It was an orgy of terror that lasted for five days.

The frenzied crime spree by Peter John Peters spread from London to Sarnia to Chatham to St. Catharines to Sault Ste. Marie to Brantford to Toronto in January 1990. The rampage began soon after a romantic relationship with his parole officer soured.

Charlene Brittain, 25, strangled and stabbed to death, her naked body found with a plastic garbage bag over her head, stuffed inside a locked storage room in Peters’ London basement apartment. The computer programmer had met Peters by chance on the train from Sarnia a month earlier. They’d gone out for one dinner date. He was a handsome guy.

Albert Philip, a 63-year-old janitor — he and Peters were strangers to each other — bludgeoned with a metal pipe in the underground parking lot of a downtown Toronto apartment building, struck so hard his skull fractured. The married father, just a year short of retirement, died in hospital.

Sandie Bellows, a 28-year-old telephone company employee, was abducted outside a credit union in St. Catharines. She was forced to drive Peters — in the station wagon he’d stolen from Philip — 100 kilometres, ordered to stop near a woodlot. Bellows was raped, kicked in the face, stabbed in the back, shoulder and chest with a screwdriver. The assault, which likely would have resulted in murder, was interrupted by a retired OPP officer who happened on the scene while hauling logs. “He stabbed her four times right in front of me,” Al Pike said afterward. “It looked like he was enjoying himself.”

Pike managed to smash the station wagon’s rear window as Peters drove away, then put Bellows on his tractor and brought her to his son’s home to call police.

Peters ditched the vehicle soon afterward, went to a farmhouse and stole another car under threat of a butcher’s knife held to the female occupant’s throat.

In Paris, Ont., he robbed a bank.

In Chatham, he tried repeatedly to coax a 15-year-old girl into the car until she fled screaming up the driveway of a nearby house.

In Sault Ste. Marie, he attacked a woman who’d been clearing snow off her car and then stole the vehicle.

When the car couldn’t make it up a slippery hill, he broke down the front door of another farmhouse, threatened the residents with a knife, forced the owner to load up a shotgun, and took him hostage in the family’s car, ransacking several homes as the rampage continued. He made obscene phone calls to women he’d known.

That automobile got stuck in the snow. He broke into another house and roughed up an elderly man, pointing the shotgun at his chest. A preacher had been over visiting. Peters took his wallet and Ford Tempo.

With shotgun in one hand and knife in the other, he barged into another home, tore the phone off the wall, demanded a woman present to clear the ice off the Tempo and drove away.

Three teenagers were taken hostage during the wild crime binge and released.

By that point, police had mounted one of Canada’s biggest manhunts ever: nearly 1,000 officers, tracking dogs, helicopters.

But the suspect remained elusive, zig-zagging across rural back roads, briefly crossing the U.S. border and returning — apparently with the help of a man never identified — while frightened homeowners bolted their doors and windows.

Peters dropped into a Tim Hortons in Chatham — large coffee and chocolate milk to go — then popped up at a Sarnia strip club looking for an ex-girlfriend who fortunately wasn’t there.

Finally, around 4 p.m. on Jan. 25, 1990 — Day 5, a blizzard raging — the Tempo skidded to a stop at an OPP roadblock 40 kilometres from Sault Ste. Marie. Peters leapt out with his hands up, leaving the shotgun in the back seat. In his pockets he had only a tissue, a comb and a loonie.

Peter John Peters had a cobra tattoo on his left forearm, talons on his chest, and the winged horse Pegasus on his back. He’d once told his niece he admired the daring and infamy of outlaws such as Jesse James and cult murderer Charles Manson.

He never achieved their notoriety but Peters is certainly one of the baddest boys ever in the annals of Canadian crime.

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He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 17 years.

On Wednesday — 23 years after the mayhem — Peters will have a parole board hearing. He has applied for day parole which will allow him to live at a halfway house.

Darlene Brittain will be there, in Abbotsford, B.C., to face her older sister’s killer. So will Sandie Bellows, who now advocates for victims’ rights and allows her name to be disclosed though a victim of sexual assault. They will each give victim impact statements, which Peters will be permitted to read in advance.

Whether the hearing will actually proceed as scheduled is not entirely certain. Last time around, Peters — who’s since legally changed his name to John Cody — cancelled the appearance and the bid for parole.

“This is a man who’s been in and out of prison his whole life,” Brittain told the Star over the weekend. “I truly believe if he gets day parole, he will reoffend. He’ll be living in a halfway house, wandering around in public and nobody will know.”

Charlene Brittain was buried on the day Darlene turned 22. She still can’t bear celebrating her birthday, or Christmas. Shortly before her murder, Charlene had told Darlene about the man she’d met on a train but that she hadn’t enjoyed their dinner and no longer wanted to see him. Why she went to Peters’ home is unknown.

Over the course of his miserable life in and out of incarceration, Peters has twice escaped from prison.

He scaled a fence in 1980 at Warkworth. Sent to Millhaven maximum security, he took two prison shop instructors hostage, using a scissor blade as a weapon and demanding a transfer.

After one prison stint, released on mandatory parole, Peters had the romantic relationship with his parole officer. She was the one who helped him find a home in London in 1989, two months before he embarked on his manic rampage. The woman resigned from her job before a Corrections Canada investigation was completed.

In 2007, Peters walked away from a minimum security prison in B.C. — a terrified Bellows barricaded herself and her kids inside her house for 36 hours — but turned himself in a day later.

At Peters’ 1990 trial in Toronto — he’d pleaded guilty — Crown prosecutor Chris Punter told the court: “Life in this particular case should mean life.”

But life hardly ever means life, except for the most fiendish few. Peters is now 51.

“Time and time again, he has manipulated the justice system,” says Darlene Brittain. “I don’t believe he can be rehabilitated.”

She vows: “I will do whatever I can to keep that man in prison for the rest of his life.”