Wrong Side of the Law Read online

  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.

  The women said they had met the men in British Columbia and had no idea they were criminals. They were deported back to Canada. Lawler and Anderson were held in a Chicago jail until Vancouver police detectives arrived to take custody of them.

  Lawler and Anderson were tried for the botched jewellery store robbery and the Royal Bank stickup, and were sentenced to twenty years in prison. John Godbolt got ten years for his part as a getaway car driver. Frances Morton and Mary Gorry were released. That left the gang members who were charged with murder and accessory to murder in the death of William Hobbs. The trial was held in April before Chief Justice Aulay Morrison.

  The chief suspects, James Russell and Earl Dunbar, had backgrounds in petty crime, auto theft, and bootlegging, and had done time in jail. Dunbar admitted to participation in the bank robberies, but said he had been the driver and therefore wasn’t in the bank when Hobbs was shot. Moreover, he claimed that he had gone along on the robberies out of fear of Jack Hyslop. He said Hyslop had threatened to blow his and Russell’s brains out if they didn’t help him rob some banks. Hyslop, said Dunbar, had once told him he would “bump off a fellow who took a roll of money off him.”

  Russell denied any involvement in the crimes at all. He said he’d been out shopping at the time
of the murder and knew nothing about it until he heard the news on the radio. Russell’s lawyer, T.F. Hurley, argued that the gun that killed Hobbs had discharged accidentally. He also suggested that bank manager Winsby fired first and that the bandits shot back in self-defence.

  Russell seemed impassive throughout the trial, smiling occasionally. Once, when a witness made a statement that struck most of the people in the courtroom as funny, he joined in the outburst of laughter. Dunbar was the opposite; sullen, and constantly licking his lips in nervous anxiety.

  The testimony of the accused men and the arguments of their defence counsel didn’t stand up to the evidence. Eyewitnesses again identified Russell as the “iron-nerved” bandit who had killed Hobbs and Dunbar as the robber who had shot Winsby. The jury took only ninety minutes to reach a guilty verdict.

  Chief Justice Morrison sentenced Russell and Dunbar to death. Upon hearing the terrible words, “To be hanged by the neck until you are dead,” Russell hardly flinched. Dunbar almost collapsed. “He is weak,” Russell later told a guard.

  Fred Healy was convicted of being an accessory after the fact and sentenced to fifteen years. Walter Davies was also charged with being an accessory, but the Crown withdrew the charge due to lack of evidence. The judge advised him to follow the example of the Greek philosopher Socrates who “made a practice of never looking into a tavern or getting himself mixed up with tumultuous or ill-considered people.” Davies was released, along with Mary Gorry and Frances Morten.

  Charles Russell went to the gallows in the Oakalla prison at 6:45 on the morning of November 6, 1936. He approached the scaffold smoking a cigarette, which he tossed aside before his arms were pinioned and the hood was pulled over his head. Earl Dunbar, whose execution was postponed due to an appeal, followed Russell to the gallows on November 27. Suicide and the hangman ended the short and sordid tale of the Hyslop Gang.

  Chapter 8

  The Polka Dot Gang:

  “A Strange Fraternity of Men”

  The idea of a bandit gang using a specific article of clothing as a badge of identity may seem like the stuff of adolescent comic book fiction. Surely, any “professional” criminal would realize that anonymity is a key factor in avoiding arrest. For a bandit to advertise himself with a trademark would be foolish. Nonetheless, there have been robber gangs who, out of a desire to be flamboyant or a juvenile need for attention, have accessorized so as to make their mark for the media and the public. For example, John “Red” Hamilton, the Canadian member of the John Dillinger gang in the 1930s, was in his youth associated with a band of hoodlums whose leader wanted them all to wear white hats when they pulled robberies, so the world would know them as the White Hat gang. In Chicago, over a period of a few months in 1942, a gang of young gunmen who wore blue polka-dot bandanas gained national notoriety as the Polka Dot Gang. Whether by coincidence or deliberate imitation, polka-dot bandanas gave a name to a robber gang that plagued southern Ontario around the end of the Second World War.

  The robberies began in the spring of 1945. Nazi Germany had been defeated and the newspaper front pages were full of information on the trials and executions of Vichy traitors in France and speculation on how the war with Japan would be brought to a close. A series of armed holdups in cities like London, Guelph, and Hamilton caught the attention of the press when it became apparent that the same gang was responsible for all of them.

  The Guelph robbery was typical of the gang’s methods. Early on the morning of June 25, four bandits forced open a back window of the Wellington meat-packing plant on the eastern outskirts of the city. The thieves quietly made their way to the office. They had likely been watching the place for a few nights, because they seemed to know the routine of the watchman, sixty-eight-year-old J. Forestell. He had just done his rounds and had sat down in the lobby for a smoke when they broke in.

  Forestell heard a noise and went to investigate. When he opened the office door, he was confronted by the intruders. One of them said, “This is a holdup.” Then another one slugged the unarmed watchman over the head with a wooden stick that was used for hanging meat.

  The blow knocked Forestell out cold. Twice he stirred and began to come to, and both times he was bludgeoned back into unconsciousness. The robbers put him in a chair and tied him up.

  The bandits went to work on the safe with a sledgehammer and other tools. Investigators later determined that these criminals were experienced in cracking safes. Once they had the double doors open, they scooped out over a thousand dollars in cash and bonds. They scattered the rest of the contents around the office. Then, instead of hightailing it, the robbers pulled up a table and sat down to a snack. They broke into the smoked meat room from which they filched a cooked ham and helped themselves to some chocolate milk and soft drinks staff had left in the office icebox.

  After the bandits left, it took Forestell an hour to wriggle loose from the chair and call for help. It was about 4:00 a.m. when the phone rang in the Guelph police station. Constables who responded to the call sent the battered old night watchman to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he was treated for severe lacerations to the head and a broken jaw.

  (L–R): Kenneth Green, Hubert Hiscox, Bruce Kay, George Constantine, and George Dobbie were the core members of the Polka Dot Gang that terrorized postwar southern Ontario.

  Toronto Star.

  Another victim whom the gang handled roughly was Norman Bowman, engineer of the Duff & Sons packing plant in Hamilton. In the early hours of August 27, five bandits broke in and stole $14,000 in cash, Victory bonds, and war savings certificates. Bowman was subjected to a pistol-whipping. “They jumped on me when I was in the engine room,” Bowman said. “I was hit in the face twice. I was told to lie down on my face. I obeyed. I told the fellow who hit me, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ He replied, ‘Shut up or I’ll put a bullet through you.’ Then they tied me up.”

  Bowman suffered a broken nose and cuts to his face. The night watchman, Frank L. Tomlinson, was also beaten and tied up. Help didn’t come until after 4:00 a.m., when Tomlinson failed to punch in his regular signal to a security company.

  From witnesses’ accounts, police concluded that no more than five men made up the gang, and not all of them participated in all of the robberies. This was later proven to be only partially correct. Victims described the leader as a six-foot-tall, well-dressed youth. They were armed with revolvers and machine guns and they all masked the lower parts of their faces with red polka-dot bandanas. War news was soon sharing space in Ontario newspapers with stories of the depredations of the “Polka Dot Machine Gun Gang.” The name would soon be shortened to the Polka Dot Gang as the robbers struck again and again.

  The gang’s favourite targets were the offices of dairies, creameries, packing plants, and flour mills. The safes in those businesses were full of cash for payrolls and daily operations. Such places were easy pickings because they lacked the security measures used by banks. On some occasions the bandits even robbed employees of any money they had in their pockets.

  Emboldened by their successes, the Polka Dot Gang turned their attention to the big city. Their first known attempt at a robbery in Toronto came on the night of August 24. Four of them were attempting to break into the office of Urquhart Motors on Dufferin Street, when they were interrupted by Constable Walter McGowan of the York Township police. They fled after exchanging shots with the officer. McGowan was later able to identify two of the suspects in court.

  The gang had better luck on September 16, when they broke into the Lake of the Woods Milling Company on Dupont Street. The robbery was carried out with the violence that had become as much the gang’s trademark as the polka-dot bandanas. The victim was the night watchman, William Cunliffe.

  “I had just reached the shipping room on the main floor when three men appeared,” Cunliffe recalled later. “One man had a small machine gun, the others two revolvers. The man with the machine gun hit me four times on the head with some part of it. I crumpled to the floor.�
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  The robbers wrapped a towel around Cunliffe’s bleeding head and tied him up. Then they dragged him along with them as they went from room to room. “They seemed perturbed about the clocks,” Cunliffe said. “They kept asking me how they operated.” The robbers were concerned that the plant might have a signal system that was connected to the clocks.

  In the office, the thieves left Cunliffe tied up on the floor while they hammered away at the safe. “It sounded like a boiler shop,” he said. The robbers got away with over $1,200. Cunliffe was found seven hours later. His injuries kept him hospitalized for two weeks.

  The Roselawn Farm Dairy on Dufferin Street was the next target. The office safe contained $7,000, and in a storage vault was $17,000 worth of furs. Early in the morning of October 8, the gang forced their way into the building. They took night watchman William Bartie and employee George Bradley by surprise, beating and kicking them into unconsciousness. Bartie said later, “They slugged me on the back of the head so hard, it broke my false teeth.” The bandits took $150 that Bartie had in his wallet. They bound both men’s hands and feet and threw a cover over Bartie’s face to muffle his groans.

  The robbers were working on the safe when two employees, Roy Downing and Lloyd Kearney, arrived at the dairy. Two bandits armed with a machine gun and a revolver met them on the stairs that led to the second floor office. “One move and you’ve had it!” a gunman snarled, and ordered them up the stairs. “Going upstairs, he jabbed the gun in my back and made me put my hands up,” Downing said. “He acted like he meant business, so I put them up … It was a gruesome sight to see Bill (Bartie) lying on the floor in what looked like a pool of blood. Bradley was lying there too. I thought they were both dead.”