The year 2008 would be hard to forget for 35 passengers and a driver onboard Greyhound Bus 1170 travelling from the Canadian province of Alberta to Manitoba for all the wrong reasons after one of the passengers did what he believed was an instruction from God. Vince Weiguang Li was that passenger whose act of killing and cannibalism on the bus would later go down as one of the most shocking crimes in the history of Canada.
The Ill-Fated Bus Ride
It was the night of July 30, 2008, 37 passengers were travelling on Greyhound bus 1170 from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Vince Li (40) — a former church custodian and computer programmer who emigrated from China to Canada in 2001 — was sitting beside 22-year-old Tim McLean.
The passengers had reboarded the bus after a break, some of them were napping while others were watching the movie "The Legend of Zorro" on bus television screens when Vince Li suddenly took out a knife and stabbed his fellow passenger, McLean some 50-60 times, as per an Associated Press report.
The bus driver, alerted by McLean’s screams stopped the bus and fled along with the horrified passengers who shut the bus’ door to contain Vince Li.
"Some people were puking, some people were crying, other people were in shock ... everybody was running, screaming off the bus," passenger Garnet Caton told CBC television.
"The attacker was standing up right over the top of the guy with a large hunting knife - a survival, Rambo knife - holding the guy and continually stabbing him... in the chest area," he added.
‘Like A Robot’
As passengers fled the bus and waited for police to arrive at the desolate stretch on the TransCanada Highway, Caton along with the bus driver and a trucker — who stopped at the scene — went on the bus again to see if the victim was still alive.
"When we came back on the bus... he was cutting the guy's head off and pretty much gutting him up," Caton narrated.
"He calmly walks up to the front [of the bus] with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," the passenger added.
"There was no rage in him ... It was just like he was a robot or something.”
‘Badger’s Hacking Off Pieces, Eating It’
After several hours of confrontation, when Vince Li broke a bus window trying to escape, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) finally apprehended him.
One of the police officers present at the scene reported seeing the attacker hacking off pieces of the victim's body and eating them, as per a police tape leaked on the Internet.
In the radio transmission tape, the police officer referred to Vince Li as “Badger”, armed with a knife and scissors and is "defiling the body at the front of the bus as we speak,” according to an NBC News report.
The RCMP officer continued to detail the attacker’s movement on the 80-second tape until one reported: “Badger's at the back of the bus, hacking off pieces and eating it."
Vince Li was charged with second-degree murder but a Canadian judge ruled it out after psychiatrists from both the prosecution and defence sides agreed that he was schizophrenic, according to a 2009 BBC report.
Dr Jonathan Rootenberg, from the defence side, said that the attacker claimed to hear the voice of God telling him to kill McLean or risk being killed himself. "The voice said: "Do it now... If you don't, he's going to kill you."
Dr Stanley Yaren, who appeared for the prosecution, testified that Vince Li was undergoing a major psychotic episode, including auditory hallucinations.
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‘I Believed He Was An Alien’
Four years later, Vince Li, whose name was changed to Will Baker, spoke about the horrific incident for the first time in an interview with a schizophrenia society saying he had heard what he believed was the "voice of God".
He also said that he had bought the knife used in the attack for protection from the aliens, as per a 2012 BBC report.
"The voice told me that I was the third story of the Bible, that I was like the second coming of Jesus [and that] I was to save people from a space alien attack," he said in his interview given to Chris Summerville, head of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada.
"I was really scared. I remember cutting off his head. I believed he was an alien. The voices told me to kill him, that he would kill me or others. I do not believe this now," he added.
After being kept in a secure wing of a psychiatric hospital, Vince Li — whose name was later changed to Will Baker — was discharged in February 2017, reported AP.