Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

Campbell hadn’t taken a hard look into Brockman’s eyes and didn’t yet realize that he was revved up on speed. Campbell also didn’t know that Brockman was sitting that night on a stash of pills that would be worth a considerable amount on the street. Campbell did understand that he was dealing with a dangerous man.

  Brockman was too slow to answer. Campbell recalls: “He never got more than two words out and I hit him. He went down.”

  Brockman barely touched the pavement before he bounced up with a gun in his hands. Now Campbell was the one caught off guard. “You never know what you’ll do when a gun’s pointed at you,” Campbell says. Brockman pulled the trigger from point-blank range. “The first one went through my arm. The next two went by. I knew he had a six-shooter and that he had three left.”

  It was the perfect time to sweat and panic and beg for the chance to go on living. A very different feeling overtook Campbell as he faced the gun with its three remaining bullets. The sensation surprised him. “There was such a calmness, I couldn’t believe. I said, ‘Finish it now, because I’m going to come after you.’ In my heart, I knew I was dying. I was sure he was going to shoot again.” In that moment of kill-or-be-killed, Campbell didn’t feel any hatred towards the man firing at him, just an odd, hard-to-define sense of regret: “Too bad that happened, because I liked him.”

  Jimmy Brockman didn’t want to be a killer that night. Perhaps he too had gone into the Royal relaxed and eager for an evening of comedy. Brockman had never hated Campbell and now he was a finger squeeze away from ending Campbell’s life. In that instant, when he literally held the power of life and death in his hands, Brockman did something totally unexpected: he threw down the gun and ran away.

  Campbell’s bullet wound was treated by the mother of a club member, who also happened to be a nurse, which saved him from going to hospital, where the injury would have been reported to police. Still, it’s hard to keep a shooting in a downtown parking lot quiet, and so it wasn’t long before a cop appeared at Campbell’s door. It was the same cop who had had so much trouble with his nerves while arresting Campbell after he burned down the family home. The police officer appeared to have gained a little confidence since their last meeting.

  He asked Campbell about his wounded arm.

  “I fell on a nail against a wall.”

  “Expect me back to arrest you.”

  “Don’t bother, because I fell against a nail. That’s all you’ll get.”

  Not long after that, Campbell was pulled over by RCMP officers. They too asked who’d shot him, and Campbell also told them that he hadn’t been shot. Then, according to Campbell, a Mountie said something chilling.

  “You know what? If you keep this up, we can shoot you.”

  “Well, you had better be faster than me.”

  The cop continued, noting that other bikers would be suspected if Campbell’s life ended with a fresh bullet in him. But again, they didn’t arrest him.

  With the police out of the way at least for the time being, Campbell set out on the hunt for Jimmy Brockman, to settle their unfinished business. He was confident that he was now the hunter and not the hunted. “At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I figure if I’m packing and there’s a threat, let’s get it on. I had no fear.”

  Campbell was taking a break from the hunt early one morning with his Choice friend Rick Smith, better known in biker circles as Smutley (pronounced Schmut-lee), in an Oshawa booze can owned by a man called Jewels. Booze cans are the watering holes of the biker world, the cool shores to which everyone—hunters and hunted alike—is drawn to refresh themselves. It was at Jewels’s booze can, between sips of beer, that Campbell finally laid eyes on Brockman sitting on a couch. It was just luck, and perhaps no small measure of stupidity on Brockman’s part, that brought them back together. Brockman had been living out of his car, with a machine gun on his lap, fearing the day when Campbell would finally call out his name again.

  That night in the booze can, Campbell went after Brockman with his fists, not his pistol. “I pounded on him. I heard, ‘Click, click.’ Jewels had got a shotgun.” Campbell didn’t nourish false hope that Jewels was on his side since the shotgun was clearly pointed in his direction.

  Smutley wasn’t packing a gun and the best he could muster was a large ketchup bottle, but he brandished it mightily, like a club. At least it was glass and not plastic, but few lunatics would consider it a deterrent against a loaded shotgun. “I started to laugh,” Campbell remembers. “I said, ‘Just what are you doing? It’s a 12-gauge shotgun. You’re going to run up with a ketchup bottle?’ ”

  Brockman saw the humour too, and also started to laugh. The mood for murder and revenge was irreparably broken. The shotgun and ketchup bottle were lowered and they all returned to their drinks.

  Decades later, Campbell still cherishes the story of how Smutley tried to come to his rescue with a ketchup bottle. He doesn’t expect many from outside his world to find it amusing, but it’s hilarious to him. “I realize, to other people who didn’t live that life, that’s not funny.”

  Campbell didn’t hold a grudge against Jimmy Brockman for shooting him. At the time he put the bullet in Campbell, Jimmy was stoned and figured Campbell was trying to rip off his stash of speed. In their world, that was a reasonable fear. “In his mind, I’m ripping him off. I liked Jimmy. I would have done the same thing. Only I would have pulled the trigger again. I wouldn’t have thrown away the gun.”

  Life was too short to take such murder attempts or beatings personally. It wasn’t as if Brockman harboured some particular ill will against Campbell. “He had shot people before me, and he shot people after me.” Things remained that way, on a friendly, live-and-let-live basis, until years later, when someone killed Jimmy Brockman with an axe.

  One night, all Campbell wanted to do was work himself through a hangover in a downstairs bedroom of the Oshawa clubhouse. This wasn’t so easily accomplished, as a childhood friend named John had pounded on his bedroom door several times earlier that night, rudely interrupting his sleep. When there was yet another knock at his door, Campbell’s bleary eyes settled on the .22 semi-automatic rifle he kept by his bed.

  “Get the fuck out!”

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to leave me alone?”

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Campbell emptied a clip into the door and the pounding stopped. He had no clue it was Peter (Rabbit) Pillman at the door, along with one of Campbell’s long-time friends. He didn’t really object too much when the club fined him five hundred dollars for pumping eleven bullets in the direction of his president, but he wasn’t happy either. “I didn’t think it was fair, because I didn’t shoot anybody—but I did shoot the door right between them. You’ve got to accept what you’ve got to accept.”

  Campbell was alone in the Oshawa clubhouse another night when his old friend Larry (Beaver) Hurren and another member named Randy came home late one night with two women they had met in a bar. Members all had keys to the clubhouse, but they had both forgotten theirs. There was also a way for members to sneak in, and that was their means of entry that night. By the time they were on the stairs, Campbell heard them.

  Campbell didn’t ask the intruders on the stairs to identify themselves before he fired a shotgun in their direction. “All four of them ran upstairs,” Campbell recalls.

  “Who’s up there?” Campbell demanded.

  “It’s Larry.”

  Once satisfied that they weren’t thieves or invaders, Campbell invited them down for a drink to show there were no hard feelings on his side. They wouldn’t budge or socialize with him. This time Campbell wasn’t fined, because chapter members ruled that Hurren and Randy should have brought a key. “They should have woken me up first. I was pretty security conscious.”

  Tough as he was in a fight, Campbell didn’t have a particularly strong stomach. His friend Larry Vallentyne from the Toronto Choice was even more queasy. That said, they were both holding
up well at an all-Canadian run in the late 1970s in Thunder Bay, which brought together members of the Choice, the Vagabonds of downtown Toronto, Los Bravos of Winnipeg and the Grim Reapers of Alberta. They mixed together and sampled a concoction of yellow jackets, black beauties, bennies, LSD, whisky, rum and vodka. It was called, simply, Concoction and was set out in a punch bowl and jugs with the warning, “Don’t drink this unless you’re ready for it.”

  There was a live rock band playing in a field, and Campbell and Vallentyne were the function’s shuttle service, driving attendees out to the bandstand in a souped-up Oldsmobile. They attacked their duties with ferocity, hitting speeds that felt like a hundred miles per hour and crafting dramatic stops worthy of a Hollywood stunt driver. Somewhere along the line they managed to tear off two of the Oldsmobile’s doors and back over a new Harley, which had been driven only once. The Harley’s owner was a good sport, letting his insurance company handle the damages, while riders in the shuttle service seemed overjoyed just to step out of the vehicle alive. “Larry is a very good driver. People were freaking out.”

  Part of the biker shtick for freaking people out was to kiss each other on the lips in plain view of others, so it wasn’t a shock when Vallentyne turned to Campbell and said, “Give me a little kiss.” It was a shock, however, when Campbell felt something live crawl into his mouth at the culmination of their smooch. “He had a live field mouse in his mouth and spit it into my mouth. I started throwing up. It ruined my whole day. My whole evening. I couldn’t stop barfing.”

  Potent as the Concoction was, there was likely no drink anywhere that would have been strong enough to wash the taste of rodent from Campbell’s mouth. A girl at the party kept asking him, “Why are you sick?” Answering her question only threatened to make him relive the experience and become sick again, but she wouldn’t back off. Finally, Campbell recalls, he replied: “ ‘He shoved a mouse in my mouth and it’s still stuck in my fucking mouth.’ Now she’s getting sick.”

  Campbell had noticed that Vallentyne was queasy whenever he was around a regular called No-Face in a bar they frequented. No-Face got his name from the day he tried to commit suicide with a .306. Through good fortune or bad shooting, he missed his brain but blew off much of his face, including his nose. No-Face got his life back on track, and now Campbell saw him arrive at the get-together in party mode. “He’s all dressed up. He’s sporting a fedora but no jaw. Two holes for a nose.”

  Campbell was chatting with some Vagabonds when he saw Vallentyne crawling out of a tent with a titanic hangover. “I’m talking about Larry being upset by seeing No-Face. I know Larry’s approaching. I said, ‘Then Larry turned around and gave him [No-Face] a French kiss right on the lips.’ Larry just started puking.

  “What a good party that was.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Biker Chick Magnets

  I heard a guy blindfolded his girl—a dancer—every night when he took her home. I asked him why he does it. He says, “Yeah, I don’t want her to know where I live.” Like it was normal.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Boy Scouts get merit patches for knot tying, semaphore and other crafts. At one field day, the Satan’s Choice awarded Campbell a patch on his club vest for performing cunnilingus on a menstruating woman (a red wing patch) and another for having sex with a woman with a sexually transmitted disease (green wings). Campbell scored a biker’s daily double of sorts that day, getting both his patches from contact with the same woman at the same party. To make it official, the event had to be witnessed by a club member, much like the Guinness Book of Records needs an official spotter before recording an achievement in its books. With that accomplished, Campbell declined to go further in his patch earning and didn’t seek purple wings, for sex with a dead person—not that there was a corpse available anyway. “The other ones are just too weird for me. I never saw anybody wear a purple patch. Nobody in Canada ever did. There was a white patch for sex with a virgin. I never saw that either.”

  When it came to their treatment of women, Campbell was actually disgusted at the conduct of some clubmates back in the 1960s and 1970s. He remains troubled by the memory of how young girls would show up at biker clubhouses as if expecting some sort of protection. If a girl looked too young, Campbell says he would give her a stern fatherly lecture. “I’ve sent many underage girls home in cabs.”

  Plenty of women willingly arrived at biker clubhouses, eager to party with the bad boys. One of the wilder biker parties of the 1970s was in the apartment of an Oshawa woman who had a framed eight-by-ten photo of her father on top of the television in the living room. What made the photo stand out was that her father was wearing a police uniform. It wasn’t until later, when evidence was revealed at a biker trial, that Campbell learned that the orgy had been electronically recorded by police, and that the officers who listened in on the bacchanal included the woman’s father. It might break another man to listen to his daughter in mid-orgy with a biker gang while flanked by his peers. However, the father in the picture that watched down from his daughter’s television was nothing if not zealous, and he rose high in policing after the incident. “They [police] call us sick. What would the other cops think? And we’re the bad guys? Holy cow! Think moral. To bug your daughter, that’s mind-boggling. Did his wife know? There’s a thousand questions there.” As Campbell sees it, much of the tension between police and bikers came from jealousy. “We’ve been with the nicest broads, we’ve partied heartier, and these cops sit there for days [in surveillance] just watching.”

  Campbell had an extremely low sperm count because of a case of mumps he contracted as a child, which made him doubt several claims that he made women pregnant in these late-night romps. “I’ve had four or five girls blame me for being the father. I just smiled at them.” There were other stories about women that he didn’t doubt, although they made his head spin nonetheless. “I heard a guy blindfolded his girl—a dancer—every night when he took her home. I asked him why he does it. He says, ‘Yeah, I don’t want her to know where I live.’ Like it was normal.”

  One good spot for bikers to meet women was the bar of the Genosha Hotel on King Street East in Oshawa’s downtown core. In Marvel comics, “Genosha” was a make-believe land populated by mutants that devolved into a full-fledged disaster zone. In Campbell’s day, the real-life Genosha wasn’t much different. It hadn’t always been this way. The Genosha was conceived as an impressive place to house visiting auto executives and salespeople, and its name was a combination of “General Motors” and “Oshawa.” Opened in 1929, it never rebounded after the stock market collapse later that year. Rescued from bankruptcy in the Great Depression by local notables, it was still grand enough that Queen Elizabeth, the consort of George VI, stayed there for a night in 1939.

  Over time, however, furnishings were stripped and the once stately Chicago Style, art deco–influenced hotel was converted into a rooming house while the basement became a low-end strip club. The Genosha had been a rock-bottom dive for quite some time when Campbell and his friend Smutley arrived for a drink one afternoon in the late 1970s and overheard two men at a neighbouring table boasting that they were members of the Satan’s Choice. It was clearly a ruse designed to impress a pair of nearby women. Worse yet, it appeared to be working, as if the imposters were writing a cheque on funds that weren’t even theirs.

  “The broads are going to go with them,” Campbell recalls. “They’re getting lucky. Smutley wanted to hit them right off the bat. We didn’t have colours on, so they didn’t know we were with the club.

  “I said, ‘You’re Choice?’ The guy answered, ‘Yeah.’ I hit him in the face and Smutley hit the other guy. I had had enough.”

  The fight was over before it began, as were the men’s hopes of afternoon romance.

  Of all the women in the bikers’ party sphere, one particularly stood out. She was of elfish stature, standing barely over five feet and weighing a little over a hundred pounds. She was Smutley’s girlfriend, and she was fie
rcely possessive of him, even though she was anything but exclusive. Her name was Daryle Noreen Newstead, and she loved having the same first name (albeit with a different spelling) as hockey star and Toronto Maple Leafs captain Darryl Sittler.

  Daryle would sometimes find other women for group sex with Campbell and Smutley. Despite the adventuresome sex, Smutley eventually grew tired of Daryle and dumped her. On the rebound, she travelled to northern Ontario and hooked up with a man named Darryl Gerald Dollan, who at twenty-eight was three years older than her. It was never clear to Campbell if Dollan’s first name was part of the attraction. Whatever the case, Daryle and Darryl soon headed south to avenge what she considered Smutley’s insult to her honour.

  Around four in the morning of November 18, 1978, Ontario Provincial Police constable Phillip Duffield noticed only one headlight shining from a maroon Datsun station wagon on Highway 17 near the hamlet of Thessalon, between the northern Ontario cities of Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. He called the car’s licence number into his police radio and was informed that the Datsun was stolen. Duffield, who had been a cop for only fourteen months, pulled it over on a dark, lonely stretch of road. Then he did that most frightening thing for a police officer working alone at night: he walked up to the driver’s side, shone his flashlight inside and asked the stranger inside to get out.

  “Yeah,” the male driver replied, and opened the door slightly, just wide enough for the barrel of a shotgun. The first blast caught Duffield in the left arm, while the second somehow missed him altogether.

  Duffield was able to squeeze off a shot from his service revolver before he radioed in to his dispatcher that he had been hit.

  The Datsun’s driver fled north off Highway 17 onto side roads, eventually pulling up at a well-lit, one-storey home. It belonged to the Kehoes, a retired couple brimming with small-town goodwill, who never hesitated to open their door to anyone in need.