Mathew Charles Lamb

Lamb continued to show improvement, becoming a productive laborer 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 unrecognised 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.

In the late afternoon of 7 November 1976, three insurgents from a group of seven were spotted by an Army observation post in the Mutema Tribal Trust Lands, just south-west of Birchenough Bridge in Manicaland province. Fireforce was called up and the Rhodesians readied themselves to fly out by helicopter and engage the guerrillas. There were eight four-man "stops" involved in a Fireforce, and on this occasion Lamb headed Stop 2. Just before they left, Lamb ran over to Lance-Corporal Phil Kaye, the leader of Stop 3, and shouted over the noise of the aircraft. "They are going to get me this time," he yelled, sardonically; "Just you watch, Phil Kaye!" Kaye and his MAG gunner, Trooper Pat Grogan, waved away this comment and told Lamb to get moving. "Go nail gooks!" Kaye called after Lamb as he and the rest of Stop 2 took off aboard their Alouette III gunship. Lamb's men were an 18-year-old national service MAG gunner of Portuguese-Rhodesian extraction named Trooper Soares; Trooper Cornelius Olivier, a 20-year-old Rhodesian regular who carried an FN FAL battle rifle; and Trooper Tony Rok, an Australian Vietnam veteran, aged 28 and also equipped with an FN. Lamb carried the stick's radio on his back with his FN FAL ready in his hands.

As Lamb had predicted, his death provoked stories in the Canadian local and national media that strongly stressed his history of violence and insanity. It even caused a heated debate in the Canadian House of Commons over why, considering his personal history in Ontario and subsequent service in the armed forces of a country Canada did not recognise, Lamb had been issued a valid Canadian passport and allowed to renew it on 26 April 1976. The Chaykoski family received the news with some relief, Wanless reported in the Windsor Star, having "lived in terror" since Lamb's release from Penetanguishene three years earlier.

In Rhodesia, by contrast, Lamb was posthumously held in very high regard by the men who had served alongside him. His photograph in full dress uniform was placed on 3 Commando's Wall of Honour and remained there until the RLI was disbanded in 1980. When the story of his earlier life in Canada was run by the Rhodesia Herald, the paper received numerous strongly worded letters from soldiers who refused to believe it. They demanded a printed retraction and apology, which the Herald gave soon after to preempt any further scandal. The lance-corporal was given what the Windsor Star and Newsweek both described as a "hero's funeral" in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury, on 15 November 1976. No members of his family were present. His coffin, draped in the Rhodesian flag and topped with a large bouquet of flowers, was carried on a gun carriage to Warren Hills Cemetery, on the western outskirts of the city, where soldiers of the RLI fired three volleys of shots and senior officers saluted as the coffin was carried to the crematorium on the shoulders of eight RLI men. Lamb's ashes were afterwards returned to his relatives in Windsor, Ontario, where they were buried alongside the remains of his grandmother.

Lamb visited his aunt and uncle in Windsor on leave in May 1975, "proudly wearing his uniform", journalist Tony Wanless writes. Turned out in the RLI's tartan green ceremonial dress and green beret, he was conspicuous walking along Ouellette Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. Coincidentally, a funeral procession was being held for Edith Chaykoski's grandmother along that very street at the same time, leading Edith's younger brother Richard to spot Lamb on the pavement. The soldier remained oblivious, but his presence horrified the Chaykoski family. "He had the uniform and looked a little different," Richard told the Windsor Star a year later, "but I never forgot his face." Chaykoski's mother was so upset by the incident that for some time afterwards she refused to leave the house alone. While staying with the Hesketh family, Lamb went to see Barker and told him that serving in the Rhodesian security forces had enriched him personally and made him respect himself for the first time. Because of this he wished to forget about his previous life in Canada; in particular he said he "didn't want it associated with his adopted country". He expressed his concern that if he were killed or captured, the Canadian press might reveal his prior history and embarrass the Rhodesian Army, the Canadian government and the Penetanguishene mental hospital. However, he said, he felt great loyalty towards Rhodesia and would still go back to continue his service.

Soon after his furlough to Canada, Lamb was transferred from the RLI to the elite Special Air Service (SAS) unit in September 1975. There he trained as a paratrooper and, after passing selection, found himself in a vastly different role to the one he had become used to during his time in the RLI. Rather than taking part in the RLI's fast and furious Fireforce counter-strike procedures, he found himself taking part in covert reconnaissance actions, "acting as eyes and ears," as Barbara Cole writes. Wishing to see more action, Lamb requested a posting back to the RLI, which was granted; he rejoined 3 Commando. In late 1976, at the age of 28, he was promoted to lance corporal and took command of a "stick" of four men from 12 Troop, 3 Commando on Fireforce duty on Operation Thrasher, which covered Rhodesia's eastern highlands against guerrilla activity.

The conditions of Lamb's release were that he must spend a year living with the Barker family on their 200 acres (0.81 km; 0.31 sq mi) farm, under the doctor's observation. The former inmate proved to be an industrious labourer, helping to fence the property and becoming one of the farm's best workers. Barker and his wife came to trust Lamb so closely that they allowed him to babysit their three-year-old daughter, who became very attached to the young man. During his time living and working on the farm, Lamb read a number of books on psychiatry, including The Mask of Sanity by Hervey M. Cleckley, which affected him particularly. He told the doctor that he had come to terms with his condition as a psychopath and that he wished to go overseas and do something purposeful with his life. At the same time, he considered a career in the military, which Barker supported. "He wanted that kind of life," Barker later told the Globe and Mail. "He really seemed to need the esprit de corps of an army organisation." When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on 6 October 1973, starting the Yom Kippur War, Lamb thought he had found his calling—using money he had saved from his labourer's salary and gifts from his grandmother, he bought State of Israel Bonds and, with Barker's encouragement, travelled to Israel to volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces. However, after hitch-hiking to the Israeli lines, Lamb became disillusioned by conversations he had with the soldiers there, many of whom were loath to fight and wanted to go home. He applied anyway, but was turned down because of his psychiatric history. He resolved to instead tour the world, and to that end left Israel days after arriving, intending to travel to Australia.

On his way to Australia in October 1973, Lamb stopped off in South Africa and Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), where he cut his travels short to enlist in the Rhodesian Army. According to Barker, Lamb travelled to Africa with this intention all along. Rhodesia's unrecognised and predominantly white government was at that time fighting a war against communist-backed black nationalist guerrillas who were attempting to introduce majority rule. Like most of the foreign volunteers in the Rhodesian forces, Lamb was assigned to the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), an all-white heliborne commando battalion engaged largely in counter-insurgency operations. He and the other foreign soldiers received the same pay and conditions of service as the Rhodesians they served alongside. Keeping his past a secret, he became a highly regarded and popular member of 3 Commando, RLI, noted for his professionalism and physical fitness. "The Rhodesians thought he was a first-class soldier," Barker later told the Globe and Mail.

In August 1968 the unit created a "Total Encounter Capsule", which was a windowless, soundproofed room, 8 feet (2.4 m) wide and 10 feet (3.0 m) long, with green-painted walls, a green wall-to-wall mat on the floor and a ceiling containing a one-way mirror. It was empty apart from a sink and lavatory. In one of the earliest uses of videotape in therapy, television cameras were trained through the mirrored ceiling and through holes in the walls. Liquid nourishment was provided through drinking straws that were built into the door. The Capsule's purpose, Barker writes, was to provide "a place of undisturbed security where a small group of patients could focus on issues they felt important enough to warrant the exclusion of the usual physical and psychological distractions." Though participation in the STU programme was required, entering the Capsule was voluntary, and each patient could choose how many days he spent inside. Groups numbered between two and seven and stayed in the room for as little as 24 hours or for sustained periods as long as 11 days. Because Barker believed that they were more inclined to reveal their inner selves if unclothed, the inmates entered the Capsule naked. To further encourage communication, they were administered with LSD-25. The room was lit at all times, making day indistinguishable from night. While members of the programme were inside the Capsule, other patients operated the room and watched over those inside, running the cameras, keeping records and maintaining an appropriate room temperature.

The defence began to present its psychiatric evidence on the third day of the trial, 18 January 1967, when Yaworsky was called to testify on Lamb's behalf. Yaworsky recounted in detail his examination of the defendant two days after the shootings; he put weight on the fact that Lamb had laughed while incoherently describing the events of 25 June, and had at one point giggled and exclaimed "poor broad", referring to Edith Chaykoski. So far Lamb had sat through the trial in muted silence, showing no emotion whatsoever, but when Yaworsky mentioned the boy's having "giggled" at this point of the 27 June interview, Lamb did so again in a similar manner. Yaworsky said that he had interviewed Lamb four more times between December 1966 and the trial, and that in these discussions the young man had been able to remember more about the incident; Lamb told Yaworsky that he remembered confronting the people in the street, but that everything had then "felt fuzzy" when he fired the gun. Yaworsky quoted Lamb: "It was as if I was invisible. ... The next clear memory I have is standing minutes later in the Heaton living room. All of a sudden, I was standing there with a gun in my hand—that is when I ran out." The doctor hypothesised that this had been when Lamb returned to the real world following a psychopathic episode during which he had been divorced from reality. Dolan then testified along similar lines, describing his interview with Lamb two days after Yaworsky's and telling the court that he also believed that Lamb had had psychotic break that had made him unable to appreciate "the nature and quality of the act of killing another human being".

Justice Stark then reviewed the evidence and advised the jury that in his opinion the weight of psychiatric evidence favoured the defence; however, he reminded them, it was up to them to decide. The jury retired at 16:30 on 20 January 1967 to make their decision, and returned to the courtroom shortly before 19:00 to give their verdict. They found Lamb to be not guilty by reason of insanity. Lamb showed no reaction when the verdict was read.

Following his arrival in January 1967, Lamb enthusiastically took part and thrived in Barker's new programmes, becoming, the Montreal Gazette writes, "a model inmate". He became widely respected by his fellow patients and was successfully nominated as the ward's "patient therapist". "He was helpful to the other patients," Barker told the Globe and Mail, "and they looked up to him." Barker elaborated on this subject in an interview with the Windsor Star, telling them that during 1972 Lamb had been "one of the most respected therapists in the hospital". Lamb started a newspaper at Oak Ridge, for which he wrote articles while also encouraging others to contribute. Barker and his colleagues were so impressed by the young man's progress that they began to take him to lectures at Ontario Police College in Aylmer, where they introduced him as evidence of rehabilitation's potential. After about five years at Oak Ridge, the matter of Lamb's liberty was taken up by a five-man Advisory Review Board made up of Ontario Supreme Court Justice Edson Haines, two independent psychiatrists unrelated to Lamb's case, a lawyer and a lay person. The advisory board's recommendation that Lamb be released was approved by the Ontario Executive Council in early 1973; the board gave him a clean bill of health and said he was no longer dangerous.

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 neighborhood, 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 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, the boy 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 the boy 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 boy 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.

Seventeen days after his release from Kingston Penitentiary, on the evening of 25 June 1966, Lamb discovered a shotgun in his uncle's house. He took the weapon and left the house shortly before 22:00 Eastern Time, then walked a single block north along Ford Boulevard and hid behind a tree outside number 1872. Six young people—Edith Chaykoski, 20, her 22-year-old brother Kenneth, his wife and three friends, 21-year-old Andrew Woloch, Vincent Franco and Don Mulesa—were heading south from 1635 Ford Boulevard on their way to a bus stop on Tecumseh Road when they approached the tree behind which Lamb was hiding at about 22:15. Lamb suddenly stepped out in front of the strangers, pointed the shotgun at them and said "Stop. Put up your hands!" When Edith Chaykoski stepped forward, towards Lamb, he shot her in the abdomen. Woloch then moved and was hit in the stomach by a second shot, which also wounded Kenneth Chaykoski. Lamb then ran across the street to 1867 Ford Boulevard and fired on a girl whose silhouette he had spotted in a side doorway of the house; his target, 19-year-old Grace Dunlop, was injured. As law enforcement and medical assistance were summoned, Lamb strolled away and walked two blocks before knocking on a door, which he had seemingly chosen at random. Pointing the shotgun at the elderly lady who lived there, Ann Heaton, he threatened to kill her. When Heaton cried out to her husband Forrest to phone the police, Lamb fled, throwing the shotgun over the old couple's fence into a field. He returned to the Hesketh house and went to sleep.

Edith Chaykoski died from her wounds at Windsor Metropolitan Hospital at about 05:30 on 26 June. Police searched the neighborhood during the morning and found the shotgun where Lamb had thrown it. They identified it as Hesketh's and concluded that the 18-year-old must have taken it and gone on a shooting spree the previous day. Lamb was arrested at 15:30 on 26 June and charged with the capital murder of Edith Chaykoski. Under the terms of Canadian law at that time, he faced a mandatory death penalty if convicted. When Woloch's injuries also proved fatal at 14:45 on 11 July 1966, his murder was added to Lamb's charge.

On the morning of 27 June 1966, Lamb appeared without legal counsel at Essex County Magistrate's Court in Windsor, where he was remanded for psychiatric examination. As he was being escorted from the courthouse at around noon, the boy attempted to escape custody and, when restrained, begged the officers to shoot him. A private psychiatrist from Windsor, Walter Yaworsky, gauged the teenager's mental state in an interview starting at 12:30. Yaworsky said that Lamb was "hyperactive and agitated"; he was unable to sit still and periodically rose from his seat and paced around the room. He was silent for a few minutes, apparently irritated, then began laughing as if in a state of euphoria. When questioned by Yaworsky directly, Lamb did not appear concerned about the interview: he treated his murder charge lightly and when asked about his spell in Kingston Penitentiary began laughing.

When the interview ended at 13:35, the doctor noted that he found Lamb's hour-long maintenance of this seemingly hypomanic behavior "remarkable". Simulation on Lamb's part was unlikely, Yaworsky believed, and lack of memory credible. The doctor wrote in his report that Lamb had been "suffering from a disease of the mind" at the time of the shootings, which had caused him to be in a kind of dream world, outside of reality. Standing before the magistrate that same afternoon, Yaworsky testified that Lamb was mentally unsound and not fit to stand trial. The magistrate once again remanded Lamb, this time to custody at Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre for a minimum of 30 days. Lamb was again examined on 29 June 1966, this time by James Dolan, the Clinical Director of Psychiatry at St Thomas Elgin General Hospital.

After 30 days, on 27 July, the staff at Penetanguishene still deemed him unfit to stand trial, but by 27 August 1966 his state had improved enough for the doctors to allow his return to custody at Windsor. The doctors reported that he could now face the court—they said that the young man was now able to understand what the proceedings against him meant, and capable of working alongside a legal advisor. Because Lamb could not afford legal counsel, Justice Saul Nosanchuk was assigned by a local legal aid plan to advise him in the upcoming trial. Nosanchuk says that Lamb had "no hesitation" in signing a paper authorising the justice to represent him.

After a brief preliminary hearing starting on 8 October 1966, during which Lamb reportedly showed no signs of emotion, the young man's trial for capital murder began on 16 January 1967 at Essex County Courthouse in Windsor. Because of the charge's severity, the case was heard by a judge and jury under the auspices of Ontario's Supreme Court, which chose Justice Alexander Stark to preside. The trial started with Lamb pleading not guilty to the capital murder of Edith Chaykoski and Andrew Woloch; Nosanchuk then opened his mental disorder defence under Section 562 of the Canadian Criminal Code. Stark gave an order allowing all relevant psychiatric doctors to remain, then allowed the Crown to open its case against Lamb.

In his cross-examination of the two doctors, Duchesne cited the psychological reports filed on Lamb at Penetanguishene in 1966, which had determined Lamb to have an IQ of 125, far above most of his 18-year-old peers. The prosecutor proposed that it was not beyond Lamb, with his psychopathic personality and high level of intelligence, to invent a story of amnesia and confusion to avoid responsibility for satisfying his dangerous impulses by consciously killing people. Both Yaworsky and Dolan said that although this was possible, they were each sticking to their original conclusions made in the days following the incident.

John Robinson, the governor of Essex County Jail, was then called by the defence. Robinson testified that during Lamb's time in the county jail, his conduct had been impeccable except for an incident five weeks before the trial, on 10 December 1966, when he had, for no apparent reason, gone on what Robinson called a "rampage". In an episode lasting three hours, the defendant had smashed over 100 windows, set fire to blankets and broken plumbing, causing cells to flood. "I was amazed by what I saw," Robinson said. "The pupils were dilated like someone who comes in heavy on narcotics—except their eyes appear sunk in and his were bulged out." George Scott of Kingston Penitentiary then told the court that Lamb lived in a fantasy dream world, which had existed in his mind since early childhood, and had been in a pre-psychotic state when released from jail on 8 June 1966. This, he said, had boiled over into an "acute schizoid episode" on the night of the shootings. In cross-examination, Scott was pressed as to why he had allowed Lamb's release from Kingston if this was the case; he replied that although the prison officers had been concerned about Lamb's mental state on his release, there had not been conclusive grounds to certify him insane at that time.

Duchesne now called on Basil Orchard and Wilfred Boothroyd to counter the defence's evidence. Orchard, another doctor from Penetanguishene, testified that Lamb had suddenly abandoned any show of amnesia during an interview in August 1966. He saw no evidence that Lamb was insane and said that he was simply a young man with strong impulses who sometimes could not control them. Boothroyd, of Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, then spoke, arguing that Lamb had been acting out strong feelings of anger and bitterness and fully intended to kill the people he confronted, knowing and understanding what that meant. Lamb, he said, was capable of all kinds of emotion and was perfectly able to understand the nature of what he had done. Justice Stark intervened during Boothroyd's testimony, asking how he could give a reliable opinion on Lamb when he had never examined him. He also remarked that his opinion was contrary to every doctor who had testified so far.

Nosanchuk gave his final statement to the court first. Speaking for the defence, he reminded the jury that every one of the doctors speaking on Lamb's behalf had originally been engaged by the state and that Yaworsky was the only one not employed in the public sector. He conceded that the defendant's actions were senseless and violent, but stressed that if found not guilty by reason of insanity, Lamb would stay in custody and could be kept in psychiatric care for the rest of his life if necessary. He argued that Lamb's actions on the evening of 25 June 1966 clearly made no sense and asked the jury to carefully consider them: the victims were not known to Lamb; Lamb made no attempt to disguise himself; Lamb acted alone; Lamb had nothing to gain from the act; Lamb inexplicably diverted his fire from the original group to a shadow in a doorway; Lamb then chose another house at random and threatened to kill the occupant, then left without doing anything; Lamb made no attempt to hide the weapon, leaving it in a nearby field where it would surely be found; then, finally, the boy simply went home to bed as if nothing had happened. Was this, Nosanchuk asked, the behaviour of a premeditated killer, or of a profoundly disturbed young man who did not appreciate what he was doing?

Elliot Barker, the head of Oak Ridge's therapeutic division, had already interviewed Lamb in 1966 and spoken on his behalf at his trial. The doctor had arrived at Penetanguishene in 1959, and in 1965 stepped up his efforts to reform the unit's programmes, which on his arrival were still based around the traditional methods of neuroleptic tranquillisation and electroconvulsive therapy, supplemented by long periods of isolation for each inmate. Barker innovated a programme whereby the patients could spend more of their time in each other's company, in a more natural environment; he believed that the key to overcoming these illnesses was communication. "My original vision," he writes, "was that I wasn't really dealing with patients. I thought we could evolve a social structure where people could resolve the internal conflicts in community." Barker's "Social Therapy Unit" (STU), initially made up exclusively of young male psychopaths and schizophrenics of normal intelligence, began in September 1965, with a programme of 80 hours of treatment a week, focussing on cures brought about by mutual cooperation and interaction. Joan Hollobon, the medical editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, volunteered in 1967 to spend two days at Oak Ridge as if she were a patient, and afterwards heaped praise on the inmates, saying that they were "pioneering a brave and exciting experiment in self-government and self-therapy ... [displaying] individual responsibility, co-operation with colleagues and authority, and acceptance of rules reached by consensus."

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, the boy 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.

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. The boy arrived at the penitentiary in April 1965.

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.

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 the boy 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.