Edwin Alonzo Boyd

by Brian Vallee

  Boyd was assigned to work in the canvas shop making straight-jackets and mailbags. His instructor reported that “he is not mixing with other inmates, but he’s doing the work of two ordinary men.”

  Ten months later, Boyd was still at work in the canvas shop. By then, prison staff believed his interest in religion was sincere, noting that he was maintaining his self-imposed isolation. “He seldom bothers with other prisoners, but will give his opinion if asked,” said one report.

  Boyd says his first three years were the most difficult because he was looked up to as a “big shot” after all the media attention over his criminal exploits, and when he rejected those inmates who curried his favour, there was some resentment against him. Boyd kept himself in peak physical condition with a rigorous exercise and weight-lifting program. He had been in Kingston just over a year when two inmates came at him from opposite directions in the exercise yard. Boyd was always watchful and had been wondering when someone would “test” him. One of the inmates was of medium build, and the other was stocky and much taller than Boyd. When they lunged at him, he kicked the heavier inmate in the testicles while simultaneously grabbing the other by the wrist, flipping him and sending him sprawling in the dirt. The smaller of the two brushed himself off but kept his distance. The other, quite pale, was on his knees holding his crotch. Boyd stepped back, eyeing the two men. “You guys know my reputation,” he said, his voice calm and measured. “You know the training I’ve had in the army. You know I’ve taught karate and judo. So you just think about what’s going to happen if you try to push me around again. I don’t bother anyone, and I want to be left alone. You had better understand that.”

  The men didn’t say a word as Boyd turned and walked away. A guard had witnessed the incident, but decided not to intervene. “In no time, everybody in the joint heard about what had happened,” says Boyd. “From then on, nobody ever bothered me again.”

  In 1955 he announced that his official religion was no longer Church of England. He now considered himself a Seventh-day Adventist. Despite his apparently sincere interest in religion, Boyd was kept under close scrutiny because of his notoriety and his reputation as an escape artist. “For the first three or four years in Kingston I was never anywhere where there wasn’t a guard,” he says. “At night a guard was even posted outside my cell. I guess because of the breakouts at the Don Jail they figured they had to keep an eye on me.”

  The media had often compared Boyd to Red Ryan and Mickey MacDonald, both of whom had escaped from Kingston. Ryan went over the wall on September 10, 1923. He was serving twenty-five years for armed robbery when he escaped with four others after setting fire to the stable adjacent to the east wall. Ryan, who was wounded, was captured in a blazing gun battle with police in Minneapolis three months later. He was suspected in a series of bank robberies. Ryan received thirty lashes and a life sentence when he returned to Canada. He was a manipulator, and convinced many clergy, politicians, and some reporters that he had reformed. He even had a visit in prison from Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, who declared that the convict was reformed. Ryan was released on parole in July 1935. Ten months later he was shot dead while attempting to rob a bank in Sarnia. He killed a policeman in the shoot-out.

  On August 17, 1947, Nicholas Minnelli, Ulysses Lauzon, and Mickey MacDonald sawed their way out of their cells, climbed up to the attic, and escaped over the wall. Minnelli was recaptured a year later after being stopped for drunk driving in San Francisco. Lauzon was found murdered in the United States, and MacDonald was never heard from again. MacDonald and Boyd had ping-ponged as the No. 1 most wanted criminal in Canada: when Boyd was out of jail, he was No. 1, when he was in jail, MacDonald was back on top.

  In 1954, two pieces of hacksaw blade, obtained from one of the workshops, were found in a search of Boyd’s cell and he was sent to solitary confinement for ten days. His religious zeal apparently wasn’t sufficient to quell the desire to escape.

  And he made a second attempt after he was turned down for parole in the late 1950s. “I just got fed up waiting for them to do something about me, so I started sawing the bars,” he says. The bars were in an office used to interview and counsel prisoners. The office was one of three in a row near a dormitory Boyd had been assigned to. Through an inmate he trusted, he was able to get several short pieces of hacksaw blade. Using a flat piece of steel as a screwdriver, he unscrewed the plate over the lock on the office door. It was an ordinary lock with three or four tumblers that moved up and down when a key was inserted. “I left the front tumbler and threw away the others,” says Boyd. He could then quickly pick the lock with a nail or a needle and enter the office. The single tumbler would fall into place and the door would lock behind him. For a month he worked on the bars of the office window.

  “I would do that in the evening in the winter time,” says Boyd. “It got dark early. The guys were watching TV, and the guards weren’t really watching the guys. I’d slip away and lock myself in the office and saw the bars. I had to work from the lights on the wall outside which was only about fifteen feet away.”

  As he had done in the Don Jail, Boyd used soap mixed with dirt to hide the cuts in the bars. “You had to rub the dirty soap on all the bars to make sure they all looked alike,” he says. “Several times when I was inside sawing, a guard would try the door. If they had come with a key, I would have been sunk. They couldn’t see into the office because the glass in the door was frosted for privacy when the inmates were being interviewed.”

  Boyd says that not all of the guard towers were manned at Kingston. His plan was to drop to the prison yard once the bars were cut and make his way to the base of one of the unmanned towers under cover of darkness. “You could attach a rock to a rope and catch it on the guard tower railing, or you could ease your way up the wall at the corner and go over the top,” he says. “I was in good enough shape to do that.”

  But his plan was foiled when one of the guards decided to check the bars of the office window. “They didn’t bother for months, and then all of a sudden one of them decided to tap the bars with a hammer and he found the saw cuts.”

  Those two incidents would be the only blemishes on Boyd’s otherwise perfect record in prison. By January 1960, his good behaviour had earned him 814 days of remission from his sentence. After five years in the canvas shop, he had moved on to the machine shop, where he became a welder. “Boyd has conducted himself surprisingly well,” said one report. “He was well thought of by the officers in the canvas department, and the officers in the welding shop where he now works, report that he is doing exceptionally well there.”

  During this time Dorreen Boyd’s visits to the prison dropped from once every two months to once or twice a year. She had been moving from apartment to apartment and job to job as she tried to raise the children on her own. It became easier as they grew older and found employment.

  By 1960 Boyd was in group therapy. His therapist felt that Boyd had not achieved much insight into the reasons for his behaviour and had made up his own mind about what was wrong with him. Boyd told them his “confused thinking” always seemed to place him in the position where he had to be the leader “directing and bossing others.” He saw this as a form of compensation for his lack of education or trade.

  “He is not afraid of returning to Toronto because he feels the police there are not hostile to him and that he has many friends on the police force,” reported the counsellor. “He is relying too strongly on assistance from outside rather than making the necessary efforts himself.”

  Therapy disclosed that Boyd wanted to prove to himself that he was stronger than the police (who subconsciously represented his father). He wanted to outsmart the police, but was not interested in harming anyone.

  Boyd’s second application for parole was denied on July 15, 1960. Soon after, Dorreen wrote to Pierre Berton, then a columnist and associate editor of the Toronto Star, saying that her husband had reformed and that there was no need to keep him in prison. His family
had suffered, and they needed him. She added that his parole had been rejected only because of public opinion, and she was asking Berton to write something in his column to help the situation. She also said that Boyd’s relatives “through all the long years have not so much as phoned me to ask me how we are and if we are with or without bread.”

  Berton contacted the parole board and asked about the status of Boyd’s case. He was told that the case was under review and would come up again automatically in two years. Boyd had made a lot of progress, and there was a good chance he would be paroled in 1962, although this sentiment was not conveyed to him.

  A parole analyst said in his report to the parole board: “This is the most notorious inmate in Kingston Penitentiary and possibly in any prison across the country.… During his incarceration, Boyd has given no cause for criticism. He has continuously rejected the adulation and preferred treatment from the inmate population which could easily have been his and indeed which was offered to him by reason of his notoriety.”

  Prison psychiatrist George D. Scott said of Boyd: “This man’s future does not seem to be unusually concerning. He is an intelligent man who understands clearly his role in society when he returns, and with his insight and relatively long sentence, he is not likely to offend. It would be my opinion that there is no psychiatric problem within this man which would interfere with his rehabilitation to society.”

  But Boyd’s imminent parole was placed suddenly in jeopardy when at 1:30 a.m. on November 24, 1961, prison guard William Wentworth was stabbed to death in Dormitory C, where Boyd had been living with forty-one other inmates. The dormitory was supposed to hold soon-to-be-released prisoners as a way of resocializing them in a group setting. For reasons never made clear, the prison had also assigned a number of dangerous troublemakers to that dorm. The prisoners had the run of the place, and it was no secret that there was extensive use of drugs and homebrew, and that some of the inmates had home-made weapons.

  Wentworth, alone and unarmed, was making the rounds in the dorm when he was jumped from behind in one of the washrooms and a knife was driven into the back of his neck. He was stabbed ten more times as he struggled and screamed for help, before bleeding to death on the floor. Wentworth left behind a wife, a ten-year-old son, and a fifteen-year-old daughter. (The son, Michael, killed himself in 1996, saying in a suicide note that he had never recovered from the pain of his father’s death. His sister Daphne has fought for years to get answers about her father’s death.)

  Boyd and the other prisoners were awakened by the struggle and the screams. Most thought it was a fight between two inmates and stayed out of it. Boyd’s bed was near the washroom, and he says he looked up to see inmate Ralph Cochrane coming out of the washroom, naked and covered with blood. Two or three of Cochrane’s friends helped him to the shower to clean up, while another cleaned up the washroom. Boyd and the others looked into the washroom and saw Wentworth on the floor. “There was blood everywhere,” says Boyd, “but right away there was a guy in there with a mop and a bucket cleaning it up.”

  Boyd and two other lifers found themselves in a difficult situation when the parole board announced that no one in the dorm would be granted parole until Wentworth’s killer was found. And there would be no parole-for-testimony deals. Boyd and at least two other inmates told the prison administration privately that Cochrane was the killer. But they would never testify in court as long as they were behind bars “because someone might come up and stick a knife in you from behind.”

  As it turned out, the Wentworth murder case would not go to court for more than thirty years. Prison officials and police decided there wasn’t enough evidence for a conviction. At the time of the murder, Ralph Cochrane was thirty-four. He would be almost twice that age, in June 1994, when he appeared in a Kingston courtroom to face a murder charge for Wentworth’s killing.

  With no resolution of the case in sight, the ban on parole for C-dorm inmates was lifted. Boyd was granted parole on September 24, 1962, and was released on October 1, two days before the announced date, to avoid the intense media pressure that had been building since news of his parole was leaked.

  The Parole Board issued a press release stating that the secrecy in Boyd’s case was a departure from usual procedure but was necessary because of the unusual circumstances and his high profile. “It is hoped that he will not be hampered in carrying out the terms of his parole by undue publicity.”

  The media ignored the board’s plea. On the night of October 1, Dorreen Boyd called the penitentiary to complain that her house was surrounded by reporters and that it was “floodlighted” as everyone waited for Boyd to show up. Boyd did not show up at Dorreen’s, nor did he call. Instead, he took a motel room in Scarborough and waited for the media pressure to subside. But it didn’t, and with the approval of his parole officer he called a press conference to get the inevitable over with.

  The newspapers and other media gave extensive coverage to Boyd’s return to society and continued to badger him after the press conference. Daniel Coughlan, head of Ontario Parole Services, who was in overall charge of Boyd’s case, said there shouldn’t have been a press conference, even though Boyd’s parole supervisor had approved it. Boyd was confused.

  Boyd already knew that Dorreen was with another man. He says he attempted to reconcile with Dorreen but failed. He wrote to D.M. McLean, regional director of penitentiaries for Ontario, to thank him for his help, and added: “Also, my good wife packed me in favour of another man, so I’m on my own and can put in full time on homework.” Boyd had signed on for an eighteen-month government retraining course at the Adult Retraining Centre on Jones Avenue. He would be paid $6 a day, for a five-day school week.

  Boyd rented an apartment and invited the twins to come and live with him. It didn’t work out. His son Robin, then nineteen, “was very hostile, and he wouldn’t do a damn thing that I asked him to do. They were both kind of standoffish. They didn’t really know me, you see. So I decided to move out, and when I did, Dorreen moved in, and I didn’t have much to do with them after that.”

  Boyd was living at a house on Page Street on December 13, 1962, when Dorreen and a male friend, Kenneth Caustan, arrived and smashed the front door. Boyd called the police. Dorreen said she was trying to retrieve some clothes. Police arrested her and her friend for being drunk. They were held in jail overnight and pleaded guilty in court the next day. Dorreen was fined $10, and Caustan $25.

  Boyd moved to an apartment nearby on Clinton Street. At school he had met sixteen-year-old Adele K., who came from an abusive background that Boyd says he related to because of his own upbringing. He found Adele easy to talk to and wanted to help her. In spite of the innuendo that followed, he insists that his relationship with the girl was never more than platonic.

  By now Boyd knew he was being followed almost constantly, and thought the authorities might be planning to pick him up. Boyd says Coughlan didn’t try to help him: “All he did was tell me I was going back in again if I didn’t toe the line.” Boyd believes the Ontario Probation Service wasn’t qualified to handle a parole lifer like him, because they usually supervised only those serving sentences of two years less a day in provincial jails. He says Coughlan tried to browbeat him from the first moment they met.

  “He had been an Anglican priest and he didn’t like the religion I was in,” recalls Boyd. “He ordered me not to go to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I guess he was afraid that there would be a lot of bad publicity if I was ever in trouble. He wasn’t taking any chances and he had the police following me everywhere. If I went into a restaurant for a hot dog or something, they would be looking through the window, and when I looked up they would dash off to one side.”

  Boyd says he was called into Coughlan’s Queen’s Park office one day for an encounter he would never forget. “Coughlan got into a real rage and he said, ‘Look, I used to be a boxer, and I could wipe the floor with you in no time at all.’ He said, ‘If I ever catch you not doing what I tell you,
you’re going to be in trouble.’ Boyd says the pressures on him at that point were so great that “I would have been better off in Kingston because nobody would bother me there.” Coughlan’s harangue brought Boyd to the verge of tears, and after he left the office, all of his old resentments towards authority began to surface.

  “I’d always been like that,” he says. “When somebody started pushing me, I would do the opposite to what they wanted. Coughlan didn’t know how to handle me, and he wasn’t going to take any chances, so he overdid it the other way.”

  Boyd might have overdone it too. He had started to think about robbing banks again and had even obtained a .22 rifle, which he modified by cutting off the stock. Then he thought it over and decided it would be foolish to attempt another robbery. “I knew that if I did it, I would be in for another twenty-five years. I realized I had to get rid of the gun, so I took it down to the ravine near Bloor Street on the other side of Bathurst. I cut it into pieces and threw it in the bushes.”

  By mid-December, Boyd was not co-operating and was expressing increased hostility towards his parole officer and parole conditions. And he continued to see Adele. She was his friend, and nobody was going to tell him not to see her.

  At 8:30 p.m. on February 5, 1963, Boyd was arrested at the City Wide Telephone Answering Service, on Bloor Street. Adele worked there, and he was waiting to meet her after her shift.

  Boyd was escorted to the Don Jail. A search warrant was obtained for his room at 353 Clinton Street, but nothing was found. The next day Boyd was brought before Magistrate R.C. Taylor, who signed the warrant of committal suspending his parole and ordering him held in jail.

  Parole Board representative R.S. Beames met with Boyd on February 12. Boyd was remorseful that his parole hadn’t worked out, and agreed that next time it would be better if he went somewhere else to live secretly. “I asked if this would not work a hardship on him because of his family and relatives,” wrote Beames later. “He replied that it wouldn’t because he has now lost all interest in all of them, and this includes his three children, which he now maintains are not his, but were fathered by other men.” Boyd also complained to Beames about Coughlan’s conduct.