Crime, punishment and the parole system

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/05/2025 (397 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In an excellent op-ed (Reviewing the parole system, April 29, Think Tank) Robert Marshall urges readers to consider the consequences of a lenient parole board.

I want to show you an example from 40 years ago to demonstrate that nothing has changed.

I am going to tell you about a man who used the parole system and temporary absences to commit heinous crimes against women. This man visited our city, terrorized a young woman, and then escaped under the radar to another province where he continued his vicious rampage against defenceless women.

In 1977, I was a 29-year-old detective working robbery/homicide on the Winnipeg Police Service.

One day in May, my partner and I were assigned to interview a young St. James woman who had reported being abducted from the Polo Park parking lot the previous evening.

This woman reported that she had returned to her car after shopping and, just as she opened the driver’s door, a male, armed with a screwdriver, grabbed her and pushed her into the car. The male then got in, bound her hands, pushed her down into the area in front of the passenger’s seat and sped off driving west on Portage Avenue.

Just before arriving at the Perimeter Highway the male turned off of Portage Avenue and stopped in a back lane. By this time the woman had managed to free her hands and when the car stopped, she jumped out and ran.

The male didn’t pursue her but rather sped off in her car. This had all been quite traumatic for the woman and you have to appreciate that we didn’t have a victim services unit and the available supports for victims that we have now.

The woman was able to provide a good description of the male but having only this description limited our options in moving forward with the investigation. This was before the days of computerization, closed circuit TV cameras, DNA and automated fingerprint searches that assist investigators today.

Two days after interviewing this woman, I was reading the paper with my morning coffee and came upon an article that described how the Peel Regional Police were investigating the stabbing death of a young woman outside of her car on a Mississauga, Ont., mall parking lot. When I got to work I sent a message to Peel Region describing our attack.

Their response was simple. “Was your assailant right- or left-handed?” I replied that he was left-handed and they immediately arranged for a detective to fly out and interview our victim.

This lead to a year of back-and-forth correspondence with Peel Region police with requests to interview airline personnel, truck drivers, and others who would have been in both cities in the given timeline. Then, in 1978, Peel Region arrested a male named Donald Armstrong for our offence and theirs and this lurid story emerged.

Appreciate that we knew none of this prior to his arrest.

We have to start with who Armstrong was and how he ended up in our city.

Armstrong was born and raised in Nova Scotia and at a later hearing his mother testified that he was a different child right from the start.

In his youth Armstrong set the family house on fire and stabbed his younger sister. Armstrong ran up a lengthy criminal record and finally ended up in Kingston Penitentiary after abducting a woman by holding a knife to the woman’s two-month old-baby’s head to force her to comply.

While serving this sentence in 1977 and on a one-day temporary absence from the penitentiary, he abducted a 16-year-old female from a Kingston shopping mall lot. The teen was later found dead on the side of a country road after having been raped, strangled, and run over by a vehicle.

Armstrong then applied for parole stating that he wanted to spend his supervised parole at the X-Kalay Foundation in St. Norbert, Man., a suburb of Winnipeg. He never revealed why he chose that location.

Between leaving Kingston Penitentiary in 1977 and arriving in Winnipeg, he attempted to kill a woman seated in her car on the lot of a Mississauga mall by stabbing her in the chest, neck, and face with a screwdriver. She was only saved by the heavy jacket that she wore. She provided the “left-handed” description.

Once at X-Kalay, Armstrong fell into the routine of the place and participated in programs until that fateful night where he attacked the woman at Polo Park. After driving off from the back lane he drove to a Pembina Highway dealership and stole a car that had been left for repairs.

It is suspected that he drove straight to Brampton, Ont., where he is highly suspected of stabbing a woman to death outside her car on the Bramalea City Centre shopping mall lot.

Armstrong went to trial and received a 25-year sentence with no parole for the murder of the 16-year-old, the attempted murder in Mississauga and the abduction of the woman in Winnipeg. The 16-year-old’s two sisters have attended every one of Armstrong’s parole hearings to oppose his parole.

Think of the countless family members and friends of Armstrong’s victims whose lives were forever changed by his evil deeds.

It’s obvious from reading this that the system failed when it gave Armstrong the one day temporary absence and then parole.

The parole system has many more resources available to it than a judge does who is seeing an accused for the first time and is dependant on the background available to them at the time. This could be the day of the accused’s arrest or the next. As much as this story was about Armstrong and events from 48 years ago, it is also about our need to always be aware that such people exist and to be on guard against them.

If we use the psychiatrist’s definition and stats then one per cent of the population will display Armstrong’s symptoms while up to 30 per cent will exhibit some of them.

Don’t think that some miraculous cure has been developed in the last 50 years. It hasn’t.

Stan Tataryn is a former member of the Winnipeg Police Service.