It's early July of 1983, and a man is standing in the sunshine on a street in Peterborough, Ontario, for the first time in 10 years without a wall around him.

He's 50 years old now, greyer than he used to be, but still sharp, still charming, still carrying himself like the wealthy home builder he once was. He spends his days at a halfway house, running a life skills program for other parolees. He gives a guest lecture on morality to university philosophy students. He takes his 13-year-old daughter to the movies on weekends. By every outward sign, this is a man who has served his time, learned his lesson, and is quietly rebuilding a life.

His name is Peter Demeter, and 10 years earlier a jury convicted him of arranging the murder of his wife, Christine, bludgeoned to death in the garage of their Mississauga home while he was 22 miles away buying her a gift. If you haven't heard part 1 of this story, go back and listen to it first, because everything you're about to hear only makes sense once you know what came before it.

Here's what you need to know if you're catching up: Christine Demeter died in July of 1973. Her husband was convicted 17 months later, on a mountain of circumstantial evidence built around wiretapped conversations, a missing garage key, a mistress in Vienna, and $1.1 million in life insurance. Nobody ever caught the man who actually swung the weapon. Peter Demeter went to prison insisting, and he would keep insisting for the rest of his life, that he was innocent.

That's part 1. This is what happened after.

Because within about 3 months of tasting freedom again, Peter Demeter was going to throw the rest of his life away, not once, but 3 more times, and drag an entirely new set of people down with him each time.

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime, and this is the case of Peter Demeter, part 2.

CHAPTER ONE: A Second Chance

Peter Demeter spent his first 4 and a half years behind bars in Millhaven, a maximum security institution, and for most of that time he refused to let his young daughter, Andrea, visit him at all. He said he couldn't put a small child through the process of walking into a maximum security prison. In 1979, when Andrea was 9 years old and had just learned at school that the relatives raising her weren't her real parents, Peter was granted an emergency escorted pass on humanitarian grounds to see her. Months later he was transferred to Warkworth, a medium security institution with a far gentler regime, and the visits slowly became routine.

By early 1983, Peter had served roughly 9 years and was living part of every month in a Peterborough halfway house. He gave interviews. He told one reporter that Andrea was "the most important person in my life," and that once he had full parole, he planned to settle permanently in Peterborough so she could finish school there. He'd already made social connections at Trent University, giving a guest lecture on contemporary morals to a group of third year philosophy students, and had a talk scheduled for a local Grade 12 law class on the Canadian justice system, until word reached Ontario's Education Minister, Bette Stephenson, who said publicly she wasn't convinced a convicted killer was the right person to speak to a room full of teenagers. The school principal quietly cancelled the talk rather than turn it into a media circus.

In that same round of interviews, Peter described himself as a "half-fun" person before Christine's death, a "lady's man" who'd arrived in Canada with $8 in his pocket and turned it into a fortune. He estimated he'd spent $240,000 on his legal defence alone. And he offered one line about the Canadian justice system that, looking back, reads almost like a dare. Out of the several thousand convicted men he'd served time alongside, he said, only 3 had ever turned out to be genuinely innocent. "That is a phenomenally good batting average," he told the reporter. He wasn't talking about himself. He didn't need to be. Within months, he was about to personally lower that average, more than once.

Even his bad luck that spring had a strange, almost darkly funny quality to it. In February, Peter took Andrea to see a movie called The Verdict, a courtroom drama, and came out to find his $60,000 Mercedes had been stolen. Police found it later, crashed into a factory wall.

By June of 1983, the parole board expanded his release further, letting him spend 5 days a week in the community and return to Warkworth only on weekends. He was scheduled to become eligible for full parole on October 29th, 1984, roughly a year away. For a man who'd committed one of the most notorious murders in the country's history, it was, by any measure, a remarkably soft landing.

He threw it away in about 3 months.

CHAPTER TWO: The Fires

In April of 1983, Peter Demeter struck up a friendship with a man named Tony Preston. Preston was a career criminal in his mid 40s, the kind of man who drifted through Metro Toronto's bars and restaurants doing favours for cash, and he and Peter did their plotting in exactly those kinds of rooms: a steakhouse, the Long Bar at the Sheraton Centre, a pancake house in Peterborough. Over the following weeks, Peter offered him $8,000 to burn down the Mississauga house on Dundas Crescent, the same house where Christine had died a decade earlier, so he could collect the fire insurance.

Preston agreed, and it was messier than either of them planned. Demeter mailed him the key to the house that August, along with a note authorizing him to go inside and inspect the damage, cover for anyone who spotted him coming and going. Preston's first attempt, using as much as 16 litres of methyl alcohol and gasoline, only scorched the place. He tried again days later and failed a second time. It wasn't until his third try, on August 23rd, 1983, just 8 days after the first, that he finally managed it. He punched holes through the interior walls with his own elbow so he could pour naphtha down between the joists, came back that night with more fuel, soaked the house, and burned the century old home to the ground.

Here's the thing about Preston, though, and it's what makes his eventual testimony so valuable. He was a criminal, but he wasn't a fool, and he had a line he wouldn't cross. Because the arson, it turned out, was only meant to finance the real plan. Peter wanted the insurance money to pay for a murder.

The target was his own 19-year-old cousin, a student named Stuart Demeter. Stuart's father, Dr. Steven Demeter, was the same cousin who'd taken Andrea into his home the week Peter was first arrested back in 1973, the family we told you to remember at the end of part 1. In the years since, a soured lawsuit over legal fees, roughly $60,000 to $70,000 worth, had curdled into something much worse than a money dispute. Peter didn't just want to win. He wanted Steven and his wife to suffer, and he'd decided the way to do that was through their son.

The plan Preston described was methodical and grotesque. He was to lure Stuart to a secluded spot with the promise of a summer job at a computer firm, then lead him to Peter, who would shoot the young man himself. Afterward, Preston was to remove the body's hands and teeth, to defeat fingerprint and dental identification, and bury what was left. Only then would the second act begin: a phone call to Stuart's grieving parents telling them their son had been kidnapped and was still alive, followed by a ransom note laying out 15 conditions for his safe return. The note demanded stocks, paintings, cash described as money the parents had supposedly embezzled from Peter, and, as its single most important condition, a signed affidavit implicating two of the Crown's own witnesses from the original 1973 murder trial. In other words, Peter wanted to murder his cousin's child, extort the family, and manufacture evidence to reopen his wife's murder case, all at once. As Preston put it, Peter wanted to put the knife in and twist.

That was the moment Preston got out. It wasn't the arson that scared him, he'd already agreed to that. It was hearing a man calmly plan the murder of his own young relative. Preston's logic was blunt and, frankly, sound: a man who would kill his own favourite cousin would have no hesitation at all about killing the hired help once the job was done. On the police tape that later captured him describing it, Preston put the turning point plainly. Once Peter started talking about killing his own nephew, he said, that was when he got scared.

But Preston didn't refuse outright, and this is a revealing detail. Saying no to Peter Demeter's face apparently didn't feel safe either. So instead, Preston played along. He agreed to help while privately deciding he never would. When Peter proposed they become "brothers of blood" to seal the pact, Preston went along with that too, later admitting he simply wanted to get out of the room, and that he found the whole scheme so overwrought it read like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel.

So how do you back out of a murder plot without ever actually saying the word no? Preston's method was quiet sabotage. The next step in the plan was a dry run, a rehearsal of the killing, and Peter paid him $150 to carry it out. Preston took the money. Then he just didn't do it. No dry run, no phone calls, no follow up. He went silent and stayed silent, letting the plan die by simply refusing to be the one who moved it forward.

And that told Peter everything he needed to know. You don't have to announce that you're quitting when you take a man's money for a job and then vanish. Peter could see the plan had stalled, that his arsonist had gone cold on him and wasn't coming back to finish what they'd started. Preston was out. If Stuart Demeter was going to be killed, Peter needed a new man, someone who would actually pull the trigger. He found him at a Peterborough Holiday Inn.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: The "brothers of blood" line tells you everything about how a man like this recruits people. He's not looking for someone who agrees because they're evil too. He's looking for someone he can make feel chosen, bonded, obligated, so that walking away feels like a betrayal instead of a rescue. It's the same instinct predators use on victims, just aimed sideways, at an accomplice instead. But watch what Tony Preston actually did, because it's smarter than it looks. He didn't argue. He didn't lecture Peter about right and wrong, and he didn't try to walk out of that room a hero. He recognized that saying no to the wrong person can be as dangerous as saying yes, so he agreed to everything, took the $150, and then simply disappeared and did nothing. In my experience, that's exactly how you get out of a situation like that alive. You don't win the argument. You lower the temperature, you buy yourself distance, and you get gone. Preston was a criminal and an arsonist, and he'd be the first to admit it, but on this one, his instincts were dead on. The tragedy is that Peter didn't take Preston's disappearance as a no. He just went looking for someone else. And the next man he approached would have every reason in the world to say yes.

CHAPTER THREE: Operation Dragon

The man Peter found was Mike Lane, a 33-year-old Peterborough bodybuilder locally famous for his strongman stunts. Lane had once carried a 400-pound barbell down the main street of town to raise money for charity, and had let a full-sized van drive over his own chest during a strongman contest. He'd served time for manslaughter years earlier, and he and Peter had a casual acquaintance through mutual friends. Over drinks at the Holiday Inn in October of 1983, Peter laid out his proposal.

Lane didn't take the bait. Within 5 minutes of getting out of Peter's car, he flagged down a Peterborough police cruiser and told them everything.

Police faced a real problem. Peter had already convinced plenty of people that his original murder conviction was itself a frame job by Peel Regional Police, and they knew he'd claim the same thing again. So instead of moving on Lane's word alone, they set up hidden cameras, in a Holiday Inn room and in Lane's own kitchen, and let Peter keep talking.

What they captured over 2 long recorded conversations was extraordinary. Peter is heard proposing a "package deal": the murder of Stuart, followed by the kidnapping of a wealthy executive's child to influence an unrelated lawsuit Peter had going. "There are 2 opportunities to make a buck, okay?" he tells Lane on tape. He instructs Lane on exactly how to lure Stuart into a van lined with plastic sheeting to catch blood and gunpowder. "He gets in, bang, finished," Peter says. "We do the job. We package him." He specifies the dimensions of the grave he wants dug in the basement of a house he'd just bought: 6 feet, 4 inches long, which happened to be Stuart's exact height. Lane would later testify that Peter said he wanted to see the look in the young man's eye the moment he realized what was about to happen.

Police called the operation Dragon, a nod to how long, they joked privately, anything involving Peter Demeter tended to "drag on." On October 19th, 1983, they finally moved, arresting Tony Preston for arson and Peter for counselling murder. Eight charges came out of that arrest, spread across arson, conspiracy to commit arson, counselling murder, and counselling abduction, and a judge would later split them into 3 separate trials.

The human cost of that operation didn't end with the arrest, and it wasn't only measured in fear. Mike Lane later testified that Peel Regional Police and the Ontario attorney general's office had promised him $100,000 for his cooperation, a new identity, and possibly relocation to California. Instead, he spent the following 5 months in a Brampton hotel room under constant armed guard, and was eventually told the $100,000 offer had never been properly authorized. He called the 20 months since Peter's arrest "a living hell." His own sister later wrote publicly about what those months did to their family, how they lived under a code name, communicated through police issued phone numbers, and watched bodyguards accompany Mike everywhere, even to the movies, even in his sleep. Lane went from feeling, in the early days of the operation, like part of a team that had prevented a killing, to feeling, by the end of it, like a prisoner himself. Whatever else you think about how that investigation was run, it's worth remembering that an ordinary Peterborough gym owner put himself between a killer and his cousin's teenage son, at real and lasting cost to his own life, and that the system that used him didn't always treat that cost as seriously as it should have. That's not nothing.

CHAPTER FOUR: A Man Who Wouldn't Take a Lawyer

Getting Peter Demeter in front of a jury a second time turned out to be almost as chaotic as anything he'd actually done.

In May of 1984, his lawyer, Toby Belman, withdrew from the case. Peter told the court he'd defend himself, with help from a "trial assistant," a young woman named Lisa Ross, who by this point had become his girlfriend. He fought, and won, a battle to keep the counselling murder trial out of Peterborough and in Peel County instead, arguing that a repeat of the "mockery of justice" that convicted him a decade earlier was exactly what he expected from that jurisdiction. It didn't stick. By the following spring, the trial was underway in Peterborough anyway, on 2 counts of counselling first degree murder.

It opened April 15th, 1985, in front of District Court Judge Bourke Smith, and almost immediately came apart. Peter's legal aid lawyer, a Toronto-area man named Stuart McKeown, never once showed up in court. His associate, Sarah Bagnall, filled in for days at a time and eventually told the judge, in the jury's absence, that she'd personally urged McKeown to take the case because she'd hoped it might help him beat a drinking problem. Instead, she said, he'd been drunk every day from March 9th clear through to the trial's opening. McKeown, when finally ordered to appear, denied all of it, called Bagnall's account "bizarre, startling, and false," and claimed he'd never actually been retained in the first place. It later came out that he had, in fact, already been suspended from practising law for 18 months back in 1983, after the Law Society of Upper Canada documented 12 separate instances where his drinking had interfered with his work.

Judge Smith heard from McKeown, from Bagnall, and from Demeter's latest lawyer, Edmund Schofield, and on May 16th, 1985, he declared a mistrial, saying he had "grave doubt" Peter's right to counsel had been respected throughout the proceedings. By that point Peter had been represented, on and off, by 4 different lawyers, on top of representing himself. A new trial was ordered to start fresh on June 11th, with an entirely new jury.

CHAPTER FIVE: Guilty Again

The retrial opened as scheduled, and one of the Crown's earliest surprises came from the defence's own witness list. Lisa Ross, Peter Demeter's girlfriend, took the stand as the first defence witness and testified that she'd spent 17 months leaving $1,000 a month, most of it her own savings and money set aside for her young daughter, under the doormat of a downtown Toronto law office. The office belonged to Toby Belman, Peter's former lawyer. Ross said Peter told her the payments were buying information from a corrupt police officer about how the Operation Dragon videotapes had supposedly been doctored to frame him. Remember that name. Toby Belman's office is going to come up again in this story, in a much darker context, before we're done.

Ross herself was 26 years old, a divorced mother whose own father was an Ontario Provincial Police officer in Belleville. She'd been studying at Trent University in Peterborough, not far from Demeter's halfway house, when they met in October of 1983. She quit school the following spring because she no longer had time to study, between running errands for him, managing his finances, and now, apparently, acting as his courtroom assistant too.

Peter testified in his own defence as well, at length and often bizarrely, a striking contrast to his complete silence at the original murder trial a decade earlier. He claimed the incriminating videotapes were fabricated, likening the process to dubbed dialogue in a Hollywood musical: "when you saw My Fair Lady you saw Audrey Hepburn singing for 2 hours, but she did not sing a word." He claimed the entire conversation with Lane had actually been an innocent rehearsal for a role in an American film being shot nearby, a story a talent agency representative flatly contradicted on the stand, testifying that Lane never had a speaking part and the film's script bore no resemblance to burial pits or dog food factories.

The trial also revealed something darker underneath all the theatrics. On March 28th, 1985, while awaiting this second trial in solitary confinement, Peter swallowed 81 Seconal pills, washed down with shampoo. Guards found him unconscious and rushed him to hospital, where he stayed in a coma for 4 and a half days. When he woke up, he said, he was "surrounded by Peel Regional Police. I thought I went straight to heaven," he added, sarcastic even about his own attempt to die.

On July 2nd, 1985, the jury found Peter Demeter guilty on both counts of counselling murder. He was sentenced 2 weeks later, on July 15th. Judge Bourke Smith didn't mince words. "I consider the accused a very dangerous man," he said, "very intelligent but diabolical." He handed down 2 concurrent life sentences and recommended, in the strongest terms available to him, that parole authorities never let Demeter out again.

It was Peter's second and third life sentences. He was 52 years old.

He was arrested again exactly one month later.

CHAPTER SIX: A New Grievance

The trouble went back to that same lawyer's office where Lisa Ross had been leaving cash under the doormat. Toby Belman had represented Peter Demeter for years, and by 1985 she was owed roughly $45,000 in unpaid legal fees. She'd gone to court and won an order freezing 75,000 shares of stock Peter still owned, worth a substantial sum. Peter, freshly sentenced to 2 more life terms and furious about the frozen stock, decided the solution was to kidnap Belman's own teenage daughter, Eliza, 16 years old, and hold her until her mother handed over the shares along with roughly $388,750 in cash.

He built the plan from inside the Metro West Detention Centre, and once again, he needed someone to actually carry it out. He turned to a former cellmate, Peter Winstanley, offering him $25,000 for the job, with an additional $5,000 approved, according to testimony, if it became "necessary" for Winstanley's hired man to kill the girl rather than risk being identified. And once again, he used Lisa Ross as his go-between, sending her to meet Winstanley and coordinate the details.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: What strikes me about Lisa Ross isn't that she was foolish. It's how ordinary the pattern is. A young, recently divorced mother meets an older man who is charismatic, articulate, and treats her devotion as though it's the only real thing in his life. He gives her purpose, secrets, a sense of being chosen the same way he'd once made Tony Preston feel chosen with the words "brothers of blood." It's the identical mechanism, aimed at a different kind of person. Marina Hundt, the mistress from part 1 of this story, believed he loved her. Lisa Ross believed the same thing more than a decade later, right up until the moment it cost her everything too. That's not coincidence. That's a man who had, by that point, spent decades learning exactly which words make a devoted person feel needed enough to do something they'd never otherwise consider.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ransom

Winstanley, like Mike Lane before him, had a conscience, and went straight to the intended victim's mother instead. Toby Belman, working with police, walked into the detention centre on the planned kidnapping night, August 15th, 1985, and pretended her daughter had already been taken, drawing Peter into a videotaped conversation in which he calmly instructed her on how to get the stock freeze lifted quietly, so his other creditors wouldn't find out. The next day, August 16th, 1985, both Peter and Lisa Ross were arrested and charged as co-conspirators in the kidnapping and murder plot.

It had been exactly one month since Peter was sentenced to his second and third life sentences. He was already facing his fourth and fifth before the ink was dry on the last ones.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Trial and the Turn

The Belman conspiracy trial didn't reach an Ontario Supreme Court jury until 1988, nearly 3 years after the arrest. By then, the case against Peter had changed shape in one crucial way: Lisa Ross was no longer his co-accused. After Winstanley agreed to wear a recording device for police and testify, the charges against Ross were dropped, and the Crown's one-time devoted messenger became its star witness instead.

"I was so obsessed and in love I couldn't see straight," she told senior Crown counsel Glen Orr from the witness stand. "He likes to think he's a puppeteer and everyone else is a marionette, and he pulls the strings. It was psychological coercion." She testified she'd known, even while doing it, that she'd eventually be caught and sent to prison for plotting to kidnap a child. She did it anyway. When Orr asked her directly whether the kidnapping plan had been genuine or just a ploy to keep Peter occupied while other legal matters were sorted out, she didn't hesitate. "It wasn't," she said flatly. Peter had every intention of having Eliza Belman taken.

The trial revealed the same instinct for manipulation that had followed Peter through every institution he'd ever passed through. A case worker at the detention centre, James Shields Shortt, testified that Demeter made a habit of digging up private details about the guards and officials who controlled his daily life, including the fact that Shortt's own father was a District Court judge, and using what he learned to curry favour. Ross herself testified that inside Millhaven, the other inmates had turned on Peter for exactly this reason, calling him a stool pigeon because he got along so well with the guards and prison staff that some of them reportedly wanted him dead for it.

On June 27th, 1988, the jury convicted Peter Demeter of conspiring to kidnap and murder Eliza Belman. It was his fourth conviction for arranging someone's death. At sentencing, Mr. Justice John O'Driscoll didn't bother with restraint.

"Your evil knows no bounds," he told Peter. "It never rests. It never ends... In my opinion, this man should never, ever, ever be released on parole. Whether or not you are inherently evil, I do not know, but you ooze evil out of every pore and contaminate everyone around you." He went further, calling Peter a coward who becomes a "heavyweight criminal" the moment he has access to money, and said he personally couldn't care less whether Peter served his sentence on the north shore of the Arctic or the south tip of Antarctica. He turned to what Peter had done to the young woman who'd once been ready to go to prison for him. "Words are inadequate to describe what you and your cunning mind did to Lisa Ross," the judge said. "Why anyone would be mesmerized by you is beyond me." And he left the courtroom with one last observation about the man in front of him. "If Peter Demeter is a psychopath, he has a unique feature," O'Driscoll said. "Instead of burning out as he gets older, he's getting worse."

Senior Crown counsel Glen Orr, closing the case, had put it more simply for the jury. Peter, he said, was "a clever, manipulative liar who is vicious, has an inherent evil, and is dangerous" because he could always find someone desperate enough to carry out whatever his mind concocted. "He's not the type of person who should ever see the street again," Orr said.

He handed down a fifth life sentence. Under the National Parole Board's rules, Peter would become eligible to apply for full parole 7 years from his 1985 arrest date, though officials made clear his history of parole violations would weigh heavily against him whenever that application came.

Peter Winstanley, the man whose decision to go to the victim's mother instead of carrying out the plan almost certainly saved Eliza Belman's life, spent the following months fighting his own deportation back to South Africa, where he claimed his work with the anti apartheid movement would get him killed if he was sent home. He was still waiting on that asylum claim years later, one more person whose life got tangled up in Peter Demeter's orbit and never quite got free of it.

EPILOGUE

There's one more piece of this story that almost never makes it into the shorter versions, and I think it matters.

A young corrections officer named Derek Anthony had been assigned to guard Peter at the Metro West Detention Centre. Starting in December of 1987, his wife, Tracy, began receiving anonymous phone calls at home. The caller described, in detail, what she was wearing while she sat in her own living room. He threatened to kill her, her husband, and their infant son. When the family fled to a new city and got an unlisted number, the calls found them there too, along with a break in and a note slipped through their mail slot. Nobody was ever charged. The Anthonys always believed the calls traced back to Peter Demeter, reaching out through whatever connections he still had, simply because Derek Anthony had once had the misfortune of standing guard over him.

If that's true, and there's real reason to think it was, it tells you something about the actual shape of the danger in this case. It was never really about any one grievance, Christine's life insurance, Stuart's inheritance, Toby Belman's legal bill. Those were just the occasions. The through line, across 4 separate plots and 15 years, was a man who used other people almost entirely as instruments, useful right up until the moment they stopped being useful to him, at which point they became targets instead.

Peter Demeter spent his final years in Kingston Penitentiary. In 2006, at 73 years old and fighting cancer, he gave a rare interview from a prison hospital bed, still insisting, more than 30 years later, that he'd never arranged his wife's murder at all. He told the reporter he expected to die "in the dungeon," in a small palliative care room set aside for him in maximum security, and that he'd made his peace with it. His case had already inspired two books and a movie by then, and he seemed, even from that hospital bed, oddly proud of the notoriety, while still fighting, on principle, a routine request from Peel Police for a DNA sample connected to a national database, one final small battle against the police force he'd spent half his life insisting had framed him.

By 2006 he'd already been denied full parole twice, and though the law still entitled him to apply again in 2007, he told the reporter he wouldn't bother. There's a Hungarian saying, he said, that defines an idiot as someone who does the same thing and expects a different result. He wasn't going to be the idiot. A man who'd done almost exactly the same thing 4 separate times over 15 years, and never once gotten a different result, said that about a parole application. Not about himself.

What strikes me most about this case, even after everything else, is how little any of it actually got him. The insurance money was tied up in litigation for years and, as far as the public record shows, was never paid to him at all. The house on Dundas Crescent burned to nothing. The stocks were seized by a bankruptcy trustee. Every single plot, the murder that started it all, and the three conspiracies that came after it, cost Peter Demeter more than it could have ever paid him back. And he kept doing it anyway, from inside a cell, with nothing left to lose and, it turned out, nothing left to gain either. That's not the profile of a man chasing money. That's the profile of a man who simply couldn't stop.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If you liked what you heard, please take a moment to give the show a 5-star review. These episodes are ad free, and leaving a review takes less time than listening to the ads other podcasts make you sit through. It helps the podcast grow, and it helps other people find these stories.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

From my years in this work, the cost first responders pay is real, and most of them never say a word about it. You don't have to fix it. You just have to notice. Check on the ones you know. That's enough to matter, and could be the difference that matters most.