers with him.
He didn't talk much.
It was small talk,
but we became, you know, friendly.
During our conversation,
Mr. MacDonald got up to go to the washroom.
I had to make a decision.
Do I stick around and continue the conversation?
It wasn't going anywhere. It was just small talk.
Or do I take the opportunity to seize the DNA
that I knew that I could get?
[Trevor] So Windsor Police,
they didn't find a lot of evidence,
but one thing they eventually did reveal,
about six feet from Michelle's body,
they found a cigarette butt.
So the undercover officer picked up the cigarette butt
that MacDonald had discarded,
and they send it to the Centre of Forensic Science,
hoping to get a DNA match.
[Frederick] In the meantime, to cast off DNA,
he is submitted to the data bank in Toronto.
Not long after we received it, there was a hit.
So in a strange twist, the DNA they collected in Windsor
actually tied MacDonald to an unsolved murder
four months earlier in Toronto.
♪
Welcome back.
Windsor Police suspect Peter MacDonald
of killing Michelle Charette,
but can't connect him to her murder.
The surveillance team manages to get a piece of his DNA,
hoping for a match to their crime scene.
Instead, a hit comes back to a homicide
almost 400 kilometers away in Toronto.
We now return to "She's Still Gone."
[Davis] It was April the 29th, 2000.
We arrived here.
The officers' uniformed car was already on the scene.
It was parked outside the building here.
The information that we had
was that there was a deceased person
in apartment 608 here at 99 Tyndall Avenue.
He was lying on the opposite side of the bed
in the bedroom, on the floor, naked.
And there was some white powder substance
that was spread on him,
a slice of cheese that was found near the body,
some sheets that were rolled up on the end of the bed,
this Brian Mulroney doll was sitting on the pillow
along with an Ontario hospital card
in the name of James Campbell.
There was a living room area there.
On the couch, there were a couple of beer bottles.
There was a tumbler.
There were signs that something had happened that night,
that there was some drinking going on,
whether it was just the deceased by himself
or was he with somebody.
These are all questions
that you have in the back of your head.
And standing at the bedroom door,
I could see the white powder
that the officers first saw when they arrived.
We didn't know what it was.
Didn't appear to be any scent to it.
But later on, they found that it was talcum powder.
Why that talcum powder was spread over him, I don't know.
To this day, I don't know why.
And when I saw the cheese,
I started to think whoever may be responsible for this,
maybe they were leaving some sort of signs behind.
I don't know. It-- it was just bizarre to me.
There was no signs of any blunt force injury
to Campbell at the time
We could see that there were no cut marks to him
from a sharp edge object.
There were no bullet wounds to him.
There didn't appear to be any bruising of any sorts.
We really didn't know what James Campbell had died from.
The forensic identification services officers
began to collect the evidence.
And what we were hoping for was to locate
some sort of blood or bodily substance of some sort,
looking for DNA.
The autopsy indicated that James Campbell's cause of death
was manual strangulation.
One other thing that was collected during the autopsy
were fingernail clippings,
looking for possible DNA from anybody else
that he may have come into contact with.
The canvassing, I don't believe there was any video cameras
set up at that time at 99 Tyndall.
So we didn't have the video at all, people coming and going.
There were some people that did come forward
that indicated that he would frequent the Gladstone Tavern,
a bar called the Dufferin Tavern.
He would frequent that as well.
He would meet with friends, have a beer.
He seemed to be a pleasant fellow.
And of course, we would speak to the family as well.
And I believe the last time they had heard from James
was on April the 25th,
so a few days before he was found deceased.
There was no real leads. It was a real whodunit murder.
We started to get some DNA results back.
The beer bottles were an unknown source.
The tumbler, Campbell was identified
along with an unknown source.
They were able to find bodily fluids on the sheets,
including blood.
Some of it was from Campbell.
Some of it was from an unknown source.
The same person on all these items.
So we were ahead a little bit, but not by much.
Once the DNA is extracted by the CFS,
then they would submit it to the National Data Bank,
where all DNA samples from all crime scenes would sit
until there were some matches.
On April 5th, 2001, I received a call advising me
that they had a match from our crime scene
to an investigation that was being conducted
by the Windsor Police Service.
While they were surveilling Peter Dale MacDonald,
he threw away a cigarette butt.
That was the DNA that matched our crime scene.
That name never came up in our investigation,
Peter Dale MacDonald.
So we had no idea who this person was,
but we found out that he had a lengthy criminal record.
He had been incarcerated many times
and that he was in custody here in Toronto
at the East Detention Centre on other charges
unrelated to Windsor, unrelated to our homicide.
So on June 1st of that same year,
we go and visit him.
We asked the jail staff
if they could have MacDonald removed from his cell
so that we could speak to him.
The guards later come back to us and said,
he refuses to come out of his cell,
doesn't want to talk to you.
[church bell tolls]
On June the 25th, we find out
that he's making an appearance in court
down at the Old City Hall.
I go to the cells,
MacDonald's there lying down.
I asked him to get up, asked him what his name was,
told me it was Peter MacDonald.
I then told him that he was going to be charged
with the first degree murder of James Campbell.
He just looked at me and said, "Yeah, yeah,"
and laid back down and went back to sleep.
[Frederick] In Toronto, there was a hit,
but we still didn't have a piece of DNA
that connected him to our crime.
We received a bit of a break about a year later.
A man who had been living across the hall
from MacDonald came to police
and said that he had admitted to killing her.
He'd gone through his treatment program
with MacDonald and they were drinking one night
and basically said, "I beat this woman to death
and dumped her body in a field."
He had some level of detail,
the informant did, of what happened.
In addition to the circumstantial evidence we had,
we felt that we could lay the charge.
So there was a charge of second degree murder
laid on Peter.
About a year later, after a preliminary hearing,
the Crown Attorney, [indistinct name],
withdrew the charge.
[Trevor] The case against MacDonald was actually dropped
because the DNA evidence ended up being inconclusive.
[Frederick] Unfortunately, there was no DNA
able to be reproduced from the cigarette butt
that was seized at the scene.
There was some biological matter,
but it wasn't suitable enough for DNA analysis.
You don't want to prosecute, lose the case,
and then you've lost the ability to retry them
if new evidence becomes available.
While disappointing at the time,
it was probably a good tactical move.
But the DNA that couldn't convict him
for Michelle's murder ended up convicting him
in the Toronto murder.
[Davis] MacDonald and Campbell had met each other
in a park near where Campbell lived on Tyndall.
And from there, they went back to Campbell's apartment.
They had some sort of sexual interaction.
Things got out of control,
and MacDonald ended up strangling Campbell to death.
At trial, the evidence is called,
witnesses are called, forensic officers are called.
The nail clippings, we found DNA from not just Campbell,
but we also found it from MacDonald.
Obviously, there was some sort of contact
between the two of them.
At the end of all this,
after the jury deliberated,
they came back with a verdict
of guilty of second-degree murder.
Justice Epstein set his parole eligible
after serving 13 years.
[Trevor] It's a rough several years for Michelle's family.
They don't have answers. She's been murdered.
No one's responsible for it. There's no closure.
And her father, George, is getting old.
He starts to worry, "Am I gonna live long enough
to see my daughter's killer brought to justice?"
And so years pass.
And in 2009, new investigators are assigned to the case.
[Frank Providenti] I went about my career and wound up landing
in our major crime unit as a homicide detective.
And Michelle Charette's homicide was
one of my cases assigned.
I knew that there was a cigarette butt
located six feet from Michelle Charette,
which was unusual.
It's not someone that's just gonna pass by
and discard their cigarette butt.
It's gonna be the killer's cigarette butt.
There were other people that had dealings with Michelle,
but nothing that would arouse our suspicion
into committing such a heinous crime.
Everybody knew her.
So it wasn't hard to find out
who was hanging around with Michelle at certain times
prior to the murder.
And it all led to Mr. MacDonald.
We knew we could resubmit the forensics.
That was going to be done.
But the decision was made to pay Mr. MacDonald a visit
in Kingston Penitentiary.
When you walk by Paul Bernardo's cell
to get to Peter MacDonald's cell,
you know you're in a bad place.
In 36 years of policing,
that's probably the most uncomfortable position
that I've ever been in.
He doesn't know what's going on,
and we introduce ourselves,
and we want to talk about Michelle Charette.
Well, he doesn't want to talk to us about it.
Shuts us down right away and asks to leave the room.
So we left him a business card.
Say, "Listen, if you change your mind,
just give us a shout
and we can have a conversation."
We got up and left.
[Trevor] A few weeks later, he calls them.
So the officers go to Kingston to meet him for a second time.
[Providenti] The conversation didn't go very well
from the beginning.
It became apparent to me
that the only reason that he wanted to talk to us
was for him to get something out of this interview.
It was self-serving.
He wasn't there to talk about Michelle.
He made allegations that the guards were picking on him.
He wanted out of Kingston.
He wanted to be transferred to a nicer institution.
That went on for about an hour and a half.
Him denying it, him wanting to be moved,
and us saying, "We're not moving you.
We want to talk about the homicide."
After an hour and a half to two hours of interviewing,
and he started to break a little bit
and started to talk about Michelle.
"She'd always hang around me. She was always bothering me.
She was always, you know, talking church with me.
And she was just getting on my nerves."
And ultimately, he told me that she had bothered him so much
that he couldn't stand it anymore
and that he put her in a chokehold
and choked her out and killed her.
So he confesses, you know,
he's charged with a murder, crime is solved.
Then he recants it.
Now they're back to the square one.
You know, they have to build a case against him again
without a confession.
Not long after he's charged with Michelle's murder,
there's another Toronto connection.
Police in Toronto now suspect him
of the murder of three sex workers in the mid '90s.
♪
[Rolf Prisor] '94.
On July 7th, we received
a call with regards to a female
that was found down by Sunnyside Beach.
This is the area here where Julianne was found.
This is the dock.
It's not quite the same
as it was back then,
but her body was found on the right-hand side.
But her torso was just under the dock
and her clothing was found by a galvanized fence
just on the east side of the building.
[reporter] Patrick Middleton was 30 years old
when his sister Julianne was strangled,
partially disrobed and thrown into Lake Ontario.
No, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
[reporter] It was July 1994 when Middleton,
a sex trade worker from Parkdale, was killed.
It appeared initially that it was possible
it could be a drowning or a suicide,
but there were some red marks on her body
around her neck and other parts of her torso.
But that was consistent with her body
sort of moving up against the dock
from the flow of the water, the breakwater there.
The following day on July 8th,
a post-mortem examination was conducted.
What initially looked as though it was reddish bruising
was starting to become a little darker.
The cause of death was officially listed as drowning,
but the factor of the strangulation
became part of that.
The investigation lasted a number of months initially,
but eventually the leads went cold.
When Middleton's father learned that another prostitute
had been strangled and dumped in the lake
just three months after his daughter's killing,
he feared there was a serial killer on the loose.
That woman was 33-year-old Virginia Coote.
Three years later, 35-year-old Darlene McNeill,
another prostitute, was murdered
in the exact same way.
The other homicides were directly east of here.
They were within the range of about a kilometer.
The second scene is at the...
east side of the Palais Royale,
between that and the Boulevard Club.
And then you go further east,
and it's at the rear of the Legion by the water
where Darlene was found.
So at that point, it's pretty obvious.
We have someone in our minds
that's responsible for all three.
We needed to set up some kind of a task force.
So Doug Grady was put in charge of Project Breakwater.
[Doug Grady] Around 2000,
we started to review these cases.
These victims, they were last seen
eleven o'clock in the evening
to about two o'clock in the morning
by peoples in that area.
We didn't have much to go on
because nobody saw them walk away
with anybody in particular.
Back in that time, police services
across the country were stopping people
on a regular basis
and recording that information in whatever form they used.
In Toronto, we used
a particular contact card, I'll call it.
And in it, police would write time, date, location,
the name of the person, date of birth, home address,
reason they're being stopped, perhaps what they're wearing.
We got all the contact cards for those areas in 2000
and it gave us an idea of who was out and about
in the hours we were looking at.
So we went through everybody
that came in contact with the police
and went and interviewed them.
And our reason was not to say
all these people were suspects in the murder.
We were looking for anybody who may have had contact
with either the victims or a potential suspect.
[Prisor] With respect to Middleton,
there was DNA evidence obtained.
Further leads are followed up.
Persons of interest come to light.
DNA samples are taken to eliminate them.
[Grady] And from our investigation,
a name that came out was Newf.
Somebody was going by Newfie or Newfoundlander.
And from those contact cards,
we started to get a particular person
who was using that name in that area.
That was a man I now know as Peter Dale MacDonald.
There was a worker at a hotel that said,
"Newf used to be around here all the time
and he wasn't for a while.
And then he came back."
Our murders were in 1994 and 1997.
So being around in '94, not around for a while,
and then back, that was unusual
and perked our interest a lot.
There was one incident
where somebody yelled out the name Newf
when one of the young ladies was seen
walking near the time of her murder,
but nobody saw anybody.
In the end, we found a location in the East End of Toronto
where he had been staying.
And at the address, I spoke to a gentleman
who had known Peter Dale MacDonald
for a while.
At least the last few months he had lived with him,
but he wasn't there.
He gave us a lot of information
and he said he would probably see him in a while,
but he didn't know where he was
at the time that I was talking to him.
What I learned about Peter Dale MacDonald's
criminal history is he had 20 convictions.
He had been sentenced to at least 14 years in jail,
armed robberies, break-and-enters.
I would say petty crimes,
but they were more robbery with violence
and break-and-enters to commit indictable offenses.
He was an active criminal who'd been in jail
in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Ontario.
He was a parole violator,
routinely, or a probation violator.
Whatever he was on, he never complied with anything.
During our investigation, we had to talk
to parole officers and coordinators
and various custody locations where Peter was.
Turns out that even though he is registered
as being in Dorchester, New Brunswick prison,
he was actually paroled to a halfway house
in downtown Toronto for about a two-year period
where on our file, it looks like he's in prison,
but he's being stopped in the street
using various aliases.
When he hit our radar,
he became quite clearly somebody
who we should be concerned with.
There was DNA evidence from one of the victims
that may have given us a lead
that Peter Dale MacDonald was involved.
[Prisor] Peter Dale MacDonald's DNA
came back to Julia Middleton.
Unfortunately, she had several DNA samples
that were evident, and we could not put
sole proximity on Peter.
So it was frustrating.
We went to the Crown Attorneys,
and it was quite clear that we did not have enough
to go forward with a case for exclusive opportunity
and for a chance of a conviction.
It wasn't a strong case.
[Prisor] We had examined
every potential lead at that time.
Once the Project Breakwater concluded,
we did not have any viable suspects.
Eventually, the three cases go into the cold case squad.
[reporter] Today, 16 years after his sister's murder,
the family finally got to look at the man accused
of killing her, 52-year-old Peter Dale MacDonald.
When police were asked why an arrest took so long
in the case of the three prostitutes.
We need evidence that will allow us to lay a charge,
and over the past 16 years
and within the last little while,
we've managed to come up with that extra piece
that we needed to charge him.
[reporter] It's a case that's haunted
those who live in Parkdale.
Everybody got scared in the neighborhood,
especially all the prostitutes.
[reporter] Today, relief, there's been an arrest.
That's wonderful.
And some closure for the families of these girls.
[reporter] MacDonald, who remains behind bars
serving life in jail,
won't go to trial here in Toronto
until he stands trial first in Windsor.
♪
[theme music]
Welcome back.
At the end of 2010,
convicted killer Peter MacDonald
is facing four more murder charges.
Already serving a life sentence for strangling James Campbell,
he now stands accused in the deaths
of three sex workers in Toronto
and Michelle Charette in Windsor.
But will all these families finally see justice?
Here now is the conclusion of "She's Still Gone."
[Trevor] In Toronto, the charges
involving the sex workers were ultimately dropped.
[Prisor] In July of 2011,
the Crown Attorney withdrew the charges
based on no reasonable prospect of conviction.
Whether it was insufficient evidence,
loss of witnesses,
they felt that it was not viable to pursue a trial.
[Trevor] The case against MacDonald in Windsor,
after he basically admitted to this murder,
he then recants, says he didn't do it.
We needed more evidence other than a confession
because sometimes confessions don't hold up in court,
confessions are thrown out.
We knew that DNA testing had come a long way
since the homicide.
So six months after the confession,
after being charged, we submitted the cigarette back
for further analysis, it came back to Mr. MacDonald.
It was pretty phenomenal to think that
the cigarette butt had been discarded
in an overgrown field, sat there for weeks,
heat, humidity, rain, you name it.
And there's enough integrity in that DNA
more than a decade later to get a hit.
Not just get a hit, but a solid hit that police said,
"This is within billions, it's this guy.
This is our guy."
[Providenti] I was very happy that that came back.
What else can you say now?
You've confessed, you're in the middle of a field
where nobody goes, and your cigarette butt
is six feet from Michelle's knee?
How do you explain that when in court?
So he's charged, and it hasn't gone to trial yet,
but there's a speak-to day.
[Providenti] He's up in court to discuss whether
he's mentally fit to stand trial.
That's a defense tactic.
[Trevor] And everyone thinks,
"Oh, it's just a regular court day.
It's not a trial.
That comes weeks or months away."
[Providenti] There was a lot of people in that courtroom.
There was family. There was a lot of press.
[Trevor] He's brought into court, shackled,
surrounded by tactical officers,
and he's charged with second degree murder.
And he's asked, how does he plead?
And out of nowhere, he pleads guilty to manslaughter.
I think there were gasps in the courtroom.
I cover a lot of crime,
a lot of courts over the decades,
and this was a dramatic moment.
Michelle's father was not expecting that.
Even the Crown, I think, later said that
he wasn't expecting it
until moments before it happened.
[Providenti] And I believe the defense lawyer
was just as shocked as everybody else was.
[Trevor] So police did tell us at one point
that when he initially confessed,
he said he strangled her
because she was trying to help him.
And in his eyes, she was just nagging him.
He had a temper.
He had a quick temper, a violent temper,
and he just snapped and strangled her to death.
So this woman was 4'10", 125 pounds,
like a tiny girl, and he was a Hulk.
He was this big, muscular, bruising, tattooed guy.
So you can only imagine just the fear she was going through.
Like, this guy had his hands wrapped around her throat,
right, and literally crushed her windpipe.
[Providenti] It was unexpected.
He did take ownership of the case.
But when the Crown Attorney
went through some of the facts in the case,
Mr. MacDonald interrupts the Crown on numerous occasions
because he doesn't like what's being said.
It makes him look really bad.
[Trevor] He's interrupting and talking about
how that it's being sensationalized,
and this is unfair to him.
And he was actually silenced by the judge.
I remember the judge saying, you know...
"That was a horrible thing you did that day.
But today somewhat makes it better
by taking ownership of it.
And I accept your guilty plea."
He's immediately sentenced that day.
He's already in prison serving time for the Toronto murder.
But they add seven years to his sentence
to be served concurrently.
On Thursday, February 23, Peter Dale MacDonald,
54 years, entered a guilty plea to manslaughter in relation
to the death of Michelle Charette.
[reporter] Was there ever a motive in this killing?
Mr. MacDonald is a lifelong criminal
with a very violent background.
So my experience with Mr. MacDonald
is that he has a bad temper,
and he just snaps as indication of his last conviction
for a second degree murder.
He's just... he loses control...
and kills people.
He didn't have much to say about why you did it,
except that he said he wanted to give
Michelle's father some closure.
And he also said something like,
"For what it's worth, Michelle said he was a good dad."
Dad was emotional.
He was surrounded by reporters
outside the courthouse.
It was a bittersweet day. It was a sad day.
But in some way, he'd found a little bit of closure,
a little bit of justice.
Very emotional,
because he thought he was going to die
and never know who did this to his little girl.
[reporter] What's it like after all these years?
After all these years, what's it like?
It still pays a toll on me.
- You know? - [camera shutters click]
I think I've aged ten years from this.
I didn't think I'd ever see the end of it,
the closing to this case.
But with MacDonald admitting he killed her,
that kind of gives me a relief.
But she's still gone.
You don't expect to bury one of your own.
But the waiting time until they found her...
that was the hard part.
And then when we did find her, then we had to wait.
I never thought we'd ever find the killer.
We knew who it was, but we couldn't prove it.
So it's a good feeling that we know
the man committed it and admitted it.
But that don't bring Michelle back.
[Rogers] She had that willingness
to want to help people,
but without the discernment,
it would have been the very thing
that would lead her to Peter MacDonald.
Her heart put her into a vulnerable spot.
She couldn't foresee...
"This is what could happen to me."
She had the heart of a lamb,
but she didn't have the eyes to see a wolf.
[Antony] George Charette passed away in March, 2019,
seven years after Peter Dale MacDonald
was convicted of killing his beloved daughter.
MacDonald became eligible for parole in 2017.
However, according to the Parole Board of Canada,
his most recent application
in May, 2022, was denied.
To this day, nobody has ever been convicted
in the deaths of the three other women in Toronto.
I'm Anthony Robart.
Thank you for joining us tonight on Crime Beat.
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