David George Hoffman (born 3 March 1948) is a Canadian man wrongly convicted of murder, for which he served four years in prison before he was acquitted on an appeal.
[3] A huge man whose hobby of weightlifting made even larger, Hoffman had the nickname of "Tee Hee" owing to his high-pitched laughter.
[5] After being forced to wait for half an hour, Hoffman was allowed to enter the clubhouse and set out to buy a new lock to replace the one damaged by the police.
[8] During that time, William "Heavy" Matiyek of the rival Golden Hawk Riders was killed in the Queen's Hotel in Port Hope.
[9] During the investigation of the murder, Constable Donald Denis of the OPP showed the witnesses of Matiyek's killing photographs of various Satan's Choice bikers and asked them to identify any that they recognized.
[7] Several of the witnesses such as Gayle Thompson, Cathy Cotgrave, and Susan Foote picked Hoffman's photograph out of the array and named him as one of the men involved in the killing.
[17] A number of Satan's Choice bikers from the Kitchener chapter testified that Hoffman was replacing the lock for the clubhouse on the evening of 18 October, but Meinhardt was able to discredit those witnesses by bringing up their criminal records.
[21] The police records showed that Hoffman had made three phone calls from the Kitchener clubhouse on 18 October with the last one starting at 8:40 and ending at 8:45 pm.
[23] Meinhardt noted that the Crown's theory was that Sauvé was the mastermind of the murder plot and called the Toronto clubhouse to ask the bikers to come with him to the Queen's Hotel to kill Matiyek.
[19] On 21 March 1983, Justice Gregory Evans sentenced Hoffman to four years in prison for being an accessory after the fact for Matiyek's murder.
[26] That the police had these intercepts of Hoffman's phone calls on 18 October 1978 all long, which were not disclosed by the Crown to the defense as per the rules regarding evidence disclosure, was controversial and the American journalist Mick Lowe feels that Hoffmann should never have been charged with Matiyek's murder, let alone convicted.