On the evening of November 7th, 1975, sixteen-year-old Mariam Peters was planning to visit her sick grandfather at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. Her mother Merle dropped her off at Finch station, and she boarded the train.
Mariam arrived at her stop, St. Patrick station, at about eight-twenty p.m., and entered a dimly lit corridor between the northbound and southbound platforms, heading toward the exit.
Before she could leave the station, however, an unknown assailant loomed out of the shadows and stabbed the teenager sixteen times before fleeing the scene. When police arrived, they found Mariam barely alive, lying on the escalator, and transported her to Toronto General Hospital. Sadly, though, the girl succumbed to her injuries four days later.
For a time, authorities suspected that the perpetrator was a man who had allegedly stabbed another woman nearby only ten minutes after the attack on Mariam, but there was no direct evidence linking this unnamed person of interest to Mariam’s murder.
If the tragic event had anything close to a silver lining, it did directly lead to the beefing up of security measures by the Toronto Transit Commission in several stations and trains, including passenger-triggered alarm systems and the closing off of station areas where attackers could lie in wait. The murder of Mariam Peters remains unsolved nearly fifty years later.
Crime Immemorial 