Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  When Boyd read the stories about the robbery, he realized just how lucky he had been. Not only had the bank manager missed him with all five shots, but he had eluded the police by a matter of minutes. One of those policemen was Maurice “Moe” Richardson, then a detective-sergeant with the North York force. He and his partner, Bert Trotter, had been patrolling in Willowdale just north of the bank in their 1949 Mercury. Police cars were unmarked in those days, distinguishable only by the big aerial in back.

  “We weren’t too far away that day,” recalls Richardson. “We came down Avenue Road and when we got to the bank everything was in chaos. We should have got him, but he slipped away through the backyards. He was lucky the bank manager was a poor shot.” It wasn’t the last time Moe Richardson would cross paths with Edwin Alonzo Boyd.

  13

  Second Time Lucky

  Boyd wasn’t sure if he would ever rob another bank, but he knew that if he did, he would have to be certain his disguise was effective. A few days after the first robbery, he dressed neatly and returned to the Armour Heights bank. Shortly before noon he walked up to Joyce Empey’s wicket and with a friendly smile asked her to change a twenty-dollar bill. She cheerfully completed the transaction without any hint that she recognized him.

  With the robbery proceeds Boyd paid off a few bills and helped with household expenses. He was also able to buy decent gifts for Dorreen and the children at Christmas. Dorreen never asked about the money, but she knew he didn’t have a regular job and wondered where it came from. By the New Year of 1950 his cache was all but depleted. It didn’t take much for him to convince himself that it was time to rob another bank. He enjoyed having cash at hand – it made him feel worthwhile. He convinced himself the next robbery would go much more smoothly – he wouldn’t need luck to bail him out.

  Many years later, when he was seeking to understand what had driven him to rob banks, Boyd linked it to a compulsion to succeed. However sloppy the first bank job had been, he had still pulled it off. “I enjoyed planning a bank robbery, especially when I was doing it myself. Most important, it was knowing I could be successful. And I think it was also that my dad had been a policeman, and that nobody knew who was doing these things.”

  By mid-December, a month before his second robbery attempt, Boyd was breaking the law again. He had also started another moustache. He practised stealing cars, and he rented two more garages. “The garages were only $5 a month, and every one was rented under a different name. Eventually I had so many of them I had to keep books on them. I always put my own padlocks on the doors. It was like having a little home right close.” (Perhaps they were larger versions of the cubbyhole he called his “fort” below the back porch of his childhood home.)

  Boyd used the garages to store junk or equipment from the house, including – until he lost track of it – his disassembled tommy gun. He would also use the garages to house stolen cars before a robbery. “A lot of the city streets had back lanes with garages in those days. It was just made for robbing banks.”

  The first car he stole in Toronto was in front of a busy drugstore, where drivers would stop on their way home for a pack of cigarettes or some other last-minute item. “Usually they left the motor running because it was chilly. I waited until a guy jumped out and ran across the road, and I just got in and drove away.”

  Some nights he merely observed, picking up drivers’ patterns of behaviour. He concluded that the best time to steal a car was at ten or eleven at night, when people were in a hurry to get home and would leave their keys in the ignition while they ran into a store.

  It was cold at ten in the evening of January 16, 1950, as salesman Fred Care locked the doors of the used cars on the Cedarvale Motors lot at 979 Eglinton Avenue West. Before locking up the office, he started his own car in front of the dealership, to warm it up. When he came out of the building minutes later, he saw someone else driving his blue 1949 Meteor along Eglinton.

  “I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Care, who is now eighty. “The car was brand-new. I used it as a demonstrator, and it only had seven hundred miles on it.” Care ran back inside and telephoned the police.

  “Which way was he headed?” asked the dispatcher.

  “East,” replied Care. “You can’t help but get him – he’s right about at Eglinton and Bathurst by now. I’ll sit in the office and wait for you.”

  But Edwin Alonzo Boyd was gone, and the Meteor was soon locked away safely in one of his rented garages. Care waited more than an hour and then borrowed a used car off the lot and drove home. “It’s lucky I didn’t wait any longer,” he says. “I would have been sitting there for three days.”

  Two days later, on Wednesday, January 18, Boyd parked the Meteor on Sandra Road, immediately west of the new Canadian Bank of Commerce on the north side of O’Connor Drive at St. Clair Avenue East. He was in full disguise, with shabby clothes and his face puffed out and reddened. From several days of reconnaissance, he knew that at exactly 12:30 p.m. the manager returned to his apartment above the bank to have lunch.

  On this day there were no customers in the bank when the manager left. Five minutes later, Boyd entered the bank. Georgina Black was in the teller’s cage, and accountant William Church was at his desk next to her. The two were separated by a partition of frosted glass. Church was talking to his wife on the telephone. The teller heard Boyd enter the bank but did not look up until he reached her cage. He handed her a Bank of Commerce cheque. She examined it and saw printed on it in pencil: THIS IS A HOLD-UP. A black handgun was aimed at her through the bars of the wicket.

  “Mr. Church!” she called, her voice cracking. The accountant stood up, peered over the glass partition, and saw what was happening. Twenty-nine-year-old Church had been a lieutenant in Canada’s 48th Highlanders in the Second World War, and he knew by the gun’s shape that it was a German Luger.

  “Hang up the phone and get over here,” ordered Boyd, pointing the gun at Church, who placed the receiver on his desk and moved behind Georgina Black. Church’s wife had heard the twenty-one-year-old teller’s voice over the phone. “I thought it was just a mouse had scared her or something. I heard a man raise his voice and I thought it was my husband speaking to her. We were having a little argument over something when he left the phone. I hung on for a while, didn’t hear anything, and then hung up.” Boyd’s puffy, rouged face led Church to believe the gunman was “hopped-up with dope” – a detail the newspapers would exploit later in the day.

  Boyd pushed his white cloth sugar bag towards the teller.

  “Fill it up,” he ordered, thrusting the Luger at her. “And hurry up.” She quickly began emptying bills into the bag from her cash drawer.

  “Where’s your gun?” asked Boyd.

  “I … I don’t have one,” she lied.

  When the drawer was empty of cash, Boyd reached over for the bag. Waving his gun, he ordered the accountant and the teller into the open bank vault. Church closed the vault door behind them, waited a few seconds, and then came out. Boyd was gone. The accountant grabbed a bank-issue revolver from his desk and ran out onto the street in time to see Boyd pulling out from Sandra Road in the blue Meteor. Church was prepared to fire as the car turned west on O’Connor but he was afraid of hitting passers-by. Instead, he ran to his own car in the bank lot. But he had trouble starting it. “By the time I pulled out onto O’Connor Drive, the bandit had about a hundred-yard head start,” Church told reporters later. “I was able to jot down the licence number, but in the chase in and out of traffic, I lost him.” When he reached Donlands Avenue and O’Connor, he realized the robber had given him the slip, and turned around and returned to the bank.

  On being informed of the robbery, L.E. Miller, the forty-year-old bank manager, had rushed down from his apartment. It wasn’t a new experience for him: ten years earlier he had been held up at gunpoint at a sub-branch of the Bank of Commerce in Baden, Ontario. And ten days after that he and his wife had been confronted by a masked gunman in the
ir apartment above the same bank. His wife was tied up, and he was forced to enter the bank, where he foiled a robbery by convincing the gunman there was a time lock on the vault. Now his latest bank, open just eight months, had also been hit.

  Boyd had realized he was being pursued and was able to lose Church by turning sharply onto Don Mills Road and heading north. He was aided by the weather, which had turned nasty that morning, with strong winds and driving snow, and was worsening by the minute. Certain that Church could give a good description of the Meteor, and probably the licence number, Boyd looked for a spot to abandon the car. About five hundred yards north of O’Connor, he pulled onto a sideroad leading to the East York disposal plant.

  Meanwhile, police radios across Greater Toronto were crackling with news of the armed hold-up and descriptions of the robber.

  Witnesses said he was slight, about five-foot-seven, and that his face had been “puffed out” with cotton batting or paraffin wax and reddened with rouge or lipstick. He had “an unusually heavy moustache” and was wearing a ski cap and a dark windbreaker.

  One of the first police officers to join the chase was East York Constable Cecil Caskie, who by chance checked Don Mills Road and noticed the blue Meteor on the sideroad. He arrived less than a minute after Boyd abandoned the vehicle. “I found the engine of this car very warm and the keys in the ignition were still swinging.” The police were certain the bandit had fled into the heavy brush of the adjoining swampy ravine, near what is now Taylor Creek Park and the Don Valley. By 2 p.m., in a swirling snowstorm, about seventy-five uniformed officers and detectives from East York, Toronto, and surrounding departments were combing the six-square-mile area from four different directions. They were soon bolstered by reinforcements from the Ontario Provincial Police. Roadblocks had been set up on all streets leading in and out of the ravine, and police were canvassing nearby homes along Don Mills Road, O’Connor Drive, and St. Clair Avenue. They were also stopping and searching freight trains on the CNR line running through the ravine.

  The police dragnet was for nothing. Boyd had been in the bush only long enough to spit the cotton from his mouth and wipe off his make-up. His windbreaker was reversible, and he turned the dark side in, removed his ski cap, and walked quickly to O’Connor Drive. From there he walked a few blocks south to a rented garage where his panel truck was waiting. By the time most of the police search team arrived, he had already left the area.

  The abandoned Meteor was taken to East York police headquarters and checked for fingerprints, but none were found – Boyd had worn gloves. There was no damage to the car, but Fred Care still wasn’t pleased when police returned it to him. “There were only a few more miles on it,” he says, “but they sure left a hell of a mess with their fingerprinting.” Powder residue and smudges were everywhere. The first thing most car thieves do is adjust the rearview mirror to see if they are being followed. Police had removed the mirror, dusted it for prints, and left it lying on the front seat.

  Boyd counted his loot before returning home in mid-afternoon. It was slightly more than his first robbery, but not as much as he had hoped for. The snowstorm was getting worse when he parked his truck behind the house on Eglinton. Unaware of how close he had come to being caught, he was feeling elated.

  Once again the Star and the Telegram gave the robbery massive coverage, even though it was competing for space with a major American story – the Brinks Robbery, which had taken place in Boston the night before. Nine bandits wearing Halloween masks had broken into the company’s main vault and walked out with $1.5 million – at that time the largest cash robbery in American history. Edwin Alonzo Boyd’s take was a mere $2,862, but newspaper readers could be forgiven if they thought the amounts had somehow been reversed. Although both stories made the page 1, it was the Bank of Commerce heist that got the banner headlines. HUNT DOPE-CRAZED BANK BANDIT, screamed the Star. Across the top of the Telegram’s page 1 was BANK BANDIT ELUDES POSSE IN BUSH CHASE. There were two photos on page one, and on page two a five-column map and five more photos. Flush against a page 1 photo of Fred Care’s abandoned Meteor, near the ravine, was the headline SCARFACED GUNMAN / LOOKING ‘HOPPED UP’ / GETS $1,000 IN LOOT. (The bank didn’t provide the correct amount of its loss until days later.)

  Dorreen had wondered about the source of Ed’s income, but had never questioned him. It certainly hadn’t occurred to her that her husband was a bank robber. But if he was supposed to be working at odd jobs, as he said he was, how did he manage to look so neat at the end of the day? “He used to go out in the morning nice and clean and shaved, and then he’d come back the same way – as if he should have an attaché case. I got suspicious.”

  Dorreen had heard about the Bank of Commerce robbery on the radio, and when Ed returned home later that afternoon, she picked up on the elation he was feeling. When he gave her a handful of new twenty-dollar bills, she suddenly knew there were no odd jobs – her husband robbed banks.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You robbed that bank.”

  The truth was out, and Ed’s dammed up emotions spilled over. He was “like an excited kid,” Dorreen says. He couldn’t wait to tell her the details and show her the rest of the money. Now he wasn’t the only one in the world who knew – and he didn’t mind at all. “Less than three minutes flat!” he told her. “That’s how quickly I was in and out of there.” Most of the bills from the robbery were new, and Ed decided he and Dorreen should wash them to make them look used. He half-filled the kitchen sink with water, and she soaked the bills.

  “Don’t use soap,” he instructed.

  After the bills were soaked and the water drained off, Ed put them in the coal-fired oven to dry. “I think he opened it two or three times to make sure they weren’t cooked,” Dorreen remembers.

  Later, when Boyd read about the robbery in the newspapers, he realized it had been another close call. He began to think an accomplice – a partner – might be the answer. One could control the customers and staff while the other grabbed the cash; that way, more cash drawers could be emptied in the same amount of time. “I had learned that you couldn’t walk into a bank by yourself and be out in less than three minutes with any significant amount of money.”

  14

  Partners

  About 11:15 p.m. on Monday, July 3, 1950, Mary Helen Guinane parked her new green Ford convertible in the Dominion Store parking lot at 2300 Yonge Street. When she returned half an hour later, the car was gone. It was already in one of Edwin Alonzo Boyd’s rented garages.

  With a wife and three kids to support, and no full-time work, Boyd was nearly broke again by the Dominion Day holiday. He decided to rob another bank, this time with a partner. The identity of the man he chose has never been revealed. All that is known about him is the description witnesses gave to police. He was about twenty-five, which was ten years younger than Boyd at the time, and stout (one witness used the word “fat”).

  Boyd didn’t wait long to introduce his new partner to the world of bank robbing. The day after they stole the convertible, they parked it with the motor running on Glencairn Avenue near Dufferin Street, around the corner from the Dominion Bank. It was 2:30 p.m. Boyd, in his usual make-up and thick moustache, was wearing a blue suit, straw hat, and gloves. His partner wore a peaked cap and dark clothing. Neither had shaved for several days.

  There were six employees in the bank, but only one customer, when the two men came through the door with guns drawn. Teller Richard Barry was working at his desk when he looked up and saw Boyd’s Luger aimed at his chest.

  “Don’t press any alarm!” shouted Boyd, leaping up on the counter. “Everybody get to the back against the wall!” Jumping down behind the teller’s cage, he herded the hostages down a narrow stairway to the basement. The bank’s acting manager, Alfred Brown, had been working behind the counter when the men came in. “It was all done very quickly,” he said later. “Within a matter of seconds they had us in th
e basement and the door was locked.” The cash drawers were quickly rifled, and the gunmen were on their way out of the bank in less than two minutes. They didn’t know it, but one of the employees had managed to press an alarm button. But instead of alerting a police station, it was rigged to ring in the grocery store next door.

  Store owner John Miskiw heard the alarm but didn’t call the police immediately because the alarm often malfunctioned, sounding on its own. He sent his delivery boy, fifteen-year-old Tom Morris, to check the bank.

  “It’s empty,” said the boy on his return. “There’s nobody in there.” Miskiw immediately called the police.

  As Boyd was rushing from the bank with his partner he nearly knocked over a sixty-three-year-old woman entering the bank. She was angry and chased after them. As they rounded the corner on Glencairn, sixty-six-year-old Carl Rudge was peering into their car, suspicious as to why they had left it running in front of his house. When he looked up, he saw the two men running towards him, one of them (Boyd) carrying a white cloth bag.

  “Stop those men!” shouted the woman behind them.

  “What have you two been up to?” asked Rudge as the men jumped into the car. Boyd, in the passenger seat, shoved his Luger into the man’s ribs.

  “Scram!” shouted Boyd, shoving him. Rudge lost his balance and fell to the ground.

  “They’re going to shoot me!” he shouted. His two married daughters, in the house at the time, heard their father and ran out to the street just as the convertible pulled away. One of the daughters, Irene McGregor, recently released from hospital, fainted from the excitement.

  Across the street, taxi dispatcher Colin McCallum saw the incident from his office and called the police. Taxi driver Fred Gipp jumped into his cab to chase the bandits, who had headed east on Glencairn. He soon lost them in the heavy mid-afternoon traffic. “I didn’t have a chance – they were miles ahead of me,” he told police later. The convertible turned north on Bathurst Street and east again on Lawrence. Boyd was crouched down in the front seat to make it look like the driver was alone. “The other chap was driving,” he remembers, “and he hit a hole in the road which threw me right up to the roof.”