Wayne Earl Kellestine (born 1 May 1949), better known as "Weiner" Kellestine, is a Canadian outlaw biker, gangster, and convicted murderer, currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder for his killing six out of the eight victims of the Shedden massacre of 2006.
Early criminal career Kellestine is of German descent. He claims that his ancestors were Hessians hired to fight for the British Crown during the American Revolutionary War who settled in the British colony of Upper Canada (modern Southern Ontario) after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. The journalist Peter Edwards, the crime correspondent for The Toronto Star, wrote that Kellestine is a pathological liar and though he is of German descent, there is no evidence to support his claims that his ancestors were Hessians. Kellestine has likewise frequently claimed to have served in the Canadian Army, but Edwards wrote that this claim is false.
Kellestine has a long criminal record going back to 1967. In 2006, the Toronto Sun reported that since he turned 18 in 1967 that: "Kellestine amassed convictions for three counts of assault causing bodily harm, three for assault, three for possessing unregistered weapons and more than a dozen counts for various weapons, property and breach and escape charges." In the summer of 1967, Kellestine as an unruly teenager went on a crime spree that led to three convictions for assault and assault causing bodily harm. When Kellestine was arrested in April 2006, a policeman told the journalist Timothy Appleby of The Globe and Mail: "He's a guy who if you were to meet him, the hair on your neck would stand on end. This is one scary individual."
On 1 July 1977, when the Outlaws gang expanded into Canada and opened a chapter in London, Ontario by “patching over” the Satan's Choice chapter, Kellestine attempted to join, but was refused as he was considered to be a "heat score", slang for a criminal who continually draws police attention. In 1978, Kellestine was considered a suspect in the murder of Giovanni DiFilippo, although he was never charged. Kellestine was allowed to start the Annihilators Motorcycle Club based in St. Thomas, which existed as a puppet club to the Outlaws chapter in London. The clubhouse of the Annihilators was on 54 Mondamin street in St. Thomas.
At Kellestine's 1982 trial for assault, one of the witnesses testified that it was widely known in criminal circles that Kellestine had in 1978 murdered Giovanni DiFilippo, a Woodbridge, Ontario, businessman. DiFilippo had been killed while answering his door by an assassin disguised as a pizza delivery man, who pulled out a gun and shot him in the head. A police investigation established that Kellestine had almost certainly murdered DiFilippo, but there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against him. In 1982, Kellestine left Thorndale and purchased for $50,000, a farm near Iona Station at 32196 Aberdeen Line, buying another 52.33 acres of adjoining farm land in 1987. Kellestine's farmhouse was disorderly with rusting automobiles lying on the front lawn, through the farmhouse itself with unpainted pine finishing in the kitchen; stone fireplace in the living room; and a sauna and cedar hot tub in the basement was described as charming and cozy. However the Confederate and Nazi memorabilia marked the farmhouse as different and within the walls was Kellestine's secret gun caches, which he held despite two lifetime weapons bans.
In 1984, Kellestine paid a $700 fine after he was convicted of assaulting a bouncer in a London, Ontario bar. In 1985 Kellestine was arrested after being found with some $350,000 worth of cocaine and LSD together with an unregistered handgun, but the case was not pursued in the courts.
Annihilators president Kellestine became the president of the Annihilators, having at first founded a gang called the Holocaust before becoming the Annihilators president. On the outside of his barn, Kellestine painted the logo of the Annihilators, a mailed fist clenching a lightning bolt that resembled the lightning bolt runes of the SS. One biker who knew him said of Kellestine "...he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer." Kellestine often annoyed visitors to the Annihilator clubhouse by throwing roofing nails on the parking lot to deter the police from getting too close, which he would forget where he had placed, causing the tires of his guests' vehicles to be punctured.
In 1989, at a motorcycle show in London, Kellestine got drunk, assaulted a police officer, and attempted to flee by hijacking a limousine, leading to a car chase down the streets that ended at the Outlaws' clubhouse and his arrest, an incident that confirmed his "wild man" reputation. In June 1991, Kellestine shot Thomas Roger Harmsworth, a biker with the Outlaws gang, putting four bullets into his body, and was charged with attempted murder. Harmsworth was dropped off at the St. Thomas-Elgin general hospital, bleeding badly. The attempted murder charges were dropped when Harmsworth refused to testify against him. Harmsworth chose to follow the outlaw biker code by never testifying against another biker even if he was the victim of a crime committed by the said biker, and instead gave Kellestine an alibi.
Two days after the charges were dropped against Kellestine for the attempted murder of Harmsworth in January 1992, the body of David "Sparky" O'Neil was found in a shallow grave with three bullets in his skull. O'Neil was wanted for the murder of police constable Scott Rossiter on 19 September 1991, and it is generally believed that Kellestine was in some way involved with O'Neil's murder and led the police to his body in exchange for the charges of attempted murder against Harmsworth being dropped. O'Neil had often visited Kellestine's farm looking for shelter after he killed Rossiter. It was widely believed in Iona Station that Kellestine had killed O'Neil. After O'Neil's murder, Kellestine started to wear a special patch consisting of the SS lightning bolt runes on his biker jacket on the front alongside his Annihilator patch, which in the outlaw biker subculture indicates that one has committed a murder. Likewise, Kellestine started to sign his letters with the SS lightning bolt runes as he normally closed with his letters with: "Your brother always, Weiner, 1%er, SS". Without naming Kellestine as the killer, an Outlaw-turned police informer, Michael Simmons, stated in an interview that the Annihilators had killed O'Neil, saying: "He [O'Neil] wouldn't stay put. So they put him on ice". Simmons, the younger brother of the Outlaw national president, Andrew "Teach" Simmons, visited Kellestine's farmhouse where Kellestine pointed a .45 handgun at one of his toes and asked for permission to shoot it off; Simmons replied that he would prefer being shot in the head as he disliked pain. Kellestine found that answer hysterically funny and lowered his gun.
In early 1992, Kellestine sold a handgun, cocaine and ecstasy pills to an undercover policeman. On 12 March 1992, during a police crackdown codenamed Project Bandito on both the Annihilators and the Outlaws, Kellestine was arrested at his farm outside of the hamlet of Iona Station, being found drunk and high in his living room surrounded by guns, cocaine, cash and Nazi memorabilia. An evaluation by the prison psychologist done on 11 January 1993 declared about Kellestine "Criminality appears to be a matter of choice of lifestyle" for him and that he was a paranoid narcissist. Kellestine was sentenced to six years in prison as a result of the Project Bandito charges. The parole board twice denied Kellestine's applications, citing concerns that he had repeatedly failed drug tests while in prison. In late 1994, Kellestine was released on parole. Shortly afterwards, the body of a London woman, Sonya Nadine Mae Cywink, was found murdered in the Southwold Earthworks, near Kellestine's farmhouse . Her murder was never solved, but Edwards wrote that rumors in Iona Station claimed she had "done something to annoy Weiner Kellestine shortly before her murder". Aside from Nazi memorabilia, Kellestine also collected Confederate and Montreal Canadiens memorabilia. Kellestine was much feared in south-western Ontario, being widely seen as a wild-man with an extremely bad temper and an unpredictable streak.
Kellestine had a certain local notoriety as the man who liked to introduce himself as: "Hi, I'm Wayne Kellestine. I sell drugs and I kill people". Visitors to his farmhouse noted he would shoot his wife Linda with an air-gun for no apparent reason. In 2009, one of Kellestine's neighbors, a farmer who did not wish to be named, told Appleby: "He didn't bother us too much most of the time, but everybody knew he was trouble, there was often biker types around, and there was always talk that he had killed people". Journalist Bruce Owen, who has long covered outlaw bikers, wrote that Kellestine was "likely nuts, but not criminally insane." Kellestine had a deeply paranoid streak with his farm being surrounded by various security cameras and alarms. More than once, he was thrown into a state of panic in the wintertime when frost buildup would set off the alarms on the motion detector cameras at night, leading him to run around with one of his guns looking for any possible enemies. In an interview with the journalist Yves Lavigne, published in The London Free Press on 18 April 1998, the Annihilators were described by Lavigne as having "a low profile, making money on the drug trade."
Alongside his criminal activities, Kellestine was widely known in Iona Station for being a racist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe with his farmhouse full of Nazi memorabilia. Kellestine traveled to London every year to protest the local Gay Pride Day by waving the Confederate battle flag (he wanted to use the Nazi flag instead, but did not because he could be indicted for violating hate-crime laws). Kellestine's closest friend was another biker, David "Concrete Dave" Weiche, whose father Martin K. Weiche was a German immigrant who ran a local construction company. The elder Weiche, a Hitler Youth alumni and a Wehrmacht veteran, had one of the largest collections of Nazi memorabilia in Canada and in the 1968 election had run for the House of Commons as a National Socialist, winning 89 votes. Through the Weiche family, Kellestine had connections with various extreme right-wing groups in Canada and mowed a giant swastika into his fields in emulation of the swastika that the elder Weiche had mowed into the grass outside his house. The swastika in the field, though only visible from the air, gave Kellestine a certain amount of attention in southwestern Ontario. Besides farming, Kellestine ran a security firm whose name, Triple K Security with the three Ks that were prominently displayed on his business cards were a conscious evocation of the white supremacist group. The business literature for Triple K Security promised "complete electronic privacy", "telephone taps", "home intrusion alarms", and "discreet professional services". Starting in the late 1990s, Kellestine claimed to have served in a regiment of the Canadian Army that was disbanded in disgrace, a clear reference to the Canadian Airborne Regiment, which was disbanded in 1995. The Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded after hazing videos were released showing white soldiers abusing black soldiers and the revelation that soldiers of the Airborne regiment had tortured and murdered a Somali teenager in March 1993. Kellestine was trying to imply that he was in some way involved in these activities, but Edwards noted that Kellestine was in prison at the time of the Canadian Airborne's ill-fated peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1992-1993 and that his criminal record would have had disqualified him from serving in the Army.