Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  Forty-five years later, Norman Boyd is philosophical about the harbouring conviction. “His wife came along and asked me if I could find Ed a place to stay,” he says. “When you get a request like that, from someone so close to you, it’s pretty hard to say no. You just do whatever you can. In this case, it didn’t work out.”

  Forsyth sentenced Norman to three years for the armed robbery and nine months for harbouring his brother after the first escape from the Don Jail. McMahon launched an immediate appeal of Norman Boyd’s armed robbery conviction, and it was overturned by the Court of Appeal four months later. Norman is still bitter at the justice system over that conviction. “The appeal court quashed it entirely,” he says. “The jury automatically believed all the stuff in the newspapers. But the appeal court said it was an impossibility – it couldn’t have happened. All the witnesses said four people took part in the robbery, and here we’ve got five people charged.”

  The appeal court also could not understand how the jury could have convicted Norman Boyd after his boss testified that he was working with him at the time of the robbery. “If your name was Boyd, you were automatically guilty,” says Norman. “That’s the way juries think.”

  Then it was William Jackson’s turn before Judge Forsyth. His lawyer said his client was “prepared to take his punishment,” and emphasized that there had been no shooting in the robberies in which he participated. If Willie Jackson was prepared to take his punishment, Judge Forsyth was ready to dish it out. He sentenced Jackson to twenty years concurrent for each of the two November 1951 armed robberies. The twenty years, however, was in addition to the seven years he was already serving for his previous crimes. Jackson was also sentenced to two years concurrent for each of his escapes from the Don Jail.

  Edwin Alonzo Boyd was the last to be sentenced by Judge Forsyth. McMahon made an eloquent appeal for leniency, saying that Boyd had spent more than five years “as a fine, outstanding soldier” in the Second World War, and had fought bravely until his discharge in early 1945. “As far as I have been able to find out, he is an introvert, a deep thinker,” said McMahon. “He takes things to heart. When he was a teenager, his mother died and this sorrow crowded all else out of his mind. Later his father remarried and this weighed heavily on him.” He said that Boyd’s police record from his days riding the rails had been held against him when he sought work after the war.

  “He became frustrated, and the record shows what happened,” said McMahon. “He has been made out to be a super colossus of crime, but the record doesn’t show that.”

  In the prisoners’ dock, shackled to the others, Boyd nervously ran his tongue over his lips and leaned over to whisper something to his brother. “I beg that he be left a ray of hope,” said McMahon. “He has a deep affection for his wife, the twins, and his oldest boy. As he is a deep thinker, I submit that the loss of these loved ones will torture him more than the actual sentence of confinement. There is nothing so desolate as a human being without hope.”

  Judge Forsyth turned to Boyd, whose jaw tightened as the sentence was solemnly pronounced: eight life terms, one for each of the banks he was convicted of robbing; ten years for the bungled robbery attempt in which he fired in the direction of the bank manager; four years for each of two auto thefts; two years for each of the escapes from the Don Jail; and five years for each of two counts of jail breaking. In all, he received eight life terms, plus thirty-two years. The sentences were concurrent, however, and the speculation in the press was that he would serve twenty years, perhaps less depending on his conduct in Kingston.

  Dorreen Boyd was sitting in the front row of the courtroom about fifteen feet from her husband. Beside her was her friend Florence Lamb. Dorreen, hatless and wearing a scarlet coat, had been tense as she waited for the verdict. Sometimes her eyes were closed, and she continually clasped and unclasped her hands.

  When the life sentences were passed on her husband, Dorreen gasped and rose to her feet. Her friend fainted, and Dorreen went to her aid. “Are you all right, Flo? Are you all right?” The woman came around. Tears streamed down Dorreen’s face as Boyd and the other prisoners were taken from the dock. She moved to the railing, put her arms around her husband, and kissed his cheek. Inspector John Nimmo rushed across the courtroom and pulled Dorreen away from her husband.

  Dorreen rejoined Florence Lamb, and they sat in stunned silence for a moment. Several well-wishers approached and said they thought Boyd’s sentence was too harsh. One man, who said he knew Ed’s father, asked if Glover Boyd had been in the courtroom. “I have not heard from the family at all,” said Dorreen, “and at no time have any members of his family been in court as spectators.” (Glover Boyd did appear as a character witness for Norman Boyd.)

  Dorreen left City Hall through the side door. “When they sentenced Ed, they sentenced me to life too,” she told Telegram reporter Dorothy Howarth.

  Boyd and the other prisoners were taken through the gauntlet of armed officers, down the elevators past the basement holding cells, and out to the courtyard to face the throng of reporters and photographers. The page 1 newspaper photos that night and the next morning belied the fact that Boyd and Willie Jackson had just been given such heavy sentences. Boyd’s Hollywood grin was in place, and Jackson, his fedora at a rakish tilt, was positively effusive as he puffed on a large cigar clenched between his teeth. The cigar was courtesy of Inspector John Nimmo, who had promised it to Willie when the trial ended. Both Willie’s hands were in cuffs, and he used his tongue to roll the cigar around his mouth, much to the amusement of the media. Willie and his cigar of course made the front pages. Willie had told Dolph Payne that whatever sentence he received, he would serve it standing on his head. “You’re going to have an awful flat head,” said Payne.

  Dorreen Boyd arrived home at her basement apartment at the Lambs’ at 1:30 p.m. She immediately telephoned the prison and set up an appointment to visit her husband late in the afternoon. “I told him I would bring up the children to the best of my ability,” she told a reporter after the visit. “I’m not going to bring up my children to hate their father. When they’re older I’ll tell them of the wrong and how he paid for it.”

  Dorreen said her husband was in a cheerful mood and didn’t talk about the stiff sentence. “He told me he is going to study hard while he is in Kingston and further his education.”

  At 6 a.m. the next morning, one year and one day after he was first arrested by Toronto police, Boyd was spirited out of the Don Jail in a blue patrol wagon with a motorcycle escort. With him were Willie and Joseph Jackson. As the van’s rear door closed Boyd shouted, “Give us a blanket. It’s cold in here.”

  The night before, Boyd had signed a waiver stating that he did not plan to appeal his life term. He also signed statements providing the details of his two escapes. But he did not disclose the source of the hacksaw blades, or of the file and piece of steel he used to make the key for the cells in the second escape. The information about the escapes would be passed on to the Royal Commission studying the jail breaks.

  The security surrounding Boyd’s removal from the Don Jail was unprecedented, but Col. Hedley Basher was nervous whenever Boyd was around and didn’t want another embarrassment. The usual practice was to transfer prisoners to Kingston by train, but Boyd rated special attention. Two officers from the morality squad, William Harris and Harry Long, sat in the rear of the van with the prisoners, and in front with the driver were two sub-machine-guns. Inspector Nimmo, who co-ordinated the operation with Sheriff J.D. Conover, kept the transfer secret until the convoy was well on its way. Meanwhile, Kingston police set up barriers on roads leading to the penitentiary, and all traffic was diverted.

  While the gates of Kingston Penitentiary were closing behind Edwin Alonzo Boyd and William R. Jackson, Leonard Jackson and Steve Suchan were awaiting their fate in the cells of No. 9 Hospital – sometimes called the Death Cells.

  33

  Dead Men Walking

  A young boy, a wanderer from
home for seven months, sits between two tramps in a railway yard and drinks in with blue-eyed astonishment the story of how easy is the life of the pilferer and housebreaker, and how ample the rewards. The boy snaps at the shining lure they cast before him, and the robber’s trade and evil become the good of fifteen-year-old Frank McCullough.

  ———

  Three men struggle at desperate grips in a livery stable. Nearby stands a buggy with a few paltry yards of stolen cloth. Suddenly from among the writhing figures two shots flash out in the semi-darkness and Frank Williams, aged 24, guardian of the lives and property of his fellow-citizens, falls, and the blood froth on his lips tells that he has sealed his pledged service with his life.

  ———

  Throwing away a smoking revolver, a tall figure runs through the open door to the street, and the mark of Cain is on Frank McCullough.

  ———

  “Our father which art in heaven …” The words of the greatest prayer human lips have ever repeated, are now used as the stopwatch of the hangman. The prayer is broken by a jarring clash, and the falling figure at the rope’s end is Frank McCullough.

  That melodramatic language, typical for newspapers of the period, was the lead in a Toronto Telegram story describing the hanging death of Frank McCullough, twenty-seven, at 8:15 a.m. on Friday, June 13, 1919.

  Seven months earlier, McCullough had shot and killed Detective Frank Williams of the Toronto Police Department. Williams had approached McCullough to arrest him for selling stolen fur-lined coats. McCullough was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to hang. But he sawed his way out of his Don Jail death cell and enjoyed three weeks of freedom before he was recaptured and hanged.

  There are several uncanny parallels and coincidences in the Frank McCullough and Boyd Gang cases:

  • Both Sergeant of Detectives Edmund Tong and Detective Frank Williams were shot in daylight in the city’s downtown.

  • McCullough, in 1919, sawed his way out of the same window that the Boyd Gang would escape through in 1952.

  • Col. G. Hedley Basher was called in to take over the Don after McCullough’s escape, and was called in to take over again after the Boyd Gang’s first escape.

  • After McCullough was recaptured he befriended Detective Bart Cronin, just as Leonard Jackson befriended Jack Gillespie. “Who squealed on me?” McCullough asked Cronin several times. “A little bird told me,” replied Cronin. More than three decades later, Lennie Jackson asked a similar question of Gillespie. Gillespie’s reply: “A little bird told me.”

  • A prominent lawyer, Thomas C. Robinette, tried to save Frank McCullough from the gallows. Thirty-three years later, Robinette’s son, J.J. Robinette, tried to save Steve Suchan from the same fate.

  John Josiah Robinette, “perhaps the greatest lawyer this country will ever see,”30 had quietly earned a reputation among litigation lawyers for his thorough and articulate arguments before the Ontario Court of Appeal. But his reputation was publicly and firmly established in 1947 when he won a new trial for twenty-five-year-old Evelyn Dick, who had been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to hang. The public and media interest in the case was as intense as it would be with the Boyd Gang, and when Robinette convinced a jury to acquit Evelyn Dick at her second trial, the lawyer’s reputation was further enhanced.

  Robinette later described the aftermath in Jack Batten’s 1982 book, In Court: “When the trial ended, the front page of the Star carried a double red banner, ‘EVELYN ACQUITTED.’ Nobody needed to be told what that meant. I’ve never seen a case for such sensation, and overnight, I went from being an academic lawyer to being a criminal lawyer.”31

  Seven weeks after her acquittal, Dick was charged with manslaughter when the body of her seven-month-old son was discovered encased in concrete. Even Robinette couldn’t save her this time. She was sentenced to life, but was released after eleven years.

  Five years after the Dick case, Robinette was working late in his office one night when a cleaning lady told him her son was in trouble and needed help. The woman was Elizabeth Lesso, and her son was Steve Suchan. Robinette thought Lesso to be hard-working and decent. He later told Jack Batten, “She was such a nice woman that I couldn’t say anything except that I’d help her.”

  The day after their capture in the North York barn, Steve Suchan and Leonard Jackson were taken directly from the North York jail to the holding cells beneath Toronto City Hall. At 2:15 p.m. on September 17 they were brought before Chief Justice James McRuer of the Ontario Supreme Court and arraigned on capital murder charges in the death of Edmund Tong. The trial was set to open a week later, but Robinette asked for more time to prepare his defence. Besides, the court was told, Leonard Jackson didn’t even have a lawyer. But Justice McRuer had already solved that problem: he had cornered up-and-coming lawyer Arthur C. Maloney and asked if he would mind taking the case. Maloney already had a reputation as a brilliant defence lawyer but wasn’t sure about handling a major murder trial. He decided it would be unwise to turn down the Chief Justice, and besides, by accepting the assignment he would get to work with the distinguished Robinette. Leonard Jackson agreed to McRuer’s choice of counsel.

  The Telegram described the upcoming court case as “one of the biggest legal battles of the century” and described Robinette, forty-five, and Maloney, thirty-two, as “two of Ontario’s best-known legal brains.” Robinette, said the article, was regarded by his peers “as one of the top lawyers – criminal or civil – in Canada.” And Maloney’s views on abolishing capital punishment were internationally respected. “Capital punishment is brutal and outmoded,” he had often stated. “It is not morally justified and not necessary.”

  Robinette and Maloney suffered their first setback in the case when McRuer refused to delay the trial. It would go ahead on schedule September 22, leaving them just a week to prepare.

  For Robinette and Maloney the strategy was clear. There was no dispute that Suchan and Jackson were in Anna Camero’s Monarch when Suchan’s bullets hit Eddie Tong and Roy Perry. To save their clients from the gallows, they would have to convince the jury that there was no conspiracy between Suchan and Jackson to resist arrest by potentially lethal means, and that when Suchan fired, he didn’t see Tong and didn’t know it was a police car. The lawyers knew their clients had no chance of walking free; they were after a verdict of manslaughter.

  Their opponent was a tough veteran Crown attorney, William O. Gibson, considered one of the best in Ontario. He methodically laid out the Crown’s case, presenting expert medical and forensic evidence that connected Suchan and Jackson to the shooting and describing the wounds to Tong and Perry. One of the worst moments for the defence was Justice McRuer’s decision to allow in as Crown evidence the mannequins from Anna Camero’s basement, which Suchan and Jackson had used for target practice. Robinette and Maloney had argued that the mannequins were irrelevant and that introducing them would be prejudicial to their clients. Some of the jurors gasped when they saw the plaster head, and the chest portion of the papier mâché torso, riddled with holes from the air pistol pellets. It wasn’t difficult for the jurors to conclude that those shooting at the targets were decent marksmen. If Suchan was a decent marksman, how could some of his shots have hit the cruiser’s windshield in the area of Roy Perry’s head when he was supposedly aiming at the car’s engine a few feet away?

  It took one week and forty-three witnesses for Gibson to lay out the Crown’s case. On Monday, September 29, the defence began its case, with Robinette and Maloney calling just one witness each – Suchan and Jackson. Suchan was first, and after a brief outline of his background, Robinette quickly led him to the crucial part of his testimony – the shooting of Edmund Tong. As Suchan told his story, Justice McRuer sometimes interjected with his own “clarifying” questions.

  Suchan claimed in court that he thought the man yelling at him to pull over was the angry driver or passenger of a car he had cut off in traffic a few minutes earlier.

 
SUCHAN: I assumed this was the car that was trying to crowd me over and, well, I had Len in the car. I got panicky I guess.

  MCRUER: You mean Leonard Jackson?

  SUCHAN: Yes.

  ROBINETTE: Would you explain that, or what you mean by that?

  SUCHAN: At the time Len was hotter than a firecracker.

  MCRUER: What do you mean by that?

  SUCHAN: He was wanted. He escaped jail.… I didn’t want to be discovered with him. I couldn’t risk any investigation, because my connection with Boyd would be found out.… It would have been discovered that I harboured Boyd.

  ROBINETTE: Were you thinking of Jackson’s position at all?

  SUCHAN: No, I was not.

  ROBINETTE: Whose position were you thinking of?

  SUCHAN: I was thinking of myself.

  ROBINETTE: Now, what did you do?

  SUCHAN: I thought this car was trying to crowd me over on the sidewalk. I reached for my gun and I threw a shot back in the direction of the hood.

  ROBINETTE: What was your purpose?

  SUCHAN: The purpose was strictly to damage the engine of the car and get away from there.

  During Gibson’s cross-examination of Suchan, Justice McRuer again interjected, asking why Suchan did not call the police since Jackson was a wanted man. “I’ve never been a stool pigeon in my life,” said Suchan.

  “You consider that would be a stool pigeon, if one knows a man has escaped from custody and a good citizen sees him and tells the police where to go to get him?” asked McRuer.