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Mathew Charles Lamb

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 suffered an abusive upbringing at the hands of his step-grandfather, leading him to become emotionally detached from his relatives and peers. He developed violent tendencies that manifested themselves in his physical assault of a police officer at the age of 16 in February 1964, and his engaging in a brief shoot-out with law enforcement ten months later. After this latter incident he spent 14 months, starting in April 1965, at Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in eastern Ontario.Seventeen days after his release from jail in June 1966, Lamb took a shotgun from his uncle's house and went on a shooting spree around his East Windsor neighbourhood, killing two strangers and wounding two others. He was charged with capital murder, which under the era's Canadian Criminal Code called for a mandatory death penalty, but he avoided this fate when the court found, in January 1967, that he had not been sane at the time of the incident. He was committed for an indefinite time in a psychiatric unit. Over the course of six years in care at Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre's Oak Ridge facility he displayed a profound recovery, prompting an independent five-man committee to recommend to the Executive Council of Ontario that he be released, saying that he was no longer a danger to society. The Council approved Lamb's release in early 1973 on the condition that he spend a year living and working under the supervision of one of Oak Ridge's top psychiatrists, Elliot Barker.Lamb continued to show improvement, becoming a productive labourer on Barker's farm and earning the trust of the doctor's family. With Barker's encouragement, Lamb joined the Rhodesian Army in late 1973 and fought for the 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 an errant shot from one of his own men. 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.