by Brian Vallee
They abandoned the car in a swamp near Saguenay Avenue, south off Lawrence Avenue. The car’s location caused police to speculate that one or both bandits might have been involved in an unsolved double-murder eleven months earlier. The victims’ car had been found in the same swamp. But Boyd and his partner had just been looking for a place to ditch the car without attracting too much attention. Afterwards, they walked east to Avenue Road and Boyd’s waiting truck.
Back at the bank, the employees and their customer had been locked in the basement for fifteen minutes by the time Miskiw found them and opened the door. The police converged on the bank, but the only physical evidence they found was a footprint on the counter. The bank had been robbed of $7,800 three years earlier. This time only $1,954 had been taken, along with the bank’s .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver.
Boyd was not happy with the take from the robbery. Having a partner was supposed to have dramatically increased the amount of cash taken; instead, after the cut, the job was his least successful. On the positive side, except for the irritations outside the bank the operation had gone smoothly – fast and clean, the way he liked it. The next day The Globe and Mail even referred to them as “a pair of business-like gunmen.”
All three Toronto dailies gave in-depth coverage to the robbery, but this time the banner headlines were given to the widening Korean War. Both the Telegram and the Star had correspondents in Seoul. On the day of Boyd’s third robbery American troops were pouring into Korea, and the Russians were demanding that the United Nations put an end to American involvement.
Although proceeds from the robbery were less than Boyd had anticipated, at least he had money in his pocket again. Anthony was now ten and the twins six, and he could treat them to a fine dinner at a restaurant and perhaps have an evening out with Dorreen. He doesn’t remember what the family did in the days following the robbery, but there were plenty of options in Toronto that week. The movies cost as little as fifty cents for adults, and there was a wide choice. Westerns were popular: Winchester ‘73 with James Stewart was playing at Loew’s, while Gregory Peck was in The Gunfighter at the Imperial. In a lighter vein, Tight Little Island – billed as “the comedy that kept Toronto in stitches for 9 hilarious weeks” – was back again at the Danforth, Fairlawn, and Humber Theatres, and in its fourth week at the Hyland was Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Alec Guinness.
If they wanted the kids to see live animals, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus was at the Woodbine Golf Course. If Ed and Dorreen decided to get a baby-sitter one evening, there was dancing at the air-conditioned Tempo Room at the Embassy, or at the El Mocambo they could catch The Gay Cavalleros, featuring Francine Dey, “singing star of New York Night Clubs.”
Three months after the Dominion Bank robbery, Boyd was again broke. He reasoned that the money would have lasted twice as long if he had been on his own. There were benefits to having a partner, but his had moved on, so he decided to go it alone once more.
His target this time was the Imperial Bank at Fairlawn and Avenue Road in North York, a few blocks south of the first bank he had robbed. For whatever reason, he didn’t prepare and plan as well as he usually did. It was almost as if he was doing it on impulse. He didn’t take the time to study the layout, or to determine the best hour to hit the bank. He stole a car from the lot behind the Capitol Theatre, but instead of driving it to one of his rented garages, he went straight to the bank, parking one street over near the Glendale Theatre.
There were no customers in the bank when Boyd entered at noon. The only person he saw was a teller, William Harry Boyce.
“This is a hold-up!” Boyd shouted, going directly to the teller’s cage with his Luger out. “Give me everything in the cash drawer.” But he didn’t realize there was another person in the bank: the manager, W.H.G. Smith, was sitting at his desk at the rear of the bank, his office partitioned by a large glass window. When he heard the shouting and looked out and saw the pistol, he stood and leaned out.
“What’s going on!” he said sharply.
The voice startled Boyd, who looked back and saw the manager. “Get out from there!” he ordered, motioning with the Luger. Smith didn’t budge, and when the gunman repeated his demand, he ran to his desk and grabbed his bank-issue revolver.
Boyd’s version of what happened next is probably the more reliable, simply because he was used to guns, wasn’t known to panic, and had been in tight situations before.
Smith’s version is that Boyd fired three shots at him and that he fired once in return. Boyd says the manager fired first and he fired twice in return, purposely aiming high. “I didn’t try to hit him, I only wanted to scare him,” he would tell police a year later. Whatever the sequence of shots, Boyd’s idea of robbing a bank did not include shoot-outs. He fled empty-handed to the next street, where he had parked the stolen car. From there he drove back to the lot at the rear of the Capitol Theatre, where he left the car in almost exactly the same spot he had found it. “I don’t think the person even knew that their car had been taken.”
When Detective-Sergeant George Wilson of the North York police investigated immediately after the robbery, he found only two slugs fired by the bandit, and the one fired by the manager was so deeply embedded in the north wall of the bank that he couldn’t dig it out.
Discussing that shoot-out years later, Boyd says he could feel the manager’s bullet whizzing by his head. “He was shooting from a cubbyhole on one side of the bank, and I fired back to scare him.” When he was shown police photos of the incident, he realized that one of his shots had missed the manager’s head by inches.
“I thought I was aiming higher than that,” he says, shaking his head. “I guess I came pretty near to getting the wrong end of the stick.”
Boyd always tried to be ready for any eventuality when he was robbing banks. “Once in a while I got caught off balance, but I would never shoot. I was brought up in a policeman’s home, I would never shoot a policeman. And the people working in the banks were good people. I didn’t want to shoot anybody, I just wanted to scare them enough to get the money. Usually it worked out all right. Once in a while they’d shoot at me and I’d take off.”
In the army, Boyd was trained not to shoot, to hold his fire until it was absolutely necessary. “My gun was usually always uncocked, so I didn’t have to worry about it too much. I was very careful because it’s such an easy thing to pull the trigger. And I always had the triggers filed down to the very finest, so that it didn’t take more than a deep breath and it would go off.”
The shoot-out dampened his enthusiasm for robbing banks, but by the fall of 1950 it was becoming apparent to Boyd that he would have to find a well-paying permanent job or improve the proceeds from the bank heists so that one or two more would provide him with a substantial stake to get into something legitimate. The plan he liked best was to get enough cash to purchase a small apartment house that he could live in and manage. He didn’t need any more lessons in how dangerous robbing banks could be, and he took a long time deciding whether to rob another one.
In the meantime, he continued working at odd jobs while searching for something permanent. In November 1950 he found a temporary job with the City of Toronto filling potholes with asphalt. It paid just over a dollar an hour. Working on a street-repair crew wasn’t the same as driving for the TTC, and the city wasn’t interested in his criminal record. The job, raking and smoothing hot asphalt, was tedious and dirty, with the acrid smoke of the asphalt burner swirling around him.
He was still on the job through Christmas and the New Year. Then, as spring approached in 1951, he began to plan another robbery. This time it would be a repeat performance: he would go back to the Armour Heights branch of the Bank of Montreal – except this time he would be sober. And this time George Elwood, the manager who had emptied his revolver at him eighteen months before, was off sick.
Once again Boyd dispensed with the rented garage, stole a black Chevrolet from a theatre lot, and dr
ove directly to the bank, which was on Avenue Road in North York. He had disguised his face, as he had for his first robbery, and wore what witnesses would later call “an engineer’s cap.”
As Boyd entered the bank shortly after noon on March 19, Audrey Head, who worked there as a clerk, passed him on her way out for lunch. Once again there were no customers in the bank and young Joyce Empey was the teller. She was astonished to see him enter the bank and point the same pistol at her. Acting manager Ervin H. Leigh was in a back office with bank clerk D.A. Dempsey, who stood petrified as the robber waved his gun around. Leigh later told police that the bandit “was dressed in shabby clothing, had a moustache, and his cheeks were puffed out as though padded.”
This time there was no note. “This is a hold-up!” Boyd shouted. “Don’t touch the alarm! Raise your hands and step back from the counter, or I shoot!” He leaped up on the counter, stepped down into the tellers’ cage, and cleaned out the contents of Empey’s cash drawer, stuffing the bills into his pockets. Then he vaulted the counter and was gone. Leigh said the robber “went over the counter like a rabbit. I pushed the alarm but it was all over in less than a minute-and-a-half and there wasn’t anything more I could do.” Police put up roadblocks within minutes of the hold-up, but the last anyone saw of the bandit, he was driving south on Avenue Road at a high rate of speed.
Boyd returned the stolen Chev to the Odeon parking lot, once again certain that the owner was unaware the car had been taken. When he counted the money later, the total was $3,021 – his best pay-day yet. He was somewhat chagrined when the Toronto Daily Star, in a banner page 1 headline, announced that $6,000 had been taken. For many years Boyd thought that Empey had kept $3,000 for herself, and let on that he had stolen it. “I figured the money was missing, and I didn’t have it. She was the only one handling the money, so I figured she had it all ready and just tossed it into her purse.” He thought it was a wonderful plan and wanted to ask her about it until he discovered that the error was at the newspaper, not at the bank.
The newspapers played up the “repeat robber” theme after police said they were certain he was the same “puffy-faced” man who had held up Empey in September 1949, and the Canadian Bank of Commerce on January 18, 1950, and who had bungled the Imperial Bank job on October 11, 1950.
Boyd was always careful to keep a low profile after a robbery. He would not make any large-item purchases without waiting a few weeks. He stayed on the job filling potholes for the city, and eventually purchased a used car. His decision to work for the city would be a fateful one, for while on that job he met Howard Gault.
Howard Ferguson Gault, at forty-two, was six years older than Boyd, not in as good physical shape, and – as Boyd gradually came to realize – a heavy drinker. Gault had been something of a drifter, and years before had walked out on his wife and two children. This wasn’t exactly Boyd’s idea of a dream partner. On the plus side, Gault had once been a guard at the provincial prison farm at Burwash, south of Sudbury, so he knew about guns. Boyd wasn’t looking for a rocket scientist – just somebody who would follow orders.
Gault was already a petty thief of sorts, and one day walking with Boyd after work he revealed his secret. “You know,” he said, “you can make a lot of money doing something else on the side.”
“Like what?” asked Boyd.
“Well, you may not think too much of this, but I go around stealing from people’s cars at night. It pays for my beer and a few other things.”
“Well, I’ve got a far better way to make money,” said Boyd.
“You do?”
“Yeah, I’ll show you.”
Boyd drove Gault to the Lansing branch of the Dominion Bank at 189 Sheppard Avenue East, which he had been thinking about robbing for some time.
“See that bank over there,” said Boyd.
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’re going to rob it.”
“We can’t do that!”
“Yeah, we can. While you’ve been robbing cars, I’ve been robbing banks. It’s just as easy, only you get a lot more money from a bank. We’ll plan it well, and I’ll show you what to do. After you’ve thought about it, you won’t have any problem.”
“I don’t know,” Gault frowned.
“Look, there’s nothing to it. I’ve been in the army – I know the score. All we have to do is carry out the thing as if it were an army operation. We’ll be in there three minutes or less, just long enough to grab what we can out of the till.” Gault agreed to go along.
Boyd then decided to increase the odds of success by adding a third partner. It took a lot of persuading, but he was finally able to convince his youngest brother, Norm, to help with the robbery. It was the only robbery he would go on with his brother. Norm, whose life has been exemplary since the end of the Boyd Gang saga forty-five years ago, is understandably reluctant to talk about it.
On Saturday, September 1, 1951, the three men drove in Boyd’s panel truck to a theatre parking lot on north Yonge Street just inside the city limits. They stole a 1950 Mercury from the lot and drove it to the Lansing branch of the Dominion Bank. It was near closing time, and they sat in the car waiting for the last customers to leave. But a bank employee came to the door and locked it. The men thought about leaving, but then they noticed that a man and a woman were still in the bank talking with the manager in his office. Just then, an eighteen-year-old junior clerk, Helen Butler, left the bank, relocking the door. She went to a nearby shop and returned with her key moments later. As she was unlocking the door, Boyd saw his chance.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the three of them rushed for the bank door. “This is a hold-up,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and pushing her ahead of them into the bank. The sleeve of her blouse tore as he pushed her, and he apologized. “I felt sorry for doing that. You don’t expect these things to happen, but you never know. I never tried to be violent at any time. I always tried to keep a revolver between me and them and that usually worked.”
Butler later described Boyd to reporters as “a very dirty-looking man who looked like he might have been unloading coal earlier.”
Boyd shouted “Hold-up!” and ordered Butler and senior clerk Ruth Davidson to the rear office of the acting manager, William Lepper, who was still with his two customers. Another employee, Ruby Richardson, was in the teller’s cage at the front facing the window. She fainted and slumped to the floor when she saw Boyd enter with a gun. Richardson had just returned to work after recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Boyd herded the staff and customers into the bank vault. There he held his Luger on them while Gault cleaned out the cash drawers and Norm Boyd stood guard at front. By this time passers-by were stopping to watch the action through the window.
Boyd covered the staff and customers with the Luger as he backed out of the bank behind his brother and Gault. They jumped into the Mercury parked in front of the bank. They later abandoned the car on north Yonge Street and walked south to Boyd’s truck at the theatre parking lot.
It was banner headlines all around again. Once again the Star got the amount was wrong, but this time in Boyd’s favour – the take was actually $8,029.
Ed Boyd now regrets having talked Norm into participating. “I know my reputation has probably hurt him over the years. It was just one bank, but he was scared to death. He just walked up and down and didn’t know what to do with himself. He was in a daze and wishing he was somewhere else.”
Now that he was a full-fledged, relatively successful bank robber, Boyd decided “things were getting too hot” for him to continue living in the war-time house on Eglinton Avenue West. Most of the banks he had robbed were not that far north of where he lived, and he worried that somebody might spot him, or that a curious neighbour might hear or see something. “I started scouting around and checking the newspaper for some place where we could get away from everybody else,” he says.
The place he settled on was a rough, cinder-block building on a desolate lot on Old R
ose Bank Road in the town of Pickering, just east of Toronto. The place didn’t even have running water, and Boyd had to drill a well and install a pump. “There were other people not too far away, but we didn’t have much to do with them.”
Dorreen didn’t say much at the time, but she was not at all happy to be leaving their comfortable house in downtown Toronto for the isolation of Pickering. “We only lived in it a few months. If we had kept it we could have sold it for the bloomin’ Pickering airport.16 When we first went there it wasn’t really a house, just big cement blocks and a roof and doors. It was in the middle of a meadow.”
With money in his pocket, Boyd spent most of the summer of 1951 working to make the place liveable for his family. Dorreen says he was handy at everything, from mechanics to woodworking and even plumbing. His brother Norm helped him put in bedrooms for the children. As the heat of the summer waned, as the air turned crisper in the evenings, and as his supply of cash dwindled, Boyd’s thoughts inevitably drifted to the drawers full of money just waiting for him in banks not far away.
15
Caught
Boyd was not happy with his erstwhile partner, Howard Gault. After their first robbery together, Gault had developed an inflated ego, and he wanted to rush out and purchase a good used car. Boyd objected strongly – don’t do anything to attract attention until the heat was off, was his credo – and Gault reluctantly agreed to wait until Boyd gave him the go-ahead. But when Boyd went to see Gault at his house a few days after the robbery, he was just pulling up in a shiny used car.