Wrong Side of the Law (19 page)

Map of the route taken by the bank robber and killer.
Toronto Star.

McAuliffe got out of the car. He’d been banged up when the car slammed into the ditch, but was otherwise unhurt. However, he was in a blind fury. His plans had been ruined! Sten gun in hand, McAuliffe walked back to the bullet-shattered Plymouth. He fired through the driver’s side window, then he walked around to the passenger side and shot again. As he took to the bush to make his escape on foot, McAuliffe didn’t know that witnesses to the murder were hiding just a few feet away. Bobby Nichols, sixteen, and Ray Pressey, eighteen, had seen the whole thing. Bobby described the scene to a reporter:

Gosh, I was scared. We were hoeing tobacco when I heard a single shot and looked up. I saw the cars going by very fast and making a big cloud of dust. The leading car swayed and went into the ditch. I ducked flat on the ground and then I heard more shots as if they came from a pistol or a rifle.

While I was looking I saw a man in the car on our side slump over. It was Art Lierman, who used to be our neighbour when we lived in North Middleton. When I was lying down, Ray saw someone run into the bush. I saw him too. He went south. I couldn’t tell what he was wearing. I was too scared.

Bobby told another reporter he had seen the driver of the Meteor poke a gun in the window of the Plymouth and fire it. When the stranger was gone, Bobby ran to his house and told his father, who called the police. Ray went to Kinglake. There he met Archie Van Hooren and told him what he had seen. Archie drove down the road alone. Later he described the murder scene.

There was no one around. The Meteor was in the south ditch and Lierman’s car on the road six feet behind, full of bullet holes. I went past the car, then backed up beside Lierman’s car. I saw two bodies. I then drove to Frogmore to the store and told them to call the police. I picked up Harry Carruthers and went back to the scene.

There was still no one around, although a group of people had gathered at the Kinglake end of the road. I saw one bill blow across the road and Carruthers picked it up. It was a $20 bill; he later gave it to the police. I drove fifty feet ahead and waited until provincial constable W.E. Rogers of the Tillsonberg detachment arrived. The constable looked in both cars, then spoke over the radio. We stayed until the arrival of additional police and Coroner W.J. Nicholson, M.D., of Langton.

Dr. Nicholson had been on his way to meet Beattie for their golf game when Lierman and Goddyn drove away. Soon the village was abuzz with news of the robbery. Then came information about the two cars on the Kinglake Road, six miles from Langton. Nobody in the community knew yet about the murders. There was a rumour that Lierman and Goddyn were in the woods, pursuing the robber on foot. Dr. Nicholson was with a group of local residents who drove out to the Kinglake Road just to see what was going on. “Never did I dream I would be acting in an official capacity,” he said later.

The Plymouth had twenty-seven bullet holes in it. Art Lierman, thirty-
one, had been hit seven times, the fatal bullet going right through his heart. Bill Goddyn, twenty-three, had been shot five times, with four
bullets hitting him in the head. Both men left behind wives and children.

The crime scene was soon swarming with police officers from Simcoe, Tillsonburg, Delhi, and Dundas. In the Meteor, which had been stolen in Windsor five days earlier, they found spent cartridge casings, the sun helmet and sunglasses, a green suit coat with white pinstripes, the .38 revolver, a notebook listing the back roads and communities between Windsor and Langton with a reference to a hideout, a torn shopping bag, and most of the remaining robbery loot. The fugitive’s primary concern now wasn’t money, but escape. If caught, he faced a trip to the gallows, and he was still heavily armed. Police still had no idea as to his identity.

Two OPP constables followed McAuliffe’s footprints into the woods until they lost the trail in dense underbrush. At 6:30 p.m., Inspectors Len Neill and Alex McLeod of the OPP Criminal Investigation Branch arrived from Toronto to take charge of the manhunt. “It’s a bad territory in which to find a man,” an OPP spokesman told reporters. “The Kinglake district is rocky, scrub bush country with plenty of cover.”

Hundreds of police officers and armed farmers spread out from the scene of the crime. A tracking dog was brought in from Leamington. Police set up roadblocks for miles around. They searched every vehicle and warned motorists not to pick up hitchhikers because they might be “shot to death by the desperado to get the car.” Police told farmers in an area covering three townships to lock their doors and “shoot to kill the suspect on sight.” Civilian pilots from the London Flying Club took to the air in small planes to search for the killer.

Fortunately, nobody acted on the “shoot to kill” order, or a few unwary tramps who got swept up in the dragnet might have become victims of mistaken identity. The tracking dog led one group to a schoolhouse. Taking no chances, the police shot the lock off and burst in with cocked revolvers and shotguns. The little building was empty, but the fact that the killer had been in the vicinity of a schoolhouse worried authorities enough that they ordered schools in the area closed and children kept home until the fugitive was caught.

After twenty-four hours of combing the countryside with no result, the manhunters were exhausted, sweat-soaked, and covered with mosquito bites. Officers manning the roadblocks and patrolling the country lanes had gone without food or sleep. Another OPP Inspector, Frank C. Kelly, arrived from Toronto. He had once been stationed in Simcoe and knew the country.

By now the robbery and the double-murder was news across Canada and in the United States, as well. Clifford Fanning, a sixteen-year-old Boy Scout from Mount Clemens, Michigan, arrived with his bloodhound, Doc Keen. The dog was something of a celebrity in the United States, with a record of sixty-three successful trackings. Now he and his young master were put on the trail of an armed fugitive. The story of the heroic boy and his dog made great copy for the newspapers. The Toronto
Star
reported: “Without a hint of fear, showing bravery rarely surpassed in the midst of battle, he [Fanning] led the exhaustive searches with levelled guns at his back and a killer at the other end of the trail. From the moment he entered the dense woods, he stood in constant danger of being suddenly caught in a murderous cross-fire.”

If anybody had any qualms about putting a teenage boy between the posse and a man who had already murdered two people, it wasn’t mentioned in the papers. Doc Keen led the police to two more schoolhouses, but the fugitive was gone. After a hard day on the trail, Clifford was worn out. He and Doc Keen went home. (The “Doc Keen” story appeared in newspapers of the time, but was disputed by Clifford Fanning when a National Film Board of Canada documentary about the case was being made in 1996.)

The police were perplexed over the fugitive’s attraction to schoolhouses. Perhaps he hoped to find food in them. As the search widened, police did come across some signs of their quarry, and evidence that he was scrounging. He’d helped himself to a can of milk in a barn, eaten raw potatoes in a field, and left his footprints in the mud by a farmer’s water pump. A telephone lineman reported seeing a man who seemed to be trying to hide in a ditch. A mile from Straffordville, a farmer named Bert Luce found a man sleeping in his haymow. Upon being disturbed, the stranger jumped up and fled into the woods. Luce was certain the man was carrying a Sten gun. The running man passed within a few feet of a neighbour, eight-year-old Donald Woods. The boy also reported seeing a gun in his hands. Police searched the barn and found a coat that witnesses identified as the one the bank robber had worn. There was nothing in the pockets but a couple of gnawed potatoes.

Still, after two days of rumours, alleged sightings, and clues, the killer remained at large. Local people were, as one resident put it, “scared skinny.” Police were afraid the killer had slipped through their cordon and hopped a freight train. If so, no one might ever know who had killed Lierman and Goddyn.

By the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, Inspector Kelly was almost ready to admit that the fugitive had escaped the area, when the big break finally came. Graham Haggerty, a twenty-year-old resident of the little community of Vienna, and two OPP constables were searching along railway tracks north of Straffordville, when they saw a man run into the woods. One of the policemen fired three shots in the air to alert other parties. Then the three struck into the woods after the suspect. The officers plunged into the underbrush, while Haggerty followed a path that led to an old sawmill. Peering through the open door of a shack, Haggerty saw a figure huddled in a corner. He described what happened next for the Toronto
Star
:

“Put ’em up or I’ll kill you,” I told him, and I meant it because I knew both Art Lierman and Bill Goddyn had been slaughtered when they got in the same position that I did late Saturday afternoon. The figure in the shabby clothes I was covering crouched down in the dim interior of the shack and his hand dropped down. I thought of that machine gun the men had been cut down with, and I drew back with my thumb the hammer of my deer gun — a .38-55 rifle.

“I’m going to kill you right where you are,” I shouted at him. I was talking his language now. He straightened up, raising his hands above his head and at the same time came through the doorway. “I didn’t do anything,” he mumbled.

I got a good look at him. His clothes made him look like a bum, but he was too young. He had a good four-day stubble of red whiskers, and through the open front of his shabby coat I saw that he had nothing on underneath. His hairless chest was an angry patch of red scratches. He must have done a lot of running through blackberry bushes, I thought later. He didn’t look scared, rather, sort of mean. He glared at me through his narrow eyes. Then the provincials rushed up and put the cuffs on him.

Soon more police officers arrived, along with their civilian helpers. The prisoner was hustled into a patrol car. To the disappointment of the civilians, the constables put an old rug over his head so his face couldn’t be seen by anyone who might be called upon to identify the bank robber in a police line-up. McAuliffe was bruised and covered with insect bites. His clothing was torn from his flight through brush and brambles. He was starving and he was sullen.

Locked up in the Norfolk County jail in Simcoe, McAuliffe refused to answer questions. The day after his arrest, he was placed in a lineup with fourteen other men of similar height and build, all wearing sun helmets and sunglasses. Nine of ten witnesses from the bank robbery identified him as the bandit.

Warned that he would be charged with armed robbery and with the murders of Art Lierman and Bill Goddyn, McAuliffe still refused to say who he was or where he came from. When an officer asked him how he got so badly scratched up, he snapped, “How do ya think? Eatin’ berries!” Other than that, he’d only say, “I ain’t done nothin’.” However, after Inspector Neill kept pressing him for his name, he finally replied, “Frank West will do.” He was officially charged under that name.

Police took “West’s” finger and palm prints. They matched prints found on the Meteor. Moreover, they matched prints in the RCMP Identification Branch in Ottawa, taken from one Fred Walker of Windsor who’d been arrested for burglary in 1938.

The OPP investigators knew that “Frank West” and “Fred Walker” were aliases, but when they tried to get information about the prisoner’s personal background, he’d only sneer that it was their business to find it. The police were able to do just that, thanks to a photograph of the suspect they circulated through the press.

Mrs. Emile Lezure, who kept a boarding house in Windsor, informed the RCMP that the man in the picture was a former roomer, Herbert McAuliffe. He’d stayed at her place for about two months. She also knew that he owned an old Ford that he kept in a rented garage.

Mrs. Lezure’s information was the key that opened up the investigation. Police detectives learned that Joseph Herbert McAuliffe was a loner. He was a machinist who’d worked in various Windsor area factories and moved from one rooming house to another. But though he regularly changed his personal lodging, he’d kept the same rented garage for years. The garage held the secret of McAuliffe’s hidden life as a fifty-cent-piece counterfeiter.

It was a double garage, because McAuliffe needed more than just a place to keep his car. He needed a private workshop. There, the police found a drill press, grinder, lathes, and cutting tools, as well as literature on coinage and a large number of unfinished counterfeit coins. In several hiding places they found guns and ammunition and parts of a Thompson submachine gun. Among the cache of ammunition were boxes of 9mm shells that could be used in a Sten gun. The police also found a pair of pants that matched the suit coat that had been in the Meteor.

At the same time that police in Windsor were searching McAuliffe’s garage, ten-year-old Larry Holmes was looking for crows’ nests in the bush just half a mile from the murder site. He stumbled upon a blue suit coat and a dirty shirt with narrow blue and white stripes hidden in a thicket of ferns. Realizing the clothing could be connected with the big crime story everybody was talking about, Larry went home to get his mother and older brother. Their search turned up a stash of $521 in one-dollar bills, and a Thompson submachine gun. Mrs. Holmes quickly informed the police.