Wrong Side of the Law (18 page)

As a condemned man, Buckowski did not have to see any visitors he didn’t want to see, not even police. An FBI agent went to San Quentin hoping to talk to Buckowski about a series of burglary-related murders that had occurred in New Orleans. Buckowski refused the agent’s request for an interview. Two Toronto police inspectors also travelled all the way to San Quentin, only to be turned away. It was therefore a surprise to the prison administration when Buckowski agreed to be interviewed by a newspaper reporter from Toronto.

Gwyn (Jocko) Thomas was a veteran reporter who had been covering Toronto’s crime beat for the
Daily Star
for many years. In October of 1951, he learned from reliable sources within the police department that they had tied Buckowski to the McKay murders, but couldn’t get into San Quentin to question him. Thomas got permission from the
Star
’s president, Harry C. Hindmarsh, to fly to California on the chance that Buckowski might talk to him. He took along photographer Doug Cronk.

In an interview room watched over by a burly guard, Thomas came face to face with the killer who had eluded the Toronto police for so long. Buckowski had a terrible rash on his face and refused to have his picture taken. However, he didn’t object to Cronk sitting in on the interview. Buckowski told Thomas, “You’d better take shorthand, because when I talk, I talk fast and it’s hard to get me to stop. I’ll give you a good human interest story, and in it will be everything I’ve done.” Then, smoking the occasional cigarette, Buckowski spilled out his life story.

The condemned man told the reporter all about his boyhood, his early career as a burglar, his time in Burwash, and his enlistment in the RCAF. Then came his marriage to Jean and his failure to break away from the street-corner gangs.

When Buckowski recalled the grocery-store robbery, he said of his shooting of Alfred Layng: “This fellow was putting his nose into something that wasn’t his business. He grabbed me. I said, ‘Let me go.’ He didn’t and I shot him in the leg. He still hung on and I shot him again and he dropped. I guess the bullet went through his heart. He didn’t mind his own business, but he was a good citizen.”

In Wasaga Beach on the Monday after the murder, Buckowski became alarmed when he saw the drawing of what he thought was his face in a newspaper. It was such a close likeness, he was sure he had been identified and the police were after him. Because he had lost the glasses he’d borrowed from Jean, he couldn’t read the text that accompanied the picture. Otherwise he would have known the image was a sketch which the police believed resembled the suspect, whose identity was still unknown.

“I figured right then and there they knew I killed Layng,” Buckowski told Thomas. “I was desperate. If they knew I killed Layng, they wouldn’t have any trouble knowing I had a car. I had to get out of there fast. I left my car beside the cabin I had rented and started out for Toronto. I got as far as Elmvale. Everybody seemed to be looking at me. I knew the cops would be out in full force. I tried a couple of cars but no one would give me a lift.”

What Buckowski told Thomas next was his own version of the McKay murders. Legally, it would never have stood as a confession. It was vague on some points and raised questions that would never be answered. There’d be no way of telling how much he embroidered the story, or what he left out. But his account held enough hard facts to leave little doubt of his guilt:

At the side of the road I saw a parked car. A young couple were in the front seat. She was asleep on his shoulder. I got in the back seat. I woke them. I told them I wanted to be driven to Toronto. I pulled out my gun and told him to get going.

He didn’t give me any argument at first. I was in the back seat and I held the gun at his neck at first and told him not to try any funny stuff. He drove fast and I told him to slow down because he was trying to get the cops to come after him. When we got to Toronto, I told him to turn off at certain streets. He wouldn’t do what I told him even though I warned him he would get shot if he didn’t. Once he said, “Go ahead, punk, kill me.”

He seemed to get mad. He drove against red lights and was going sixty miles an hour. I couldn’t make him slow down. He went against five more red lights. He turned along Eglinton Avenue, which wasn’t where I wanted to go.

This map traces Buckowski’s route from the time he left Wasaga Beach until he disposed of the McKays’ bodies.
Toronto
Star.

I hadn’t told him what I had done. What I wanted was for him to go along a side street. Then I would take the car. But when he started to drive all over the street on Eglinton Avenue near Bathurst, I pulled the trigger. I kept pulling the trigger. She started to scream. I pulled the trigger on her.

This allegedly took place on one of downtown Toronto’s busiest thoroughfares, with traffic heavy in both directions. Yet, nobody saw or heard anything. How exactly did the car come to a stop with a dead man at the wheel? Were there no blaring horns or curses from the vehicles behind the Dodge? Buckowski only said that no one seemed to realize that the man and woman slumped over the dashboard had just been shot.

I squeezed my way into the front seat and drove up a few streets until I found a lonely spot where I intended to leave them both. I mustn’t forget to mention the dog. He was a little sandy-haired spaniel. He’d been very quiet until just after his master was dead and then he began howling.

I pulled the man’s body out of the car. I knew he was dead because I got him many times. She was still groaning. Just after I got his body out and dragged it to a place where I figured it wouldn’t be found, the dog started barking some more. There was commotion. Someone was coming and I had to get out of there quick. She was still groaning.

Buckowski said he dragged the woman over the front seat into the back and covered her with a rug. Then he drove to the Christie Street Hospital parking lot. “When I got there,” he said, “I knew she was dead.” He wiped the car down to remove his fingerprints. He said he couldn’t bring himself to kill the dog because it reminded him of his own little spaniel, so he left Toby tied to a bumper.

Buckowski told Thomas he spent that night at the home of a friend. The next day he learned that the police had no idea who had killed Alfred Layng. “I’ll tell you, I felt sick,” he said to Thomas. “What a nightmare when I realized that what I saw of myself was not a police picture but a drawing.” Buckowski said he regretted killing Robert and Gloria McKay, whom he called “a couple of sweet kids.”

When Thomas asked Buckowski if he had any message for the youth of Toronto, he dismissed the question by saying, “I’m no grandstander or wise guy.” At one point during the interview, Buckowski became a little nostalgic and asked Thomas about three of his old cronies from the hangout at Bloor and Bathurst: “Norm, Buster and Teddy.” Thomas was familiar with all three because of their frequent appearances in police court. Before the guard took Buckowski back to his cell, he told Thomas, “My life is a nightmare that is soon to come to an end.”

Jocko Thomas’s death row interview with Stanley Buckowski was one of the biggest scoops of his long and distinguished career. It solved the mystery of the McKay murders and provided an insight into the life of a killer. The story won Thomas a National Newspaper Award. But it also had one unpleasant result Thomas would have preferred to avoid. The
Star
sent him back to San Quentin in May of 1952 to cover the execution.

Newspaper artist’s sketch of the location where Robert McKay’s body was found.
Toronto Star.

Buckowski’s lawyer, Ralph Rubin of San Francisco, had been hard at work on a petition that would have postponed his client’s date with the gas chamber by at least a few months. However, he needed Buckowski’s signature on it and Buckowski stubbornly refused to sign. The night before the execution, Rubin pleaded with Buckowski one last time. Buckowski called the man who was trying to save his life a “shyster,” and cried, “Leave me alone! Get out!” A Roman Catholic priest who came to offer spiritual comfort was treated just as scornfully. Buckowski said he just wanted to “die in peace.”

Buckowski spent his last night listening to music from a stack of phonograph records. He’d been provided with headphones so as not to disturb the other death row inmates. At ten o’clock on the morning of May 9, he calmly walked to the “Green Monster,” as the residents of San Quentin called the gas chamber, the latest “humane” device for administering capital punishment. Jocko Thomas, who witnessed the execution, called it “sickening.” He watched Buckowski writhe in agony and froth at the mouth. The tough reporter had to turn his face away. The convulsions finally stopped after thirteen long minutes.

Stanley Buckowski’s body was buried in an unmarked grave, mourned by no one. His wife Jean was in Vancouver, working as a waitress. His father, according to information given to Jocko Thomas, had died from a broken heart, refusing to believe his son was a murderer. When Robert McKay’s widowed mother, Nancy, was told that her son’s killer had been executed, she spoke the final words in the sordid tale of Stanley Buckowski. “This is the last chapter,” she said. “Poor Bob … I’ve cried too much to cry anymore. I’m glad it’s settled.”

Joseph McAuliffe:

Lethal Pursuit

A
t
2:45 p.m. on Wednesday, June 21, 1950, twenty-three-year-old Lavona Leedham was in her teller’s cage in the Imperial Bank of Canada on the main street of Langton, population 250. It was the only bank in that community in the heart of southern Ontario’s tobacco-farming country. Mrs. Leedham was serving the lone customer in the bank, Frank Hall, owner of a general store in nearby Cultus, when she happened to look through the bank’s glass-panelled front doors and saw a black Ford Meteor pull up. The driver got out and entered the bank. Mrs. Leedham later reported:

He was wearing a sun helmet and sun glasses, and was carrying what I thought was a cheque or a small piece of paper. As he stood near Mr. Hall he pulled a gun from under his coat and said, “Alright, back up everyone! In the corner and face the wall!”

I remember him saying to me, “Back out of the cage.” I didn’t realize at first that it was a hold-up and he told me again to get out of the cage.

There is a glass partition above the counter on the north side of the teller’s cage and the man moved further towards the north wall. Before leaving the cage I tripped the burglar alarm. This alarm rings in Van Hooren’s garage to indicate a hold-up. I left the cage and assembled with the others in the northeast corner. There were five of us. The bank has a staff of six but the manager, Mr. A.S. Beattie, had gone upstairs to his apartment a few minutes before.

The bandit wearing the sun helmet and dark glasses was thirty-two-year-old Joseph Herbert McAuliffe. Originally from North Bay, Ontario, he’d been raised by an aunt in Windsor after his mother died. Prior to the Second World War, McAuliffe had been in trouble with the law over some petty burglaries and had used the alias Fred Walker. During the war he had been a sergeant in the Canadian army, and served as a military artificer, responsible for the maintenance of firearms. After the war, McAuliffe had returned to crime, operating principally as a counterfeiter. He used his skills as a machinist to make bogus fifty-cent coins. Considering the buying power of a dollar in 1950, that wasn’t quite as small-time as it might seem today. It was a need for cash to upgrade his equipment that compelled McAuliffe to plan a bank robbery.

Artist’s sketch of the disguised bandit who held up the Bank of Canada in Langton, Ontario, on June 21, 1950.
Toronto Star.

The gun that Lavona Leedham had first seen in the bandit’s hand was a .38 police service revolver. McAuliffe used it to force Frank Hall to assist him in the robbery. A grill and a locked gate separated the front area of the bank from the back, where the tellers’ drawers and the vault were. McAuliffe climbed over the gate and then ordered Hall to follow. McAuliffe then pulled a folded paper shopping bag out of his coat and told Hall to fill it with money from the cash drawers. To discourage any hesitation or heroics, the robber drew a second gun: an automatic Colt pistol.

Meanwhile, the alarm Lavona Leedham had tripped went off in Lambert Van Hooren’s Shell gas station and pool hall a short distance down the street from the bank. Van Hooren told his wife it looked like there was trouble at the bank. Cecil Aspden, the local school-bus driver and rural-route mailman, thought he overheard Van Hooren say there was a fire at the bank.

This wasn’t the first time bandits had hit the Langton bank. On September 12, 1945, four gunmen had robbed it of over $30,000. They were eventually caught and packed off to prison. At that time an Ontario Provincial Police constable was stationed in Langton. However, in a departmental shuffle made in the autumn of 1949, OPP constables posted in small communities like Langston were moved to a detachment in Simcoe, twelve miles away. The absence of a police officer in Langton might well have been one of McAuliffe’s reasons for choosing the bank there.

Instead of calling the police in Simcoe, Van Hooren went to investigate himself. There had been several false alarms at the bank in the past. McAuliffe saw him peering through the window and gestured menacingly with a gun for him to come inside. Van Hooren obeyed, afraid that harm might come to the gunman’s prisoners if he didn’t. Soon Van Hooren was with the other people who’d been herded into a corner and told to keep their backs turned. Cecil Aspden followed moments later. He protested that he couldn’t climb the gate, but quickly responded when McAuliffe snarled, “Come on, climb over or something worse will happen to you.”

While Hall was filling the shopping bag with cash, three more customers came in: an insurance salesman from Brantford named Richard Broad, a local tobacco farmer and insurance company owner named Arthur Lierman, and William Goddyn, who worked on Lierman’s farm as a sharecropper. All were made to climb over the gate.

Hall found a small metal box in one of the cash drawers. The bandit said, “Open it, chum.” The box contained some bills and rolls of coins. “Dump it in the bag,” McAuliffe ordered.

Hall dropped the whole box into the shopping bag. It ripped right through the bottom. Cursing, McAuliffe pulled a second shopping bag from inside his coat. “Put the money in there, goddamn you!” he growled. “Not the cash box, you fool! Just the money!”

When all the money from the drawers was in the bag, McAuliffe told Hall to join the others. “Turn your back, chum,” he said. “Then he asked, “Who has the combination for the safe?”

Henry W. Thompson, the bank’s accountant, said that only the manager knew the combination and he wasn’t in the bank. Thompson was playing for time, and McAuliffe knew it. “I’m not fooling,” the gunman warned. “You go in and open up that safe, or you’ll get a sore head.”

The vault door was already open. The safe inside had a double set of doors with multiple locks. The lock for which only Mr. Beattie had the combination had already been thrown. Thompson and Mrs. Leedham each knew one of the other two combinations. Fearful for their own lives and the lives of the other people, they went into the vault to open the safe. McAuliffe kept one gun trained on them and the other on the rest of his captives. “If you do any talking about this after I’m gone,” he threatened, “I’ll come back and kill you, because I don’t intend to get caught.”

While Mrs. Leedham was taking her turn at the safe, Thompson had an opportunity to get a good look at the robber.

He was about twenty-five to thirty years of age, about five feet eight inches tall, sallow complexion, weighing about 155 pounds, well built, not stocky or wide shoulders, a nicely built fellow. He wore a buff coloured sun helmet, dark green sun glasses, a dark blue suit coat, a dirty blue shirt, not a sport shirt, open at the neck and I believe it had thin stripes; dark pants and black shoes. He didn’t wear gloves.

When the safe was opened, McAuliffe handed Thompson and Mrs. Leedham his loot bag and told them to fill it. He wanted everything, including the rolls of coins. He didn’t enter the vault himself, because he had to keep an eye on the other people. A couple of times, while the robber was thus distracted, Thompson and Mrs. Leedham stuffed bundles of money behind some storage boxes. He caught them at it and cried, “Hey! None of that! Pick that up!”

“Pick what up?” Mrs. Leedham asked.

McAuliffe didn’t press the issue. He was anxious to get away. Successful stickups never took more than a few minutes and he’d already been in there almost a quarter of an hour. Telling Thompson and Mrs. Leedham to get out of the vault, McAuliffe took the bag of money from them. Then he ordered all of the captives
into
the vault.

All this time, nobody outside knew what was happening in the bank. Not even Mr. Beattie in his upstairs apartment had any idea that his bank was being robbed. He was getting ready to play golf with a local physician, Dr. W.J. Nicholson. Beattie went down the stairs to a vestibule. On one side was a door to the outside. On the other was a door that opened into the bank area behind the gate. That door had a peephole in it. If Beattie had stopped to take a look, he would have seen a gunman herding his staff and customers into the vault, and could have slipped out to get help. Instead, he opened the door and walked right in on the robbery. “
You!
” McAuliffe snapped, “Get in the vault!”

The stunned manager did as he was told. The bandit still had guns in both his hands, so he told Frank Hall to pick up the shopping bag. Hall tried, but the weight of all the rolled coins made it so heavy that the handles tore loose. McAuliffe told him to lift up the bag and put it on the end of the counter, near the door Beattie had just come through. Then he ordered Hall back into the vault.

McAuliffe closed the vault door, but was unable to lock it. He pocketed his pistols, seized the loot bag in his arms, and fled from the bank. Before he reached the Meteor, the bottom of the bag broke through. Bundles of bills and rolls of coins spilled into the street. McAuliffe grabbed up as much money as he could and tossed it into the car. Then he jumped in and squealed away. McAuliffe’s initial haul had been more than $22,000. But his greed in taking the heavy coins, which amounted to just a few hundred dollars, cost him much of the swag. He roared out of Langton with about $8,000.

At this point, on what had started out on a quiet summer day in a peaceful Ontario village, the worst crime to occur had been an armed robbery. Dramatic enough for any community! Nonetheless, in spite of all the potential for danger, nobody had been hurt. The situation was about to turn deadly.

After the vault door slammed shut, the prisoners didn’t know whether or not the bandit was still in the bank. They waited two minutes before somebody tried the door and found it wasn’t locked. Art Lierman and Bill Goddyn were the first ones out of the bank, with Lambert Van Hooren right behind. Curious people who had seen the black Meteor race out of town at high speed — and the spilled money on the sidewalk — were gathering in front of the bank. They asked what was going on, but the men were in too much of a hurry to respond. Concerned that the bandit would get away before police could arrive, they’d decided to go after him themselves.

Van Hooren wanted Lierman to go with him in his car. Instead, Lierman ran to his own blue Plymouth, in which he always kept a .22 rifle for shooting small game. As he got behind the wheel, Goddyn jumped in the passenger side. They sped off in pursuit of the Meteor, with Van Hooren not far behind.

At the intersection with the Twelfth Concession south of Langton, Lierman stopped, trying to guess which way the bandit had gone. A local man who’d been working on a church on the Twelfth Concession happened by, and Lierman asked him if he’d seen a black Meteor. The man pointed west and said the car had passed him at the church.

Lierman and Goddyn changed places in the Plymouth, with Goddyn taking the wheel and Lierman getting in the passenger side. He reached behind and grabbed his rifle off the back seat. Then they sped off.

Back in Langton, Van Hooren stopped at his father’s house to tell him about the robbery. Archie Van Hooren, a taxi driver, jumped into his cab to join in the chase. At a gas station at the junction of the Twelfth Concession and Townline Road, the Van Hoorens learned that the black Meteor had screeched through the lot between the pumps and the building and then wheeled south onto the third concession road, almost smashing into a parked truck. Art Lierman’s Plymouth was five hundred feet behind it, travelling fast with the horn blaring. Archie told Lambert to head for Glen Meyer, while he went to Frogmore. He couldn’t be sure which back roads the bandit and the pursuers might take, but he thought that either he or his son might catch up with the Plymouth.

At Frogmore, Archie stopped to speak to Harry Carruthers, who was working at the roadside in front of his house. He said the Meteor had just passed by, with the Plymouth three hundred feet behind. Art Lierman had been holding a rifle out the window and the gun was pointed at the car in front. Both vehicles had turned onto the Kinglake Road. Instead of following, Archie took a detour, thinking he might be able to head the bandit off at Kinglake. That decision might very well have saved his life.

When McAuliffe realized he was being pursued, he tore up and down the back roads, trying to lose the Plymouth, but it was gaining on him. On one of the concessions, the cars roared past the farm of Henry Menary, who later reported hearing gunshots. Mrs. Menary said she actually saw Art Lierman firing his rifle at the Meteor.

Kinglake Road was just a narrow, sandy track connecting the hamlets of Frogmore and Kinglake. It was suitable for plodding farm vehicles, not cars racing at full speed. Keeping control of a fast-moving car on the soft sand would have been extremely difficult. The Meteor threw up a cloud of sand and dust that would have been blinding to the driver behind.

At a spot about half a mile from Frogmore, the Meteor went off the road and came to a sudden stop in a three-foot deep ditch. McAuliffe might have lost control of the car because a lucky shot from Lierman’s rifle punctured one of his rear tires. More likely it was because, in his rage, McAuliffe had taken one hand off the steering wheel to return fire; not with a pistol, but with a Sten gun. A Sten was a submachine gun developed by the British during the Second World War. While the Meteor ploughed along the sandy lane, McAuliffe turned and fired a burst through his back window, peppering the Plymouth with slugs. The Plymouth rolled to a halt at the same time that the Meteor went into the ditch. No more than fifteen minutes had passed since McAuliffe had fled from the bank.