Edwin Alonzo Boyd
Page 17
Brushing the thin layer of snow from the top of the wall ahead of him, Boyd, flat on his stomach, worked his way into position to view the laneway and Riverdale Isolation Hospital. There was no one in sight. He signalled to the others and they moved forward. One after the other, gripping the wall, they dangled over the side and let go. “After you got hanging straight down, there was only about ten or twelve feet left to drop,” says Boyd. “I was worried about Len’s artificial foot, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all.” What did bother Lennie Jackson was that his friend Val Lesso, alias Steve Suchan, was supposed to be there in his car to pick them up on the Don Roadway, which in those days ran north to Rosedale Valley Road. But Suchan was nowhere in sight. They weren’t about to wait around. They skirted Riverdale Hospital and headed towards the river.
“We went down from the hospital as fast as we could,” remembers Boyd. “We followed the little roadway that ran along the river, and then we started moving north. I didn’t know where I was going because I didn’t know that part of the Don Valley. The only one that had a clue was Leonard Jackson.” Boyd was amazed at how fast Lennie could move – so fast he was soon out of sight. “It didn’t really matter one way or the other if we stayed together, and I figured that when he got ahead of us that would be the last we saw of him, but he was waiting for us up ahead at a little graveyard.”
The Don’s inmates were being locked into their cells for the night as the chief turnkey, Bennett, began his final inspection of the jail on his shift. At 8:10 p.m. he checked the windows on No. 3 Corridor and discovered that the lower corner of the screen on the third window from the end had been pried upward. Training his flashlight on the bars beyond the frosted glass, he noticed that one of the lower ones was missing – sawed away – and that a sheet, tied to one of the intact bars, was hanging out the window.
Bennett immediately instructed the guards to lock the prisoners in their cells and take a count. It was discovered that three men were missing, and a more diligent roll call revealed the names of the missing inmates. Their cells were subjected to an immediate, thorough search. In front of Boyd’s cell, two lengths of hacksaw blade were found hidden between the maple floorboards of the corridor and the flagstone entrance to the cell.
Bennett would tell a Royal Commission several months later that he thought Boyd and the Jacksons were model inmates. “They were good prisoners as far as I was concerned. I had no trouble with them – no suspicions.” He said the jail was overcrowded and that there weren’t enough guards to keep an eye on so many prisoners. “There are four hundred brains working against me, what can I do?”
The Don’s governor, Charles Sanderson, was attending a Sunday evening church service and was not immediately informed of the escape. Jail officials telephoned No. 9 Police Station to check the Humberside address of Ann Roberts and Mary Mitchell, and No. 4 Station was asked to check the Winchester Avenue address of Willie Jackson.
The next day the newspapers were filled with stories and photographs of the escape. It was the first time that Boyd and the Jacksons appeared together on the front pages. It wouldn’t be the last. Wanted posters with mug shots of the three men were released by the provincial police, and the province offered a $500 reward for information leading to their arrests. Photographs were sent to all police departments in Canada and to American border cities.
The police were warned to proceed with caution. Boyd and the Jacksons were considered “vicious and dangerous,” and it was expected that they would arm themselves at the earliest opportunity and shoot it out if cornered. The police were told to be especially watchful of banks. According to the Telegram, the Toronto police feared that the three men, “in desperate straits, may rob a bank for sorely needed funds.”
Edwin Alonzo Boyd growing up in Toronto during the First World War. (Toronto Star)
Edwin Boyd on the soccer team at Earl Beatty School.
Eleanor Boyd, Edwin’s beloved mother, died when he was fifteen.
Glover Boyd, with No. 6 Division of Toronto City Police in December 1942, four years before his retirement. (Toronto Police Museum)
Boyd (front row, extreme right) sent this picture to his wife Dorreen while he was a dispatch rider with the Royal Canadian Regiment in England. (Toronto Star)
Edwin Boyd with his war bride, the former Dorreen Thompson, in England. (Toronto Star)
Edwin Alonzo Boyd (far right), with parents, Eleanor and Glover, and siblings, Gordon (standing), Norman (left), and Irene, on Glover’s knee.
Toronto policeman Glover Boyd with sons Gordon (middle) and Edwin at Union Station in 1945. (Toronto Star)
Colonel Hedley Basher was twice called in to restore order and discipline following high-profile escapes from the Don Jail. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Adolphus Payne as a 25-year-old Toronto policeman, 1934. (Helen Payne)
Helen Croft, 20-year-old New York fashion model, with her engagement ring from Dolph Payne, 1934. (Helen Payne)
Legendary Edmund “the Chinaman” Tong, Sergeant of Detectives with the Toronto Police Department.
Edmund Tong, unconscious and in critical condition on stretcher at scene of the shooting. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
A hacksaw blade secreted in Lennie Jackson’s artificial foot, was used to cut the bars in the first escape from the Don Jail. (Toronto Police Museum)
Intersection at Lansdowne Avenue and College Street where Toronto Policemen Edward Tong and Roy Perry were shot by Steve Suchan. (Toronto Police Museum)
Leonard Jackson with model Ann Roberts. They married in Montreal after his first escape from the Don Jail. (Toronto Police Museum)
Toronto police detective Jack Gillespie wounded Lennie Jackson four times in Montreal shoot-out. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Leonard Jackson being interviewed in Montreal General Hospital after wild shoot-out with police. (Toronto Star)
Ann Jackson appealing for Edwin Boyd’s surrender at a Montreal radio station. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Toronto police chief John Chisholm (left), with Detectives Dolph Payne and Ken Craven, as Mayor Lamport shows off the loot after Boyd’s capture on Heath Street. (Toronto Star)
Five handguns, commando knife, ammunition, and almost $25,000 in cash found in Boyd’s briefcase after capture on Heath Street. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Heath Street apartment in quiet Toronto neighbourhood where Edwin Boyd was captured after his first escape from the Don Jail. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Mug shots of Elizabeth and Joseph Lesso, parents of Steve Suchan.
Mug shot of Mary Mitchell (right), sister of Leonard Jackson and occasional informant to Edmund Tong. (Toronto Police Museum)
Funeral cortege for Sergeant of Detectives Edmund Tong passes honour guard on Danforth Avenue. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Detective Jack Gillespie returns wounded Lennie Jackson to Toronto on Trans Canada Airway’s flight from Montreal. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Jack Webster, former staff superintendent and now historian at the Metropolitan Toronto Police Museum and Discovery Centre. He walked the beat with Edwin Boyd’s policeman father, Glover Boyd. (Brian Vallée)
Crime reporter Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas, who won three National Newspaper Awards, covered the Boyd Gang for the Toronto Star. (Toronto Star)
Key fashioned by Edwin Alonzo Boyd and used to open the gang’s cells. (Toronto Star)
Oak door and row of cells in No. 9 Hospital at the Don Jail. Steve Suchan and Lennie Jackson stood on the table (foreground) and held a pillow over a microphone while Boyd and Willie Jackson sawed the window bars. (Toronto Police Museum)
Photo of the Don Jail 9 showing escape route during the Gang’s second break-out, September 1952. In fact, the labelled window was opened, but not smashed. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Reward poster distributed by Ontario Provincial Police after the Boyd Gang’s second escape from the Don Jail. (Toronto Police Museum)
North York barn where
Boyd Gang was captured without a fight. (Toronto Star)
Boyd and Willie Jackson being escorted from the North York jail by Constable Ernie Southern (white shirt) and Detective Bert Trotter (fedora), who were in on the capture the night before. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Dorreen Boyd reads a letter from Edwin Boyd written in the Don Jail after his recapture in a North York barn in September 1952. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Edwin Alonzo Boyd going to court handcuffed to Sergeant of Detectives Dolph Payne. (Toronto Star)
Steve Suchan (second from left) and Lennie Jackson handcuffed together as they arrive at the City Hall courtroom to face murder charges in September 1952. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Willie “the Clown” Jackson with cigar after he was sentenced to a long term in Kingston Penitentiary. Also sentenced were his brother Joe Jackson (left) and Allister Gibson. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Ann Jackson with eight-week-old Michael in October 1952, while her husband, Lennie, was in the death cells at the Don Jail. Lennie was refused permission to see his son because prison officials thought it would be too hard on him. (Toronto Star)
Boyd (second from left) and Willie Jackson (rear) mug for photographers as a police paddy wagon whisks them off to Kingston Penitentiary after their trials. (Toronto Telegram/Toronto Sun)
Cover of promotional package for 1983 docudrama on Edwin Alonzo Boyd. (Toronto Police Museum)
Dorreen Boyd in her apartment near Toronto in 1996. (Toronto Star)
Edwin Alonzo Boyd, now 83, lifting weights in his home in British Columbia. (Brian Vallée)
19
Hiding Out
Val Lesso was born in Czechoslovakia on St. Valentine’s Day, 1928, so his parents named him Valentine, a name that he always hated, later changing it to Valent. Still later he would prefer an alias, Steve Suchan.
He was eight years old in 1936 when he and his mother, Elizabeth, came to Canada to join his father, Joseph. Suchan attended the primary grades in a rural school outside Cochrane in Northern Ontario. He was a quiet boy who became an accomplished violin player. He attended high school in Cochrane and came to Toronto on his own in 1946, with his parents following the next year. Suchan was unsettled in Toronto, moving from job to job. His first was with Crystal Glass & Plastics Company. Later he operated a punch press at the John T. Hepburn steel company, and then he went to a glass company on Spadina Avenue. He liked the job, but he was handling large glass sheets such as oversized mirrors and quit because he was still studying the violin and feared he might cut his hands.
Suchan lived with his parents and younger brother, first at 73 Marion Street and later at 27 Sorauren Avenue. After the glass company he went to work in the shipping department of Standard Chemical in Leaside.
Suchan had befriended George B. Kindness through their mutual interest in violins. Kindness made and repaired violins and bought and sold the instruments out of his shop at 96 Church Street. He had known Suchan about three years when, in July 1950, Suchan approached him and offered to sell his expensive violin for cash and the .455 Smith & Wesson revolver that Kindness kept in his shop. Kindness didn’t ask him why he wanted the revolver. The gun was properly registered, and on August 5, 1949, Kindness went to the office of the Ontario Provincial Police for approval to sell it to Suchan. The permit approving the sale was signed by the OPP’s Registrar of Firearms.
Suchan was authorized to own the gun, but the form stated: “This permit does not give the right to carry a pistol or revolver.” But Suchan later purchased a shoulder holster, and sometimes drove to an isolated gravel pit west of Toronto for target practice. Whenever he carried the revolver, it gave him a sense of power.
On March 3, 1950, Suchan was sent to the Guelph Reformatory for three months on six fraud-related charges after he tried to pass three forged cheques totalling $664.
Suchan met Betty Huluk and Anna Bosnich on a blind date in October 1950. He and Huluk went on two dates and then he started dating Bosnich, who was six years his senior. Bosnich had married at eighteen and had an eight-year-old daughter, whom she was raising on her own. She had been separated from her husband for some time and had gone back to using her maiden name, Camero. She supported herself and her daughter first with her own hairdressing business and later as a real estate broker. She lived at 190 Wright Avenue between Roncesvalles and Sorauren, not far from Suchan’s parents. Camero knew Suchan only as Val Lesso. Also living at Camero’s house were her mother, a roomer, and her friend Betty Huluk, who worked at Chan’s Fruit Market around the corner on Roncesvalles.
On December 30, using his real name Val Lesso, Suchan signed on to work at the exclusive King Edward Hotel as an elevator operator. Within two weeks he was promoted to doorman, where he was making $26 a week plus tips. It was while he was at the King Edward that Suchan met and became friends with Lennie Jackson. On March 24, 1951, Suchan quit his job; two days later he began robbing banks with Jackson. Their first stick-up was the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Colborne, Ontario.
By that time, Suchan and Camero had begun going steady. She still knew him only as Val Lesso. He often took her to the movies and to taverns, where she met some of this friends. “But,” she complained,
“he would always introduce them by their first names, and I did not get to know their last names.” Suchan eventually moved in with Camero, though he would stay only a day or so at a time before going home to his parents. He bought a car and a new violin, which he sometimes played at dance recitals. He told Camero he was in the income tax business, and even had a business card to prove it.
He saw less and less of Camero after he met Lennie Jackson’s sister, Mary Mitchell, following Jackson’s arrest in July 1951. It was much more exciting to be around the worldly Mitchell, but Suchan had a reason for staying in touch with Camero: she had become pregnant by him in the spring of 1951.
When they were well away from the Don Jail, Lennie Jackson telephoned Steve Suchan at Anna Camero’s. “Where the hell were you?” he wanted to know. “I … I forgot,” stammered Suchan. It seems more likely that Suchan hadn’t shown up because he didn’t think Jackson and the others would be able to escape. And since the police had not connected him to any of Jackson’s bank robberies, he did not want to gamble on being picked up as part of a bungled escape. Suchan drove to a prearranged spot, met Boyd and the Jacksons, and whisked them to his second-floor room at Camero’s house on Wright Avenue. He introduced Lennie Jackson to her as “Freddie,” but did not introduce either Boyd or Willie Jackson. Camero was unaware that Suchan had secreted a number of guns in the house. “They had all the guns that they got when they broke into Camp Borden,” says Boyd. After a couple of hushed phone calls, Boyd and the Jacksons, now armed, left with Suchan and picked up a second car around Parliament and Gerrard Streets.
Lennie then called Ann Roberts, who was at home at 211 Humberside Avenue when her landlord, George Hill, summoned her to the telephone. Roberts had known nothing of the escape plans and was surprised and elated.
“Hi, Bunny,” said the familiar voice.
“Where are you?” she asked, barely able to contain her excitement.
“I’m out. Come down to Parliament and Gerrard. Take a streetcar and make sure you’re not being followed.” She met him half an hour later. He was behind the wheel of a car parked near the intersection. Boyd was beside him in the front seat.
“Leonard told me how he and Boyd had a tough time getting over the jail wall,” she would tell police later. Boyd got out of the car, and Ann slipped in beside Jackson. Boyd walked back several car lengths to where Suchan and Willie Jackson were parked in the shadows. They drove to 27 Sorauren Avenue, which Suchan’s parents Elizabeth and Joseph Lesso were operating as a rooming house. Suchan had arranged for Boyd and Willie Jackson to take over the second room from the front on the ground floor. The Lessos lived at the back of the house on the ground floor next to the bathroom.
Tenant Jean French and her husband, who were renting
the front room and veranda on the second floor, noticed that they were treated differently after the two men arrived in early November. Included in their rent was the use of the telephone in the downstairs hallway and access to the Lessos’ kitchen stove to boil water for tea. But after the two men arrived, the kitchen door was always locked. French would knock strongly on the door but “nobody bothered to open it” except, once or twice, Suchan’s young brother. “I thought Mrs. Lesso was trying to get rid of us,” said French, who would move out a month later. Even their access to the phone was curtailed. On one of the few occasions she was able to get to the phone, she was talking to her husband when she saw Boyd come out of his room and walk past her to the bathroom. He was wearing trousers but no shirt and had a towel over his shoulder. Boyd returned to his room, and French heard voices. “I don’t know what they said, but another man came out wearing blue trousers and cleaning his ear out with a towel.” She also noticed the tattoo on his arm. In a courtroom months later, French would point out Boyd and Willie Jackson as the men she had seen at the Lesso house.