by Brian Vallee
“I ran over to him and when I did so, he started running away from me,” Goodenough would tell the Royal Commission a few weeks later. “I had a gun on him and I warned him I would shoot if he didn’t stop.” But the CNR had strict rules about its men firing their weapons. “We are cautioned quite a lot about shooting at a person unless he tries to shoot at you.” Goodenough eventually lost sight of the man in the darkness.
Boyd’s memories of the escape up the Don Valley are somewhat blurred, but he thinks it was one of the Jacksons who ran from the CNR. Worrying that the railway cop might bring in reinforcements from the city, the gang moved quickly north again, still following the railway tracks. They made it to a point about half a mile south of present-day Eglinton Avenue, where they slept overnight in the bush. “We found a dense growth of trees where there were no paths, and just curled up and went to sleep,” says Boyd. “We were lucky it wasn’t winter.”
Early Tuesday morning the Boyd Gang was on the move again. “We never crossed any main roads or highways until after dark, so we wouldn’t be spotted,” says Boyd. “We were just trying to keep out of sight in the daytime. And at night we went out grubbing for food in gardens and farms. We ate so bloody many onions that we could barely stand to talk to each other.”
On Tuesday night after darkness fell, they crossed Sheppard Avenue and slept in a woodlot in farm country west of Leslie Street. Either they had been given the wrong directions or they had simply got lost; in either case, they had overshot by a mile or so the abandoned farm where the food cache was supposed to be. “I don’t remember why we didn’t get there,” says Boyd. “We just kept moving north.”
When they awoke in the woodlot on Wednesday morning they were pleased to discover that the adjacent barn and farmhouse had been abandoned. Known locally as the Doner Farm, it had been vacant since July 5. The farm was on the west side of Leslie Street, a mile north of Sheppard Avenue. The farmhouse was set well back from the street at the end of a long driveway. And well back from the house was a large barn beyond which, to the west, was a woodlot and a deep ravine. The Don River and the CNR line ran through the property, and there was an “at your own risk” sign posted where the tracks crossed the driveway leading to the house. Boyd thought it was an ideal spot to hop a freight heading west. At the time the Boyd Gang arrived at the farm, the driveway was being torn up by crews digging a massive trench for an oil pipeline. The trench was parallel to the railway line. Dump trucks, bulldozers, backhoes, and other heavy equipment were at the site.
Having a construction crew so close to the farm was a mixed blessing for the Boyd Gang. With the driveway impassable, no cars could suddenly approach the farm, but with so many workers in the area, the risk of discovery was greater. Boyd and the others decided they would stay out of sight in the woods during the day and sleep in the barn at night. The barn, with its rough stone base, was “banked” – built into the side of a hill – with the main doors opening directly to the loft. Below the loft was the stable, its entrance facing south.
The farmhouse had fallen victim to young vandals. It had been peppered with gunfire. “We tried to sleep in the house,” says Boyd, “but the windows were all broken or shot up and it was dirty compared to the barn, and probably not as safe.” The house was in the open, and for anyone looking west from Leslie Street there was cleared land all the way to the wooded lot behind the barn. Any of the gang coming out from behind the barn in daylight would be visible all the way from Leslie Street.
On Thursday as darkness approached, Steve Suchan left the others. He returned early the next morning with a bundle of clothes, an artificial foot for Lennie Jackson, a large supply of ammunition, and three automatic pistols – a Luger, a Canadian Army-type Browning, and a Walther P-38. There were plenty of clothes, but they were too large for Boyd and Willie Jackson, who opted to keep wearing their denims. Suchan didn’t talk about where he went for the guns and clothes. Boyd assumes Suchan walked to Yonge and Sheppard and called one of his or Lennie’s underworld contacts from a pay phone. “Some of his cronies probably picked him up and dropped him off the next morning with the clothes and guns, and a new foot for Lennie,” says Boyd. “He was probably on the other [west] side of the valley. Lennie would have told him who to contact to get his foot.”
For food, the gang raided neighbouring farms at night, stealing corn, potatoes, onions, carrots, and apples, all of which they ate raw. Taking a page from his days riding the rods with Red the Barber, Boyd decided to have a cooked meal for a change. “One night we went deep into the bush and lit a fire to cook the vegetables,” he says. “It didn’t work too well, everything was half-burned or half-cooked, but it kept us from starving.”
By Friday they were ready to gamble. They had about $45 in cash between them and decided to send Willie Jackson out to buy some food. He was the least known of the four men, and he was willing to give it a try. His hair had started to recede a bit, and to change his appearance Boyd shaved it back further, leaving him bald on top at the front.
Willie cut through the bush, emerging on Sheppard Avenue west of the farm. It was about two miles from there to Yonge Street. He had covered about a quarter of a mile when he heard a car coming. He decided to test his luck. He turned and stuck out his thumb. A pleasant, middle-aged woman was driving the car. She pulled over. Willie, with his broad, engaging grin, had a ride. He turned on the charm and entertained her with his wit. When she dropped him at Yonge and Sheppard he went into the Magazine Depot and bought cigarettes, soap, and razor blades. Glancing casually at the newspaper rack, he picked up information about the continuing manhunt, the suspension of the guards and governor at the Don Jail, and the appointing of a royal commission.
Willie was gaining confidence. He walked around a bit, enjoying the feel of a city sidewalk for the first time in nine months. Then he went into an IGA store just two blocks south of the North York police station. He bought three loaves of bread, two quarts of milk, sausage, cold cuts, cheese, two large cans of pork and beans, a couple of boxes of cookies, and a box of salt that might make the raw vegetables more palatable.
“Nobody recognized me,” he would brag later. “The clerks were nice to me. They even told me about that terrible Boyd Gang hiding in some richly furnished house.”
Willie was given a hero’s welcome when he returned to the barn with the groceries and cigarettes. Never had food tasted so good to them.
Another of the myths about the Boyd Gang is that Lennie Jackson left the others to visit his wife and month-old son and to pick up another artificial foot. But Boyd says that the gang stayed together until they reached the barn, and “Lennie was too sick to go anywhere.” Ann Jackson and her child were staying in Apartment 7 at 6 Howard Street with Lennie’s half-brother Sammy Stone, recently released from Kingston Penitentiary. Dolph Payne and Charlie Cook had the apartment under observation “for some hours” from the moment they learned of the jail break. Once Payne was convinced Lennie was not showing up and that Ann hadn’t heard from him, he went to the apartment and interviewed her. Ann Jackson told him the same thing she would tell reporters later: “I didn’t know a thing about the escape. I hope they don’t catch him. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, but I hope so.”
Farmers near the Doner Farm were soon aware that outsiders or transients were hanging around the barn. Most of them didn’t think much of it at first – they knew that abandoned farms attracted hobos and transients. They’d seen it before.
Robert Trimble, 49, from the nearby village of Oriole, went to the Doner farm on Thursday or Friday about 5 p.m. to remove some old wire from the property. He had been hired to manage the property, which was now used by other farmers as pasture for their cows. While Trimble was there, he noticed a man sitting by the railway track in front of the house. He thought the man might be one of the workers pushing the oil pipeline through the farm. He would learn later the man he saw was Steve Suchan.
At about 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 13, Trimble
and his brother Howard, who farmed nearby, were back on the property to repair a fence when they saw another man come out of the barn carrying hay and walking towards the house. He realized later the man was Boyd.
A Toronto junk dealer, known in the Oriole area as Stephenson, had spoken with the men and later told Robert Trimble they were “very nice guys.” They had helped him load his truck with scrap metal he was removing from the property. With that reassurance, Trimble didn’t pay much more attention. “I saw them going towards the old house on the farm, but nobody was living there, and it wasn’t any of my business.”
Another Trimble brother, John, who lived three farms to the south, discovered that his potato patch had been raided. And on Monday, September 15, his dog had howled all night and strained towards the barn with its hair standing on end. “We get used to bums around here,” he said. “We figured the men around that house would just stay here one night to catch onto the train that rides through the property.”
Catching the train was exactly what Boyd was thinking about, and to this day he regrets not hopping one heading west or north. He can’t understand why he ignored his own instincts. They had been too long in the same place. Perhaps he was clinging to his Hollywood ideal of what a gang was supposed to be. Perhaps this time Suchan and Lennie Jackson might not run off with their women, leaving him and Willie in the lurch. Or perhaps he simply felt sorry for Lennie. “Even without his foot Lennie moved pretty good up the Don Valley,” says Boyd. “He never let anything slow him down. But he was suffering terribly from hay fever and asthma and he seemed like a beaten man. He was never the same after he was shot up in Montreal.”
Boyd thinks back to those days in the barn. His eyes are intense and he shakes his head. He can’t find an answer. “I don’t know why I stayed there with them,” he says finally. “If I had been smart, I would have been in a boxcar heading north or west. I just never got around to it, and in no time at all it was too late.”
31
Trapped
Scarborough police constable Andrew Ouellette was on patrol alone at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 16, 1952. Ouellette, a native of Quebec, was considered an observant and diligent officer. A few weeks earlier, he and a partner had nabbed a gang of five safe-crackers. On this day he noticed a black 1951 Ford parked opposite the Gleneagle Hotel on the Lansing cut-off in Markham Township north of Highway 7. What drew his attention to the car was the rear licence plate, which had been bent up, concealing the numbers. As Ouellette approached the Ford to investigate, a man standing beside the car jumped in and drove off to the west at a high rate of speed.
As Ouellette sped after the Ford, he noticed there were two other men in the car. The chase continued for three miles at speeds reaching ninety miles an hour. Ouellette fired two warning shots. When the Ford didn’t slow down, he fired four more shots, emptying his revolver. As the chase continued along the Brooks Sideroad, Ouellette tried to get his cruiser alongside the Ford. He was within ten feet when a man in the rear seat rolled down the window and fired four bullets, which ripped into the cruiser. Two of the bullets popped holes through the windshield on the passenger side.
“There was no doubt that the man was shooting to kill,” Scarborough Police Inspector Harold Adamson29 said later. “He was aiming directly at the constable. One bullet passed within four inches of his head.”
The road was in poor condition, and as Ouellette swerved to avoid further shots he lost control of the cruiser, which went off the road, through a ditch, and into a tree. He radioed for help and was taken to hospital with internal injuries.
Ouellette’s call set in motion a chain of events that would have dire consequences for the Boyd Gang. After more than a week of fruitless searching, police pressure had begun to slacken, and many senior officers believed the gang had split up and moved out of the area. Now police were convinced Ouellette had flushed out the gang. Within minutes the area was flooded with cruisers from the Scarborough Police Department and an all-out search had been launched.
When word got out that the fugitives were in farm country northeast of Toronto, police officers from across the region, including the OPP, descended on the area by the hundreds. The Toronto police rushed out as many officers as they could spare, but held back enough men to keep an eye on the city’s banks because, as the Star reported, “they thought it might be a Boyd trick” to divert police so that he and his gang could rob a bank without interference. In downtown courtrooms, several cases were quickly adjourned to allow any police officers who were there to testify to join the manhunt. As a precaution against the gang doubling back into Toronto, roadblocks were set up on north Yonge Street, Avenue Road, Bathurst Street, and the Lakeshore at the Humber River.
Over the next six hours police would closely search eight square miles of farms, woodlands, and sideroads northeast of Toronto. Ontario Hydro offered the use of one of its helicopters, and police sergeant George Long, armed with a heavy automatic rifle, climbed aboard it at Malton Airport and used a short-wave walkie-talkie to stay in contact with cruisers on the ground.
The Boyd Gang had no access to a radio or newspapers and so had no way of knowing that a manhunt, more concentrated than that of the first day of their escape, was under way not more than a couple of miles away.
Early Tuesday afternoon, police officers involved in the search came upon a cache of food on the ledge of a pump house at an abandoned farm less than a mile south of the Doner farm. The police decided to leave the food as bait. Detective Frank Cater, who had arrested Boyd in his panel truck after the bungled robbery with Gault in October 1951, was assigned with another officer to stake out the farm.
Cater was at police headquarters on College Street as weapons were being distributed for the manhunt. He left for his assignment armed with a machine-gun, a shotgun, his service revolver, and a 9 mm Luger from his personal gun collection. “When the hunt was on for Boyd, I got permission from the inspector to carry the Luger with me as an extra precaution,” says Cater, now retired and living in Burlington. While he was on the police force he belonged to a revolver club and won several marksmanship trophies.
“Frank Cater was a gun nut,” laughs Jack Webster. “We used to joke around the department that if Cater was having a shower and you tried to sneak up on him, by the time you pulled the curtain back he’d have you covered with three guns. He always had a gun strapped to his ankle, one in the small of his back, and another in his shoulder holster.”
Cater wasn’t too pleased about concealing his cruiser and lugging all his weaponry into a field to watch a box of groceries. “The upper echelon figured that we should lay there in the high grass and wait for the buggers to come and get their food,” he says. “We lay there and lay there for hours.”
Meanwhile, in the woods beyond the Doner barn, the Boyd Gang was feeling miserable and restless. The weather had cooled a bit and there had been some light rain earlier in the day. Lennie Jackson could barely breathe after nine days without respite from his hay fever and asthma. Willie Jackson had eaten too many cookies and had a toothache. And Suchan and Boyd wanted to get moving again. The four fugitives talked it over and decided they would leave the next morning. Maybe they would hop a freight train and head north and then west. “We’d had enough of the dirty barn,” says Boyd. “We were ready to make a break. Lennie was in agony all the time. Another day and we would have been far away from North York.”
They knew they had been seen. They’d even talked to the scrap collector and to one of the workmen from the pipeline project. And just the day before, they’d had an unexpected visitor. They had been lying in the loft when they heard someone approaching the barn.
They grabbed their weapons and through cracks in floor looked down into the stable. A man walked in, glanced around, and stretched out in the hay. Above him the four men didn’t make a sound as he unbuttoned his trousers and proceeded to masturbate. When he was finished, and wandered out of the barn, Boyd and the others, like adolescent schoolboys, cou
ld barely suppress their laughter. “It was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen,” says Boyd. “Willie nearly busted a gut trying to keep from laughing out loud.”
When farmer Howard Trimble first told his brother John about the men living at the barn on the Doner farm, John jokingly suggested they might be the Boyd Gang.
“Don’t be silly,” said Howard.
John Trimble worked as a farmhand on an immense estate owned by Col. W.E. Phillips, a Toronto industrialist. The estate was not far from the Doner farm. Col. Phillips’ superintendent, and sometimes chauffeur, was Maurice Doyle. While Doyle was having lunch at his Sheppard Avenue East home on Tuesday, he heard on the radio about the Boyd Gang being suspected in a shoot-out with a Scarborough policeman. Not all that far away, he thought. After lunch, while working on the estate, Doyle had a chance meeting with John Trimble. They talked about the shooting incident, and Trimble mentioned the men at the Doner farm.
“My brother Robert has seen some tramps hanging around the barn,” said Trimble. “Stephenson, the junk dealer, was taking some scrap from there and these fellows helped him load it. My brother looked in the barn and he saw hay piled up where they had apparently been sleeping. One of them was a big fellow, and Robert saw him sitting on the veranda at the house smoking a cigarette. But they seem to be away during the daytime.” Trimble also told Doyle about his missing vegetables and how his dog had howled half the night.