Episode 4 of The Shell Lake Massacre: The Killer

Less than three weeks after being discharged from a hospital for the mentally ill, 21-year-old Victor Hoffman found himself driving along the highway away from his family farm. As he travelled toward the small community of Shell Lake, Sask., an urge to kill that had settled deeply within him grew stronger and stronger. Within the hour, he would commit one of the worst random mass murders in Canadian history.

Episode 4 explores the early life of Victor Hoffman, his mental health struggles, and previously unheard details about the police investigation that led to his arrest.

The Shell Lake Massacre podcast is a special presentation by Rawlco Radio. The six-part series hosted and produced by Brittany Caffet airs Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m. on 650 CKOM and 980 CJME. Weekly episodes are available for download on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Content warning: This episode contains depictions of violence and other content that may be disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

Listen to episode 4: The Killer

Listen to episode 3: The Last of the Petersons

Listen to episode 2: The Night of Fear

Listen to episode 1: The Petersons

Transcript of Episode 4: The Killer

Disclaimer: Most of the following transcription is AI generated, and errors may have occurred.

Victor Ernest Hoffman was born on Jan. 15, 1946. He was the fifth of seven children born to Robert and Stella Hoffman, who lived on and operated a farm near Leask.

Victor was seemingly a perfectly average baby. He started walking at nine months old and talking at 10 months … and aside from being what some called “excruciatingly shy,” nothing seemed amiss. But as Victor got older, the differences between him and other children his age started to become more and more apparent.

As a toddler, he would have violent tantrums, banging his head against walls and pulling out his hair, eventually leaving a permanent bald spot on the side of his head. He showed very little interest in making friends and led quite a solitary childhood.

Victor started to fall behind in school, repeating grades 3 and 9. These challenging behaviours continued into his teenage years, and would only escalate as the years went on.

Victor and his family didn’t know it at the time, but most of his struggles through his adolescence were caused by a severe mental illness. Although he hadn’t yet been diagnosed, Victor Hoffman had schizophrenia.

I spoke with Lisa Dailey, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a non-profit that works to eliminate barriers for people with severe mental illnesses, in an attempt to better understand what exactly schizophrenia is.

[LISA DAILEY: “It’s basically an illness that has been with mankind forever. It is an organic illness that affects people’s ability to think clearly, reason normally, can affect people’s mood, can certainly create certain symptoms that either are positive symptoms, which we would call things like hallucinations and delusions and sensory kind of disruptions, and then negative symptoms, which can be things like having a flat affect, not really having much of an expression and that kind of thing. It affects about one per cent of the population, typically, if not more.”]

Victor would later tell psychiatrists that he began experiencing hallucinations around the age of six. He would see what he believed to be the devil — a six-foot-tall creature with a long tail that was black as the night.

This seems to be early for hallucinations to begin in the life of someone with schizophrenia, but it isn’t impossible. These would have been considered “very early onset hallucinations.” The average age for a male to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia is in their late teens to early 20s, but it is common for symptoms to surface long before the diagnosis much like they did in Victor’s life.

[LISA DAILEY: “You sort of see that it was that in hindsight a lot of times. So many times you don’t recognize that this is going on with someone until they have their first psychotic break, which is basically like the first time that they’re not really able to distinguish between reality and what they’re perceiving as reality. Earlier than that, there’s something that they call the Padromal Phase, and that can start to happen in childhood. It can start to happen in early adolescence. And it usually will involve sort of distorted thinking and some kind of more mild symptoms where the person is still basically engaged with reality, but in hindsight, you can see that it started earlier than the break.”]

By the time Victor was 10 years old, he grappled with impulses to kill almost daily. He didn’t act on those impulses against another human for many years, but instead directed his rage and aggression toward animals on the farm. Victor tortured and killed cats, dogs, squirrels and other small animals regularly throughout his adolescence.

As he entered his 20s, the symptoms that he was exhibiting became more and more severe. He seemed to lose all interest in the few hobbies he did have and retreated almost completely within himself.

His mother Stella tried to engage him. She would send him out of the house, tasked with completing simple chores, but she would find him sitting alone in the fields surrounding their home, staring off into the sky. This was baffling behaviour for Victor’s family to witness, but it lines up perfectly with what we now know about how schizophrenia can present itself.

[LISA DAILEY: “Some people do actually talk about what they’re experiencing or they might ask people whether they also see things and like, but not everybody does that. So sometimes people will sort of be more withdrawn and kind of quiet and seem to be kind of distracted. Distraction is a big one in terms of not being able to really focus on what’s going on … (It) can affect memory. You might see that somebody has inappropriate emotions. Somebody might say something that is sad and they might laugh. And it’s basically just sort of like an inappropriate reaction to what they’re experiencing. You can see things that are sort of like aggression at some point, but that usually tends to be closer to when you might see an actual break.”]

As the calendar turned to the year 1967, Victor’s first full break with reality was drawing near. The devil had become a familiar companion for him. He had also begun to see angels and claimed to have received messages from God.

Victor’s father, Robert Hoffman, recalled being out in the field with Victor and another of his sons in early May. Victor was sitting behind the wheel of the family’s farm truck. He suddenly burst into laughter, and when questioned about what was so funny, his humour turned to rage. He slammed the truck into gear and sped off, forcing his brother to jump out of the way to avoid being hit by the one-ton vehicle as it barrelled out of the field.

On May 28, Victor’s mother, Stella, was in the kitchen preparing dinner when she was startled by the sound of a gunshot. She looked up and through the window saw Victor standing in a nearby field, pointing a rifle toward the sky. As Stella ran toward him, Victor fired again. And again. When he noticed his mother running toward him, he turned to her and said, “Mom, I shot the devil!”

Stella demanded Victor give her the gun and he went into a frenzy, dropping the rifle, jumping into his vehicle and spinning out of the driveway away from the Hoffman home.

With Victor gone, Stella and the other members of the family hurriedly hid all of the firearms in the house. Victor returned within half an hour and demanded to speak to a pastor.

Looking back, there seems to be a common religious theme between most of Victor’s hallucinations. Dailey says that isn’t an uncommon occurrence for those with schizophrenia.

[LISA DAILEY: “Delusions and hallucinations can often involve religious motifs and can involve angels and devils, depending on what the religion is that the person is associated with or most familiar with. If it’s somebody who doesn’t really have a history of being particularly religious or particularly caught up in religion, and then suddenly that becomes something that can be one of the things that makes it easier to identify that this is different, something different is going on.”]

The Hoffmans did as Victor requested and called a local pastor to come and speak with their son. There is no record of exactly what was said during that conversation, but immediately after speaking with Victor, the clergyman told Robert and Stella that their son was incredibly sick and needed to see a doctor as soon as possible.

Victor was admitted to the Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford the very next day. He was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after his arrival.

The Saskatchewan Hospital was a massive brick building holding over 1,000 beds that were used to provide treatment to Saskatchewan’s most mentally ill residents. The hospital provided the most up-to-date treatments available at the time, but even by 1967, treatments for schizophrenia were nowhere near as effective as they are now.

Records indicate that Victor was given tranquilizers through the course of his stay at the Saskatchewan Hospital, which would have calmed and sedated him, but most likely wouldn’t have had an impact on the delusions he was experiencing. He was also treated with electroconvulsive therapy.

[LISA DAILEY: “The way that that would have been practised in 1967 is so different from how anything like that would be done in this day and age. I know that it isn’t what you would expect to see in like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s not quite that because they would have already at that point started sedating people … They would have the electroconvulsive therapy and then there would be a period of recovery. There usually tends to be a period of memory loss following that. And the sensation would probably not be a thing that someone has a recollection of.”]

Victor was also given occupational therapy and supportive psychotherapy.

[LISA DAILEY: “Both of those can be effective in terms of treating people who are stabilized in terms of ensuring that they’re able to cope and thrive within the community, but it doesn’t sound to me like he was … He was probably not stabilized first, in which case I’m not sure if he would have been in a good position to make use of talk therapy or occupational therapy. Both of those are very beneficial to people who have schizophrenia, but of course you have to get on top of the actual break and you have to bring somebody to a point of stabilization before they’re really able to make use of something like talk therapy.”]

Records from Victor’s hospital stay describe him as withdrawn, seclusive and indifferent. He told psychiatrists that he believed the devil had put another brain in his body. When he described his many interactions with the devil to doctors at the hospital, they told him the conversations were not real, that they were simply created in his mind, but Victor disagreed. He insisted that he had been able to speak with, touch and had been in physical fights with the devil.

Again and again, Victor was told that these were merely delusions. He later said that he eventually realized that if he didn’t stop telling the doctors about these visions, he would never get out of the hospital.

So Victor stopped talking about his interactions with the devil … but the delusions continued all the same.

When Victor was first admitted, doctors told Robert and Stella that their son was incredibly ill and would need to spend at least a year, maybe more, in treatment. Imagine their surprise when just under two months after Victor had entered the hospital, a letter arrived at the Hoffman home alerting them that their son was ready to be discharged.

On July 26, 1967, Robert Hoffman returned to the Saskatchewan Hospital. When he approached the front desk and asked to speak to the doctor, he was told the doctor was unavailable but that he had confirmed that Victor was able to return home. And so he did. Victor Ernest Hoffman was discharged to the care of his father with nothing more than a prescription for tranquilizers.

[LISA DAILEY: “That would be like something that sedates you, makes you calmer, but only because you’re sleepy. It probably wouldn’t really have much of an effect on what is going on in your mind, but it would physically make you less likely to get up and go do anything in particular. Obviously we have no reason to think that he was reacting to any medication that was making him improve. It’s 1967, so the tools that were available for a family that doesn’t really have much of a sophisticated knowledge of a psychiatric illness or what it means, there wouldn’t have been very many tools. But even the tools that were available kind of seem to have been only marginally used in this case. I don’t really see that there was evidence that his thoughts were different at the time that he was discharged. He had sort of learned that he needed to not talk about certain things in order to be released, so it can certainly be the case that physicians cannot understand the full extent of somebody’s symptoms. But essentially what I think happened here is that he was discharged before he was actually stabilized, which makes sense if he wasn’t receiving any medication that could have done anything about his positive symptoms.”]

Robert Hoffman left the Saskatchewan Hospital with his son in tow, feeling surprised but optimistic at the quick change in Victor’s prognosis. Robert and Stella had listened to the doctors and done everything they could to help their son return to his right mind, and they were hopeful that his mental health would improve. They had no idea that their son’s descent into madness was only just beginning.

In the days after Victor returned home, life on the Hoffman farm trudged on. Victor began helping with farmwork again and sometimes seemed to be doing a bit better, but his improvement was sporadic at best. One day he would seem to be in high spirits, and the next his hallucinations and the rage and aggression that came along with them would return in full force. He claimed to be taking his medication and begged his parents not to send him back to the hospital, saying he would rather die than go back.

Victor would later tell psychiatrists that throughout the early days of August he thought about killing his parents, his siblings or even complete strangers every single day.

As the warm summer days rolled into cool summer nights, Victor was consumed by these murderous thoughts. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep … he could only think of killing.

Aug. 14, 1967 was a quiet day on the Hoffman farm. Victor spent the day on the tractor summerfallowing. After a long day working in the hot August sun, Victor dozed off on the couch at about 9:30 that night. His parents woke him up and sent him to bed at 11:30, but he didn’t sleep long. By 3 in the morning on the 15th, he was wide awake.

It had been less than three weeks since he had been released from the Saskatchewan Hospital, but according to Dr. Abram Hoffer, a psychiatrist who would later testify in his defence, Victor had now completely lost any grip on reality. He got up and went out to the garage where he saw one of the family dogs. He had a sudden impulse to kill it, but he resisted.

Instead Victor Ernest Hoffman filled his car with gasoline, loaded his .22-calibre rifle, put it in the car, and drove off into the dark.

I’ve spent the last number of months compiling as much information about the Peterson case as possible, but had been unable to obtain any documentation from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police relating to the investigation into the death of the Petersons — until now.

Days after the initial production on this episode wrapped, a 407-page RCMP case file landed on my desk, containing all of the details surrounding the police investigation into the death of the Peterson family.

The RCMP case file consists of two folders. It’s labelled with the name HOFFMAN, VICTOR ERNEST and marked with a large ink stamp reading “DORMANT RECORDS.”

A statement from Cpl. Barry Richards, the first law enforcement officer on the scene, sits about a third of the way through the file. The following audio consists of excerpts from the statement of Richards, recreated by a voice actor.

[STATEMENT OF CPL. BARRY RICHARDS: “At 9:20 a.m. on Aug. 15, 1967, I was in the Spiritwood detachment office when I received a long-distance call from Shell Lake. The man who was calling identified himself as Wildrew Lang and stated that a man appeared to have been murdered.”]

Cpl. Richards immediately left the Spiritwood RCMP detachment and headed toward the Peterson home. As he approached Jim and Evelyn’s farm, he saw Wildrew Lang, the neighbour who had first stumbled upon this crime, standing by the highway, waving to get his attention.

The scene was eerily quiet as Cpl. Richards exited his police car and made his way into the small white farmhouse. He saw Jim Peterson’s body laying in a pool of blood as soon as he entered the home. As he looked through the kitchen, he could see into Jim and Evelyn’s bedroom, and made note of the open window.

[STATEMENT OF CPL. BARRY RICHARDS: “I stepped into the entrance of the living room, which was immediately to my left. I saw a girl of about 12 years of age lying on a cot.”]

He slowly walked closer toward the body of 11-year-old Dorothy. After confirming that she was dead, he continued into the bedroom where the rest of the Peterson children had slept.

[STATEMENT OF CPL. BARRY RICHARDS: “My immediate impression was that everyone in the room was dead. I continued across to the bed in the southwest corner of the room and touched the large girl on the outside and noticed that her skin was cold.”]

Cpl. Richards stood silently, surrounded by the bodies of the Peterson children … when something in the corner of his eye caught his attention.

[STATEMENT OF CPL. BARRY RICHARDS: “I noticed movement on the bed located in the northwest corner. I noticed the head and the shoulders of a small girl. She was lying face down. Her shoulders and hair were moving. I didn’t stop to examine the room further or to examine the little girl.”]

Cpl. Richards hadn’t yet checked every room in the house. He needed to ensure that the person responsible for this wasn’t somewhere in the home, so he exited the bedroom and made his way toward Jim and Evelyn’s room as four-year-old Phyllis lay face down on the bed between the bodies of her sisters, trying to stay still.

A quick search of Jim and Evelyn’s room revealed that no one else was in the house, and Cpl. Richards stepped out of the home. He found Wildrew Lang and Alvin Simonar waiting. He told them that one little girl was still alive in the home, and asked the men if one of them would go back into the house with him to retrieve the girl. Wildrew and Alvin said no and told Cpl. Richards that they were scared.

[STATEMENT OF CPL. BARRY RICHARDS: “I then re-entered the house and went to the bed on which the living girl was lying. She was in the same position as she had been when I last observed her, face down on the bed with her head buried in the mattress. She didn’t move as I approached the bed and tapped her two or three times on the right shoulder. She raised up on her elbows, lifted her head, and looked right at me. She said, ‘Where are you going to take me now?’ I didn’t answer her. I just pulled back the covers and picked her up.”]

He gently gathered Phyllis into his arms and carried her out of the house of horrors and into the safe, warm arms of Alvin and Marjorie Simonar.

Cpl. Richards then got back into his patrol car and sped back to Shell Lake where he was able to call RCMP headquarters to request assistance. As police reinforcements began to arrive from North Battleford, they noticed the bodies of Evelyn and Larry Peterson on the ground behind a rain barrel near the back of the house.

Dozens of police officers descended on the scene and scoured the home, yard, and surrounding land for any clue that would lead them to the killer.

Police set up a command post in the Shell Lake Community Hall. Tracking dogs were brought in, but to no avail. Officers dusted for fingerprints, but none of any interest were found. They cut pieces of linoleum from the floor that were soaked in blood and showed a distinctive boot print in hopes that they would later be able to match them to a suspect. Five spent .22-calibre cartridges were recovered from the scene — officers believed the killer had picked up the rest in an effort to hide their identity.

Checkstops were set up on roadways far and wide, and RCMP officers knocked on the door of hundreds of homes in the area, questioning residents, searching homes and yards, and checking weapons. The search went on for days until finally … a break in the case came.

On Aug. 17, a man walked into the RCMP detachment in the nearby community of Shellbrook. He told police that his neighbour’s son had just got out of a mental hospital and that the young man liked hunting and guns. This tip led police to the farmyard of Robert and Stella Hoffman near Leask. Robert Hoffman willingly handed over his son Victor’s .22-calibre rifle and rubber boots.

On Aug. 19, just 10 minutes before the funeral of James and Evelyn Peterson and seven of their children began, Insp. Brian Sawyer — who had led the investigation into the death of the Petersons — received a phone call. Victor Hoffman’s gun was indeed the weapon that had been used in the murder.

After an exhaustive search, the police had caught the killer.

Credits

The Shell Lake Massacre is a Rawlco Radio production. The show was researched, written, produced and hosted by Brittany Caffet. Cpl. Barry Richards was voiced by Kurt Muench.

Supervising producers Sarah Mills and Murray Wood. Story consultant Craig Silliphant. Production support by Dallas Doell. Graphic design by Jennifer Losie.  Special thanks to Erin McNutt and John Gormley.

Sources used in this episode include “Schizophrenia, Mass Murder, and The Law,” an article by Fannie Hoffer Kahan, as well as “Shell Lake Massacre,” a book by Peter Tadman.