by Brian Vallee
“Well, if you’d like to come up tomorrow and meet my aunt and uncle and they think it’s okay, why it would be very nice,” she told him.
“So the next day he drove up in this shiny new Ford, and he had white slacks on and blond, beautiful hair.” Helen’s aunt and uncle approved, and Payne drove her to Wasaga Beach on Georgian Bay for the day. He was on the three-to-eleven shift the next night but invited her to meet his sister after work. After that, Helen and Dolph met for lunch every day until she returned to her job in New York. They continued their romance by correspondence. In November of that year, when Payne went to visit Helen in New York he brought along an engagement ring. They were married eighteen months later.
On the police force, Payne earned a reputation for doggedness, and he would often stay beyond regular work hours if he was pursuing a lead. “It annoyed me sometimes,” Helen remembers, smiling. “I’d have dinner ready and there was no Dolph. He loved his work, but he wasn’t much for running around with the boys. He enjoyed his home life.” On the auto squad, where he tracked down car thieves, Payne would spend hours studying the classified ads in the three Toronto dailies. He made careful notes of garages for rent, and when he no longer saw them listed in the ads he would drive over and check them for stolen cars or other goods. There is a good chance that if Boyd had not been caught after the last robbery with Gault, Payne would have eventually found one of his garages. Payne’s oft-stated credo was that no matter what crime was committed, there was almost always a car involved.
The Boyd case would be the most famous of Payne’s long career, but there were hundreds of others that he brought to a successful conclusion through his diligence. At six feet and over two hundred pounds, Payne was an imposing presence, but he was also amiable and soft-spoken. He was a master interrogator and could be intimidating when necessary. When he met Boyd he wanted a confession that would close the books on several Toronto bank robberies. Gault had given them considerable information, but because Boyd had always used disguises, Payne thought it might be difficult to make robbery charges stick in court if he pleaded not guilty.
Boyd didn’t reveal much in his interviews at No. 12 Station. He was tired when they brought him to police headquarters on College Street, but Payne and his partner, Ken Craven, would grill him continuously for several hours. When nothing worked, Payne, feigning anger, threatened Boyd while Craven played the role of “good cop.”
“Come on, come on now, take it easy, Dolph,” Craven would say. “This guy is a good guy, he’s going to tell us everything.” Boyd says his impression of Craven was that he was “a nice policeman – like my father. But the other guy – Payne – he looked like he wanted to kill me.”
There were different rules in those days, and when nothing else worked, Payne backhanded Boyd across the jaw. Boyd was stunned that a policeman would do such a thing. “If you don’t talk you’ll get a lot more than that,” said Payne. Boyd came to believe he wouldn’t be left alone until he told them what they wanted to know. He was pensive for a moment. They had Gault, they had his Luger, and they had his truck with the make-up and the ammunition. He decided to talk.
“You fellahs tell me what banks have been robbed, and I’ll tell you which ones I was involved in,” he said finally.
Payne and Craven left the interrogation room with Boyd’s signed confession admitting to six bank robberies and one attempted robbery. Edwin Alonzo Boyd was on his way to the Don Jail.
16
The Don
The Toronto Jail, more commonly known as “Don Jail” or simply “the Don,” earned a mention in a 1996 annual human rights report from the U.S. State Department for its decrepit condition. Inmates, the report said, complained of inhuman conditions resulting from overcrowding and inadequate health facilities. “Conditions were described as so depressing that some inmates purportedly pleaded guilty in order to be sent to other facilities and thus avoid awaiting trial in the jail.” And a study of the Don in the spring of 1996 declared that “the current conditions are inhumane for inmates, present untenable working conditions for the staff, and ultimately create hostile conditions for the larger community.”
The jail they described is not the original Don Jail but an annex built in 1958. But the complaints were remarkably similar to those that ultimately led to the closing of the original jail in 1978. For half a century, grand juries, royal commissions, and other critics routinely railed against it.
The original Don, at Gerrard Street East and Broadview Avenue, was designed by prominent Toronto architect William Thomas. The building had an inauspicious beginning: it burned down in 1858 before it was completed, and it would be another seven years before it was rebuilt and opened for its first prisoners.19 The imposing structure, of grey stone, has eighteen-foot stone walls and a four-storey centre pavilion with flanking three-storey wings. The Italian Renaissance columns along its front are tethered by evenly spaced, roughly carved stone bands that function as symbols of confinement and enforced conformity.
In Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, Patricia McHugh writes that “earnest Victorians, dedicated to such humanitarian issues as imprisonment and reform, took their prison buildings very seriously.” Latter-day critics, “appalled at the tiny cells, may not realize that correctional philosophy of the time called for many small cells where prisoners could solitarily think upon their transgressions.” The classically inspired jail sits serenely “on its rise of ground like a grand palace, entered by one of the noblest doorways in the city.”
Christopher Hume, architecture writer for the Toronto Star, agrees that the jail is grand, but he also finds it “thoroughly ominous”. In an article about prison architecture he wrote of the Don: “The scale overwhelms. The front door alone is enough to make a visitor squirm, no matter how innocent.” And he wonders if the bearded figure gazing down from the keystone above the entrance is Father Time, grimly reminding prisoners who enter of what lies ahead.
Whatever its worth as architecture, the Don has always been under siege from critics. When it first opened, outraged Toronto citizens described it as “a palace for prisoners” and much too opulent for low-life criminals. But by the turn of the century there was an about-face – now the jail was too dungeonlike. It has been called everything from a cesspool to a school for criminals. In 1928 a grand jury said it was a disgrace to the city. City Council agreed, but a few days later shelved a motion calling for a full investigation by the provincial government. Another grand jury described the Don as “an overcrowded dungeon, somewhat like the Black Hole of Calcutta.” In 1930 the Don was condemned again in scathing terms by the Ross Royal Commission. Once again no action was taken.
Ever since the jail’s first prisoners – Irishmen from failed Fenian Raids – arrived in shackles in 1866, inmates at the Don have sought to escape its confines. In 1869, the year public executions were abolished (the Don had its own gallows inside the walls), Mac Spellman, Charlie Jarvis, and George Pearce escaped. Known as the Spellman Gang, they sawed through the bars of their cells and lowered themselves to the ground on knotted sheets. In 1908, seven men gained temporary freedom: after spending weeks chipping away at stone and mortar, they slid over the wall on a rope and knotted blankets.
The most sensational escape was that of young Frank McCullough,
who was awaiting the hangman for the murder of a Toronto detective. He sawed his way out, thus becoming the only inmate in the Don’s long history to escape from a death cell. He was captured three weeks later and was hanged at the jail on June 13, 1919.
In 1906, guards searching the cell of Norman Neal discovered five hacksaw blades and promptly moved him to another cell. Five days later he took a sixth saw from its hiding place and sawed his way to freedom. In 1930, twelve hours after he was sentenced to fifteen years for shooting a policeman, a prisoner was back on the street after cutting through his cell bars with a hacksaw blade that had been smuggled in to him. And in 1944, bank robber Allan Baldwin, beginning a nineteen-year sentenc
e, beat and strangled guard Robert Canning after escaping from the jail hospital. Baldwin was captured almost immediately near the Humber River, and a manslaughter conviction was added to his record.
There were also many failed escape attempts. Most notable was that of the notorious Polka Dot Gang, which was active in southern Ontario and Toronto in the spring and summer of 1945, four years before Edwin Alonzo Boyd began his bank robbery spree. The gang’s name derived from the polka dot handkerchiefs they used to cover their faces during robberies. They specialized in holding up businesses like Swift Canadian of Stratford and John Duff Ltd., a Hamilton packing company. The gang liked to carry machine-guns and usually left their victims trussed up. In August 1945 two of the senior members of the gang, Kenneth Green and George Constantine, were involved in a shoot-out after police caught them breaking into Urquhart Motors at Dufferin Street and Eglinton Avenue. They evaded capture, and no one was injured. Two months later the police cornered a car on Dupont Street and captured three of the gang, including Green and Constantine, who were sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
More than half a dozen of the gang and their associates were in the Don with Green and Constantine, who were awaiting transfer to Kingston Penitentiary. One afternoon in the jail’s exercise yard the gang beat and tied up two guards, and then formed a human pyramid in order to hoist one another over the wall. However, the first one to the top was met by an armed guard, and the plan and the pyramid quickly collapsed.
After Frank McCullough sawed his way out of his death cell in 1919, there was an administrative shake-up at the jail and a new governor was appointed (they weren’t called wardens). He was a square-shouldered military man with the unlikely name of Col. G. Hedley Basher. Basher had immigrated to Canada from England in 1913 and was invited to join the Toronto police after capturing a man who had escaped from police custody. Basher joined the force when he was twenty but took a leave of absence to enlist in the Canadian army. He went overseas in August 1914 and within a year had been commissioned with the British Army. He gained prison experience when he was appointed commandant of a detention barracks at Aldershot, and then governor of a “field” military prison in France. After the war he returned to the Toronto Police Department as a patrol sergeant. A short time later, after McCullough’s escape, he was appointed governor of the Don. Basher went right to the death cell where the sawed bars had been welded back and ordered the window bricked up.
Basher was over six feet tall, solidly built, with broad features and a waxed walrus moustache. His intimidating appearance was complemented by a deep, forceful voice. He was a strict disciplinarian who during his twelve years at the Don would be feared by guards and prisoners alike. In 1931 he was transferred to the Langstaff jail farm just north of Toronto.
Basher remained at the jail farm until September 1939, when he was called up to help mobilize the Royal Regiment of Canada for overseas duty. Soon after it arrived in England, Basher was promoted and left the regiment to serve in North Africa and Italy. He had a reputation as the toughest commanding officer in the Canadian Army and received the Order of the British Empire (OBE). After being demobilized in December 1944, Basher returned to Toronto, where he was appointed by the provincial government to conduct a survey of all the province’s penal institutions. After he completed that work in 1945, he was appointed superintendent of the Guelph Reformatory.
In the fall of 1951, Basher was still at Guelph when Edwin Alonzo Boyd arrived at the Don Jail to await a preliminary hearing on six counts of bank robbery and one count of attempted robbery. Boyd’s career would soon cross paths with Basher’s.
Boyd arrived at the Don handcuffed to other prisoners. They were taken through the front entrance to the “bullpen” – a holding area where prisoners were stripped, searched, and handed the coarse blue-denim prison pants and shirt. They were also issued underwear and black lace-up ankle-boots. Boyd knew about institutional life, having spent time in a penitentiary and in camps and barracks during his five years in the army. But for first-timers, some of them serving merely five days for being drunk, the experience was unnerving. The stone floors magnified every sound, and with all the traffic in and out, the jail was as loud as a busy railway station. At that time, roughly sixty-five new prisoners were processed through the Don every day of the year, and every weekday at least that many were being moved in and out on their way to and from court hearings. Fear in the bullpen was palpable, with those in for minor offences finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with hardened criminals destined for Kingston Penitentiary. Once the prisoners had been sorted, however, the Kingston prisoners were separated from short-timers.
The jail was originally designed to accommodate no more than 231 male prisoners and 30 females, but that figure had been boosted year after year. By the time Boyd arrived on October 17, 1951, the official capacity for male prisoners was 341, but the daily average over the previous three years was 450. The cells were on three levels in the wings that flanked the central pavilion, which housed the front entrance hall, main office, governor’s office, visiting room, property room, and library. On the second floor directly above the pavilion was the women’s section, with a capacity of forty prisoners in cells and a small dormitory.
Boyd was one of about sixty “potential penitentiary men” awaiting a preliminary hearing or trial. Another thirty had already been sentenced to penitentiary but remained at the jail pending an appeal or awaiting a new trial. It was these “Kingston prisoners” who posed the greatest security threat.
The Don’s governor, Charles Sanderson, on the job just fifteen months, was progressive, fair, and reform-minded. He carefully studied each new prisoner’s charge sheet and previous record. He considered Boyd’s early brushes with the law during the Depression years as trifling. Boyd had served his country well during the war, and although he had robbed banks at gunpoint, he had fired his gun on only one occasion and had never hurt anyone. He had even apologized to a bank clerk for tearing her blouse. Boyd was on the Kingston list, but in Sanderson’s mind there were others who were much more dangerous and brutal.
The only precaution he took with Boyd was to keep him separate from Howard Gault. It was Sanderson’s policy to keep apart prisoners who had committed crimes together, so they wouldn’t be planning new ones on his watch. Gault, still missing his teeth, wasn’t anxious to face Boyd after giving him up to the police.
But Boyd was more angry at himself for choosing Gault as a partner in the first place. “He was a real moron because of the drinking. He thought that he was in command of himself but he wasn’t. Soon as they started threatening him he told them who I was and where I lived and everything. It was my own fault. If I had stayed on my own, kept in good physical shape, and planned the robberies properly, I don’t think I would have ever been caught.”
Two days after Boyd entered the Don, Dolph Payne and another detective visited Gault and returned his false teeth after he signed a statement acknowledging that he had left them in Boyd’s truck prior to the Dominion Bank robbery.
Charles Sanderson had started his career as a guard at the Guelph Reformatory in 1939, but left in 1941 to enlist in the army. He went overseas to England, landed in France on D-Day, and participated in the northwestern campaign to Germany. At war’s end he revived his career as a guard at Guelph. He was promoted quickly within the corrections system and by the summer of 1950 was governor of the Don Jail.
He arrived to find staff morale “the lowest of any institution I have ever been in.” The main cause of this was poor pay and the lack of a pension plan or paid sick leave. There were other problems: the Don was consistently understaffed, and many of the guards were not properly qualified or trained. Some of them, Sanderson knew, had got their jobs through political patronage.
Sanderson would tell a Royal Commission in 1952 that many unsatisfactory guards “were taking care of prisoners who, in many cases, had served years and years and years in institutions. They knew far more than the guards could d
ream of knowing. It was not a great state of affairs and I spent many, many nights without sleeping.”
Sanderson didn’t believe in prisoners, especially the younger ones, sitting around with nothing to do. He thought it was an acceptable risk to have those serving short terms – a month or two – working outside. Of the thousand or so prisoners who worked outside during his tenure, only two ran off. Both were under twenty: one had eighteen days left to serve, and the other only eight. “We tried to give them decent healthy work, and it was a calculated risk,” said Sanderson. The escapees, on that hot day in June 1951, were caught within half a mile of the jail. Sanderson himself and one guard gave chase and collared them.
Some accused Sanderson of mollycoddling prisoners. But he accepted the view of most North American penologists of the day – that the jail system was a disgrace, and that the idleness of prisoners was the main reason. “I have seen men lying around the corridors day after day, week after week, and month after month. It must be a terrific strain on them.”
At that time more than twenty thousand prisoners passed through the Don’s gates each year, most on remand and many entering jail for the first time. Sanderson believed that without counselling and recreation programs many first-timers would become habitual criminals. He introduced work projects, with inmates cleaning the brick face of the old building and improving the grounds. Residents living nearby congratulated him for the upgrades. Sanderson sent two of his officers to Guelph for training as counsellors and recreation officers. He allowed music and sporting events to be played on radios in the corridors and, improvising because of a lack of funds, set up an impressive recreation program.
He introduced five-pin bowling using short lengths of rubber hose as pins and beanbags as bowling balls. The long corridors in front of the cells were used as alleys, and regulation league bowling sheets were used to keep score. There were chess and checkers tournaments and, for card players, tournaments for bridge, cribbage, euchre, and gin rummy. In the exercise yard he introduced quoits – similar to horseshoes – using rubber hoses wired together to form small rings. The rings were tossed towards a peg imbedded in the ground.
