by Brian Vallee
“I think they have various other lines to find where a man is. I have never been an informer and I did not intend to start being one.”
Both Robinette and Maloney felt that Suchan was a credible witness and had survived, relatively unscathed, the questioning from both Gibson and Justice McRuer. The questions had been tough, but Suchan had not given the Crown the answers he wanted. Suchan said he was looking out for himself and did not have a compact or understanding with Jackson that they would protect each other – with violence if necessary. And Suchan had stuck to his story – he had fired to cripple the car, and had not seen Tong approaching when he fired the shot that caused Tong’s death.
But Lennie Jackson read it differently. He thought that to cover for him, Suchan had taken a lot of heat. And Jackson wasn’t a man who would tolerate others taking heat for him. He didn’t seem to fully grasp the tightrope that he and Suchan had to walk to raise enough doubts in the minds of the jurors about the Crown’s conspiracy theory.
Maloney wasn’t sure if his client should testify, but Jackson insisted. He was called to the stand at 11:40 a.m. In his testimony in chief, Jackson said that as the Monarch pulled over he saw a figure approaching “through the corner of my left eye.” Because he was wanted, he opened the door to run away.
MALONEY: You got out of the car, and what did you say was your plan?
JACKSON: To flee.… As I got out of the car, I started towards the back and I heard a volley of shots.
MALONEY: After hearing the volley of shots, what if anything did you do?
JACKSON: I had a gun and I pulled it out to protect myself.
MALONEY: Did you at any time that day fire that gun?
JACKSON: No sir.
MALONEY: When you were at the back of the car and had your gun out, what, if anything, did you see?
JACKSON: I seen a man lying face down.
Jackson said he knew Tong, but didn’t know it was him lying on the street that day because he couldn’t see his face. And he didn’t realize the car was a police cruiser until he looked up and saw the radio aerial. Jackson’s defence was that he didn’t fire his revolver, wasn’t aware Suchan was carrying a gun, and had not entered a pact with Suchan to resist arrest. He did admit that he was prepared to take violent action to avoid capture, and would have shot at the police – though not to kill. He said he wasn’t expecting Suchan to help him avoid capture, and therefore there was no conspiracy, and Tong’s death was not a joint act by him and Suchan.
Jackson’s testimony in chief went relatively well, but under intensive cross-examination by Gibson, with “clarifying” questions Jackson told Gibson that in Montreal he had been prepared to fire his automatic pistol “to assist me to escape if possible.” He said he didn’t recognize Jack Gillespie when the door to the apartment was opened.
“But when the door was opened, there is the man – you fired?” asked Gibson.
“The firing was approximately simultaneous,” said Jackson, who also testified he would not have given up in the Montreal shoot-out if it had not been for his wife. Jackson also told Gibson that Suchan had no choice but to help him.
“In the rules of your society, he could not refuse to, could he?” asked Gibson.
“Not after once, sir,” said Jackson.
After Gibson’s cross-examination, Justice McRuer had more questions.
MCRUER: I want to understand a little more of what you mean with reference to the purpose that you had in mind when you armed yourself with a loaded revolver. Was it a revolver or a pistol?
JACKSON: A revolver, sir … 32–20.
MCRUER: That is a revolver that will cause death?
JACKSON: Yes, sir.
MCRUER: No doubt about that?
JACKSON: That is right, sir.
MCRUER: What was your purpose in arming yourself with a loaded revolver?
JACKSON: To aid me in attempting to flee if I was apprehended.
MCRUER: . You would fire it to assist you in attempting to flee if you were apprehended - was that the purpose?
JACKSON: Not to kill, sir.
MCRUER: I am saying to fire it?
JACKSON: Yes, sir.
MCRUER: So it is perfectly fair and perfectly clear, is it, that as you went out and got into that car and drove to the corner of Lansdowne and College, you were armed with a loaded revolver, having in your mind that you would fire it if necessary in an effort to assist you in escaping lawful apprehension.
JACKSON: Yes, sir.
Jackson’s testimony under cross-examination had given Gibson all he needed to prove his conspiracy theory.
“I was shattered,” Maloney later told Jack Batten. “I listened to Jackson and I knew he had thrown in the sponge. He virtually admitted that he knew Suchan was carrying a gun, that it was loaded, and that he knew Suchan would use it to shoot anybody who tried to stop the pair of them.” Maloney later asked Jackson why he had given such self-incriminating evidence.
“If those bastards, that judge and that prosecutor, want me this bad, hell, I’m gonna give myself to them,” said Jackson. He could see Maloney was upset. “I let you down, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t let me down,” Maloney told him. “You let yourself down.”32
After the lunch break, Robinette and Maloney gave their summations to the jury, hoping to salvage what had been lost through Lennie Jackson’s damning testimony. Robinette in his thirty-five-minute address reiterated the theme he had established with Suchan on the stand – there was no common intent to kill Tong, he didn’t see Tong when he fired, and he fired to disable the car and not to hurt anyone. “If after all the evidence, you are not certain, you must find him guilty of the lesser charge [manslaughter].”
In an unusual move, probably in desperation, Robinette became somewhat melodramatic when he suggested that a higher force had intervened to save Suchan’s life in the Montreal shoot-out.
Maloney followed with a forty-minute address, telling the jury that Jackson did not fire his revolver and had nothing to do with Suchan’s actions that led to Tong’s death. The lawyer said Jackson “will not walk from this courtroom a free man, but he does deserve to live.”
In an effective opening, Crown attorney Gibson scorned Robinette’s contention of a higher power intervening to save Suchan. He said he had been working on the Tong case for months and months and “today is the first time I’ve heard it said that the case involved divine intervention.”
In the crisp, thirty-minute address that followed, he reviewed the facts of the case and said that both Suchan and Jackson had practised their shooting skills with air pistols in Anna Camero’s basement. He said that Roy Perry probably saved his own life when his raised arm took a bullet. “Otherwise he would have received a bullet in the same place as the marks on the dressmaker’s dummy – in the head.”
In his charge to the jury, Justice McRuer said, “If you feel these two men had formed a common intention to resist lawful apprehension by use of firearms, and one of the two fired a fatal shot, it does not matter which one fired the shot – both are guilty of murder or manslaughter.”
The jury retired at 5:55 p.m. and returned with a verdict less than two hours later. Both were found guilty of murder. Jackson and Suchan stood impassive as the verdict was read.
Addressing the jurors, McRuer said, “I cannot see how you could have arrived at any other verdict upon the evidence, but I know it is always difficult for jurymen who sit in judgement on their fellow men to arrive at this solemn verdict.”
McRuer displayed rare emotion as he sentenced Suchan and Jackson, in turn, immediately following the verdict. In a quavering voice he said, “You shall be taken to the place from where you came and there kept in close detention until the 16th of December, 1952, and thence you shall be taken to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. May God have mercy on your soul.”
Robinette turned to Maloney as they sat side by side at the defence table. “My God, I’ve never h
eard those words before,” he said.
After Suchan and Jackson were removed to the Don Jail, Boyd and Willie Jackson, whose trials were ongoing, were taken to different cells. No. 9 Hospital was now truly the Death Cell. Willie Jackson and Boyd would never see Lennie Jackson or Suchan again.
Ann Jackson heard the verdict over the radio and collapsed in shock. “It’s a life for a life, I understand that,” she said in an interview a few weeks later. “But two lives for one seems too many to take. I don’t see that he should hang for something he didn’t do. Lennie isn’t guilty.”
Ann also attacked the newspapers for repeating the lie that Lennie had used her as a shield in the Montreal shoot-out. “I came out of the apartment away ahead of my husband,” she said. “Lennie was well behind me. All my friends were upset by those stories. Lennie isn’t a coward.”
Robinette and Maloney immediately filed appeals of the death sentence, but their last hopes for clemency died on Friday, December 12, when Mr. Justice J.W. Estey of the Supreme Court of Canada decided there were no legal questions of sufficient importance to justify a full hearing before the Supreme Court.
In the two and a half months until their executions, Steve Suchan and Leonard Jackson gradually turned to religion for solace. Elizabeth Lesso had asked Robinette if her son could see a Roman Catholic priest. Robinette, who was not Catholic, asked Maloney to help. Maloney recommended the Reverend John Kelly33 from St. Michael’s College in Toronto. Father Kelly became a daily visitor to the Don Jail to see the condemned men. Suchan renewed his lost faith, and Jackson, half-Jewish and raised an Anglican, became a convert to Catholicism – with his mother’s permission.
There were other visitors besides Father Kelly. Suchan’s mother had been released from jail and came to visit her son, as did Anna Camero, who talked about their child, now eleven months old. Ann Jackson visited Lennie as often as she was allowed.
Although Ann had given up hope of a reprieve for her husband, she continued to speak out publicly on his behalf. “They’re not hanging him – they’re murdering him,” she told the Telegram two days before the execution. “No lawyer could have saved him. No one on earth could have saved him. As soon as the police caught him, they decided he was guilty – long before the trial.”
She predicted that her husband would go bravely to his death. “These stories about a man at the end always being scared and hollering and being dragged to the gallows – I’ve been expecting them. But Leonard isn’t that sort of man. He’s brave. He always has been and he always will be. He’ll go like a man.”
Leonard and Ann had agreed to name their son Michael. “Leonard said the boy would have two strikes against him if I named our son after him,” she said. “He does look like Leonard. His eyes are blue now, but I hope they change so they’re dark like Leonard’s.”
Robinette visited Suchan for the last time on the afternoon of December 15. Suchan had written a final letter in Slovak to his mother, and he translated it for Robinette. In it he urged her to be strong for his four-year-old brother. “Keep your head up, and look people straight in the face, because they are no better than you are. Straight from my heart, I love you Momma. And my small brother a million times. Please forgive me, Momma, for bringing you so much sorrow. Bye, bye, Mother dear.” Robinette was in tears when he left the cell. Suchan had come to believe that he had been spared in Montreal to allow him time to prepare his soul for death.
Robinette would, like Maloney, become a crusader against the death penalty. Ten years later, two others would be hanged back-to-back in the Don Jail. No one has been executed in Canada since then.
The temperature hovered just above freezing as three or four hundred protesters gathered outside the Don Jail at midnight. Swirling winds and light snow made it seem colder. Cars crawled past the jail, bumper to bumper. Inside, Suchan and Jackson appeared calm after spending three hours in prayer and meditation with Father Kelly. Jackson’s request to wear his prosthesis was turned down, and he was forced to walk to the gallows on his stump.
Father Kelly administered the last rites to the men, and each shook his hand before the hangman placed black hoods over their heads. The priest prayed as Suchan and Jackson stood back to back on the trapdoors. The hangman pulled the lever at 12:14 a.m., and they dropped through the trapdoors. They were pronounced dead at 1 a.m. on December 16.
Ann Jackson and Elizabeth Lesso had arranged for the bodies to be removed to cemeteries outside the prison for burial. They did not want their loved ones to be buried in the jail cemetery.
Edwin Alonzo Boyd had been in Kingston Penitentiary for two months when Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan were hanged in the Don Jail. It seemed to him unfair that Lennie should hang for Suchan’s rash act, but he also thought Lennie should have known enough to stay away from Suchan.
The back-to-back hangings added to the myth and lore of the Boyd Gang, which thanks to the media had surpassed all others for notoriety in the annals of Canadian crime. But had it really been much of a gang at all? When Boyd thought about it, he had only robbed two banks with Lennie Jackson, and three with Suchan. He had escaped from the Don Jail twice with Lennie and once with Suchan. But other than the eight days they had spent together as fugitives after the second escape, the gang hadn’t spent much time together at all. It certainly wasn’t like the gangs he had seen in the movies.
As Boyd pondered the years of incarceration facing him in Kingston, he could not know that the myth of the Boyd Gang would survive Leonard Jackson and Steve Suchan.
34
Kingston
Edwin Alonzo Boyd entered Kingston Penitentiary with clear resolve – to improve his education, study religion, and be left alone to serve his time. Being left alone would not be as easy as it seemed; he soon realized that his notoriety had made him a hero to much of the inmate population. He would have to work at being a loner.
Boyd was prisoner No. 1760, and home was a small cell with a fold-down metal bed, a fold-down table, a shelf, a sink, and a toilet. He didn’t know how many years he would be behind bars, and on his mind was the wife and three children he had left behind in Toronto. The twins were nine years old and Anthony twelve when Boyd went into Kingston. He wondered how old they would be when he got out.
The cell blocks in the 117-year-old penitentiary were like spokes in a great wheel, fanning out from the hub of the main dome. At the dome’s centre, on a platform of polished wood, was the bell that would dictate Boyd’s daily life for as long as he was in Kingston. “Everything had to be done by the bell,” he recalls. “You woke up by the bell, you went to work by the bell, you went to your meals by the bell … I think it was used deliberately to get the guys all riled up.” At 6:45 a.m. the bell would ring three times, the sound penetrating every block, range, and cell, and another day would begin.
In his best-selling book Go Boy, long-time Kingston inmate Roger Caron describes the bell as a symbol of oppression and regimentation to the inmates: “The bell was actually the golden cow for the prison staff. They all gathered around it.… You lived and breathed by the bell. It drove people literally crazy. In June 1959, the bell rang in the dome. This guy came charging completely across from ‘A’ Block like a mad enraged bull and butted the bell with his head. I don’t know what happened to him, but they took him away on a stretcher.”
Boyd says mental breakdowns were not uncommon. “Every once in a while there are guys going off the beam around you – smashing up their cells, breaking their toilets, and knocking the sinks off the wall. You hear it. You see the water coming down – sometimes into your cell. These things are just part of living in a cloistered atmosphere where you don’t really want to be. You’ve got to keep your own counsel and keep your mind occupied so you don’t go over the edge and turn into a moron. So I constantly read books.”
Boyd’s arrival at Kingston Penitentiary could have been like old-home week if he hadn’t been so intent on keeping to himself. His old partner, Howard Gault, was there serving time for the ro
bberies he had committed with Boyd. But Gault and Boyd didn’t care if they ever saw each other again. Fellow gang members Willie and Joe Jackson were also there, along with their brother-in-law Allister Gibson. Boyd says Gibson didn’t belong in Kingston, and the administration apparently agreed, because Gibson was soon transferred to Joyceville, a prison for less-hardened inmates about twelve miles away.
Among the others that Boyd knew in Kingston were Lennie Jackson’s mentor Frank Watson and Lennie’s half-brother Sammy Stone, who had arrived back in the prison about the same time as Boyd went in. This time Stone had been convicted of possession of more than one hundred heroin capsules. Watson was in for twelve years for trying to bribe prison guard James Morrison and for possession of counterfeit money.
When Stone put the word out that Willie Jackson and Boyd were somehow responsible for the deaths of Lennie Jackson and Suchan, Boyd thought he had to put Sammy straight.
“Look, you’re climbing up the wrong tree,” said Boyd when the two met in the yard.
“Well how come you and Willie are in here, and they were hanged?” asked Stone.
“Because they messed up,” said Boyd. “They killed a policeman.
We had nothing to do with it. So Willie and I are in here serving time, and they’re dead.”
Sammy was thoughtful for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. “I flew off the handle there.”
“We’re just in here trying to do our time, same as you are.” Said Boyd.
In his first interview with a penitentiary counsellor, Boyd said that although he was a good athlete, he had no interest in the sports programs for inmates. He wanted to concentrate on reading and studying. He did not brag about his past criminal activities, and said that the first half of his life had been a miserable failure. When he talked about studying religion, the counsellor warned Boyd that he might be greatly scorned and misunderstood by other inmates. Boyd said he was aware of that, but “if a man has a purpose, there is nothing that will shake him from it.”
