Wrong Side of the Law (12 page)

The trouble started with some minor brushes with the law. Then early in 1933, Hyslop was sent to the Oakalla prison farm for three months for being in possession of a stolen car. He hadn’t been out of jail for long when he participated in an armed robbery. He was caught and sentenced to two years in prison. By the time Hyslop was released, he’d become embittered toward society in general. He had a bad temper, and police had him marked as a “dangerous character.” There had been several incidents in which he’d been arrested for allegedly shooting at people without provocation. Investigating officers had found witnesses unwilling to testify against him, and had therefore been obliged to release him. Hyslop had supposedly said on several occasions that he would “shoot to kill” before he’d go back to prison.

Jack “Red” Hyslop (left) and George “Blackie” Lawson (right): Vancouver bandits who started out as honest kids but made some bad choices.
Vancouver Public Library.

Detectives were told to keep a lookout for two other members of the Hyslop Gang: William Davies, age thirty-one; and Earl Dunbar, age thirty-two. They learned that Dunbar had a room in a boarding house on Cambie Street. A pair of detectives watched the place for a while, but when Dunbar didn’t show up they searched his room. They found a handgun and a mask. There was also a postcard from a western American city. From it, detectives gleaned a clue that implicated James Lawler, age twenty-six; and David Anderson, age twenty, in the botched jewellery store heist. Both men were known Hyslop associates.

Then police had received a tip from a woman who, after hearing about the robbery and shooting, remembered seeing two men walk away from a car parked in a back lane. The car was still there. Detectives found the key in the ignition. The car was registered to a man named Donald McNeill, who had reported it stolen several hours after the robbery.

Two detectives went to McNeill’s home to question him. He seemed nervous and his answers weren’t at all satisfactory. When the detectives pressed him to tell the truth, McNeill changed his story. He said some friends who lived in a house on East Tenth Avenue had borrowed his car. When they didn’t return it at the agreed time, he went to their house to see them. They told him they’d had some trouble and the police were looking for the car, which they’d left in a lane two blocks away. That evening, McNeill said he’d read about the robbery and shooting in the newspaper. That’s when he phoned the police and reported his car as stolen. The detectives were sure McNeill wasn’t telling them everything. They took him to police headquarters for further questioning.

McNeill had given the police an address, but they didn’t want to just barge in and risk triggering a gun battle. They also had to be sure McNeill was telling the truth. Plainclothes detectives discreetly questioned neighbours. People told them several men and two women had been going in and out of the house for about two weeks. One day, two men were seen carrying in what appeared to be a heavy club bag. The day after the robbery and murder, two of the men had thoroughly scrubbed down the verandah, even though there had just been a heavy rain. It looked as though they were trying to cleanse the place of evidence. Neighbours didn’t connect the suspicious behaviour with the bank robberies. They thought the strangers were bootleggers.

The local grocery store owner told police the women did all of the shopping for the people in the house. They were very frugal at first and paid for their purchases with handfuls of change, as though they didn’t have much money. After the first bank robbery, the women suddenly had plenty of paper currency. They bought large quantities of food and cigarettes. Police searched for the house’s owner, a forty-one-year-old taxi driver named Fred Healy. He had disappeared.

At ten o’clock on the night of January 16, police cars converged on the house on East Tenth Avenue. Chief Foster personally directed the raid. Twenty-four officers surrounded the house, which was in darkness. Superintendent Harold Darling and Detective Inspector Gordon Grant took the considerable risk of going to the front door and ringing the bell.

William Davies answered the door, opening it just a crack. The officers shoved their way in and one of them pressed the muzzle of a revolver against Davies’s stomach before he could bolt. Quietly, Grant ordered the bewildered Davies to lead him through the house and not make a sound. If at all possible, the officers wanted to pull off the raid without a gunfight. As it turned out, there was no fight in this bandit gang.

Officers swept through the house and met no resistance at all. Davies claimed he was just a visitor. Earl Dunbar was trying to hide behind the living-room door. When he saw a gun in an officer’s hand, he threw up his hands and cried, “You don’t need to use that!” Charles Russell was hiding under a bed. He meekly surrendered without trying to use the three pistols he had on him.

A search of the house turned up several hundred dollars from the bank robberies. Among a cache of guns and ammunition was the revolver that had been stolen from the Bank of Commerce. A roll of tape of the same type that had been used to bind and gag the unfortunate taxi drivers was added to the mounting evidence. Dunbar and Russell were charged with murder, and Davies as an accessory to murder.

At a luncheon the next day, Mayor McGeer congratulated Chief Foster on the success of the raid. He was confident that the rest of the gang would soon be in custody. Foster told the press that officers not directly assigned to the manhunt were “scouring the city for all undesirables and underworld characters with a view to placing them in jail or driving them from the city.”

The police learned that most of the gang members had rooms in boarding houses and had been using the Tenth Avenue house as a hideout. Fred Healy had evidently rented it to them, knowing that they were plotting and carrying out bank robberies. The morning after the raid, Healy walked into the police station with his lawyer and gave himself up. He was charged with being an accessory to murder.

At a coroner’s inquest held on January 20, five witnesses identified Charles Russell as the bandit who had gunned down William Hobbs. Earl Dunbar was identified as the one who had shot Thomas Winsby. Throughout the four-hour hearing, Russell, who was known to have a taste for fine clothes and was nattily dressed, seemed amused at the proceedings. According to the
Daily Province
, he was “ice cold.” Dunbar, on the other hand, frowned often and “showed decided reaction to the evidence.”

For the next few days, newspaper headlines across Canada were dominated by news of the death of King George V and the accession of King Edward VIII. But in Vancouver, reports on the hunt for Hyslop and Lawson still merited front-page space. In the hours after the raid, police kept watch on the robbers’ lair, hoping the unsuspecting fugitives might return. Questioning of the captured bandits revealed that hours before the police closed in, Hyslop and Lawson had left in the company of two women, now identified as Mary Gorry and Frances Morton, both twenty-eight.

The vigil at the house proved futile. Then a rumour spread that Hyslop and Lawson had engaged police officers in a gunfight, but Chief Foster quickly dismissed that as false. Citizens were encouraged to keep providing the police with tips, which had been coming in at a record rate, but were cautioned not to approach the suspects, who were considered armed and dangerous.

Some of the tips the police received led them on wild goose chases to locations in Vancouver and nearby communities. Officers raided scores of rooming houses, only to come away empty-handed. One man the police picked up bore such a resemblance to Lawson that he could have been a double, but he was able to prove his identity. Chief Foster told the citizens of Vancouver, who were nervous about two potentially deadly criminals on the loose, “It is just a matter of time.”

A big tip finally paid off on January 21. It led the police to a West Pender Street apartment that Frances Morten had rented under an assumed name. She and Mary Gorry were taken into custody. In the apartment, detectives found men’s clothing and papers bearing Lawson’s name, including his birth certificate. They also found two boxes of bullets.

The net was tightening around the fugitives. They had little money. The loss of Frances Morten’s apartment had left them with no safe refuge. They were — in the parlance of the underworld — so “hot,” that nobody would take the risk of helping them. The only ammunition they had were the bullets in their guns. Detectives who had an ear to the underworld grapevine heard whispers that the pair had been talking about pulling another bank robbery. Every bank in Vancouver was placed on alert, but no robbery was attempted. Word on the grapevine also had it that Lawson was badly in need of medication for his “social disease,” and that Hyslop might be willing to give himself up if he could escape prosecution for murder.

A good lawyer might well have been able to save Hyslop and Lawson from the hangman. Neither had fired the fatal shot, and in similar cases the Canadian government had sometimes granted clemency and commuted death sentences to life imprisonment. But Jack Hyslop, who’d foolishly sought an escape from poverty through crime; and George Lawson, whose mental state might well have been affected by the ravages of syphilis, chose in the end to take their own way out.

It was yet another tip that drew the attention of the police to a rooming house called the Oaks Rooms on East Hastings Street in the city’s east end. Chief Foster was once again in charge as more than forty constables and detectives surrounded the building at 7:30 on the evening of January 23. Extra guards were placed at the entrances and at the foot of the fire escape. Beams from police flashlights probed the shadows as officers armed with revolvers, riot guns, and tear-gas guns took up positions.

The police had been told only that Hyslop and Lawson were inside; they didn’t know which room. Therefore, they had to undertake a coordinated room-by-room search. As one group of officers began on the first floor, Sergeant A. Hann climbed the stairs to the second floor. A detective was already at a desk at the end of the corridor, looking through the second-floor register. Hann decided to go up and begin a search of the third floor. He’d ascended just a few steps when the usual night sounds of a working-class rooming house — conversation, laughter, arguments, radio music — were shattered by two gunshots fired almost simultaneously. Sergeant Hann dashed back down to the second floor. A startled lodger stuck his head out of his door and said, “There is something wrong in that room.” He pointed at room number 40.

Hann pounded on the door and called, “Open up in there! Police!” There was no answer. He put his shoulder to the door and the flimsy lock gave way. Gun in hand, the sergeant burst into a room that was dark, silent, and reeking of gunsmoke. He saw at once that there would be no need for the riot guns and tear gas.

Jack Hyslop and George Lawson lay on the floor almost at right angles to each other, their feet nearly touching. Each had a bullet hole in the left side of the head. Hyslop’s left hand clutched a .38 Smith and Wesson. Inches from Lawson’s left hand was a .38 Iver Johnson. Other police officers poured into the room. One constable opened the window and called down to the police below, “They are shot. Both dead.”

Hyslop was actually still alive, but unconscious. He would die hours later in Vancouver General Hospital with his family around him. His father, who was a patient in the hospital, was brought to his dying son’s side in a wheelchair.

“If I knew that Jack was in the Oaks Rooms last night, he would have come out for me without any shooting,” his mother lamented. But as she was led away from his body she said, “It was better that it should have ended this way.” Perhaps she was thinking of the possibility of Jack being hanged.

Evidently Hyslop and Lawson realized the police had found them. Rather than face arrest, trial, and death on the gallows, they had stood face to face and committed suicide. Police and forensic experts dismissed a story that said they had shot each other, which would have been almost impossible.

Detectives found $135 in the bandits’ pockets. They had no spare ammunition. The seedy room in which they had reached the end of the line was sparsely furnished. The only items police found in it that belonged to the dead men were a felt hat, a pair of gloves, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

The Hyslop Gang was finished, but two members were still wanted for robbery. Thanks to postcards and letters that James Lawler and David Anderson mailed to their friends in Vancouver, the police learned they were travelling with two women on a leisurely tour of the western United States. Because American media rarely reported on events in Canada, Lawler and Anderson were unaware that Hyslop and Lawson were dead, and the rest of the gang in jail. They wrote that they were heading for Chicago where Lawler, using the name Mitchell, would check for mail at the general delivery window of the post office.

Vancouver police passed the information on to the Chicago police, advising them that the Canadian fugitives were probably armed. On January 27, Lawler was arrested in the Chicago post office. Shortly after, Chicago police officers broke down an apartment door, taking Anderson and the women completely by surprise. There was a gun on the kitchen table, and another one in a dresser drawer, but Anderson was seized and handcuffed before he could reach for either weapon.