Toronto police have charged a man who was once a prime suspect in the murder of Byron Carr with three counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of prostitutes in the 1990s.
Peter Dale MacDonald, 52, appeared in court on Thursday in relation to the deaths of three women in Toronto. He is currently in police custody.
He is originally from the Borden-Carleton area of Prince Edward Island.
“The fact that we are here today is a testament to all of the excellent quality of police work that was done by the original investigators and by the investigators in the cold case squad,” said Detective-Sergeant Steve Ryan of the Toronto Police homicide squad.
MacDonald is charged with the deaths of Julianne Middleton, Virginia Coote and Darlene McNeil. They were killed in 1994 and 1997 near Sunnyside Pool, south of High Park.
He is currently serving a jail sentence for the murder of James Campbell in Toronto in 2000.
Shortly after the death of popular P.E.I. teacher Carr at his Charlottetown home sometime in the early hours of Nov. 11, 1988, MacDonald quickly came on the police radar. He was a recent parolee, having just served federal time for a serious crime, living on P.E.I. when Carr was killed.
MacDonald was also in violation of his parole when he left the Island without notification.
Police were able to confirm that MacDonald was, as he claimed, in Montreal at the time of Carr’s death.
Forensic evidence collected from MacDonald at the time didn’t match that collected at the crime scene. Years later, MacDonald’s DNA was found to not match the DNA profile police subsequently developed on Carr’s killer. MacDonald has been removed as a suspect in the long unsolved murder that shocked the Island more than 20 years ago.
In January, MacDonald was charged in connection with the death of Michelle Charette, 40, who was killed in Windsor, Ont., in 2000.
MacDonald’s name originally surfaced in connection to the 1994 deaths of Middleton, 23, and Coote, 33, but police didn’t have evidence to back charges then, Det. Sgt. Ryan said. The body of McNeil, 35, was discovered in 1997.
New evidence surfaced over the past six or seven months, investigators said. MacDonald was living in Toronto at the time of the murders, police said. All three women were killed in the same way, but they did not elaborate.
Staff Inspector Mark Saunders, unit commander of the homicide squad, credited the hard work of Toronto police and co-operation with other forces for the breakthrough on the cold cases.
“There was never a moment that the Toronto Police Service ever took this investigation lightly,” he said. “In fact, I will tell you that we put a tremendous amount of resources into this particular case to reach this conclusion.”
