Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  27

  Answered Prayers

  Detectives Payne and Craven transported Edwin Alonzo Boyd to No. 11 Station at London and Markham Streets. He was given the standard police caution, and once he learned that some of the bills found in his briefcase had been marked, he quickly admitted to the March 4 robbery of the Bank of Montreal at College and Manning. He refused to identify the other two hold-up men. At noon, Boyd took Payne and Craven to a garage at the rear of 294 Euclid, where he had hidden the stolen 1948 Chevrolet coupe used in the robbery.

  Later, the detectives went to the garage in the laneway behind Kenwood Avenue, where the Austin had led them the night they tailed Dorreen and Norman Boyd. Inside, they found the 1951 grey Nash sedan that Ed Boyd had purchased under the name Charles Hunter. The licence plates on the car had been stolen. Three other sets of stolen plates were found under the Nash’s rear seat.

  In the glove compartment was the owner’s manual for the Nash. Thumbing through it a few days later, Payne noticed the numbers 5, 6, and 0 pencilled in on succeeding pages along with a telephone number that checked out to a rooming house on Logan Avenue. Further investigation revealed that Joseph W. Jackson had rented a room at the house shortly after the March 4 robbery. He had left there following Boyd’s arrest and had not returned. In a search of Jackson’s room they found a motor vehicle ownership permit listing one of the stolen sets of licence markers found in Boyd’s Nash. A background check revealed that Joseph Jackson was the brother of William R. Jackson, now in Kingston after escaping the Don Jail with Boyd.

  Provincial records disclosed that Joseph Jackson had purchased three motor vehicles since the March 4 robbery, and his latest registration listed a Jarvis Street address as his residence. The house was placed under police surveillance.

  Ontario’s new Deputy Minister of Reform Institutions, Col. Hedley Basher, appeared at the Don Jail in person to discuss the security measures to be used for Ed Boyd. The jail governor, Thomas Brand, whom he had chosen to run the Don after Boyd’s first escape, said that Boyd would be going to No. 9 Hospital on the jail’s second level. Basher went with him to inspect the cell. No. 9 had not been used as a hospital or infirmary for many years, but the name had stuck. It now housed the death cells, so named because of their proximity to the gallows. No. 9 Hospital was a row of four cells with a corridor in front. Beyond the corridor, through an iron grille gate, was a narrow antechamber about twelve feet long. The entrance to the antechamber was through a solid, oversized oak door.

  In Basher’s days as governor, the four cells had been one large cell. He had ordered the installation of the antechamber after a guard had been viciously attacked by an inmate. “Up to that time there had been no separation,” Basher explained to Brand. “The guard was in the room with the man.” High on the east wall of the corridor in front of the cells, Basher noticed a window that could be opened inward to provide ventilation. Beyond the glass was a set of double-bars – the only such set at the Don. They were seen as necessary because outside the window it was only a short drop to the top of a partitioning wall that led to the jail’s outer wall. As he studied the window, Basher noticed the raised weld scars where the original bars had been repaired after Frank McCullough sawed his way out in 1919.

  For added security, the ceiling and dividing walls of the four-cell block were made of metal. Only the floors were made of wood. And the front grilles and cell doors were of steel fabricated by the J.J. Taylor Safe Company. Beyond the oak door was a landing, another steel grille, and three or four steps leading to the other eighteen cells on No. 9 Corridor. When the oak door was open, a guard sitting on the landing outside No. 9 Hospital had a full view of the corridor in front of the cells and a partial view of the cells themselves.

  Basher noticed a screened air shaft on the ten-foot ceiling of the corridor in front of the four cells. As an additional security measure, he instructed Brand to have a microphone installed behind the screen. Wire would run from the microphone to a speaker in Brand’s office on the main floor. Boyd was a dangerous criminal and Basher wanted him watched continuously.

  As Basher and Brand were inspecting the cells, they were told that Boyd had arrived at the jail. They ended their discussion and went down to watch him being processed. After Boyd was issued his prison denims, a guard escorted him to Brand’s office. After a stern warning from Brand about following the rules and behaving, Boyd asked if he could have something to read in his cell.

  “I wouldn’t give you anything to read if you were to stay in here for the next fifty years,” said Brand. Boyd realized then that he would be paying the consequences for his escape four months earlier and for being associated with the men who had shot down a policeman. “I guess I’m sunk,” he thought.

  He was despondent when he entered his assigned cell, which was second from the corridor entrance. From behind the bars of his cell door he could see the double-barred window directly ahead high on the east wall. To his left was the stone wall at the end of the corridor; to his right, through the grille and the open oak door, sat a guard. This was to be his world – for how long, he didn’t know. A couple of days later a workman arrived to install a microphone behind the screen in the ceiling air vent. He said he was making plumbing and electrical repairs, but Boyd knew differently.

  Boyd was feeling guilty that his wife and brother had been incarcerated because of his crimes. Thoughts of suicide crossed his mind, but were quickly dispelled. As he lay on his bed contemplating his life, and the predicament he found himself in, he began thinking about “all the stuff in the Bible I’d been brought up to believe in.”

  Then he decided to fast and meditate. He wasn’t allowed to eat in the mess hall with the other prisoners, and when his meals were brought to his cell, he flushed them down the toilet. Two days after his arrival, he received a letter from Dorreen. Writing from her cell, she said she was feeling helpless, depressed, and hopeless. On March 19, Boyd replied:

  My darling wife:

  It hurts me more to see you in this trouble than it could possibly bother me about myself. You and our family are the sufferers. If only you had done what I asked and stayed away from me. Anyway, even if I have nothing else to offer, you have my deepest love which has always been the most solid asset in our marriage. As you say we have pulled through worse messes than this. The little cell I have here is not bad although it is a bit lonesome. Nobody is allowed near me so I have lots of time to think, which I have always enjoyed anyway. Some of the greatest men in history did their best work in prison. So you see there is no need for you to worry about me. Let us pray that you and Norm are able to leave soon and I also pray that you will receive some help to make a living instead of having snobs refuse you a job because of me. Darling, don’t let anything get your spirits down. I’m sure that with all of us pulling hard together, we’ll get through the rapids with only wet skin. Now do you feel better?

  All my love and a barrel full of kisses.

  Eddie xxxxxxx

  With Boyd facing a long penitentiary term, it’s difficult to imagine what “worse messes than this” he was writing about. All letters coming into or going out of the Don were read by the administration, and Brand would have seen Dorreen’s letter and Boyd’s response.

  Boyd continued fasting and meditating and began “visualizing.” He began to see himself outside the prison, taking walks on streets he knew, visiting shops and houses. For hours he stared at a matchstick on the floor, attempting to move it by force of will. It didn’t work, but he felt his powers of concentration growing. He desperately wanted reading material and decided to focus all of his mental energies on that. “I thought maybe I could get what I wanted if I visualized it,” says Boyd. “So I visualized myself leaving my cell, walking down the steel stairs, and stopping in front of the steel gate where the superintendent24 was at his desk.” He visualized their conversation:

  “What do you want?” asked Brand.

  “I want a book to read.”

  “W
ell go back to your cell, and I’ll think about it.”

  Perhaps because he was fasting, the visualization was very real to him, and he repeated the mental exercise for the next three days. On the fourth day, as he lay on his back in bed with his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head, he heard the clank of the grille being opened and looked up to see Brand standing there, with a book and some pamphlets in his hand.

  “Can I talk to you?” asked Brand.

  “Certainly.”

  “I brought you up a couple of books to read.”

  He handed Boyd a couple of Rosicrucian pamphlets and the Bible. “I was amazed,” says Boyd. “I thought, geez this visualizing and self-hypnosis really works.”

  He wasn’t interested in the pamphlets but was immediately engrossed in the Bible. “The more I read it, the more it became a part of me. And when I started thinking about something, the text from the Bible that fitted in would shoot into my mind.” Now, in addition to visualizing, he began praying – hoping a Higher Power would help him find a way out of his situation.

  While Boyd was praying for a way out, Jack Gillespie was in Montreal preparing to bring Lennie Jackson in. Jackson was released from hospital on March 21, six days after Boyd’s capture. Although Jackson’s wounds were healing well, his arms were still immobile; one was in a cast, the other in a splint.

  Gillespie and Jackson sat together on the plane to Toronto, and the detective said later that it was a pleasant flight. There was no personal animosity between the two men, though Gillespie has always believed that Lennie wanted to kill him in the gunfight, and that he had survived only “by sheer luck.” On the plane, Gillespie described a hypothetical scenario to Jackson: “What if you just came out of a bank. You’re standing there in a doorway with a sub-machine-gun under your gabardine topcoat, and I happen to drive up in a uniform car. What would you do?” Lennie rolled his eyes, shook his head, and didn’t say a word. “Aw, come on, Lennie,” said Gillespie. Jackson smiled slightly but kept silent.

  “He was quite capable of killing any policeman who tried to capture him,” says Gillespie.

  Less than half an hour after he was booked into the Don Jail, Jackson’s shoes and his artificial foot were sent by Brand for examination under a fluoroscope at the Medical Arts Building, at Bloor Street and Avenue Road. In a barely visible slit in the boot extension that covered the calf, two used hacksaw blades were discovered – one full ten-inch blade, and a second broken blade about eight inches long. Jail administrators had been unsuccessfully lobbying the City of Toronto for a fluoroscope at the Don. The discovery of the blades bolstered their position. The blades used in the November escape had come from the same boot, and if the city had spent $900 for a second-hand fluoroscope, Tong and Perry might not have been shot.

  When Jackson arrived at the jail, he was assigned to the Debtor’s Room, so called because it had been used in the jail’s earliest days to incarcerate people who didn’t pay their bills. Because Jackson couldn’t look after himself, another inmate was assigned to attend his personal needs – to wash his face and help him use the toilet, and so on. The Debtor’s Room was directly above No. 9 Hospital, where Boyd was. Brand was worried about the two notorious inmates “being one over the top of the other,” and after ten days he moved Jackson to a cell in No. 3 Hospital, “the only available place I had for him.”

  At 12:23 a.m. on Sunday, March 23, seventeen days after being shot down by Steve Suchan, Sergeant of Detectives Edmund Tong died when a massive blood clot from his paralysed legs moved to his heart. His wife and children were rushed to the hospital in a police cruiser. Evelyn Tong had expected her husband to survive. She had already been planning a rehabilitation program and was thinking of selling their Doncrest Avenue home and moving to a bungalow so that Eddie would be able to get around in a wheelchair. Evelyn had become engaged to Eddie when she was sixteen and had followed him to Canada five years later to become his wife. Now he was gone. “It never should have happened to him,” she said. “He was a good man and never hurt anyone in his life.”

  The Telegram’s Doug Creighton wrote that “to those who didn’t know Tong, he was a tough cop. But underneath he was as long on kindness as he was on courage. Since the shooting which touched off the largest manhunt in the city’s history, the police department switchboard has been flooded with calls from citizens, even criminals he had arrested, asking about his condition and wishing him well.” A Star editorial said Tong was “a fearless officer and never hesitated in the performance of his duty because of danger to himself. The Toronto force will be poorer without him.”

  There had been hope that Tong might survive, but he was in and out of a coma for several days. In a lucid period, ten hours before he died, he was able to grasp that Suchan, Jackson, and finally Boyd had been captured. “They’re all in the bag,” his friend Inspector John Nimmo told him. Tong responded with a taut grin and a murmured “good.” Doctors at Toronto General said Tong had survived for seventeen days “on courage alone.” An autopsy confirmed that if he had survived, he would never have walked again.

  Attorney General Dana Porter paid tribute to Tong in the Ontario legislature: “His cases and arrests read like a rogue’s gallery, with almost every prominent criminal listed. Murders, holdups, shootings, big robberies – Tong got them all. He cultivated underworld contacts and was known by criminals everywhere. Though many criminals feared and hated him, others admired and respected him. For Eddie Tong was fair. He never lost his head or used bad judgment. He was kind and considerate to those who deserved it. He was hard and tough with others – those who usually ended up in Kingston Penitentiary.”

  One of the few visitors who saw Tong in the hours before he died was Jocko Thomas. “I wasn’t there to interview him,” recalls Thomas. “He couldn’t talk or anything, but I got right close to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Eddie, it’s Jocko.’ He did make a little twitch of one finger, but that’s all he could do. He was still alive, but he was comatose.”

  On Tuesday night at a Danforth Avenue funeral parlour, Evelyn Tong was composed as she received friends and officials who came to pay their respects. Tong’s body was moved to the Church of the Nativity on Monarch Park Avenue. On Wednesday morning, light snow was falling as 250 mourners filled the small church for the funeral service. Hundreds of others stood outside listening to the proceedings over loudspeakers set up by the police department.

  It was one of the largest funerals the city had ever seen for one of its policemen, with officers and contingents from many parts of Canada participating. Also on hand were dozens of dignitaries, from the province, the city, and other municipalities. Chief John Chisholm led the procession on foot east along the Danforth to Woodbine Avenue. Between Coxwell Avenue and Woodbine the marchers broke off and formed an honour guard as the hearse and Tong’s family passed slowly by. Scores of onlookers lined the Danforth sidewalks as more than one hundred vehicles, led by a motorcycle escort, followed the hearse to Pine Hills Cemetery off Kennedy Road. After a short graveside ceremony, Rev. A.R. Beverley, Anglican Bishop of Toronto, spoke a few words of condolence to Mrs. Tong and her children, and Mayor Lamport, who had cut short his Florida vacation, shook hands with them.

  When the news of Tong’s death reached Lennie Jackson in the Don Jail he was silent, but his eyes registered concern, and he was sullen for a few days, realizing he would now be facing a charge of first-degree murder – a capital offence.

  In Montreal, Toronto Star reporter Powell Smily went to the fifth floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to see how Steve Suchan was reacting to the news. There was an armed policeman posted outside his room. Smily could see Suchan sitting in an easy chair, and a second policeman in a chair next to him. “He looked pale, but well on the road to recovery,” wrote Smily.

  The guard motioned to Smily to move away from the door out of earshot. “He still talks about wishing he’d been killed,” said the guard. “But I guess he was meant to be saved for something besides bullets.�
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  Detective-Sergeant Lucien Goulet, in charge of the guard detail, arrived while Smily was speaking with the guard. “What did Suchan say when he heard Tong had died?” asked the reporter.

  “He didn’t say anything,” replied Goulet, “because he doesn’t know about it. He gets no papers and has no radio, and we’re under strict orders to see that no one tells him. In fact, he’s allowed no visitors, not even his mother.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell him about Detective Tong?” asked Smily.

  “No, we’re not,” said Goulet. “If he found out, he’d probably try to make a break for it, and we don’t want any more shooting. Even now, when he doesn’t know anything about Tong, we have to keep an eye on him all the time. We have three shifts of guards doing eight hours each shift. Sometimes Suchan lies in bed, and you’d think he was dead to the world. But he often isn’t asleep. He’s just pretending to be, in case we let up and give him a chance to grab one of our guns. No sir – we don’t want him to know about Tong’s death until he’s out of the hospital and safely behind bars.”

  Dorreen Boyd spent two weeks in the Don Jail before she was released. They had been holding her as a material witness. “They had nothing to hold me on,” she recalls. “You can’t be charged with harbouring your own husband.”

  While she was in the Don, Dolph Payne and Detective Charlie Cook “every second or third day” took her out of the jail for lunch. “I think they were looking for Joe Jackson and his brother-in-law, Allister Gibson. I wasn’t going to tell them anything.”

  At the Heath Street apartment, besides the cash and the weapons, police had found several stiletto knives, hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside several wool socks, an electric cattle prod, several pieces of new luggage, and some of Dorreen’s clothing and other personal items, including a box of Tampax. Upon her release from the Don Jail, Dorreen Boyd wanted her things back, but mostly she was concerned about her box of Tampax. Detectives Payne and Cook were there when she arrived to pick up her belongings.