According to Halifax Regional Police, 73-year-old high-risk offender Douglas Worth is living in Dartmouth.
Worth, originally from the Pictou County area of Nova Scotia, was released after serving 35 years of a federal life sentence for the December 1987 second-degree murder of Trina Campbell in Brampton, Ont.
National Post has contacted the Parole Board of Canada to obtain a copy of their decision to release Worth, who police say can have no contact with children or his victims, no drugs or alcohol, and must report all relationships.
Worth has a criminal history dating back to 1968 that includes break-ins, motor vehicle theft and the 1978 rape of an Indigenous girl in Ontario, for which he was sentenced and served eight years, earning his release in June of 1987, about seven months before he killed Campbell.
The circumstances surrounding that murder are detailed in multiple news articles from the time and are also explored in
a 2005 episode of the television series Crime Stories.
In the show, it notes that shortly before his release, Worth had said he planned to kill people and go on a rampage as retribution for his incarceration. Despite those concerns, he had served his limited sentence, and nothing in Canadian law at the time established safeguards around release.
After Worth got out in the spring, however, police tracked him to Edmonton, where he reconnected with a woman named Mary Kelly and her teenage son from a different relationship, Shawn. Police said they lost track of Worth soon after, but believed he returned to Ontario.
Police said Campbell, a Metis girl who’d had a troubled life, was living in a group home in the fall of 1987 after having run away from foster parents on several occasions.
When she failed to return to the facility on Dec. 11, they thought at first she might have run away again.
A months-long investigation into her disappearance ensued, but police didn’t have any credible leads by the time February rolled around. Despite no evidence of foul play, the file was handed off to homicide detectives Edward Toye and Len Favreau.
Meanwhile, Peel police were completely unaware that Worth was living in a downtown boarding house close to where Campbell was last seen by her school bus driver.
”We had no idea this sadistic predator had moved into our area,” Inspector Rod Piukkala said on Crime Stories.
Authorities later learned Worth was soon rejoined by the Kellys, and in March of 1988, he asked Mary to rent a vehicle and accompany him so that he could move evidence related to an undisclosed crime.
“He left the car with a hockey bag and went into this ravine area. He then was seen by Mary to come from there carrying this hockey bag that was now laden with something,” assistant Crown prosecutor Al O’Marra said on the show.
The two drove about an hour north of Brampton, where Mary said Worth took the bag into the woods and came back with it empty.
Back in Brampton, he then ordered 14-year-old Shawn to clean up a stain left in the car’s trunk.
After the Kellys moved with Worth to his home province in April, Shawn asked his school’s guidance counsellor and Stellarton Police for help escaping the violence he was experiencing at home, according to a 2005 article in The Evening News in New Glasgow.
During that chat, Sgt. Hugh Muir, knowing Worth was wanted in connection with crimes in Ontario, asked Shawn about Brampton specifically, prompting the teenager to recount the stain story and that he had heard Worth tell other family members that he had killed a man there, not a girl.
“We were both stunned,” Muir said of himself and the guidance counsellor. “We had no inkling whatsoever that this was coming.”
Armed with new information, Toye and Favreau located the rental car with the dark stain. Testing quickly revealed it to be not only human blood, but decomposed human blood. They also discovered the rare blood type is common among Indigenous persons, leading police to think there could be a “loose chance” of a Campbell connection.
The Peel detectives travelled to N.S. to begin surveilling Worth, but had little evidence to act on. Before long, Sharon and Wade Lewis, Worth’s sister and brother-in-law, agreed to interviews, during which they spoke about the murder admission overheard by Shawn and Worth’s growing paranoia that someone would find the body and connect it to him.
“They advised us that Doug had approached them requesting assistance to get back to Brampton so that he could retrieve the head of the victim,” Favreau said on Crime Stories. “Doug told them that if you can get the head of the victim, it would prevent anyone from being able to identify the victim.”
Armed with that knowledge, police devised a plan whereby they would provide money and a rented car to Sharon that she would give to Worth and urge him to hit the road and deal with his problem.
Worth took the bait, and police discreetly tailed him back to Brampton, where he and Mary arrived on the night of May 7 under constant surveillance. Worth gave police the slip overnight, but officers fanned out and eventually located the pair exiting the woods.
“I’ll never forget that sight and that immense wave of relief that washed over me when we saw the car parked there and saw Doug coming out of the bush carrying a gym bag. He didn’t seem to pay us any mind,” Peel Det. Mike Cederberg told producers for Crime Stories.
To eliminate any chance of an alibi that he had found the remains and was returning them to police, officers allowed Worth to drive past two police stations before stopping him in Brampton. In the gym bag, forensics officers found a decomposing skull wrapped in garbage bags, which they soon confirmed was that of the missing girl.
The rest of her body was recovered from the area north of the city later that day.
“He broke her leg, fractured her skull, her body was butchered, he snapped off her forearms and dumped her body,” O’Marra told the court during Worth’s 1990 trial, according to the Windsor Star.
When first apprehended, Worth told police he’d grabbed Campbell in a supermarket, and raped and beat her before leaving her to die in a ravine.
During the trial, however, he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. Defence lawyer Damien Frost asked the jury to accept an insanity plea, arguing Worth was hallucinating and believed Campbell was a female prison guard from his previous time in prison.
It took jurors under an hour to reject that argument and present their guilty verdict to Justice Coulter Osbourne, who handed Worth a life sentence with no chance of parole for 23 years.
Worth unleashed a confusing and contradictory rant after his sentencing, per the Star.
”I did not kill her,” he said before adding, ”I’m not saying I’m not to blame for the cause of her death.”
He went on to add that people who commit crimes like this against children “should be shot.”
“That goes for me, too,” he said.
He also told O’Marra that he is “not the cold-hearted son of a b—-” he was made out to be during the trial.
”They say I’m mentally ill, but I don’t want to go on living like this if there’s no hope. . . I’ll put a bullet through my head.”
Halifax police said its advisory this week is meant to inform the public of Worth’s presence and is “not intended to encourage any form of vigilante activity or other unreasonable conduct.”
High-Risk Offender Notification: Douglas Worth
Halifax Regional Police is advising citizens, particularly those in Dartmouth, that a high-risk offender is residing in the community.
Douglas Worth, 73, is a federal offender who has been serving a life sentence for second-degree… pic.twitter.com/8B2VNjDRJf— Halifax_Police (@HfxRegPolice) July 30, 2025
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