MANDEL: Man with 'severe' schizophrenia guilty of murdering his mom in Etobicoke park
· Toronto Sun
On a cold winter morning in 2021, Colin Hatcher killed his mom Kathleen in King’s Mill Park in Etobicoke, just as he’d threatened to do so many times before.
Visit moryak.biz for more information.
On Friday, Colin was convicted of second-degree murder after Superior Court Justice Shaun Nakatsuru rejected his defence of being not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
While he was suffering from untreated, “very severe” schizophrenia, the judge found Colin knew slashing his mom to death was morally wrong.
Nakatsuru, though, rejected the Crown’s argument that it was a planned and deliberate murder.
Kathleen Boyle Hatcher, 69, was afraid of her son. And still she met him that morning because she couldn’t give up on her child.
“Yeah,” she had told her daughter, “I will continue to be very careful.”
But a mother’s love would be so cruelly torn to shreds.
A man walking in the park on that Feb. 26 morning heard a woman’s scream that lasted a horrifically long minute or two. Then dead silence.
Victim called 911 as her life slipped away
At 10:47 a.m., Kathleen managed to call 911 as her life slipped away.
“Help,” she kept gasping in the heartbreaking recording. “Help.”
But help would not arrive in time. After a frantic search, first responders found her lifeless body lying face down in the snow 23 minutes later.
Kathleen , 69, had suffered seven separate wounds to her head, face and neck and defensive wounds to her hands in the frenzied and personal attack. The “sharp edged instrument” used by her 38-year-old son was never identified or found.
A devoted grandmother and quilter who’d recently retired from the Toronto District School Board, Boyle had spent years trying to get help for her son’s declining mental health.
Trained as a chef, Colin was fired in 2018 and began telling his family he was being followed and his phone was tapped. During March Break that year, Colin and Kathleen were in Niagara Falls when, after a disagreement, he told his mom in a “brazen, nonchalant manner” that he’d agreed with his grandfather that after he worked for 10 years, he would get to throw her off Niagara Falls but the guy to help him hadn’t shown up.
A few days later, Colin visited his father’s girlfriend and told her he and his grandfather planned to kill his dad and he wanted her help. His sister Laura said he often spoke of this double murder pact with his deceased grandfather and that the police knew about it so he wouldn’t face any consequences.
Clearly, Colin wasn’t well.
When he was committed involuntarily to the psychiatric ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital for just over two weeks, Colin blamed his parents.
He told his psychiatrist about the grandfather murder pact but said he wasn’t comfortable killing Boyle because she was “his mother and he felt it hard to carry through with it.” He also expressed other delusions, such as his family being members of the Mafia, that his mother threw babies over the Falls, and his parents were trying to poison his food.
Colin was discharged on a pill form of an anti-psychotic medication.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
Psychiatrist warned parents to take safety precautions
“I canNOT beLEEVE (sic) they let him out,” Kathleen confided in a friend.
Even his psychiatrist warned his parents to take safety precautions.
In August 2018, Colin left psychiatric care. Six months later, he told his family doctor microchips had been implanted in his ears. His doctor diagnosed him with schizophrenia and upped his medication.
In the fall of 2019, Colin convinced his reluctant doctor to reduce his meds.
In January 2020, Colin changed family doctors and Dr. Milan Atanackovic agreed to lower his dosage of anti-psychotic medication still further. In March 2020, he left a hostile voicemail at his mom’s work warning she was a drug addict.
His doctor was worried Colin wasn’t taking his meds and suggested his father seek another Form 2 to have him involuntarily committed. Yet a few months later, the family doctor had weaned Colin completely off his anti-psychotic medication.
A search warrant after the murder discovered bottles full of prescription pills; the judge found he’d actually stopped taking his medication as far back as 2019.
Mom emailed doctor about son’s paranoid delusions
In January 2021, mother and son went for a walk where Colin shared delusions of being poisoned and followed. After another walk together, Kathleen wrote Atanackovic a long email detailing her concerns about her son’s paranoid delusions.
The doctor believed he talked about Kathleen’s email with Colin during their appointment where he recommended he resume his anti-psychotic meds. On Feb. 12, Colin asked Atanackovic to delete his mom’s email from his file and give him a copy, which he did.
Two weeks later, he arranged to meet his mom in the parking lot by the Old Mill subway station to go for another walk.
Colin later told a forensic psychiatrist that during their walk he suddenly heard a voice commanding him, “Stab her, stab her, stab her.”
But the judge found his self-report of hearing command voices came three years after the killing and is unsupported by any other evidence – not even by Colin himself, who didn’t testify.
“Even though I can readily conclude that Mr. Hatcher was mentally ill and unstable at the time of the homicide, I do not find it more likely than not that Mr. Hatcher was incapable of knowing that his actions were morally wrong,” Nakatsuru said.
A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for June.