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In 1983, Peter Collins killed police officer David Utman in at Bayshore Shopping Centre. Now, on his own deathbed, he reveals to Andrew Duffy the full story of his crime, what he would say to his younger self, and his plea to die outside prison walls
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic content and language.
In September 1984, after being found guilty of murdering a Nepean police officer in cold blood, Peter Collins refused to stand in court to be sentenced.
“I don’t want to,” a defiant Collins told Judge Nicholson McRae, who imposed the automatic penalty of life in prison.
The sentence meant Collins would not be eligible for parole until Oct. 14, 2008 — 25 years to the day after he confronted Nepean Police Const. David Utman in Bayshore Shopping Centre and shot him dead in front of a horrified lunch hour crowd.
The sentence also meant that the story behind his confounding crime would be locked up with Collins for decades.
“Whatever his motive or reason, Peter Collins shot an unsuspecting, totally innocent policeman,” Crown attorney James Stewart said at the time. “Constable Utman is dead and the motive is a mystery and will remain a mystery. Only Peter Collins knows why. But it appears he isn’t willing to tell us.”
More than three decades later, as he approaches the end of his life, Collins is ready to explain himself to the people of Ottawa. Or at least try.
The 53-year-old, one of Canada’s longest-serving prisoners, has been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer. In January, after chemotherapy and radiation, he was told the cancer had spread to his abdominal wall, lungs and spine. His only treatment now is palliative.
Supporters are lobbying for his compassionate release from Bath Institution, near Kingston, so that he can die among family and friends.
Utman’s relatives, however, are dead set against parole. “I think they should keep him there until he expires,” Utman’s brother, Stan, said in a phone interview from his home in Moose Jaw, Sask.
For many years, Collins has been a model prisoner — someone dedicated to furthering his education and helping other inmates — but his crime was so heinous that, for the parole board, it has always outweighed his rehabilitation efforts. He has been turned down for release five times since becoming eligible seven years ago.
Peter Collins in the custody of Nepean Police officers on October 24, 1983 following the slaying of Nepean Police Constable David Utman.
“I think I’m going to die in prison: that seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Collins said in a recent series of interviews during which he discussed his life, his crime, his reform, and his quest to die outside of prison.
He also talked about the angry and reckless young man who ruined his life and many others: the 22-year-old Peter Collins. The two have a difficult relationship.
“He was someone who didn’t understand consequences,” said Collins. “He didn’t have any comprehension of what could happen, what it actually meant …
“I wish I could have spoken to him back then. I wish things hadn’t turned out the way they did. Yeah, fuck, you know, but you can’t change any of that. You can only move forward. But certainly, there’s a lot of regret around that.”
******
Peter Collins was born on Aug. 22, 1961 in the British colony of Hong Kong where his father, Michael, was serving as a musician with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment band.
The Collins family — it would grow to include five children — returned to England the following year then moved to Canada in 1967. The family settled in Ottawa, where Michael Collins joined the Governor General’s Foot Guards Band. An accomplished trumpet player, Michael Collins would become a founding member of the city’s venerable Apex Jazz Band while also supporting his family as a sheet metal worker.
Peter grew up in a middle-class home on Fillmore Crescent in Gloucester. His family considered him an intelligent, caring boy, but local police came to know him as a runaway and troublemaker. He built up a thick police file through a series of petty crimes: trespassing, mischief, theft. By Grade 10, he was barred from the grounds of his high school, Colonel By Secondary.
His parents, Michael and Joan, sought family counseling in an attempt to address the source of their son’s problems. The sessions, however, proved fruitless and Collins moved out of the family home.
His criminality continued along its ruinous arc. In January 1978, Collins scuffled with an officer who had ordered his friend out of the Beacon Hill Shopping Centre. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
In April 1983, he was arrested in connection with a series of bank robberies and held in custody at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. Two months later, he scaled a barbed-wire fence around the jail yard and escaped.
Collins was still at large when he walked into the Bayshore Shopping Centre with a loaded handgun late on the morning of October 14, 1983, determined to rob another bank.
“I had no money left,” he explained in an interview from prison.
******
The Bath Institution, west of Kingston, is a medium-security federal penitentiary on the windswept north shore of Lake Ontario. It has been Collins’s home for the past 16 years. He lives in what’s known as N-house: a community-style building with a shared kitchen. He has a key to his own cell and, when he’s up to it, can cook his own meals.
It’s a far cry from the special handling unit at Millhaven Penitentiary where he spent the first three years of his sentence. Collins was placed in the high-security unit because of his escape history.
His cell featured a bed and desk welded to one another and a window covered with two sheets of steel. Light seeped in through small, nickel-sized holes punched into the metal.
At first, Collins’s dark well of anger only deepened.
“In the early years of my incarceration, I took no responsibility for my conduct or my crime,” he wrote in an essay that appeared late last year in Scapegoat, a left-wing journal. “The process of being caught, convicted and sentenced only strengthened my belief that I was the victim.”
According to Collins, his childhood was marked by emotional distress: His parents fought, and he felt unloved and isolated at home, where he was cast as the black sheep. His mother’s anger focused itself on him.
“It seemed like I was always in trouble, always a bad fit,” he said. “I couldn’t find my way to fix it and my parents couldn’t figure out how to fix it, either.”
By the age of 12, he was a chronic runaway and spent time living on the street. There, Collins said, he was abused by two pedophiles — one a teacher and the other a karate instructor — after being invited to stay in their homes.
Unable to deal with the resultant trauma, he embraced the comfort of drugs and hardened his mind against adult authority. Collins eventually fell in with an older woman, who surrounded herself with a rough collection of bikers, sex workers and drug dealers.
“I thought they were amazing people who had control over their lives: No one screwed them around and I looked up to them,” said Collins. He had a swastika tattooed on his forearm to brand himself a member of their rebel tribe.
Collins’s worldview began to change only after corresponding with a social worker who challenged his hard-minded articles of faith: that society was to blame for his fate; that only he could see the truth. She asked Collins to embrace Jesus, but he told her not to write if he was only a conversion project. She agreed, and their letter exchange, which grew to thousands of pages, carried on for years.
“We had this endless conversation where she wasn’t judging me: we were just talking,” remembered Collins.
“The way I was able to go so far off course as a young person was because it was just me having conversations with me. I was able to justify a lot of my bullshit. But her questions, her willingness to go through it with me brought me around to the point where I was able to recognize that I was the problem, that I had to change.”
He resolved to do something useful with his life.
Unsure of how to make that happen behind bars, Collins took a job in the prison library and began to read widely. He earned his high school equivalency diploma, passed a first-year political science course at Queen’s University then earned a graphic, commercial and fine arts certificate from a Toronto career college.
The more he learned, the more disturbed he became by what he saw around him: how the prison system isolated inmates from each other; how they learned to be silent in the face of violence, racism, injustice and abuse; how any kind of objection was viewed by prison officials as a dangerous act of rebellion.
Collins believed the inmate code — the unwritten rules that govern prison life —furthered that isolation. Don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. Don’t look into anyone’s cell. Don’t steal. Don’t rat. Don’t gossip. Those who lived by the code did their time without complaint, eyes-to-the-floor, alone.
“In prison,” Collins said, “I found what I felt was a useful social purpose: trying to improve things.”
He wrote to politicians, law professors and social justice organizations, drawing attention to concerns about health care, HIV/AIDS transmission, systemic racism and overcrowding.
He also tried to build community. Collins sought to convince other prisoners that they deserved dignity, respect and human rights. He worked for Frontier College, tutoring other inmates. He helped inmates prepare for their parole hearings and led seminars to prevent the spread of HIV and Hepatitis-C. He lobbied for new harm reduction programs, including prison tattoo parlours. (The pilot program, which sought to reduce the spread of HIV through homemade tattoo equipment, was launched at six institutions, but eliminated in 2006.)
For his efforts, Collins would receive the Canadian Award for Action from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch in 2008.
Mindful of the need to build a case for his own parole, Collins also pursued an approved correctional treatment plan. He launched a short-lived graphic arts business from his prison cell, and completed courses in anger management and dispute resolution.
Peter Collins, 53, has spent 32 years in prison. He taught himself to paint and to play the guitar in order to relieve what he describes as the “crushing boredom” of a life sentence.
To relieve the crushing boredom of prison, he taught himself to play guitar and produced hundreds of illustrations and paintings. One series of paintings juxtaposed birds and prisons: a cardinal on barbed wire, an owl and a guard tower. His illustrations often editorialized about war, poverty, policing, and the pain of an inmate’s life.
His art was exhibited in Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Halifax, but the shows often stirred controversy.
Many regarded Collins’s art — and its political messages — with disgust. Prison guards and police officers argued that a cop-killer should not be given a public platform to display work that depicted them as racist and corrupt. Conservative Senator Bob Runciman, a former solicitor-general in Ontario, once suggested that his cartoons were a kind of hate crime.
Collins admitted that it was a mistake to publish cartoons about police officers.
“I didn’t think about the fact that maybe I shouldn’t have been the one doing those cartoons. So I regret that lapse in judgment,” he told the Citizen. “I think they were perfectly legitimate cartoons; I just don’t think I should have been the one doing them.”
Peter Collins has courted controversy behind bars for his opinionated illustrations and comics, which editorialize about war, poverty, policing and prisons.
Collins is convinced that his artistic expression and prison advocacy have come with a heavy price: that corrections officials have thwarted his parole because of his outspokenness (see sidebar). His latest application was denied in November despite his cancer diagnosis.
“Silence, it seems, equals ‘rehabilitated’ in Canada’s prison system,” he once wrote. “And this explains why so many prisoners withdraw emotionally and try to mimic doormats.”
*****
Const. David Utman was assigned to patrol the Bayshore neighbourhood and its landmark shopping centre.
Utman had spent 10 years as a patrolman and identification officer in Nepean following a stint as a military policeman with the Royal Canadian Air Force. A motorcycle enthusiast, he was known as an amiable, even-tempered officer, someone always armed with a new joke or a funny story. He loved to entertain a crowd.
But in October 1983, his personal life was in a state of upheaval. He had separated from his wife, Jane, and was living apart from her and their two young sons, Shane and Wade. He was trying to figure things out.
On his first coffee break, Utman, 38, met a girlfriend, Joan Hould, at the Gourmet Fair Restaurant on the ground floor of the shopping centre. He sat with his back against the wall, put his nightstick and cap on the bench beside him, and leaned into a conversation with Hould, a shoe store sales clerk.
Const. David Utman, 38, a father of two boys, was known for his sense of humour and his problem-solving ability.
That’s when Peter Collins walked into his life. Collins approached the table with a gun levelled at the uniformed officer. “Get up asshole, your time has come,” he told Utman, according to Hould’s courtroom testimony.
Utman didn’t budge. Hould told court that Collins fired a gunshot into the wall and said, “I told you to get up. Now.”
The officer slid out of the bench and picked up his nightstick. Collins backed into the mall concourse, gun in hand, as Utman walked slowly toward him, nightstick outstretched. The officer repeatedly urged Collins to put down his weapon.
Trial witnesses disagreed about what happened next. One said Collins goaded the officer, “Take out your gun. Go for your gun.” Another said Collins warned Utman to keep his distance, “Don’t come any closer. Get out of my way or I’ll shoot you.”
What’s undisputed is that Utman reached for his walkie-talkie to key its microphone.
“I guess I’ll have to kill you,” Collins said, according to one witness. He fired a single shot into the officer’s chest and Utman fell forward to the ground.
Utman would die of massive internal bleeding.
Collins took the downed officer’s service revolver from its holster and raced down the concourse toward the Eaton’s store with a gun in each hand. He fired two shots into the ceiling to deter his pursuers before running out the door.
He was arrested later that same day at a friend’s townhouse on Penny Drive. Utman’s revolver was found in the home, along with other weapons.
****
At trial, in an attempt to explain the senseless murder, the Crown advanced a theory that Collins had gone to the mall in search of a police officer to stalk and kill. Both the trial judge and appeal court said the evidence to support that idea was weak.
Collins testified in his own defence and insisted that police had arrested the wrong man.
For more than two decades now, however, he has admitted his guilt to prison and parole officials. “I was just being a fucking asshole,” Collins said of his trial performance. “I wasn’t able to accept responsibility at that point in my life.”
In interviews with the Citizen, Collins said the truth is that he shot Utman because he was an idiot with a gun: “I didn’t care about myself, let alone anyone else.”
He had been on the run from the law for years by the time he walked into Bayshore on that fateful morning. He had dropped acid and smoked pot the previous night.
“There may have been some sleeplessness and some sort of residual effect, but I certainly don’t want to say that as some kind of explanation,” he said.
The shooting of Const. David Utman took place in the middle of the Bayshore shopping mall in the middle of the day. Utman was minding his own business, having a coffee at the Gourmet Fair Restaurant, when Collins approached him with a gun drawn.
His explanation is difficult to fathom. Collins said he planned to rob a bank on the ground floor of the mall, but was unnerved by the presence of Utman. He pretended to window shop while watching the officer take a seat in the restaurant. Collins said he paced the aisles of Radio Shack for a while then decided to abandon his plan. He began to walk toward the exit, but stopped.
“As I was leaving, I kept on talking to myself about always being on the run, never following through. I talked my way right back there, thinking I’d be able to disarm him and handcuff him to the table.”
Why not go for a walk, and return an hour later?
“Again, it seemed like I had waited a long time. It certainly wasn’t a good decision-making day for me,” he said. “I don’t know how to fill that in better. There was anxiety, and all the other emotions that go along with that. I think I had talked myself into thinking that I was somehow chickening out, always running away from problems. I decided that I would go and do it.”
Collins said his confrontation with Utman went disastrously wrong from the start.
According to Collins, Utman flatly refused to turn over his service revolver. Collins said he fired a shot into the wall to convince the officer that his own gun was real.
In his experience as a bank robber, Collins found that everyone did exactly what he asked when he was holding a gun. Utman did not.
“What he did instead was get up and pick up the billy club and started walking toward me, and I started backing away,” said Collins, who felt suddenly boxed in to a situation — a showdown — he had never imagined.
Utman, too, must have been mystified by this sudden life-and-death confrontation in the middle of a mall, in the middle of the day. He must have felt it was his duty to protect people from this armed lunatic. He would be posthumously awarded the Ontario Medal for Police Bravery for his actions.
“He kept moving forward, trying to convince me to drop the weapon,” Collins recalled. “When he called for assistance (on his walkie-talkie), that’s when I shot. I thought I was aiming low enough that it wouldn’t be fatal.”
The crime made no sense on any level since Utman would have eventually left the mall on his own accord had Collins not challenged him. What’s more, the bank robbery became an afterthought: He fled the mall a penniless murderer.
Collins said he can’t rationalize what happened; he can only recount the mad steps involved. He called that day “a black hole of misery.”
“I ruined all these lives and my own,” he said. “I know what I did and I know how fucking hard it has been on so many people. I’m not looking for sympathy; it doesn’t matter at this point.”
*****
Collins has tried to reach out and apologize to the slain officer’s family through Correctional Service Canada’s restorative justice program. Not surprisingly, Utman’s family has kept its distance.
Utman’s former wife, Jane, and their two children continue to live in Ottawa. They declined the Citizen’s requests to speak about the case.
It took Collins years to accept the burden of guilt for his crime. But when he did, more than two decades ago, he came to believe that he owed something — a duty of sorts — to his victim.
“I’m responsible for someone’s death so how can you possibly repay that, atone for that? You just can’t, right? If you’re thinking about it and you care – and in my case, I did think about it and I do care – I thought that I had to change what I was doing and who I was.
“One of the ways was to be honest with myself and use whatever skills I had available to work against the problems that I saw in the prison system.”
In doing so, Collins distanced himself from the anger and self-absorption of his youth. But he’s had to live with his 22-year-old self, and the decisions he made, all of his adult life.
“I guess that’s the way life is,” he said. “But on the other hand, when they’re talking to me at a parole board, and they’re talking to me as if I’m that kid, as if what they’re doing to me today has some relevance to that kid back then, there’s a remarkable disconnect for me.”
As a young man, Collins said, he knew he was on a disastrous path, but he had no clue how to turn from it. “I was too young, too prideful, too ill-equipped. I didn’t have any positive influences. And too full of myself, too fucking full of myself, to be completely honest there.”
Had he to do it all over again, Collins said, he’d like to work as a youth counselor and try to reach out to the hard cases, to the kids like him. What would he tell a young Peter Collins?
“I would help him find the footholds and the opportunities and just be there. Not condemning or punishing. Just trying to help.”
*******
Collins first noticed blood in his urine last year, yet it took six months for him to get in to see a urologist. Bladder cancer has excellent survival rates if detected early, but Collins’s cancer was advanced by the time he began treatment. In January, doctors told him he had months to live.
He has asked for a special parole hearing but is still waiting for a date to be set. Being allowed to die at home, he said, “would mean a lot to my family.”
In prison, Collins managed to rebuild ties to his parents and siblings. He even planned to write a book about the prison system with his mother, Joan, before she died of cancer in October 1995. “The forgiveness was there on both sides,” he said.
Collins’s mother wrote to prison officials as part of an unsuccessful attempt to get her son out of prison for a supervised visit during the final stages of her disease. In that essay, she described the horror of seeing her son arrested on television, of coming to terms with his violent, mindless act.
Peter Collins makes his way to court for the beginning of his trial in September 1984. Collins pleaded not guilty. He says now that he was too immature to accept responsibility for his crime.
In its wake, she suffered migraines, sleeplessness, fatigue and depression. “There has been too much invalidated grief,” she wrote. “Too much guilt, love, resentment; too much vacillation between a determination to be strong and giving in to defeatism; too much empathy and anguish, horror, stress, fear and loneliness.”
Collins’s father and younger brother, Nicolas, also died while he was in prison, the former of cancer and the latter in a motorcycle accident. He has three surviving siblings with whom he remains in close contact.
“I think it would give them peace knowing I didn’t die in one of these places,” he said.
The case of Peter Collins involves clashing absolutes. Someone who callously gunned down a police officer doesn’t deserve compassion. Yet someone who repented, changed and found meaning in prison deserves the chance to die on his own terms.
“If I’m proudest of something,” he said, “it’s my desire to want to improve myself — and also not in a selfish kind of way.”
In prison, Collins has found neither God nor a reason to fear death.
“I don’t feel a sense of panic,” he said. “I’ve done my best to address my shortcomings such as they were and I’m satisfied with those efforts. If I had one last thing to say, I’d say I regret the people I’ve hurt and the pain I’ve caused them.”
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Editor’s note: This story contains graphic content and language.
In September 1984, after being found guilty of murdering a Nepean police officer in cold blood, Peter Collins refused to stand in court to be sentenced.
“I don’t want to,” a defiant Collins told Judge Nicholson McRae, who imposed the automatic penalty of life in prison.
The sentence meant Collins would not be eligible for parole until Oct. 14, 2008 — 25 years to the day after he confronted Nepean Police Const. David Utman in Bayshore Shopping Centre and shot him dead in front of a horrified lunch hour crowd.
The sentence also meant that the story behind his confounding crime would be locked up with Collins for decades.
“Whatever his motive or reason, Peter Collins shot an unsuspecting, totally innocent policeman,” Crown attorney James Stewart said at the time. “Constable Utman is dead and the motive is a mystery and will remain a mystery. Only Peter Collins knows why. But it appears he isn’t willing to tell us.”
More than three decades later, as he approaches the end of his life, Collins is ready to explain himself to the people of Ottawa. Or at least try.
The 53-year-old, one of Canada’s longest-serving prisoners, has been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer. In January, after chemotherapy and radiation, he was told the cancer had spread to his abdominal wall, lungs and spine. His only treatment now is palliative.
Supporters are lobbying for his compassionate release from Bath Institution, near Kingston, so that he can die among family and friends.
Utman’s relatives, however, are dead set against parole. “I think they should keep him there until he expires,” Utman’s brother, Stan, said in a phone interview from his home in Moose Jaw, Sask.
For many years, Collins has been a model prisoner — someone dedicated to furthering his education and helping other inmates — but his crime was so heinous that, for the parole board, it has always outweighed his rehabilitation efforts. He has been turned down for release five times since becoming eligible seven years ago.
Peter Collins in the custody of Nepean Police officers on October 24, 1983 following the slaying of Nepean Police Constable David Utman.
“I think I’m going to die in prison: that seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Collins said in a recent series of interviews during which he discussed his life, his crime, his reform, and his quest to die outside of prison.
He also talked about the angry and reckless young man who ruined his life and many others: the 22-year-old Peter Collins. The two have a difficult relationship.
“He was someone who didn’t understand consequences,” said Collins. “He didn’t have any comprehension of what could happen, what it actually meant …
“I wish I could have spoken to him back then. I wish things hadn’t turned out the way they did. Yeah, fuck, you know, but you can’t change any of that. You can only move forward. But certainly, there’s a lot of regret around that.”
******
Peter Collins was born on Aug. 22, 1961 in the British colony of Hong Kong where his father, Michael, was serving as a musician with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment band.
The Collins family — it would grow to include five children — returned to England the following year then moved to Canada in 1967. The family settled in Ottawa, where Michael Collins joined the Governor General’s Foot Guards Band. An accomplished trumpet player, Michael Collins would become a founding member of the city’s venerable Apex Jazz Band while also supporting his family as a sheet metal worker.
Peter grew up in a middle-class home on Fillmore Crescent in Gloucester. His family considered him an intelligent, caring boy, but local police came to know him as a runaway and troublemaker. He built up a thick police file through a series of petty crimes: trespassing, mischief, theft. By Grade 10, he was barred from the grounds of his high school, Colonel By Secondary.
His parents, Michael and Joan, sought family counseling in an attempt to address the source of their son’s problems. The sessions, however, proved fruitless and Collins moved out of the family home.
His criminality continued along its ruinous arc. In January 1978, Collins scuffled with an officer who had ordered his friend out of the Beacon Hill Shopping Centre. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
In April 1983, he was arrested in connection with a series of bank robberies and held in custody at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. Two months later, he scaled a barbed-wire fence around the jail yard and escaped.
Collins was still at large when he walked into the Bayshore Shopping Centre with a loaded handgun late on the morning of October 14, 1983, determined to rob another bank.
“I had no money left,” he explained in an interview from prison.
******
The Bath Institution, west of Kingston, is a medium-security federal penitentiary on the windswept north shore of Lake Ontario. It has been Collins’s home for the past 16 years. He lives in what’s known as N-house: a community-style building with a shared kitchen. He has a key to his own cell and, when he’s up to it, can cook his own meals.
It’s a far cry from the special handling unit at Millhaven Penitentiary where he spent the first three years of his sentence. Collins was placed in the high-security unit because of his escape history.
His cell featured a bed and desk welded to one another and a window covered with two sheets of steel. Light seeped in through small, nickel-sized holes punched into the metal.
At first, Collins’s dark well of anger only deepened.
“In the early years of my incarceration, I took no responsibility for my conduct or my crime,” he wrote in an essay that appeared late last year in Scapegoat, a left-wing journal. “The process of being caught, convicted and sentenced only strengthened my belief that I was the victim.”
According to Collins, his childhood was marked by emotional distress: His parents fought, and he felt unloved and isolated at home, where he was cast as the black sheep. His mother’s anger focused itself on him.
“It seemed like I was always in trouble, always a bad fit,” he said. “I couldn’t find my way to fix it and my parents couldn’t figure out how to fix it, either.”
By the age of 12, he was a chronic runaway and spent time living on the street. There, Collins said, he was abused by two pedophiles — one a teacher and the other a karate instructor — after being invited to stay in their homes.
Unable to deal with the resultant trauma, he embraced the comfort of drugs and hardened his mind against adult authority. Collins eventually fell in with an older woman, who surrounded herself with a rough collection of bikers, sex workers and drug dealers.
“I thought they were amazing people who had control over their lives: No one screwed them around and I looked up to them,” said Collins. He had a swastika tattooed on his forearm to brand himself a member of their rebel tribe.
Collins’s worldview began to change only after corresponding with a social worker who challenged his hard-minded articles of faith: that society was to blame for his fate; that only he could see the truth. She asked Collins to embrace Jesus, but he told her not to write if he was only a conversion project. She agreed, and their letter exchange, which grew to thousands of pages, carried on for years.
“We had this endless conversation where she wasn’t judging me: we were just talking,” remembered Collins.
“The way I was able to go so far off course as a young person was because it was just me having conversations with me. I was able to justify a lot of my bullshit. But her questions, her willingness to go through it with me brought me around to the point where I was able to recognize that I was the problem, that I had to change.”
He resolved to do something useful with his life.
Unsure of how to make that happen behind bars, Collins took a job in the prison library and began to read widely. He earned his high school equivalency diploma, passed a first-year political science course at Queen’s University then earned a graphic, commercial and fine arts certificate from a Toronto career college.
The more he learned, the more disturbed he became by what he saw around him: how the prison system isolated inmates from each other; how they learned to be silent in the face of violence, racism, injustice and abuse; how any kind of objection was viewed by prison officials as a dangerous act of rebellion.
Collins believed the inmate code — the unwritten rules that govern prison life —furthered that isolation. Don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. Don’t look into anyone’s cell. Don’t steal. Don’t rat. Don’t gossip. Those who lived by the code did their time without complaint, eyes-to-the-floor, alone.
“In prison,” Collins said, “I found what I felt was a useful social purpose: trying to improve things.”
He wrote to politicians, law professors and social justice organizations, drawing attention to concerns about health care, HIV/AIDS transmission, systemic racism and overcrowding.
He also tried to build community. Collins sought to convince other prisoners that they deserved dignity, respect and human rights. He worked for Frontier College, tutoring other inmates. He helped inmates prepare for their parole hearings and led seminars to prevent the spread of HIV and Hepatitis-C. He lobbied for new harm reduction programs, including prison tattoo parlours. (The pilot program, which sought to reduce the spread of HIV through homemade tattoo equipment, was launched at six institutions, but eliminated in 2006.)
For his efforts, Collins would receive the Canadian Award for Action from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch in 2008.
Mindful of the need to build a case for his own parole, Collins also pursued an approved correctional treatment plan. He launched a short-lived graphic arts business from his prison cell, and completed courses in anger management and dispute resolution.
Peter Collins, 53, has spent 32 years in prison. He taught himself to paint and to play the guitar in order to relieve what he describes as the “crushing boredom” of a life sentence.
To relieve the crushing boredom of prison, he taught himself to play guitar and produced hundreds of illustrations and paintings. One series of paintings juxtaposed birds and prisons: a cardinal on barbed wire, an owl and a guard tower. His illustrations often editorialized about war, poverty, policing, and the pain of an inmate’s life.
His art was exhibited in Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Halifax, but the shows often stirred controversy.
Many regarded Collins’s art — and its political messages — with disgust. Prison guards and police officers argued that a cop-killer should not be given a public platform to display work that depicted them as racist and corrupt. Conservative Senator Bob Runciman, a former solicitor-general in Ontario, once suggested that his cartoons were a kind of hate crime.
Collins admitted that it was a mistake to publish cartoons about police officers.
“I didn’t think about the fact that maybe I shouldn’t have been the one doing those cartoons. So I regret that lapse in judgment,” he told the Citizen. “I think they were perfectly legitimate cartoons; I just don’t think I should have been the one doing them.”
Peter Collins has courted controversy behind bars for his opinionated illustrations and comics, which editorialize about war, poverty, policing and prisons.
Collins is convinced that his artistic expression and prison advocacy have come with a heavy price: that corrections officials have thwarted his parole because of his outspokenness (see sidebar). His latest application was denied in November despite his cancer diagnosis.
“Silence, it seems, equals ‘rehabilitated’ in Canada’s prison system,” he once wrote. “And this explains why so many prisoners withdraw emotionally and try to mimic doormats.”
*****
Const. David Utman was assigned to patrol the Bayshore neighbourhood and its landmark shopping centre.
Utman had spent 10 years as a patrolman and identification officer in Nepean following a stint as a military policeman with the Royal Canadian Air Force. A motorcycle enthusiast, he was known as an amiable, even-tempered officer, someone always armed with a new joke or a funny story. He loved to entertain a crowd.
But in October 1983, his personal life was in a state of upheaval. He had separated from his wife, Jane, and was living apart from her and their two young sons, Shane and Wade. He was trying to figure things out.
On his first coffee break, Utman, 38, met a girlfriend, Joan Hould, at the Gourmet Fair Restaurant on the ground floor of the shopping centre. He sat with his back against the wall, put his nightstick and cap on the bench beside him, and leaned into a conversation with Hould, a shoe store sales clerk.
Const. David Utman, 38, a father of two boys, was known for his sense of humour and his problem-solving ability.
That’s when Peter Collins walked into his life. Collins approached the table with a gun levelled at the uniformed officer. “Get up asshole, your time has come,” he told Utman, according to Hould’s courtroom testimony.
Utman didn’t budge. Hould told court that Collins fired a gunshot into the wall and said, “I told you to get up. Now.”
The officer slid out of the bench and picked up his nightstick. Collins backed into the mall concourse, gun in hand, as Utman walked slowly toward him, nightstick outstretched. The officer repeatedly urged Collins to put down his weapon.
Trial witnesses disagreed about what happened next. One said Collins goaded the officer, “Take out your gun. Go for your gun.” Another said Collins warned Utman to keep his distance, “Don’t come any closer. Get out of my way or I’ll shoot you.”
What’s undisputed is that Utman reached for his walkie-talkie to key its microphone.
“I guess I’ll have to kill you,” Collins said, according to one witness. He fired a single shot into the officer’s chest and Utman fell forward to the ground.
Utman would die of massive internal bleeding.
Collins took the downed officer’s service revolver from its holster and raced down the concourse toward the Eaton’s store with a gun in each hand. He fired two shots into the ceiling to deter his pursuers before running out the door.
He was arrested later that same day at a friend’s townhouse on Penny Drive. Utman’s revolver was found in the home, along with other weapons.
****
At trial, in an attempt to explain the senseless murder, the Crown advanced a theory that Collins had gone to the mall in search of a police officer to stalk and kill. Both the trial judge and appeal court said the evidence to support that idea was weak.
Collins testified in his own defence and insisted that police had arrested the wrong man.
For more than two decades now, however, he has admitted his guilt to prison and parole officials. “I was just being a fucking asshole,” Collins said of his trial performance. “I wasn’t able to accept responsibility at that point in my life.”
In interviews with the Citizen, Collins said the truth is that he shot Utman because he was an idiot with a gun: “I didn’t care about myself, let alone anyone else.”
He had been on the run from the law for years by the time he walked into Bayshore on that fateful morning. He had dropped acid and smoked pot the previous night.
“There may have been some sleeplessness and some sort of residual effect, but I certainly don’t want to say that as some kind of explanation,” he said.
The shooting of Const. David Utman took place in the middle of the Bayshore shopping mall in the middle of the day. Utman was minding his own business, having a coffee at the Gourmet Fair Restaurant, when Collins approached him with a gun drawn.
His explanation is difficult to fathom. Collins said he planned to rob a bank on the ground floor of the mall, but was unnerved by the presence of Utman. He pretended to window shop while watching the officer take a seat in the restaurant. Collins said he paced the aisles of Radio Shack for a while then decided to abandon his plan. He began to walk toward the exit, but stopped.
“As I was leaving, I kept on talking to myself about always being on the run, never following through. I talked my way right back there, thinking I’d be able to disarm him and handcuff him to the table.”
Why not go for a walk, and return an hour later?
“Again, it seemed like I had waited a long time. It certainly wasn’t a good decision-making day for me,” he said. “I don’t know how to fill that in better. There was anxiety, and all the other emotions that go along with that. I think I had talked myself into thinking that I was somehow chickening out, always running away from problems. I decided that I would go and do it.”
Collins said his confrontation with Utman went disastrously wrong from the start.
According to Collins, Utman flatly refused to turn over his service revolver. Collins said he fired a shot into the wall to convince the officer that his own gun was real.
In his experience as a bank robber, Collins found that everyone did exactly what he asked when he was holding a gun. Utman did not.
“What he did instead was get up and pick up the billy club and started walking toward me, and I started backing away,” said Collins, who felt suddenly boxed in to a situation — a showdown — he had never imagined.
Utman, too, must have been mystified by this sudden life-and-death confrontation in the middle of a mall, in the middle of the day. He must have felt it was his duty to protect people from this armed lunatic. He would be posthumously awarded the Ontario Medal for Police Bravery for his actions.
“He kept moving forward, trying to convince me to drop the weapon,” Collins recalled. “When he called for assistance (on his walkie-talkie), that’s when I shot. I thought I was aiming low enough that it wouldn’t be fatal.”
The crime made no sense on any level since Utman would have eventually left the mall on his own accord had Collins not challenged him. What’s more, the bank robbery became an afterthought: He fled the mall a penniless murderer.
Collins said he can’t rationalize what happened; he can only recount the mad steps involved. He called that day “a black hole of misery.”
“I ruined all these lives and my own,” he said. “I know what I did and I know how fucking hard it has been on so many people. I’m not looking for sympathy; it doesn’t matter at this point.”
*****
Collins has tried to reach out and apologize to the slain officer’s family through Correctional Service Canada’s restorative justice program. Not surprisingly, Utman’s family has kept its distance.
Utman’s former wife, Jane, and their two children continue to live in Ottawa. They declined the Citizen’s requests to speak about the case.
It took Collins years to accept the burden of guilt for his crime. But when he did, more than two decades ago, he came to believe that he owed something — a duty of sorts — to his victim.
“I’m responsible for someone’s death so how can you possibly repay that, atone for that? You just can’t, right? If you’re thinking about it and you care – and in my case, I did think about it and I do care – I thought that I had to change what I was doing and who I was.
“One of the ways was to be honest with myself and use whatever skills I had available to work against the problems that I saw in the prison system.”
In doing so, Collins distanced himself from the anger and self-absorption of his youth. But he’s had to live with his 22-year-old self, and the decisions he made, all of his adult life.
“I guess that’s the way life is,” he said. “But on the other hand, when they’re talking to me at a parole board, and they’re talking to me as if I’m that kid, as if what they’re doing to me today has some relevance to that kid back then, there’s a remarkable disconnect for me.”
As a young man, Collins said, he knew he was on a disastrous path, but he had no clue how to turn from it. “I was too young, too prideful, too ill-equipped. I didn’t have any positive influences. And too full of myself, too fucking full of myself, to be completely honest there.”
Had he to do it all over again, Collins said, he’d like to work as a youth counselor and try to reach out to the hard cases, to the kids like him. What would he tell a young Peter Collins?
“I would help him find the footholds and the opportunities and just be there. Not condemning or punishing. Just trying to help.”
*******
Collins first noticed blood in his urine last year, yet it took six months for him to get in to see a urologist. Bladder cancer has excellent survival rates if detected early, but Collins’s cancer was advanced by the time he began treatment. In January, doctors told him he had months to live.
He has asked for a special parole hearing but is still waiting for a date to be set. Being allowed to die at home, he said, “would mean a lot to my family.”
In prison, Collins managed to rebuild ties to his parents and siblings. He even planned to write a book about the prison system with his mother, Joan, before she died of cancer in October 1995. “The forgiveness was there on both sides,” he said.
Collins’s mother wrote to prison officials as part of an unsuccessful attempt to get her son out of prison for a supervised visit during the final stages of her disease. In that essay, she described the horror of seeing her son arrested on television, of coming to terms with his violent, mindless act.
Peter Collins makes his way to court for the beginning of his trial in September 1984. Collins pleaded not guilty. He says now that he was too immature to accept responsibility for his crime.
In its wake, she suffered migraines, sleeplessness, fatigue and depression. “There has been too much invalidated grief,” she wrote. “Too much guilt, love, resentment; too much vacillation between a determination to be strong and giving in to defeatism; too much empathy and anguish, horror, stress, fear and loneliness.”
Collins’s father and younger brother, Nicolas, also died while he was in prison, the former of cancer and the latter in a motorcycle accident. He has three surviving siblings with whom he remains in close contact.
“I think it would give them peace knowing I didn’t die in one of these places,” he said.
The case of Peter Collins involves clashing absolutes. Someone who callously gunned down a police officer doesn’t deserve compassion. Yet someone who repented, changed and found meaning in prison deserves the chance to die on his own terms.
“If I’m proudest of something,” he said, “it’s my desire to want to improve myself — and also not in a selfish kind of way.”
In prison, Collins has found neither God nor a reason to fear death.
“I don’t feel a sense of panic,” he said. “I’ve done my best to address my shortcomings such as they were and I’m satisfied with those efforts. If I had one last thing to say, I’d say I regret the people I’ve hurt and the pain I’ve caused them.”
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