by Brian Vallee
After each sawing session, Boyd would rub a mixture of soap and dirt into the cuts and run his hands up and down the bars to give them a uniform appearance. He was always amazed at how well the camouflage worked. “You would never know the bars had been touched,” he says.
They had started by sawing one of the outer bars first. It was difficult to get good leverage, and Boyd realized that even with the improved blade it was going to take several days to cut through the two bars. Their time was running out. It was late August, and they were scheduled to go to court on September 15. By the time they were ready for the final cuts to the two bars, the weekend was upon them. Saturday would be their worst day. They knew that the cells would be searched while they were out in the exercise yard, and there was always the chance that an overzealous guard would discover the cuts in the bars. They returned to their cells with great trepidation, but everything was normal. They were relieved that there was no exercise period on Sunday. With the four of them sitting at their table and the oak door open all day, the guards barely glanced at the bars.
At 5:45 the next morning, with a few firm passes of the saw blade, Boyd completed the cuts through the two bars. As the bars came free he handed them down to Willie. Standing on the radiator, Boyd began to pull himself through the narrow opening. His head and torso went through, but not his hips. Twisting and struggling for several minutes, he realized it was impossible. His hips were stuck, and Willie had to pull him back inside. Boyd was the smallest of the foursome, but Willie gave it a try anyway. He too was thwarted.
“We have to cut two more bars,” groaned Boyd.
They had no other choice. Suchan and Jackson were deflated as they watched the two smaller men struggle unsuccessfully to get through the bars. It would be another several days, and their days were running out. In the meantime, the cut bars would be held in place only with soap. The slightest nudge from a guard and the game would be over. Boyd fitted the bars back into place and smoothed the surfaces with his hands. It was impossible to tell they’d been tampered with.
Boyd felt badly for Lennie and Suchan, but he thought the fact that he couldn’t get through the bars was a sign that he shouldn’t be going with them. He decided he would help the others get out but would stay behind himself. Lennie tried to talk him out of it. “They’ll blame you anyway,” he said.
“I’ll just tell them I was asleep and didn’t see a thing,” said Boyd.
“They won’t buy it.”
But Boyd relished the idea of helping the others escape, locking the empty cells, locking himself in his cell, and watching the reaction of the guards and turnkeys. He and Willie were back sawing the bars the next morning. Two more heart-stopping weekends, including Labour Day, would pass before they were ready to complete their last cuts and remove the bars.
Guard John McNulty reported for night shift duty shortly before 11 p.m. on Sunday, September 7. In the rotunda he joined the deputy governor, Alexander Noble, and together they picked up their keys and headed for No. 9 Hospital. They arrived at the landing at exactly 11:10. The oak door was open, and Noble unlocked the grille gate and entered the corridor in front of the four cells. McNulty followed him in and went to the back wall to punch the clock that recorded his visit. Noble tried each of the cell doors to make sure they were secure while McNulty played the beam of his flashlight over each bed. “They had blankets over them, but their heads were visible,” he would later tell the Royal Commission. “As far as we knew they were sleeping.”
He said they opened the hinged window and flashed the light over the bars. Nothing seemed amiss. McNulty was asked whether he or Noble “took hold of the bars at all.”
“They were too high,” said McNulty. “You couldn’t climb on a table and make lots of noise to try the bars at that time of the night. You would have them cat-howling.” They didn’t want to disturb the prisoners. That disturbed the Royal Commission.
McNulty, like many of the guards, probably thought checking the bars any more closely was redundant. The men were locked in their cells right in front of him. They couldn’t get at the bars, so what was the point of checking them?
McNulty spent much of the night on the landing outside the open oak door. He said the cells were checked and the clock punched several more times, until the oak door was closed and locked at 4:45 a.m.
A few minutes later, Boyd was out of his cell listening at the grille gate. When he was satisfied McNulty was gone, he opened the other cells. Suchan climbed up on the table and held the pillow over the microphone while Boyd finished sawing the bars and Lennie prepared his stump for the ordeal ahead. He pulled on two pair of heelless socks, wrapped strips of newspaper around them, and fitted his enamel drinking cup over top. It wasn’t snug enough so he added more strips of paper. When the cup felt secure, he folded the socks down over the cup to attach it more securely. Meanwhile, Boyd had removed the two bars he had cut two weeks before and passed them to Willie, who placed one under his pillow and one on the floor. Within a few minutes, Boyd had cut through the other two bars. Willie put one on the radiator, and decided to keep the other for protection.
Finally, for the second time in two weeks, they were ready to go. Boyd easily pulled himself through the opening, grabbed one of the intact bars, and swung himself over a couple of feet to the wall dividing the jail cemetery from the service yard. Even with the extra bars cut out, the opening was just over nine inches by thirteen inches. It was a tight fit for Suchan, but he managed to wriggle his way through. Boyd helped each of them to the wall. They were lying flat on top of the wall ahead of him. He stared back at the window, debating whether to return to his cell. It was still dark and nearly 50°F. The air smelled fresh with a touch of fall. “I think there’s a guard out there,” one of them whispered.
Boyd hesitated for a moment. To hell with it, I’m going, he decided. Climbing over the others, he lay flat on the wall and crawled commando-style to the junction with the main wall, which overlooked the lane behind the jail. Peering over the wall, he spotted a policeman patrolling between the jail and Riverdale Isolation Hospital. He signalled to the others to stay low. “We didn’t know about the policeman until we got up there,” says Boyd. “I was lying flat with the other guys behind me and we couldn’t get off the wall as long as he was standing there.”
Five minutes went by, then ten, then fifteen. Dawn was beginning to break. If they didn’t get off the wall soon they would be spotted easily. “Just then somebody opened the door at the side of the hospital,” recalls Boyd. “And the policeman went in for a cup of coffee or something.”
Boyd signalled to the others, then moved to the main wall and slid back three of four feet to give them room to swing their legs down the side of the wall. Willie went first. It was eighteen feet from the top of the wall to the ground. He hung by his hands for a moment and then let go, landing with a muffled thump. Lennie Jackson was next. As he swung his legs over, the cup covering his stump clanged against the top of the wall and bounced to the ground. Nobody moved for a few seconds. When no guards or policemen appeared, Willie picked up the cup. Then Lennie dropped to the ground, followed by Suchan and Boyd.
29
Fallout
George Hutchinson, a guard at the Don for sixteen years, arrived for work at five minutes to seven on Monday, September 8. Following his usual routine, he picked up the keys for No. 9 Hospital. “That was the most important spot,” Hutchinson would tell the Royal Commission later, “and I liked to get that over with first. I had one key for the wooden door, one for the grille gate, and one that fit all four cells to let them out for the day.” It was Hutchinson who had twice reported seeing guard James Morrison arrive early for his shift and stop at Lennie Jackson’s cell in No. 3 Hospital.
On this day, Hutchinson walked up the steel stairs to the second level, met his partner from No. 10 Corridor, and proceeded to the landing in front of No. 9 Hospital. They unlocked the oak door and entered the antechamber. As he was unlocking the grille gate, Hutc
hinson happened to glance up. He saw the open window and a space between the bars that wasn’t supposed to be there. They entered the corridor and saw that all four cells were empty.
Hutchinson noticed that the table “was pulled underneath the microphone and there was a pillow on top of it. And one of the benches was at the base of the radiator and the other one on top.” He found one of the severed bars on the bench on top of the radiator, another on the floor, and a third under William Jackson’s pillow. The fourth bar was missing.
In Boyd’s cell, the guards discovered that the sink was plugged and that a bar of red carbolic soap “was lying in about an inch of water. Just enough to soften it.” Hutchinson also noticed that the prisoners had left behind their felt slippers and that Lennie Jackson’s enamel drinking cup was missing.
Dawn was just breaking when he hurried to the rotunda office to report the escape to W.J. Woodside, the day shift’s chief turnkey, who had replaced the deputy governor, Alex Noble, just minutes earlier. Hutchinson and Woodside checked the jail’s cemetery but saw nothing.
Guard Murray Clarke was also on the day shift that day. He had arrived before Hutchinson but was assigned to a different part of the jail. Just before 7 a.m. he noticed Hutchinson hurrying down to the rotunda “very agitated, with a serious look on his face.” Hutchinson told Clarke that Boyd, Suchan, and the Jacksons were gone. They had escaped.
Clarke ran to the guard at the front door and got the keys for the arms rack in the governor’s office. He loaded a rifle and a revolver and ran outside to the rear of the jail, where he told one of the patrolling policemen that the Boyd Gang had escaped. Two police cruisers arrived within minutes. “Seeing the jail was properly secured from the outside, I handed my rifle to another guard and gave the revolver to the man on the door,” said Clarke. A team of detectives arrived from police headquarters, and Clarke accompanied them to No. 9 Hospital.
Thomas Brand was shaving when the alarm buzzer sounded at his residence across from the jail at 7 a.m. He dressed quickly and was at the jail in five minutes. “The police were there before I got there,” he said. “The building was filled with them by the time I arrived.”
Brand joined the detectives looking for clues in No. 9 Hospital and ordered Woodside to conduct a thorough search of the building. There was considerable confusion and milling about as a result of the escape and the prisoners had not been given their breakfast. Brand told his guards to leave the investigation to the police and concentrate on the operation of the jail. The prisoner’s parade to breakfast was soon under way.
Brand accompanied Detective-Sergeant Bill Bolton in a search of the large vacant attic above No. 9 Hospital. They found nothing. As they came down the stairs to the second floor, they heard several people shouting that the prisoners were on the roof of the jail. More policemen had arrived, and they quickly ringed the jail. Some of them climbed nearby telephone poles to get a better view of the roof.
Jocko Thomas remembers being called out to cover the escape. “When I got there, the cops were ringed around the jail and the prisoners were yelling at them through the bars. The fire department had sent aerial trucks, and cops were at the top of the tall ladders, sweeping the roof with spotlights. The two sentries stationed outside the jail … insisted that no one could have got by them without being seen.”26
At one point Thomas was standing beside Chief Inspector Robert Anderson from the police department when an inmate yelled out a window, “Hey you flatfeet, they’re gone!”
Anderson turned to Thomas. “You know, Jocko, I think that guy’s right.”
Both prison officials and the police thought Boyd and the others must still be in the jail, because they were certain that the opening in the escape window was too small for the gang to go through. “Then one of the sentries remembered hearing a flock of roosting starlings suddenly take off around five o’clock in the morning,” says Thomas. “Well, they finally realized the prisoners flew away with them.”
Brand and Police Inspector John Nimmo drove out to the Peel County Jail to reinterview former jail guard James Morrison, who had been arrested for trying to help Lennie Jackson escape earlier in the summer. Morrison had nothing new to tell them. Brand returned to the Don about 2 p.m. and was told that his boss, Col. Hedley Basher, wanted to see him at Queen’s Park for a conference with ministry and law enforcement officials.
At the conference it was decided that Basher’s department would hold an immediate inquiry. Brand and all of his officers who were on duty at the time of the escape were ordered to attend. The inquiry began at 5 p.m. that afternoon and did not conclude until the following morning at 9 a.m. Six hours later, Brand was summoned to Basher’s office and told that he and seven of his officers, including Alex Noble, had been suspended immediately with pay, pending a Royal Commission investigation of the escape. In the meantime, officers from the Ontario Provincial Police would take over the guards’ duties. At the Royal Commission, which would begin only nine days after the escape, Basher would do his best to distance himself from Brand, the man he had hand-picked to take over as governor after Boyd and the Jacksons escaped the first time. Basher would stay on as deputy minister until 1959.
Mayor Allan Lamport and his police chief, John Chisholm, were both out of town at the time of the escape. Chisholm flew back to Toronto from a convention in Winnipeg as soon as he learned of the escape. Lamport rushed to the city from his cottage on Lake Simcoe. He made a brief visit to the Don on Tuesday morning, after which he spoke to reporters waiting outside. He referred to the guards as “morons” and railed against Brand without naming him. “Who in blazes was such a fool to put them in one cell block?” he asked. “The men were allowed to eat together, sleep together, and were practically given club car privileges.”
Lamport estimated that the Boyd Gang had so far cost taxpayers $1 million “in apprehending them, caring for them after their arrest, and bringing them to trial. There have been thousands of man-hours consumed at great cost. It’s pretty shabby treatment for our police who have done all they can and are let down like this.”
While Brand and his men were under attack from all sides, the minister of reform institutions, Major John Foote, said that the two Toronto policemen assigned to watch the rear of the jail “were definitely on the job.” Why then, asked a reporter, had they not seen the four fugitives? “That’s something I can’t answer,” replied Foote. But the Boyd gang had the answer: they had been lucky. If the policeman on duty had been waved into the hospital for a cup of coffee fifteen minutes earlier, he would have been back on patrol in time to catch them coming off the wall.
The coverage of the Boyd Gang’s escape from the Don Jail was unprecedented in the history of Toronto journalism, garnering more attention than Tong’s shooting, the Montreal shoot-outs, and Boyd’s capture on Heath Street.
Every story and picture on the first three pages of Monday’s Star was about the escape, and the three-line headline took up one-third of page 1.
The lead on the main Star story was written by Thomas:
Edwin Alonzo Boyd, master bank robber, and three members of his gang, regarded as the most desperate criminals ever locked in the Don Jail, have sawed their way out and every policeman in Ontario was alerted for the hunt today, with orders of “shoot to kill.”
In another of the page 1 stories in the Star, Eddie Tong’s tearful widow was quoted as saying the escape was “a disgrace to the city.” Her husband had warned his superiors “and the jail warden to watch them before the first escape was made. They didn’t listen then, and they’re not listening now. My husband said extra guards should be put on Jackson and Boyd. If they had listened to my husband the first time, he would still be living.”
Monday’s Telegram ran the main story on page 1, with the rest of the space taken up by three-column pictures of the gang members under this headline:
BOYD, KILLERPALS LOOSE/POLICE? SHOOT ON
SIGHT?/HUSBAND WON IT BE TAKEN ALIVE — MRS. BOYD
; A few days before the escape, Telegram reporter Tom Williams took a copy of a note written by Boyd to handwriting analyst Anne Shaw. Williams’ story appeared on one of the inside pages on Monday. Shaw said of Boyd: “He has pride and is level-headed. He has strong intuitive reasoning and a strong tendency toward literary ability. He is a cautious individual thinker and does not leave things half done.… He can’t be told anything … knows it all, and spurns advice. He allowed his abilities for good to be sidetracked. He is selfish and self-centered and considers only himself. And the police better keep a close eye on him.… He may be in jail now but his brain is always working. He is a clever man.”
So clever, reported the Star, that Boyd was able to con a number of clergymen who visited him at the Don before his second escape:
Edwin Alonzo Boyd is a master actor as well as a master bank robber, detectives said today.
He has been the centre of attraction to a large number of clergymen who came to the jail to visit him, and, according to some of them who spoke with police, he had convinced them of his sincerity to reform.
He was said to be “ready to take his medicine,” hoping for a term of 20 to 25 years, and earnestly praying he would not receive a life sentence, which he had been told he would likely receive for his 11 bank robberies.
Boyd is said to have prayed with some of the pastors who visited him. One mentioned him in his sermon as being a criminal likely to reform his ways.
In letters to his wife from the cell, Boyd spoke religiously, telling her he had seen the evil of his ways. “I have accepted the Lord,” Boyd wrote in one letter.
