Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  “Where’d you get the car?” asked Boyd.

  “Oh, I needed a new one, so I bought it.”

  “I told you not to do that, because it’s dangerous.”

  “Oh well …” he shrugged.

  Boyd could smell alcohol on Gault’s breath and suspected he was trying to impress his latest girlfriend with the car. “When he drank he became so confident in his own abilities, he wasn’t thinking right. I could see I was going to have trouble with him. He drank too much and that was more of a danger than I realized. And he lied to me. The minute I turned my back, he went out and bought that car.” Boyd decided he would use Gault only as a last resort.

  Those were Boyd’s feelings before the mellow summer and early fall he spent working on the Pickering house. He didn’t see much of Gault in that time. But now that he was ready for another influx of cash, he pushed Gault’s negatives to the back of his mind. He needed a partner on his next robbery, and Gault, if nothing else, had experience.

  The weekend before Boyd attempted his seventh robbery, Toronto was hosting the young Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, on their first Royal Tour to Canada. The future Queen was filling in for her ailing father, George VI, who would die four months later. Being a largely Anglo-Saxon city at the time, Toronto went all out to give the future Queen a rousing welcome. The city was in a frenzy; at every public appearance the crowds were massive, and at every parade the adoring public stood a dozen deep.

  Dorreen and the children, stranded in Pickering, didn’t get to see the Princess and Prince. And Ed had other things on his mind. Around the time the royals were arriving in Montreal, he and Gault had met and decided to rob a bank. This time there would be none of the usual long-term planning. They would meet a week later, drive around until they decided on a target, and then just do it.

  By noon on Tuesday, October 16, they were sitting in Boyd’s maroon panel truck on north Yonge Street. Boyd had his Luger and Gault a .38 Smith & Wesson that Boyd had taken from a bank in an earlier robbery. They drove around for a few minutes, looking for a suitable target. Then Boyd thought of the perfect bank, and the one he was most familiar with – the Armour Heights branch of the Bank of Montreal. Remembering the fuss the newspapers had made when he robbed it the second time, he wondered what the reaction would be if he hit it a third time. Gault too thought it was a great idea.

  First they needed a getaway vehicle. As was now the usual procedure, they would steal a car from a parking lot. Boyd drove to a lot across the street from the Fairlawn Theatre on Yonge Street, a few blocks north of Lawrence Avenue. He was in his usual disguise, his face smudged with lipstick and cotton stuffed into his cheeks and nostrils. Gault was wearing work clothes and a hunting cap with the peak pulled low. Both men also wore dark glasses. To enhance his disguise, Gault removed his false teeth, wrapping them in a soiled handkerchief and leaving them on the front seat of the truck.

  They left the truck and hot-wired a black 1948 Chevrolet sedan in the same lot, then drove west on Fairlawn Avenue and north on Avenue Road. As they approached Haddington Avenue and the Armour Heights bank just before 12:30 p.m., Boyd slowed down to look inside.

  Bank manager W.W. Keeler was out for lunch, and his second officer, Ervin Leigh, was engaged with a customer, Mrs. James W. Stephenson, who had her two children in tow. As he stood behind the counter, which faced the street, Leigh noticed the black Chev moving north slowly past the bank. He could see the two male occupants, both wearing dark glasses, staring intently at the bank.

  “I don’t like the look of those two,” said Leigh, who had been in the bank when it was robbed in September 1949 and again in March 1951. Mrs. Stephenson turned to look towards the street, but the car had moved past the window.

  Leigh continued to glance out the window as he talked to Mrs. Stephenson. A few minutes later he noticed the same car driving slowly south with both occupants again peering into the bank.

  “There they are again,” he told Mrs. Stephenson. “I think they might attempt a hold-up. Excuse me, I’m going to call the police.” Leigh went to the phone and talked to George Wilson of the North York Police Department. Wilson was the same detective who had dug Boyd’s bullet out of a bank wall after his bungled robbery attempt a year earlier. A patrol car would be sent immediately, said Wilson. Seconds after the phone call, Leigh looked out to see the black Chev pull up in front of the bank and stop. “The men did not get out of the car, but kept looking the bank over – making a reconnaissance,” he told police later.

  Leigh left the counter and walked to the front of the bank and stared out at Boyd and Gault. Startled, they turned away so they wouldn’t be recognized and quickly drove off. Leigh ran out the door hoping to get the licence number, but by the time he got to the street, the car had disappeared. Just then the police car arrived, and he told the officers what had happened.

  Boyd realized they had been spotted, and instinct told him he should drive to his truck and go home to Pickering. There would be other days, other banks. But Gault, feeling self-assured with the .38 in his pocket, argued that they should try another bank. Boyd thought for a moment, drove south to Lawrence and Yonge, and parked near the Dominion Bank. This time they simply got out of the car and went in with guns drawn. Had they looked in first, they might have hesitated.

  The only customer was a hairdresser, Dawn Foster, who was cashing a cheque, but there were also eleven employees. Boyd, fearless as always, leaped effortlessly to the counter.

  “Don’t move!” he shouted. “This is a stick-up!”

  Foster said the bandit had “beady eyes” and with the cotton batting stuffed into his nostrils he looked like a monster. “Quit staring at me!” he ordered, waving his gun.

  As Gault climbed over the counter and began emptying the cash from the teller’s cages into a shopping bag, Boyd jumped to the floor, went to the centre of the bank, and ordered everyone to the rear near the vault. He didn’t see bank secretary Adelene Jamieson pull the alarm switch under the accounting desk on her way to the back. Jamieson, whose late husband had been a bank manager, told a reporter later: “Frankly, I just didn’t like the idea of a couple of hoodlums coming in here and walking out with a lot of money that doesn’t belong to them.” The alarm sounded at No. 12 Division in north Toronto.

  Boyd now suspects that Gault had been drinking on the day of the robbery. He didn’t smell beer on him but wonders if it could have been vodka or some other alcohol with an undetectable odour. Gault seemed calm enough while they were driving around in the truck, but once inside the bank his behaviour became erratic. Perhaps he was simply intoxicated at the sight of so much cash. For whatever reason, he grew excited as he shovelled the money from the cash drawers into the shopping bag. “Look at all this!” he cried, admiring the stacks of bills.

  “Hurry up!” said Boyd, agitated. But Gault continued to comment on their good fortune as their stay went beyond Boyd’s three-minute limit. Now Gault was flipping stacks of cash in the air, exclaiming, “Boy, we really got a pile here.”

  “Let’s go!” said Boyd, backing out of the bank.

  Constables Walter McLean and Frank Skelly from No. 12 Station were on patrol in their scout car about four blocks away when the dispatcher directed them to a robbery in progress at the Dominion Bank at Avenue Road and Lawrence. Motorcycle policeman Donald Stewart saw his fellow officers speed by and followed to offer assistance.

  As Boyd came out of the bank and ran for the getaway car, parked facing west on the north side of Lawrence, the police car pulled up and McLean went after him. The two arrived at the Chev about the same time. “I reached in the open window and threw the door against him and it knocked him off his feet,” says Boyd, who didn’t draw his gun. He jumped in the car and drove off.

  McLean pulled out his revolver and started shooting. “I fired at the car in an effort to stop it,” he said. One shot hit the trunk of the Chev. Two others missed. Behind the wheel, Boyd bobbed from side to side
to avoid the gunfire. He had always told Gault that if they were being pursued, Gault was to run in the opposite direction and Boyd would come around the block and pick him up. But Gault didn’t have a chance. He had been followed out of the bank by accountant John Goodfellow, who was armed with a bank revolver and had joined the chase.

  When Stewart saw Skelly chasing the puffing Gault in a laneway at the rear of the bank, he ran north from Lawrence through a vacant lot and cut off the bandit in a used car lot. Gault was carrying his revolver in one hand and the shopping bag full of cash in the other. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” yelled Stewart, firing two or three warning shots into the air. Gault, now out of breath, dropped the gun and the bag and stopped running. Stewart checked Gault’s .38 and found it fully loaded. He then checked Gault’s pockets and found extra rounds of ammunition. Gault was taken to No. 12 Station at Montgomery and Yonge, where the money was counted by accountant John Goodfellow and an inspector from the Dominion Bank’s head office. The total was $12,234.

  While Stewart and Skelly were chasing down Gault, McLean was in his cruiser in hot pursuit of Boyd. He lost sight of the Chev for a few moments and then saw it abandoned, partly on the sidewalk, at the Yonge and Fairlawn parking lot. Witnesses said they had seen the bandit drive off in a panel truck and gave the officer a description.

  Boyd had spit the cotton from his mouth and wiped off his makeup. He now made a cursory run past the bank, but there was no sign of Gault. He was certain the police had him, and he was just as certain Gault wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  At the police station, Gault, still missing his teeth, was placed in a cell for a time and then moved to an adjoining room, where Detective Richard Gibson cautioned him and informed him of his rights. Gault then gave a statement; they had him red-handed, and the revolver in his possession linked him to the Dominion Bank hold-up of July 4, 1950. But, he told them, he didn’t even know Boyd then. He said Boyd had given him the gun to use in the September 1 robbery of the Sheppard Avenue Dominion Bank, which he freely admitted to. In his statement, Gault gave the police Boyd’s name and a description of the truck. He also told them that Boyd had robbed other banks.

  Auto squad detectives Barry Lorimer and Frank Cater were at the courthouse in downtown Toronto when they were told of the bank robbery at Yonge and Lawrence. “We jumped in our car and went up to patrol the area northeast of there,” recalls Cater, who is now eighty and lives in Burlington, Ontario.17 “As we were getting up there, the licence number and a description of the truck came over the radio.” They had circled the eastern limits and were heading back west along York Mills Road, admiring several large new homes, when Boyd passed them in the opposite direction. Boyd had decided to drive to Pickering and, if Gault had talked, to wait for the inevitable.

  “Christ, Barry!” said Cater. “There’s the god-damned truck.”

  “What do you mean? Where?”

  “We just passed him. He’s behind us.”

  Traffic was light, and Cater pulled into a driveway and turned around. “At that time the auto squad had souped-up pursuit cars – the only ones in the department. We could do eighty in second gear. I didn’t want to zoom right up on him because we wanted to figure out what to do. We didn’t want to do anything stupid.” When Boyd turned north on Bayview Avenue, the detectives decided to try to pull him over. A short distance from the turnoff there was a slight hollow in the road with a guard-rail of wooden posts connected by strands of heavy wire cable. There was no oncoming traffic.

  “Get ready, Barry,” said Cater. “I’m going to push him right over to the side.” Lorimer unholstered his .32 Colt and rolled down his window. As Cater pulled alongside the truck, Lorimer extended his arm through the open window and aimed at Boyd’s head. “I kept even with the truck and then nosed him to the shoulder,” says Cater. “Both cars stopped, and Barry had his gun right under Boyd’s nose.”

  The startled Boyd had both hands on the steering wheel.

  “Don’t move your hands one inch off that wheel,” said Lorimer. “Not an inch.” Cater, who was six-foot-three and well over two hundred pounds, got out of his car with his gun drawn and kept Boyd covered while Lorimer went around to the passenger side. The Luger was tucked under Boyd’s belt and, Cater says, “he was shaking – you could see he was thinking about risking it and making a grab for his gun. If he had, he would have been shot dead, but thank God it didn’t happen that way.”

  With Cater’s gun inches from his head, Boyd didn’t move as Lorimer reached in and searched him. “In the waistband of the accused’s trousers I found a .9mm German Luger, serial #895,” he wrote in his report later. “This pistol was fully-loaded with 8 rounds of .9mm ammunition in the clip and one round in the chamber. The action was cocked and the safety catch was applied.” Boyd was ordered from the truck and searched more thoroughly. He was co-operative and seemed unruffled and resigned as he was handcuffed.

  “How did you get my licence number?” asked Boyd politely.

  “We had a description,” said Lorimer.

  “Did you get my pal?” asked Boyd, but the policemen didn’t respond. As they began to search his truck, Boyd told them they wouldn’t find any money. “My pal got it,” he said. Lorimer and Cater decided to complete their search later, and removed the truck and Boyd to No. 12 Station. Later, in a metal tool chest in the rear of the truck, they found a pair of rubber gloves, a Second World War commando knife, a holster, several lengths of cord, and a “quantity” of ammunition. Also mascara, lipstick, one towel and face cloth, a bar of soap, a blackjack, a spare clip for the Luger, and three road maps of Greater Toronto. Gault’s false teeth were found in a search of the front seat; Gault wouldn’t get them back until three days later, in the Don Jail.

  After being questioned by detectives at No. 12 Station, Boyd was taken to Toronto police headquarters, which at that time and until the late 1970s was housed in a grand Romanesque sandstone building at 149 College Street. It later became part of the Ontario College of Art. It was in a tiny third-floor room in that building that Jocko Thomas and other crime reporters spent much of their time looking for stories. The room, with its two battered desks, was right next to the elevators where prisoners were often brought in.

  In his book From Police Headquarters, Thomas remembers warm summer nights in the 1930s when, through the open windows, reporters could hear gunshots from nearby Queen’s Park Crescent. “Trigger Payne,” one of them would declare, and twenty minutes later, Constable Adolphus (“Dolph”) Payne would emerge from the elevator with yet another car thief.18 Payne was on the auto squad, and he had memorized the licence plate numbers of dozens of stolen cars. He was a good shot, and he had earned his nickname through his knack for shooting out tires when a suspect tried to flee. “There were no restrictions on the police use of firearms then,” says Thomas.

  Dolph Payne was a sergeant of detectives with the auto squad when he met Edwin Alonzo Boyd in October 1951. Payne was by then one of the most respected investigators on the Toronto police. In later years, many would call him “Canada’s Greatest Detective.” At police headquarters on that autumn day in 1951, the curtain was about to rise on the second act of a drama that would have a lasting impact on the lives of both Payne and Boyd.

  Dolph Payne, five years older than Boyd, was born and raised in farm country at Crooked Creek, a crossroads near Port Hope, east of Toronto. He was third-youngest in a farming family of eight children – four boys and four girls. The hundred-acre farm produced vegetable crops, cattle, chickens, and horses, and Dolph did his share of the chores from an early age. “They were wonderful people and he had a wonderful family life,” says his widow, Helen. “They were all brought up to be ambitious kids and to work hard – none of them were loafers.”

  Payne had to walk three miles each way to his one-room country school. Like Boyd, he didn’t go beyond the eighth grade. Eventually he left the farm and found work at a supplier plant in Bowmanville that sold rubber mats to General Motors. When it close
d in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, he moved to Toronto and joined the Toronto Police Department at $28.80 a week. The amount was considered “city pay,” which all municipal employees started at. If you worked for the city it was considered lifelong employment. To the banks you were a good risk – on $28.80 a week you could buy a home and raise a family.

  Even when he was a rookie cop assigned to the waterfront, where the ferries came in from the Toronto Islands, Payne’s superiors took notice. He was supposed to be directing traffic, but he had a keen eye and excelled at nabbing pickpockets who mingled with the crowds waiting to catch the streetcars.

  In the summer of 1934, Helen Croft, an attractive nineteen-year-old American, was visiting relatives in Toronto on her two-week vacation. One Saturday night shortly after eleven, she was alone waiting for a northbound streetcar at Yonge and King after a full day at the Sunnyside amusement park. The street was all but deserted, and she was concerned about her aunt and uncle waiting up for her at their house on Dupont Avenue. She hadn’t noticed the young, six-foot policeman, wearing the traditional English bobby helmet, standing quietly in the shadows. It was Dolph Payne, and he was smitten.

  Helen was a dark-haired beauty and she knew how to dress. She was from New York City, where she worked for B. Altman & Company, an exclusive department store. “I modelled for them, and when we didn’t have fashion shows, I would be selling ready-to-wear clothes in the ladies’ department.” On this night, when Payne walked out of the shadows, she was wearing a stylish beige and white checked linen suit and a wide-brimmed white linen hat.

  “He was very officious,” recalls Helen. “He wanted to know why I was standing there, who I was, where I was going.”

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “I’ve just come on duty or I would have been glad to drive you to your aunt’s place. But I’m off tomorrow and I could show you around Toronto. I have a Ford car.”