Mathew Charles "Matt" Lamb (5 January 1948 – 7 November 1976) was a Canadian spree killer who, in 1967, avoided Canada's then-mandatory death penalty for capital murder by being found not guilty by reason of insanity. Abandoned by his teenage mother soon after his birth in Windsor, Ontario, Lamb had an abusive upbringing at the hands of his step-grandfather, leading him to become emotionally detached from his relatives and peers. He developed violent tendencies that manifested themselves in his physical assault of a police officer at the age of 16 in February 1964, and his engaging in a brief shoot-out with law enforcement ten months later. After this latter incident he spent 14 months, starting in April 1965, at Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in eastern Ontario.
Seventeen days after his release from jail in June 1966, Lamb took a shotgun from his uncle's house and went on a shooting spree around his East Windsor neighbourhood, killing two strangers and wounding two others. He was charged with capital murder, which under the era's Criminal Code called for a mandatory death penalty, but he avoided this fate when the court found, in January 1967, that he had not been sane at the time of the incident. He was committed for an indefinite time in a psychiatric unit. Over the course of six years in care at Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre's Oak Ridge facility he displayed a profound recovery, prompting an independent five-man committee to recommend to the Executive Council of Ontario that he be released, saying that he was no longer a danger to society. The Council approved Lamb's release in early 1973 on the condition that he spend a year living and working under the supervision of one of Oak Ridge's top psychiatrists, Elliot Barker.
Lamb continued to show improvement, becoming a productive labourer on Barker's farm and earning the trust of the doctor's family. With Barker's encouragement, Lamb joined the Rhodesian Army in late 1973 and fought for the unrecognized government of Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) for the rest of his life. He started his service in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, and won a place in the crack Special Air Service unit in 1975, but was granted a transfer back to his former regiment a year later. Soon after he was promoted to lance-corporal, Lamb was killed in action on 7 November 1976 by friendly fire from one of his allies. He received what Newsweek called "a hero's funeral" in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury, before his ashes were returned to Windsor and buried by his relatives.
Early life
Mathew Charles Lamb was born in Windsor, Ontario, on 5 January 1948, the only child of a 15-year-old mother who abandoned him soon after birth. Raised by an assortment of grandparents, aunts and uncles, he rarely saw his mother while growing up and never knew his father, who died in the United States while Lamb was young. Lamb spent most of his childhood with his maternal grandmother and her new husband Christopher Collins at their home on York Street in the South Central neighbourhood of Windsor, where his presence was resented by the step-grandfather Collins. According to interviews with relatives, friends and neighbours conducted by Lamb's legal counsel Saul Nosanchuk in the mid-1960s, Collins subjected him to sustained emotional and physical abuse, beating him and frequently calling him a "little bastard". The direction of this violence was not limited to Lamb himself, however; he often witnessed his step-grandfather and grandmother fighting while he was still a small boy.
Lamb started exhibiting violent traits of his own from an early age. Nosanchuk writes that the he lured his cousins into his bedroom, locked them in a closet and threatened them. On one occasion he followed through with these threats and beat one of his cousins so badly that medical attention was required at a local hospital. "I remember once," said Greg Sweet, a childhood friend, "when he was about seven years old, he held a knife to a smaller kid and made him eat dog faeces". Lamb first attended Colbourne School in Riverside where Collins later said he appeared to be normal. School staff agreed, later telling the Windsor Star that he rarely got into trouble, and was capable, but unable to concentrate for extended periods.
Starting with Grade 8, when he was 13, Lamb went to St Jude's School in Windsor, where the other pupils found him to be distant and quiet. According to a fellow pupil, he spurned attempts by the other children to include him in their social circles. For example, Lamb once refused an invitation to a party, saying that he "didn't like to dance." Developing a keen interest in weapons, Lamb began to carry a knife to school, which he had little hesitation in showing off. He also became fascinated with firearms; according to Sweet, he and Lamb "always had guns, from the time [they] were about 12 years old". Sweet later told the Windsor Star that police were not informed when, as a teenager, Lamb strolled down a residential street "firing a shotgun at the houses of people he didn't like". Sweet also said that around this time Lamb assembled a collection of bullets and wrote the names of various local policemen on them. Lamb's hobby even extended to crude bombs, which he taught himself to produce using parts of various weapons. When he accidentally detonated one of these concoctions during preparation his leg was sprayed with shrapnel.
On 10 February 1964, barely a month after he turned 16, Lamb confronted a physically imposing police sergeant outside the Windsor Arena and, in front of a large crowd of people, leaped upon the far larger man and repeatedly punched him in the face. According to journalist Bob Sutton's account in the Windsor Star (published three years later), Lamb did this "for no apparent reason". Lamb was convicted of assault under the Juvenile Delinquents Act and served six months at the House of Concord, a young offenders' unit near London, Ontario, run by the Salvation Army. Upon his release, Lamb was sent by his step-grandfather to live in East Windsor with his uncle, Earl Hesketh. With Hesketh's support, Lamb briefly attended Assumption College School, where apart from a dislike for learning Latin, he performed creditably. However, with no real motivation to study, he soon dropped out to look for work. He was unable to hold down a permanent job and drifted through a series of short-term engagements, none lasting more than three months.
Kingston Penitentiary
On the evening of 24 December 1964, Lamb smashed the front window of Lakeview Marine and Equipment, a sporting goods store in Tecumseh, and stole three revolvers and a double-barrelled shotgun. Using one of the revolvers, he fired twice on a police constable and the shop's co-owner, missing both times. The officer returned several shots, leading Lamb to come forward with his hands raised. "Don't shoot. I give up," he said. He then showed the constable where he had hidden the other two handguns and the shotgun. Lamb, who turned 17 during the trial, was tried and convicted as an adult for "breaking, entering and theft ... [and] possession of a .22 caliber revolver, dangerous to public peace". Motivated by a presentence investigation report characterizing Lamb as exceptionally violent, Magistrate J. Arthur Hanrahan sentenced him to two years at Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison. According to Nosanchuk's account, the severity of the sentence was unusual for a first-time adult offender who had not caused anybody physical harm. Hanrahan, Nosanchuk writes, must have deemed Lamb beyond rehabilitation. He arrived at the penitentiary in April 1965.
Psychiatric examinations and psychological tests conducted on Lamb at Kingston revealed an extremely immature young man who was strongly drawn to weapons. The prison doctors noted that he was very aggressive, did not tolerate discipline and had very little control over his behaviour. Soon after he arrived, Lamb assaulted another prisoner and had to be put into solitary confinement. The prison's director of psychiatry, George Scott, said that he had shown signs of "an obvious mental breakdown". Not long after this, Lamb knelt beside his bed and pushed a broom handle into his rectum. When he was discovered in this state by a guard, Scott examined him immediately, having to sedate him to do so. "I think this young man is developing a mental illness of hypomanic nature," he wrote in his report. In further interviews conducted by Scott, Lamb related what the doctor described as "elaborate fantasies involving robberies, fights, and shootings that demonstrated enormous hostility".
Lamb attempted suicide several times and for years afterward bore scars where he had tried to slit his wrists. According to Nosanchuk, by early March 1966, the prisoner's behaviour "bordered on psychotic". During this month he threw food at an officer and was once again found with a broomstick in his rectum, this time dragging it around the floor of his cell and laughing. When Scott sedated Lamb and questioned him on the latter incident, he said he had just been trying to annoy the guard on duty. Scott once again noted his concern that Lamb was developing a hypomanic condition, a mania of low intensity, and on 18 March committed him to Kingston Psychiatric Hospital for a month. Scott wrote in his report to the hospital that he was not sure whether Lamb's condition was genuine or whether he was just putting on an act.
Lamb returned to the penitentiary on 18 April 1966 with a report saying that, if released, he would probably relapse into recidivism. Scott grew nervous as Lamb's release date approached: he believed that allowing Lamb to return home could be dangerous for the community, but at the same time he was not certain about the young man's psychiatric state, describing it as "borderline" or "marginal". Lamb had, Scott noted, shown some minor improvement since his time in the hospital. Even discounting this, the symptoms observed in Lamb were not consistent and the doctor did not think he had evidence conclusive enough to certify Lamb as mentally unsound. He even still considered that he could just be playing immature games with the penal system. In this uncertainty, Scott resolved that he could not bar Lamb's release. The 18-year-old left Kingston on 8 June 1966, ten months ahead of schedule, and returned home to Windsor. He was taken in by another uncle, Stanley Hesketh, who lived at 1912 Ford Boulevard. Lamb secured a job as a woodworker on his release and after starting work showed no signs of irregular conduct.
Shooting spree
Incident