‘Watching the devil dance’
A retired RCMP officer revisits the haunting tale of 1960s killer who avoided the death penalty
On the evening of June 25,1966,18-yearold Matthew Lamb discovered a shotgun at his uncle’s house in a small Windsor suburb. He then walked a block north and hid behind a tree.
Edith Chaykoski, 20, and her friend Andrew Woloch, 21, were approaching a nearby bus stop with Chaykoski’s brother, his wife and two other friends. It was at that moment, shortly after 9 p.m., that Lamb emerged with the gun in his hand.
“Put your hands up,” Lamb yelled. The violence unfolded quickly: Lamb shot Chaykoski in the abdomen. He shot Woloch, too, and wounded Chaykoski’s brother, Kenneth. Chaykoski would die the next morning at Windsor Metropolitan Hospital. Woloch died 17 days later.
None of the victims knew Lamb, who shot them that Saturday evening before terrorizing a few others along his path and retreating into his uncle’s home. He was arrested and charged with the murder of Chaykoski the following morning.
Will Toffan was just 13 when he listened in horror as his father detailed the tragic events of the night before. Chaykoski was Toffan’s neighbour, and the object of his boyhood crush. “She was my girlfriend that never really was,” Toffan recalled.
The pain and shock haunted Toffan for years, inspiring him to go into law enforcement, where he launched an eventful career as an RCMP officer and later as a bodyguard to prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney.
But nothing struck him quite like the 1966 murder spree near his childhood home, which is the subject of his book, “Watching the Devil Dance: How a Spree Killer Slipped Through the Cracks of the Criminal Justice System,” published Tuesday by Windsor’s Biblioasis.
“I always told myself that one day I would get to the bottom of the story,” Toffan said in an interview.
Through extensive research, Toffan tells the story of Lamb, a troubled young man who seemed to attack the first people he encountered that evening at random. Lamb’s brutality sent shock waves across Windsor, as it was an unusual crime at a time marked by some of the lowest murder rates in the 20th century.
But what was more unusual was Lamb walking away from his crime almost scot free. He escaped the death penalty with an insanity defence — then rarely raised and rarely successful — and was instead admitted to Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre’s Oak Ridge facility.
Lamb’s mental illness diagnosis was the first step on a strange journey that saw him released from the high-security facility six years later. He wound up travelling to Jerusalem where he tried to join the Israeli armed forces but failed, and instead joined the Rhodesian army in what would later become Zimbabwe. His service was imperative enough to land him a hero’s funeral when he died in combat at age 28.
Among many aspects of Lamb’s story, Toffan’s book explores the murderer’s time at Oak Ridge under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Elliott Barker, who believed that psychopathy could be cured and engaged in controversial therapy practices to treat people who were deemed psychopaths.
It begs the question: Did the treatment have a profound impact on Lamb? Or was Lamb an anomaly who manipulated the system and walked away free of consequences? “Well, that’s up to the reader,” Toffan said.
Barker, infamous in Canada’s psychiatry circles in the 1960s, believed psychopathy was a consequence of someone’s inability to communicate their feelings effectively with others, and that this was related to issues deeply rooted in their childhood.
“He believed it was one seminal event that had occurred in every psychopath’s past, and one thing that they’ve subconsciously repressed” that led to their detachment from empathy and subsequent behaviour, Toffan explained.
The cure Barker prescribed was a strict regimine that relied on bullying tactics, torture (such as solitary confinement for days), and a constant cocktail of methamphetamines and mind-altering psychedelic drugs like LSD. The hope was this would eventually lead the patient to realize and isolate the seminal event from their childhood, thereby addressing it and “killing it,” Toffan said.
But research conducted in the 1980s of Barker’s methods found that inmates who didn’t participate in the program were less likely to reoffend when released than those treated by Barker. The recidivism rate of those who didn’t participate is 58 per cent, versus 80 per cent for those who did, Toffan said.
Barker’s mental health experiments were later deemed unethical in a landmark decision by the Ontario Supreme Court in June 2020, after 28 former patients successfully sued Barker and Dr. Gary Maier for the treatment they received under their care at Oak Ridge.
The treatment didn’t stop Lamb from thriving at Oak Ridge and rising as a superstar among fellow patients. He was just 19 when Barker made him a patient therapist, where he would run group therapy sessions for other dangerous criminals and write prescriptions for them. He also moved into Barker’s home when he was still an inmate.
A panel review board at Oak Ridge, of which Barker was a main member, released Lamb with little fanfare seven years after the shootings, failing to notify the families of the victims or Windsor police. Lamb soon left the country and began his mercenary career overseas.
Toffan acknowledges that Lamb’s story is an unusual tale marked by fascinating elements that are unique to the era in which his crimes occurred.
“In those days, there was no reason to investigate it any further, because (Lamb’s crime) was considered so strange and so crazy that it was unlikely to ever be repeated,” Toffan said.
But just a month after the Lamb slayings, Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago. A month after that, Charles Whitman became infamous as the “Texas Tower Sniper,” killing 16 people and an unborn baby in a violent rampage before he was shot dead by Austin police.
These horrific mass murders have become even more common, fuelled partly by the notoriety the media gave its perpetrators, Toffan believes. The number of mass shootings — defined as four or more murders at roughly the same location and time — in 2020 in the United States alone, as of October, is 538, more than one per day.
Yet little is understood about the psychology of the killers behind these crimes. Toffan hopes his book will provide at least one in-depth look at what once was a unique murder case; now a blueprint for many like it.
“It was an omen, but we didn’t see it that way,” Toffan said.
Above all, he says his book is both a preservation of a painful snapshot in time and an ode to the lives taken prematurely that fateful Saturday evening.
“I wanted people to know that they existed,” he said.