by Brian Vallee
Boyd was sent back to Kingston, then to Joyceville, and finally back to Kingston. In all, he would remain in prison for four more years before being released again on October 30, 1966. It was decided to send him out to British Columbia with a new identity. And this time a special condition was attached to his parole: he was ordered “not to communicate with the press and/or other mass media without the express consent of his supervisor.” He left Kingston with $217 in his pocket.
Epilogue
After he left Kingston, Edwin Alonzo Boyd held a variety of odd jobs until he found full-time work driving disabled adults to and from craft workshops in a small van. At night he worked as an instructor at a driving school. He bought an eight-year-old Nash for $175. After he was settled in, he was visited by his brother Gordon, a safety co-ordinator with Union Carbide, who was in British Columbia on business. Later, Boyd’s oldest son moved out to B.C. with his wife and three-year-old daughter.
Boyd identified with the handicapped and seemed to enjoy his work. It was while driving that he met Marjorie,34 a physically handicapped woman in her late thirties. “He was very nice, and very good about helping people,” recalls Marjorie, whose disability gradually affected her ability to walk, and today keeps her bedridden most of the time. When they began dating, Marjorie was shocked when Boyd revealed his true identity, but it didn’t change her opinion of him. She kept the truth from most of her family, whom she describes as “straight-laced.” Boyd and Marjorie soon fell in love, and in May 1970, after Boyd’s divorce from Dorreen was final, he and Marjorie married at the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Boyd’s parole officer was his best man. Included among the guests was the RCMP officer he was reporting to as a condition of his parole. Boyd bought a Ford van, and he and Marjorie took a three-month trip across the country, visiting relatives along the way.
Boyd was content and happy with his new life and new identity, but the media weren’t ready to leave him alone. Toronto Star reporter Earl McRae set out to locate Boyd shortly after the first anniversary of his parole. McRae, identifying himself as Dr. Lloyd Rickner of the National Parole Service, telephoned Boyd’s brothers and sister, his father, and Dorreen Boyd. He used same approach in each call, stating that the board was concerned because Boyd had not reported to his parole officer for over three weeks. From the responses he got from relatives, McRae was able to piece together that Boyd was in B.C., and that so was his oldest son. He called the son with the same story and was told that Boyd had visited “the previous weekend.”
It was only after the calls that Dorreen and Boyd’s son realized something was amiss. The son called Boyd’s parole officer, and Dorreen called the National Parole Service in Ottawa. The parole officer alerted Boyd that a newspaper reporter would probably try to contact him.
At 1 p.m. on November 22, Boyd called his parole officer from a senior citizens’ home where he was picking up a wheelchair patient. “I have a Toronto Star reporter in my bus, what do I do?” asked Boyd. He was told to drive to, and park near, the RCMP detachment. Boyd was there within ten minutes. McRae was taken into the RCMP office and grilled about impersonating a parole board doctor. McRae initially told police he was there with the blessing of the board, but he backtracked when Boyd’s parole supervisor came in. McRae said he had trailed Boyd for two days before revealing his true identity, and that he had enough material for a story, but wanted to top it off with an interview with Boyd.
Earlier, McRae had showed up at Boyd’s work place saying he was from the local newspaper and was there to do a story on the craft school. He took pictures, which Boyd tried to avoid being in, but McRae snapped one while Boyd was moving away. It later appeared in the Star. The Parole Board later contacted the Star’s management to complain about “unethical, illegal methods used by their reporter to track down the story.” The RCMP in B.C. felt there was sufficient evidence to lay impersonation charges against McRae under the Criminal Code, but did not proceed.
Boyd left his job and took another one driving children to a Seventh-day Adventist day school. Later he bought an old Chev thirty-six-passenger bus and converted it to a mobile home. He and Marjorie came east again to Ottawa for the marriage of Marjorie’s niece.
In 1976, Boyd, Marjorie, and Marjorie’s close friend, Pearl,35 who was handicapped from polio, moved into a house specially built to accommodate the women’s wheelchairs. Pearl says she liked Boyd from the moment she met him. “He was very friendly, very talkative, outgoing – a little pushy,” she says. “He was fun and a nice person. And he was a good thinker – he talked about everything under the sun. He was good to everybody, and very energetic. He was always wanting to help people. We got on darn well.”
The three have lived together ever since. Boyd runs errands, buys the groceries, cooks, and helps home care workers look after the women. On most mornings Boyd sits beside Marjorie’s bed and reads to her. “I try to read to her every morning because she likes to be involved in what’s going on.”
Boyd says he tries to do the best he can to look after his wife and Pearl. “That’s my philosophy, and I couldn’t possibly change it, because I can’t think of anything that would be better. I enjoy what I’m doing and I love the two ladies. We get along fine. We talk to each other.”
It seems somewhat incongruous that the once dashing bank robber with the flashing smile, in his eighty-fourth year, has spent most of the last twenty-five years caring for his invalid wife and her friend. He continues to exercise and lift weights, and seems content, although there is a certain longing in his intense eyes, which Marjorie and Pearl describe as “Paul Newman blue.”
Does Boyd ever think about robbing banks? “If I set my mind to it, I could go out and do all the silly things I used to do, but what good would it do? It would hurt Marjorie. It would hurt Pearl. I’d lose this house, and we all love this place. I couldn’t possibly bring myself to even think of robbing a bank, let alone doing it.”
In 1976, with the approval of the parole board and Boyd’s cooperation, Marjorie Lamb and Barry Pearson wrote a book about the Boyd Gang. Six years later, the book was turned into a CTV documentary drama, The Life and Times of Edwin Alonzo Boyd, with Gordon Pinsent playing Boyd and narrating the story. The movie has been shown across the country numerous times since its first release.
In 1988 there was an offbeat musical about the women connected to the gang. Called Girls in The Gang, it opened at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.
And in 1994, Boyd was back in the headlines when Kingston police re-opened the Wentworth murder case and convinced Boyd and several other former C-dorm inmates to testify against Ralph Cochrane. Boyd testified at the preliminary hearing, after which Cochrane was ordered to stand trial. But the case didn’t proceed. The murder charge was stayed when defence lawyers produced evidence that Cochrane had in fact been charged with murder in 1961, even though he had never been informed of the charge. Cochrane has always denied killing Wentworth. The judge ruled that it would be a breach of Cochrane’s constitutional right to a speedy and fair trial if he were to be tried more than thirty years after the initial charge was laid.
(Cochrane, a habitual bank robber, has spent much of his life behind bars, much of it in solitary confinement because of the suspicion that he was responsible for Wentworth’s death. He once went to court to win his release from solitary, which a judge described as “cruel and unusual” punishment.)
Willie “the Clown” Jackson was released on parole from Kingston about the same time as Boyd, after serving fourteen years. For a time he worked as a caretaker at a Cabbagetown church, where he often entertained youngsters with his jokes and his impressive repertoire of “crime does not pay” stories. The clergyman who employed Willie was asked by the Star’s George Gamester if he thought Willie was truly reformed. “Oh yes,” he said. “Except he says it’s still tough when he walks into a bank to resist the temptation to yell: ‘Stick ’em up!’ ”
In 1973, Willie moved to British Columbia and eventually looked up Boyd.
By then Willie was living with a woman and they had two children. Willie and his family stayed with Boyd, Marjorie, and Pearl for about four months before finding their own apartment.
Willie helped Boyd pour cement for a large front patio that would make it easier for Marjorie and Pearl’s wheelchairs. Willie eventually found a good job as a janitor and maintenance man. “They liked him, because he was a good worker,” says Boyd. “He’d do his work and ask them if there was anything else he could do. He was an easygoing guy.”
Willie’s biggest problem was that he drank too much, says Boyd. “When he was drunk, he’d say the wrong things all the time. If we were out somewhere, say to one of the stores on the main street, he would get out and pee on the side of the van. Marjorie didn’t think that was a good idea.” Willie died five or six years ago. “I guess he was just worn out,” says Boyd. “I don’t know.”
Dorreen Boyd had also moved out west. “I had a friend then. An excellent chef. We used to go to different resorts where he cooked and I waited tables.” After their relationship ended – he often beat her when he was drunk – she moved back to Ontario for a while, then back to B.C. again. She married another man, but they eventually separated, and she returned to Ontario, where she now lives quietly in her own apartment in a community east of Toronto.
Of her life with Edwin Alonzo Boyd, Dorreen says: “I’m glad I met him. We had good times and bad times, but I still love him.”
Robin Christopher Boyd, one of the twins, died of AIDS on March 7, 1991. “I didn’t even know he was sick,” says Dorreen. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew he was gay, but he didn’t want me to know he had AIDS. Her son’s name is on a monument for AIDS victims on Church Street in Toronto. Robin had a brief run-in with the law: In 1975 he was convicted of robbing a Safeway store of $20,000 and sentenced to two years less a day.
Dorreen stays in touch with her oldest son Anthony. Her daughter has a successful business career in the Toronto area and they see each other from time to time.
After Norman Boyd was released from the Guelph Reformatory he had trouble finding a job because of all the Boyd Gang publicity. But through the efforts and influence of his lawyer, Goldwin Arthur Martin, and former Toronto mayor Robert Saunders, Norman was hired by Ontario Hydro, where he spent a long and satisfying career. He and his wife raised two daughters.
At seventy-five Norman still has his flying licence, and he had his own plane, a Cessna 150, until 1994. “Once you get the flying bug, it’s pretty hard to get over it.”
Glover Boyd died in 1984, just a few days short of his ninety-fourth birthday. He had continued to live in Wiarton, Ontario, and married a third time after Minnie died. He and his third wife made several trips to visit Edwin in British Columbia.
“He was trying to get closer to me,” says Boyd, “but it never really worked. Maybe because of my frame of mind, or my way of looking at things. I just wanted information. I didn’t want to do anything to bring us together. He wasn’t the kind of father that I wanted to get close to. He had spent all those years wasting my life and my time and my talent. I missed out because I was really talented. I could sing. I could play musical instruments. I was good at sports. If he had treated me right and given me the approval that I needed, I would have been successful as a musician or whatever. I would have been fine. I never would have been robbing banks.”
Life was not kind to some of the others with connections to the Boyd Gang. Ann Jackson remarried after Lennie’s death. Michael, her son by Lennie, was adopted by his stepfather but kept the Jackson surname. Michael Jackson, now forty-five, runs a successful landscaping business in Calgary. He says his stepfather became his legal guardian after his mother became an alcoholic and the marriage ended.
Michael remembers his mother showing up at the house when he was nine or ten and living in Pickering. “She would grab me and take me away for a week. All of a sudden we’d be in Toronto, over around Sunnyside and Lansdowne. Her friends would all be drunk and my guardian would come and pull me out of there. It was real skid row.” He said his mother often suffered physical abuse at the hands of the men she was with.
In 1967, Michael was fifteen when his stepfather came home one day and said without sentiment: “Your mother is dead. She died three days ago. She was buried today.” Ann Jackson was forty. She had cirrhosis of the liver.
“I probably last saw her when I was twelve,” says Michael. “She was beat up as well at that time. Her life was tragic, but one lady said to me, ‘Maybe her death was like a mercy killing, and she died early in life rather than suffering for a long time.’ ”
Shortly after Michael Jackson moved to western Canada in 1976, someone sent him a copy of a book36 about the Boyd Gang that repeated the erroneous newspaper accounts of the Montreal shootout. “When I read that Tough Lennie used his wife as a shield, right then – boom – I closed that book. I visualized that, and I was disgusted because, as a kid, I saw my mother beaten up.” He didn’t want to know anything more about his father. But several years later, when he learned that the book’s account of the incident was false, he renewed his quest to know his father. That quest continues to this day, and he is working on a book about his father. He says that one of the late Arthur Maloney’s former law partners told him that Lennie did not die in vain, because his death lead to the abolition of capital punishment in 1976.
Lennie’s Jackson’s sister, Mary Mitchell, died of a brain tumour in the early 1960s. Michael Jackson says Mitchell betrayed his father by giving information to Eddie Tong about Anna Camero’s Monarch. “She brought my father down,” he says. “Her own brother. In letters she wrote to Lennie in jail, she says ‘You probably don’t want to talk to me.’ Why do you think that was?”
The Boyd Gang case helped the careers of many Toronto police officers, whose profiles were raised considerably by the intense media coverage. One was Jack Gillespie, who died in Toronto in May 1997. His obituary in the Star was written by Jocko Thomas.
The headline read: JACK GILLESPIE HELPED NAB BOYD GANG.
Thomas also wrote the obituary for Adolphus “Dolph” Payne, who died in 1981. “He became a national hero for breaking up the notorious Boyd Gang of bank robbers in 1952,” wrote Thomas.
Three years before Payne died, Boyd went to visit him at his Port Hope home. “Payne always had a sort of grudging respect for Boyd,” says Jack Webster. “He didn’t like him because he was a bank robber, but as a man he respected the unwritten code of honour that seemed to be out there. And I think that Edwin Boyd respected Payne.”
Payne’s feelings for Boyd were not shared by his widow, Helen Payne. “I didn’t want him there,” she says. “I wasn’t afraid of him, but I just didn’t like him because I knew all the trouble he had caused. He was a con man.”
The era of the newspaper battles that helped create the Boyd Gang is gone, but the memories linger. Val Sears, who worked for the Telegram at the height of the circulation war with the Star during the Boyd Gang era, was once quoted as saying: “The Telegram was one paper that came with the garbage already wrapped.” In his book Hello Sweetheart … Get Me Rewrite, Sears amended that quote: “I lied. It wasn’t garbage. It was the fragrant leavings of contemporary history. It was the refuse of a battle between the Star and the Tely that consumed 10 years of our lives, some of our loves, all of our skill. And oh what a lovely war.”
Doug MacFarlane, hired from the The Globe and Mail as the Telegram’s city editor, described the period as “great, exciting days. In my lifetime there was never a period to match those whoop-de-do years. We didn’t hurt anybody. We may have embellished. We may have stretched. But there was always a hard kernel of fact there.”37
Newspaper readers revelled in Boyd’s exploits. They had the satisfaction of participating vicariously in the action. They were even pulling for him, for to be successful in their eyes, Boyd had to get away with it – for a time at least. Besides, the banks were loaded, so who cared if they lost a few thousand here or there? But t
he death of Eddie Tong spoiled it for most. It was no longer a game: it was time for punishment.
Boyd was ultimately caught and imprisoned for many years; even so, robbing banks was the most success he ever had, and all the publicity that went with it made him famous.
One of his favourite movies was White Heat, starring James Cagney in his last great gangster role. The movie came out in 1949, the year that Boyd robbed his first bank. Cagney plays a vicious, psychopathic killer with a mother obsession. In the movie Cagney goes berserk in a prison mess hall when he learns of his mother’s death. The movie ends with him trapped and wounded on top of a gas storage tank, which explodes under him as he yells, “I made it, Mom! Top of the World!”
Boyd wasn’t looking for that kind of a fiery end. And he doesn’t want to go back to robbing banks, but subconsciously he may feel cheated that he can’t today walk into the public spotlight and declare “I did that! That was me!” In the end, Boyd, who craved approval and recognition, paid for his crimes not just with fourteen years in prison, but with a life sentence of relative obscurity.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1Tom Graham left the Toronto Police Department to go into the hardware business. Years later he was back in law enforcement as chairman of the Ontario Police Commission.
CHAPTER 2
2Bee Street was later changed to Cosburn Avenue.
