by JN Lenz
A phone call to Junior would reveal the location of the stash; Junior would meet up with us a few days’ later with cash in hand. More often than not, all three of us would celebrate another bumper crop by getting drunk together at some bar. The system had worked well for the three of us for the past three years, so we had no reason to believe the same system would continue to work in the future. For us the best part of the drop off in the bush was that no one had to complete the hand off, once the twins started harvesting Clyde and I would no longer touch the pot at any point. Once the twins assumed the cultivation Clyde and I would become just another layer in the middle collecting our slice of the pie.
Junior would become a wealth of information in setting up that first grow op in the old farm house, at times you could not shut him up about the buzz from California on the burgeoning home grow op scene. The more Junior talked about the system and the crop output potential the more I realized going inside was really the only way to go. Financially it was much more viable with its year round crops, allowing for better control on the amount of light and water resulting in higher and more predictable yields. Many years earlier as a kid I could remember seeing the documentaries on the Epcot Center at Disney in the United States with its buildings housing the latest hydroponics gardens. Who would have thought that technology I watched grow tomatoes would alter my life forever, using that same technology to grow pot.
“What you used to give me once a year you will be growing every couple of months now with the potential for five or six crops a year instead” Junior would explain to both Clyde and I.
It was apparent Junior had little back up to fill the reduced volume from our potential departure; he required more volume not less. Having Oliver and Fitch grow the crops would be vital for us, the two of us did not have the time to do all the regular work required to grow and harvest year around. Plus it would be way too risky for us to have constant contact with the operation and the potential to lose our now flourishing Funeral Home business. There was no way we could take the risk after what we had done to make a go of the heavily indebted Funeral Home. Luckily Clyde and I had a pair of friends we could trust enough like the twins to bring the plan to life.
The delivery fundamentals of the pot remained similar to our prior arrangement just better. After each harvest after the crop was clipped, bagged the twins would deliver the entire amount to a remote location on government Crown owned land to be dropped off and buried. Clyde or I would later collect the funds from Junior, after he would be provided with the location of the crop and he had retrieved the bud. We would in turn pay Oliver and Fitch, after taking our cut from the total. The beautiful thing about the entire operation was both Clyde and I maintained a complete distance from the entire operation, never touching anything but cash. Since Clyde and I fronted the initial startup capital and had the connection to Junior, it allowed us to retain an equal partnership with the twins. The pair had neither the startup capital, nor the connections to move this quantity of pot.
After all the work of installing the lamps, drip tubing and all the required equipment to start the hydroponics at the farm house Clyde and I would show the twins how to germinate and get the seedling pot plants started. Both myself and Clyde would return to the farm house during that first crop to teach Oliver and Fitch how determine the sex of the plants, when and how to trim the plants as they grew, how to clone future plants, when to harvest and how to dry and trim the crop.
Once the twins made it through that first crop, I would rarely return to Parsons or the farm house. I even made the cash payouts to the twins from each crop in a place away from the farm. The majority of the payout to the twins would be at the small two bedroom apartment they rented in the town of Parsons soon after the initial crop. They needed a place they could invite friends and girls over to, besides they quickly learned they required an escape from the chemicals and dankness of the grow house.
Both Clyde and I stressed the confidentiality and steps they needed to take so none of us ended up behind bars, we would remind Oliver and Fitch often of the measures that were required from the twins at all times each in order for the four of us to succeed. This would include that there was to be no lavish spending as long as the twins remained in the town of Parsons, this so not to arouse suspicion. The town was much too small and the town’s folk would know that the jobs which the twins held could not support an expensive lifestyle.
I had helped them to set up numbered companies in which they could legalize a portion of their funds for the pair to invest in for the future, none of these investments would take place in Parsons with all transactions happened instead in Toronto. The twins would be smart enough to remain compliant on these demands, they saw the great potential to make real cash and retire young and rich. It would not take long for the grow operations at the farm house to generate an impressive cash flow and within sixteen weeks that first crop, Clyde and I had recouped our original investment.
So successful became this first in door operation that within a year we began planning to enlarge our production output which we soon realized would be impossible to achieve at the farm while it was still being rented. More production meant more space and with all the out buildings at the old farm in various stages of disrepair that would mean a new structure or substantial work to one or more of the existing structures.
Oliver and Fitch had approached the dead farmer’s daughter in the hopes she may be willing to sell the property to them, both times they approached the farmer’s daughter with the prospect of selling the farm the pair were rebuked. For the farmer’s daughter a sale could never occur, she just could not sell the property her father and grandfather had worked their entire lives on. After approaching the farmer’s daughter for a third time in regards to the sale of the farm she would tell Oliver and Fitch to not pursue the sale of the farm again.
At the time of the third and final refusal to sell the property the four of us felt it was time to move the operations into the city of Toronto. Life in the city would allow the twins to begin enjoying the fruits of their labor without the fear of drawing unwanted attention to themselves. I had been developing a plan to increase our yields; the first years of production at the farm house had produced some impressive returns for all four of us. With a larger crops we could grow beyond the two funeral homes Clyde and I owned at that time, the inside grow op at the farm house had allowed us to completely eliminate both our mortgage on the Shackles Funeral Home and the entire one million six hundred thousand cost of the Avery Funeral Home.
Granted, for those years Clyde and I spent next to nothing on ourselves, our whole life was immersed in the work at the funeral home and in the selling and laundering of the pot crop funds. The move to a larger grow facility could be washed through several funeral homes and with the solid backing of two debt free businesses to secure mortgages, Clyde and I could continue growing our business holdings.
The cash from that first grow op at the old farm house flowed through the Avery Funeral home like blood down the embalming room drain. The additional service costs I routinely added to each service with the cash from the pot sales attracted no attention from the offices of the National taxation department. As far as I knew if there had ever been any concerns, there would never be a request to undergo any type of financial audit from the government.
With each and every funeral home we purchased the amounts we submitted to the government tax department substantially increased starting the year after our take over. It appeared as long as our tax payments continued to increase there was little reason for us to be audited, after all why audit someone that is paying you more taxes, not less? The more funeral homes we could purchase the better the system worked, spreading the cash out over more and more services. The funneling of illegal funds through the funeral homes also allowed us to keep our service cost down to our customers further helping us to grow the business.
I had a plan to bring the grow ops into the city but in houses the four of us wo
uld build and own using false identifications. The new grow houses in the city would be our first opportunity to utilize the identifications Clyde and I had acquired from the homeless patrons of the Avery Funeral Home. Each of the grow houses would be registered under a set of these fake identifications Clyde and I had acquired from the deceased homeless we had disposed of. A birth certificate from a deceased vagrant would be all that was required to obtain social security cards, driver’s licenses, visa’s and bank cards. Clyde would present me with any pieces of identification he had stripped from the cadaver before the embalming was to take place.
Clyde would bring me any identification still present with the body at the time of embalming; often the city morgue would pass these articles of identification on to us in the hope that we might be able to contact family members or because they just did not give a shit. The homeless and poorest of the poor more often than not had no family present at the services, very few had family that would ever be searching for their long lost homeless family member. More often than not the services for these outcasts of society would have not a single visitor. Being the early nineteen nineties when governments had just begun to use computers to track its citizen’s personal data, there was little problem in using a birth certificate to garner driver’s licenses and other important government issued identification even thought that same person had been issued a death certificate.
I had a room I would always keep locked in the upstairs apartment at Shackles Funeral Home ( I had continued to live after Clyde had moved down to Toronto), the room was used exclusively for the development of these false identifications. Inside the room the two of us had scores of wigs, glasses, fake mustaches and beards, backgrounds for the pictures to be taken for the few complete forgeries we made.
Almost every one of the false identities we had would show us in beards, before going to the Ministry for a photo, a fake mustache or a fake beard would be affixed before the picture was taken. I had spent countless hours establishing bank accounts and credit cards for each of these false identifications, all in an attempt to build a background for each of the new identities. These new identities could only be traced back to postal boxes I would rent throughout the city at various postal service locations.
The first pair of identities I would steal would be used to purchase the houses for the new grow op in the city of Toronto, with Oliver and Fitch once again running the grow. These same identifications would continue be used by Oliver and Fitch after the purchase of the homes, the two would use the identities at all times following the construction of the new grow op homes. Our thought process being if the pair ever got caught they would be arresting someone else. Oliver and Fitch’s true identities would be kept hidden, leaving their true identities clean.
Eventually over time, Clyde and I held a total of six alternate identifications between the two of us. I had accumulated various pieces of government identification cards in addition to credit cards and bank cards in an attempt to legitimize each one of the six bogus personas. I would use a pair of the identities and attach them to a numbered company that owned any of the homes where the cash from the grow op flowed through.
The supply of identifications I would receive from Clyde it would turn out as I continued reading more of the files came from the homeless that Clyde had not just embalmed but also murdered. Thinking back I could remember how Clyde would present a handful of the identities as;
“Iron clad, you can take these to the bank”
Clyde joked to me as he handed them over. When I questioned why he deemed these identities under the classification of “Iron Clad” his response was always that they had no family, and no criminal record.
How Clyde knew about the criminal record I never asked, my reasoning being that he must have been paying someone for the information. Reading on into the files I soon discovered what Clyde meant so many years ago by the term Iron Clad, this it turns out as code for
“I killed them”.
I guess it was his need and desire for the hunt, the core of his being would forever function as a predator. After all these years it was apparent this trait would never escape from within Clyde. It was crystal clear to me now that he craved killing on every level, inside the local forests, deep in the jungles of South America, along the plains of Central Africa, down streets of small towns and metropolitan cities. His murder had no boundaries; killing came naturally to him, regardless of his prey’s environment. There was no end to Clyde’s pursuit in perfecting his knowledge of the animal he tracked, for the sole purpose of murder.
There had been so many gutted deer along with the vast variety of other wildlife from the decades of hunting. Clyde perfected killing each in his own way, quickly and instantly. What the precise location would be to cut them wide open, exposing each of the vital organs. The years at the abattoir only training him that muck more to precisely position where the heart in a living cow, sheep, pig or almost every animal for that matter. This same knowledge would be used to hone his abilities as a murder of humans.
As I began to read through more of the files I realized how simple many of Clyde’s murder plans really had been. One of his most rudimentary and primitive plans would be carried out on victim’s numbered eight to thirteen. Using a black solid panel service van from the Avery Funeral Home, Clyde would drive down into the core of the city. Here he would search out the back alley corridors containing the down trodden, here amongst the street whores and the homeless is where Clyde would find his prey. Offering them a warm bowl of soup which Clyde had prepared in the crock pots, he had fastened the pots securely onto a raised serving tray inside the van.
Driving down the dark alleys and back lots in the cities harshest neighborhoods in search of a lone vagrant, Clyde would pull the van beside the bum and ask if they would like a hot meal, the answer was always yes.
Once Clyde had their attention he would ask the vagrant if they had any form of identification. Telling them this was only because the volunteer group he was working for was hoping to track in real numbers the problems of the homeless. The response he was provided from the downtrodden hoping for a hot meal was to determine their own fate, a negative response on having identification garnered a bowl from the far side pot of stew. That pot would be lacking the same poison that killed Gladys McGovern which was contained in the near side pot strapped to the passenger side of the front of the van. A bowl of hot stew and a small roll of bread were left with the vagrant in the ally as Clyde would drive on in search of the homeless with some form of government identification. .
A positive response from any one of these homeless men to Clyde’s request for some form of identification (in return for a hot meal) resulted in an invitation to sit in the warm van while the stew was being consumed. Welcoming these hungry men off the streets into the van, Clyde would simply slide the side door closed behind them. Clyde reported in each of the files that none of the victims from nine to fifteen made it to the bottom of the bowl before collapsing to the floor of the van. This would take less than a minute from the time they would consume their first spoonful of stew in the back of the black van.
With the door already closed, Clyde would simply make his way back to the Avery Funeral Home with the body. These late at night arrivals into the Funeral Home had been common place for years; there was little fear of arousing suspicion.
The Avery Funeral Home had its own cremation facilities on site, with the bulk of their services being low cost services which included the less expensive option of cremation over the higher costs of a burial plot and casket. Because of the high percentage of cremation services Lorne Avery had decided years ago to construct a cremation facility on site for cost efficiencies, this enabled him to reduce his costs in the contract to the city for the government disposals.
Firing the cremation oven to its 360’ operating temperature, Clyde would remove the identification and load the poisoned cadavers of the homeless into the oven, turning them to dust within minutes. All evidence of
the crime he had committed hours earlier would be blown across the city sky, with no family or friends to report the missing vagrants their murders mostly went unaccounted for.
The Avery Funeral Home had no living accommodations on site so Clyde had first rented then eventually purchased a small condo when he moved from Largo into Toronto. The fact was Clyde rarely slept there it appears logging in the files that he spent most nights sleeping on a roll away cot he kept in corner of his office at the Avery Funeral Home. The purchase of the Avery Funeral Home would mark the first time in several years that Clyde and I no longer lived together, Lilly and I would often drive down on the weekends sometimes to help out with services when at times there was up to three or four in a single day, Clyde would offer his condo to the two of us while he would remain at the Funeral Home and his cot in the office.
Reading this now it was clear that Clyde was spending much of his time at work and the nights that these disposals and the late firings of the furnace all of which were completely unbeknownst to me at the time. As I sat there now reading these secretive acts of murder for the first time it made me realize how good Clyde had become at the art of deception.
The murder plans he crafted were not elaborate by any means but by the number of files demonstrated that his simple plans appeared to have worked time and time again, to this day no one that I was aware of had been able to draw any lineage between him and all of these murders. I guess no one but Bruck Myers who did not live to expose this hunch or knowledge of a murderous Clyde.
There was certainly looked to be an amount of blind luck involved in Clyde having not been caught as well; normally there are anywhere from three to five late night calls a month for cadaver pickups at the Avery Funeral Home. The on call director would need to pick up one of the service cars or a van to make the extraction, returning to the funeral home to store the body in the embalming room until morning. Not once while burning victims eight to thirteen in the bowels of the Funeral Home was he interrupted by myself or any employee.