Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  On Friday morning, Payne persuaded another neighbour, a Bell Telephone manager, to let the police use his front living room to stake out the house next door. They waited in the house all day and into the evening. Then, shortly after 9 p.m., Norman Boyd pulled up in the Austin. The policemen watched as he made several trips into the house, carrying luggage and clothing. He was so quiet that other residents in the house didn’t even know he’d been there. He left, but returned again before 10 p.m. With the aid of overhead street lights, Payne and Craven could see the silhouettes of two passengers in the Austin. Norman Boyd left the car and walked into the house. The lights came on in the second-floor apartment. Norman returned to the car and opened the door for Dorreen Boyd, and the two of them entered the house. When Norman returned to the street once again, the door to the Austin opened and another man got out. He was wearing a topcoat and a fedora and looked to be about the right build for Edwin Boyd. As he started up the walk to the house, Payne got a glimpse of his face and knew it was Boyd. He noticed he was carrying a bulging briefcase. The Boyd brothers disappeared into the house, and Payne breathed a sigh of relief.

  In the basement apartment, Gail Ostroski noticed that the Halls

  “were very quiet and went upstairs without making a sound. We didn’t even get a look at them. Mrs. Stoddard told us they would be very quiet, and I remember thinking how right she was.”

  Recalling that night, Boyd says that before entering the apartment “I looked around and didn’t see anyone watching, so I went across the street and into the house. Of course I didn’t know that the cops were in the house next door. I shouldn’t have trusted anybody else. I was the only one left, and the police were circling around me. When Norm and Dorreen put that car up for sale, it did me in. If I had been sensible I would have gone north on Yonge Street and rented a hotel room. That Heath Street thing was for the birds. It was too wide open, and I was tired. I hadn’t been getting as much sleep as I needed. I was making all the mistakes in the book. I should have stayed away from my family. I should have known the police would be watching them.”

  Once Boyd was inside the house, Payne called his boss, Inspector Archie McCathie, chief of detectives, who was primed to have his men rush in and subdue Boyd with heavy firepower. Payne objected strongly. His widow, Helen Payne, says “Dolph told his superiors he was in charge of the case and no one was going in until they were certain the Boyds were asleep.”

  “If we go in now, there’ll be a big shoot-out,” Payne told McCathie. Payne was aware that both Suchan and Jackson had carried briefcases crammed with weapons before they were shot down, and he was certain Boyd’s briefcase also contained a small arsenal. “It was quite a big satchel,” he told Helen later.

  By midnight, more than fifty heavily armed officers had the house surrounded, but Payne would not be budged. He and Craven would go in first, but not until he was ready.

  “Dolph and Craven were apprehensive,” says Helen Payne. “Dolph phoned me around midnight to let me know that Boyd was there and what they had planned to do. I had a pretty restless night. Before I went to bed, I got down on my knees and prayed that he’d be all right. I think I managed to get some sleep.”

  The day before, Payne had removed the chain lock from the back door at 42 Heath and had an extra key made. He would enter that door, and Craven would come through the front door a few minutes later. Payne at the time was forty-three, almost twenty years older than Craven. “Craven was a lot younger, and Dolph didn’t want him to get hurt,” says Helen Payne.

  Between them, Payne and Craven had one bullet-proof vest and a heavy blue-steel riot shield.

  “We’ll toss for the vest,” said Payne. Craven won the toss.

  To satisfy McCathie, Payne had agreed to a plan whereby McCathie would telephone Boyd at 6 a.m., tell him he was surrounded, and demand that he surrender. But Payne had no intention of following the plan. He thought it would end in disaster because Boyd would have read about police shoot-to-kill orders, even though no such order had been issued by the Toronto department.

  Payne’s concern was well-founded. In the apartment with Boyd was a stamped envelope with a letter addressed to the Toronto Daily Star. He had planned to mail it the next day. The letter stated that Toronto detectives “would go to any length to obtain convictions. They will do their utmost, with the full approval of higher officers to keep their weaknesses covered. They will use an order of ‘shoot to kill’ rather than intelligent directed efforts so well known in Britain’s Scotland Yard.” The sometimes rambling letter said that from now on the initiative would remain with him. “Death has always been a friend to me and I will meet it face to face. So keep out of my way and avoid bloodshed. Death means nothing to me when I am fighting for my family. Start seeing me in your every shadow. Start guarding your families … they are your weakness, for I am no longer a respecter of persons.”

  As proof that the letter was genuine, Boyd dipped his fingers in ink and pressed them to the bottom of the page. “My fingerprints are on this paper,” he wrote. “This will prove I’m not kidding.”

  About 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, ten minutes before McCathie was to make the call to Boyd, Payne and Craven made their move. Payne, with the shield in front of him and his .38 revolver in hand, used the key to enter the back door and started up the staircase with two men behind him, one carrying a shotgun. There were no landings. The stairs went directly to the door of Boyd’s second-floor apartment.

  Helen Payne laughs when she thinks of her husband creeping up the stairs. “He was not a dainty man by any means. He was about six feet, over two hundred. He never came in the house without me hearing him, so I don’t know how he got up those stairs quietly.”

  Payne opened the door to Boyd’s floor and entered the hallway, which ran the full length of the apartment to the front. He had studied the layout and knew that Boyd could be in one of three rooms. He thought Boyd must have heard them by now, and decided on a new approach: he would announce himself. Boyd knew him, and perhaps he would decide not to shoot it out. It was a gamble, but Payne felt it was the best strategy. He charged through the first door. “Boyd – it’s Payne!” he said in a loud voice. The room was empty. He ran to the second door, again shouting the warning as he opened it. He thought the room was empty, but Norman Boyd was asleep under the covers on a bed in the corner. Payne rushed to the last door. “Boyd – it’s Payne!” he hollered as he entered. “Boyd – it’s Payne!” Dorreen says she and her husband had pushed two single beds together and were sleeping soundly when she was awakened by Payne’s shouting. “I didn’t hear him coming before that. Everything was in turmoil, our nerves were on edge. Ed always woke up early, but we had stayed up talking for a while and didn’t get to sleep until after midnight.” She sat up as Ed, foggy with sleep, was just beginning to rouse himself. “Payne is here,” she said. Just then Payne came through the door and ran straight for Boyd, pinning him to the bed with the shield and holding his revolver to his head. “It’s Payne!” he said. “You sonofabitch, if you grab your gun I’ll blow your head off!”

  Dorreen says Payne “looked so silly” when he came through the door. “I lookup and there he is with a shield with a gun over the top. I laughed but I didn’t think it was funny, just nerves I guess. I thought, oh they don’t know Ed at all. He wasn’t Billy the Kid, he would never have shot Payne.” But Payne had reason to be cautious – just a reach away at Boyd’s bedside was his open briefcase with five fully loaded handguns, arranged with handles up for instant access.

  Payne handcuffed Boyd as the room suddenly filled with policemen. In the next room, Norman Boyd, still groggy with sleep, was also being handcuffed.

  The arrest of Edwin Alonzo Boyd by Adolphus Payne was a defining, and much discussed, moment in the Boyd Gang saga. Dolph Payne would always insist that Boyd could have shot him. Boyd’s memory of that moment is that he woke up with a gun at his head. Helen Payne says that Dolph told her Boyd “was just coming awake,” with Dorreen trying to
wake him up, when Payne came through the door. “That’s what Dolph told me. I suppose they were dazed. And once Dolph was on top of Boyd, he couldn’t get up.”

  Jocko Thomas: “The way I heard it from Dolph Payne, Boyd wouldn’t have had much of a chance to use his guns. I think Payne had his gun right up to Boyd’s temple.”

  Jack Webster: “From the number of weapons that Boyd had access to at that time, he could have shot Payne dead. But he didn’t, and Adolphus Payne was forever grateful for this. Through his long career, he had been in a lot of cases involving violence, but I had many hours of conversation with him and he’d become very emotional when he talked about the moment he entered that room and said, ‘Boyd – it’s Payne. Boyd – it’s Payne,’ and Boyd didn’t shoot him. That remained with Payne right up until the end of his life.”

  Payne once wrote down his thoughts of that moment: “At Boyd’s bedside, within inches of his hand was the brief case full of money, on top of which were five loaded guns. No doubt to shoot it out with me would endanger his own life, nevertheless that course was open. I am sure that it was not because he was scared of me that he didn’t shoot, because, quite the contrary, he was very calm, which is more than I could say for myself at that moment.”

  Jocko Thomas missed Boyd’s capture. He was still in Montreal covering Suchan and Jackson and the search for Boyd in that city. He flew back to Toronto when he learned of the arrest. The main Star story on Boyd’s capture was written by Frank Teskey, the paper’s accomplished two-way man (photographer-reporter), who was often called out to cover police stories at night and in the early hours of the morning. The lead on Teskey’s story was typical of the journalism of the day: “The climax of the greatest police manhunt in Canada’s crime history was written without a shot today when Edwin Alonzo Boyd, last of a trio of desperate gunmen, looked up from his bed in a Heath St. W. apartment into the muzzle of a police revolver.”

  What will never be known is whether Boyd would have tried to shoot it out if he had been fully awake when Payne entered the house. He might have trusted Payne not to “shoot to kill”, but judging by the letter Boyd wrote to the Star, that trust would not have extended to others. He would have known there was no chance for escape, but if he thought they were trying to kill him he probably would have tried to take as many of them with him as he could.

  In a Star story later that day, Boyd’s other brother, Gordon, who lived in Lindsay, Ontario, was quoted as saying that a Toronto policeman had warned Dorreen Boyd to have her husband give himself up to a newspaper or to his lawyer. “He told her if the detectives got word first, they’d come in and shoot him down.”

  Gordon Boyd also told the Star he was relieved that his brother had been captured without a shoot-out. “I expected he would shoot it out. I wouldn’t want to go to jail for twenty years. I’d rather shoot it out.”

  Gordon was worried about his younger brother, Norman. “I told Norman to stay away from him. Talking on the telephone is different, but he should have stayed away.” Gordon didn’t know where his older brother was during the hunt. “I kind of figured he was in Toronto, but I didn’t know anything about the Heath Street place. He’d have been much better off if he’d stayed in the Don Jail. He would have had a good defense and I’m sure he would have got off.”

  He said Ed Boyd was not a criminal type, “but he’s pretty smart. We all have a little larceny in our souls. We go to church on Sunday and beat it out of the others on Monday. But he’s not a vicious type.”

  Mayor Lamport had instructed Chief John Chisholm that he was to be contacted the minute Boyd was captured, and that they were to wait until he arrived at the scene before bringing Boyd out. Translation: he wanted his picture taken and some of the credit for nabbing the notorious gunman. Besides, as chairman of the police commission, he had as much right to be there as anyone.

  Lamport lived on St. Clair Avenue, a few minutes’ drive away. He had told his driver to remain in the area and to be ready at a moment’s notice. The mayor was asleep when Inspector John Nimmo called shortly after 6 a.m. “You better get over here, we’ve made the contact,” said Nimmo.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” said Lamport. As he was putting on his shirt and tie, the telephone rang again. It was Telegram reporter Doug Creighton. The newspapers had been tipped off about Boyd’s arrest, but Creighton was in Hamilton.

  “I was following a Boyd lead that somebody had phoned in to the office,” says Creighton. “I didn’t want to go to Hamilton because I was certain from a friend of mine on the police force that he was in Toronto. But the paper sent me to Hamilton anyway, and then they phoned up panic-stricken when they got Boyd on Heath Street.”

  Creighton was most concerned that the Telegram have a photographer at the scene to record Boyd’s capture. “I called Lampy and pleaded with him,” says Creighton. “They [the police] had called him to say they’d wait for him, and the mayor decided to have some breakfast.”

  “Doug Creighton phoned me, and I said ‘I’ll hold it up for you,’ and I did somewhat,” says Lamport. Creighton didn’t make it back from Hamilton in time, but Telegram reporter Derm Dunworthy and photographer Russell Cooper were there to witness Boyd being brought out of the house. Creighton managed a one-on-one interview with Boyd at police headquarters later that morning.

  Lamport, carefully dressed in a suit and tie, but unshaven, arrived on Heath Street to find the street blocked off by police cars. Reporters and photographers were arriving en masse about the same time. Lamport was so excited he could barely contain himself. He jumped from the car and headed quickly for No. 42. “It all moved under a run,” he says. “There was no walking.”

  In the second-floor apartment, meanwhile, Dorreen Boyd was fuming. She was in her pyjamas (Chinese yellow silk) surrounded by a roomful of men. “There were eight or nine bloomin’ guys in one room,” she says. “Payne said ‘get dressed’, but I wasn’t about to change in front of a roomful of cops. I was very upset.”

  “My wife’s not getting dressed until you put a blanket in front of her,” said Boyd. Inspector McCathie had arrived, and he held up a blanket but was looking over it.

  “You can look the other way,” said Boyd.

  Dorreen now laughs at the memory. “He did turn away,” she says. Ed Boyd was also allowed to change. He put on a shirt, tie, and sports jacket.

  When police checked Boyd’s briefcase they found $23,329 in cash. Another $639 was in his wallet. Norman Boyd had $1,608 in a wallet and two envelopes, and in Dorreen Boyd’s wallet there was $100.81.

  The fully loaded guns found in the briefcase included two .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolvers, one 7.35 mm Beretta automatic pistol, one 9 mm Luger automatic pistol, and one .455 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. The .38 calibre revolvers had been stolen from banks at Pickering and the Bank of Toronto on Kingston Road. The Luger had been stolen from the auto of a Guelph man in 1942. It isn’t known how Boyd acquired it.

  When Boyd’s clothing was searched, red and black pepper was found in almost every pocket. “The pepper was a precaution he took in the event a police officer stopped and questioned him,” Payne wrote later. “If the officer recognized him or was about to establish his identity, he would toss the pepper in his eyes to make good his escape, rather than resort to the use of a gun.” To Payne, the pepper was further evidence that Boyd did not want to shoot anyone.

  “When I was on the run I always carried pepper in my pocket in case anybody got too close,” says Boyd. “I could just give them an eyeful of pepper and take off. I don’t know whether it would have worked or not, but the police thought it was quite an idea and they passed it on to the newspaper people, who made a big deal out of it. I’d like to have thrown a handful in the mayor’s face. Wouldn’t that have been nice. When they took me down to the veranda to get the pictures taken, the mayor was so excited he was hopping from foot to foot. He had a habit of doing that. When he got excited he was always jumping around.”

  There was a ca
rnival atmosphere by the time the Boyds were brought down the narrow staircase. Neighbours had awakened stunned to a street filled with policemen, reporters, and photographers. Later they brought out chairs, and some of them served coffee to the policemen when they realized they had been up all night.

  Lamport went into the house just as the Boyds were being brought downstairs. He wanted to be seen coming out the door with Boyd and the police. The reporters and photographers moved in, cameras clicking and bulbs flashing as Boyd appeared in the doorway with the mayor and the police. With all the attention, Boyd’s spirits seemed to lift.

  “I didn’t think it would take something like this to meet your worship,” he said, nodding to Lamport. “Shall I smile?”

  “With the trouble you’re in, you’d better not,” said Lamport. “You can be thankful you’re alive. You’re in the land of a fine police force.”

  “Yes,” said Boyd, glancing at Payne, “you fellows did a fine job.”

  At 8 a.m., Inspector John Nimmo telephoned Eddie Tong’s wife to tell her Boyd had been captured. “My husband is avenged at last,” she said. “I couldn’t rest until all those men were taken in. I am so glad the police have been successful but I am terribly worried because my husband was not too well yesterday. He moaned all day and it made me afraid. If only he would get better everything would be wonderful.”

  The Star’s Alexandrine Gibb reported from Tong’s hospital room at Toronto General that he had managed a weak smile when told of Boyd’s capture.

  Later that morning, Dorreen Boyd appeared before Magistrate GA. Thorburn on a charge of conspiracy to rob and was remanded in custody to March 21. Norman Boyd was also remanded on a similar charge.

  Edwin Alonzo Boyd did not appear in court that day. He was with Dolph Payne and Ken Craven. There were matters to discuss, loose ends to tie up.