Wrong Side of the Law Read online

  Throughout the 1950s, armed robbers — most of them small-time hoodlums — carried on in the dubious tradition of the Polka Dot Gang by disguising themselves with polka-dot bandanas. Some even copied the original gang’s practice of senselessly beating up night watchmen. In the autumn of 1960, the urban legend of Polka Dot Gang loot buried in the ground near the site of their old hideout in Richmond Hill arose again. As often happens with tales of outlaw booty, the amount of the swag had grown from $25,000 to $250,000! Treasure hunters equipped with a metal detector went over property that development had radically altered since 1945. They dug one shallow hole, found nothing, and gave up the search. In time the legend was forgotten. The gang that had been the terror of southern Ontario slipped into obscurity.

  Chapter 9

  Stanley Buckowski:

  The Long Road to the Gas Chamber

  July 30, 1949 would go down in the annals of the Toronto Police Department as the beginning of one of the most horrific chapters in the city’s history. The story opened with an armed robbery, and ended in an American gas chamber. In between lay a series of murders. Three of the victims were Canadians, as was the killer.

  On that Saturday afternoon, a man walked into the Loblaw Groceteria on Parliament Street in Toronto. Dozens of shoppers were in the store and no one paid him any attention. When he passed by employees Agnes Tustin and Lucy Clark, he smiled graciously and said hello as he headed for the stairs leading to the office of the store’s manager, Adam Stoddart. The two women thought he was making a business call and didn’t even catch the scent of the belt of whiskey the man had downed just minutes earlier.

  When the visitor entered the office he pulled a revolver and ordered Stoddart to open the safe and then lie down on the floor. Stoddart had no choice but to obey. The robber stuffed his pockets with money, warning the manager to be still, or “You’ll get it.”

  While the gunman was robbing the grocery store, not far away on Gifford Street, twenty-four-year-old Alfred Layng had just finished repairing some screens for his house. A Second World War vet who had served in the RCAF, Layng was married to his boyhood sweetheart, Shirley. They had a daughter named Patricia, age four. With the screen repair done, Alfred and Shirley took Patricia for a walk down Parliament Street to treat her to a soda. They stopped at a shop where Shirley bought a piece of cloth and then continued on their way.

  In the grocery store, the bandit fled from the manager’s office with about a thousand dollars in a money pouch. Stoddart shouted for help. A clerk named Ron Barrett dove for the thief’s ankles, but wasn’t able to hold him. However, another clerk, nineteen-year-old Leonard Leftly, tackled him around the waist as he reached the front door. The man dragged Leftly out to the sidewalk and then shot him in the leg. Leftly fell to the ground, but the robber dropped the money pouch. The Layngs were just then approaching the corner of Parliament and Carlton Streets. “That’s when it all happened,” Shirley said later.

  They could see a commotion in front of the grocery store and a man running toward them. Somebody shouted, “Stop that man!”

  Alfred pushed little Patricia into a doorway and then stood in the man’s path with his arms opened wide. The thief ran right into them. The two men grappled and fell to the pavement. “I stood there terrified, watching the struggle,” said Shirley afterward. “Other people stood around with their mouths open, just gaping. I shouted for help, but there wasn’t any help from any of the spectators at all. They just stood there.”

  Suddenly two shots rang out. The thief scrambled to his feet and ran down Carlton Street. No one else tried to stop him.

  Shirley saw Alfred slowly get to his feet while Patricia cried, “Daddy! Daddy!” He reached toward his wife, took a couple of steps, and said, “Don’t worry, I’m all right, hon.” Then he fell dead at Shirley’s feet. Alfred had been shot in the stomach and the heart.

  “No person came forward to help me even then,” Shirley told a Toronto Star reporter. “I had to leave him there and run into a store to phone for help. When I came out of the store, people were just standing around repeating the words, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead.’”

  Toronto Chief of Police John Chisholm quickly dispatched every available constable to the vicinity of Parliament and Carlton. Off-duty officers were called in to help search the neighbourhoods. But the robber-turned-killer was moving faster than word of mouth could spread news of the crime through the streets.

  At first he tried to lose himself in the crowds on Carlton Street. But when he drew attention, he took to alleyways and backyards, leaping over fences and desperately looking for places to hide. A woman went into her garage, opened her car door, and was startled to see a man crouching on the floor. Threatening her with a gun, he got out, shoved her against the wall, and fled.

  John Vancott of Seaton Street hurried into his kitchen when he heard his six-year-old daughter call out that a man was in the house. Vancott, who didn’t know about the robbery and shooting, confronted a stranger who was sweating and breathing hard. He took the man for a lost drunk.

  “I asked him what he was doing in my house and he replied he was just trying to get through to the street. I told him to get out.… Just as he disappeared from my sight, a police cruiser rounded Carlton and Seaton and came up to me. They raced back to find this chap, but he had gone from sight.”

  The police did find a bullet the fugitive had dropped in Vancott’s house, but there were no fingerprints on it.

  Albert Hailes of Ontario Street was washing his car when a stranger suddenly stuck a gun in his face and demanded the keys. Hailes handed them over, but when the man tried to start the engine, it wouldn’t turn over. The gunman told Hailes to get behind the wheel and drive. Hailes refused, and the man dashed away on foot.

  Somehow the fugitive managed to evade the police patrols and escape. Chief Chisholm called in every off-duty detective and put them to work chasing down leads. They questioned suspects from as far away as Niagara Falls. Chisholm replaced the detectives’ .38 service revolvers with more powerful .45s. Police posted a reward of $2,000 for information leading to the killer’s arrest. The Loblaw Company offered an additional $1,000. Telephone tips were coming into police headquarters at the rate of twenty-five an hour.

  In the neighbourhoods through which the suspect had fled, Detective Sergeant Adolphus Payne literally crawled on his hands and knees in search of clues. He looked under porches and back steps, and at a house on Sherbourne Street his perseverance paid off. In a hasty attempt to change his appearance, the fugitive had taken off his suit jacket, fedora, and tie, and stuffed them under a rear stoop. The jacket’s label had been removed, but in the pocket Payne found a pair of white gloves and two .38 cartridges. Under the back step of a neighbouring yard the detective found a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses.

  Initially, these items gave no clue as to the fugitive’s identity. But Payne believed they could be crucial in leading police to the man. He had the hat, coat, and tie put on a mannequin and placed in the window of a store near the murder scene in hope that someone might recognize them. A police detective was on hand to take down any information anyone might have. Meanwhile, Payne went to work tracking down the makers of the jacket and the glasses.

  Dozens of witnesses had seen the suspect’s face. They went through stacks of mug shots, but to no avail. However, the descriptions they provided enabled a police artist, Detective Maurice Inglis, to draw a likeness that was sent to the newspapers for publication. The uncanny accuracy of the pencil sketch was to have dramatic results. But more than two years would pass before the Toronto police would finally locate Alfred Layng’s killer. By that time, he had added to his score in homicide.

  The man the police were looking for was Stanley Buckowski, age twenty-three. He was born in a remote part of Saskatchewan to Polish-Canadian parents. While still a boy, he moved to Toronto where he attended Essex Street Public School. Young Stanley fell in with bad company and started hanging out on street corners, particularly
at the intersection of Bloor and Bathurst Streets, which at that time was a tough part of town. His first crimes were break-ins. He had an interest in chemistry and stole electrical devices.

  At the age of fifteen, Buckowski pulled his first “armed” robbery. Using a cap gun, he stole a car from a motorist in High Park. He was caught and sent to juvenile court. Instead of handing Buckowski a stint in reform school, the judge released him to the custody of his father, with instructions that the elder Buckowski give the boy a sound thrashing. Stanley got that thrashing, but it didn’t do any good.

  Newspaper artist’s sketch of the suspect in the Alfred Layng murder. The accuracy of the likeness caused Buckowski to panic.

  The Globe & Mail.

  Buckowski continued to mix with bad characters. He had developed the attitude that working for a living was for suckers. He and a partner held up a gas station. This time Buckowski had a real gun, but no bullets. They got away with it, so Buckowski decided to hold up a clothing store on Bloor St. The proprietor resisted and Buckowski struck him on the head with his empty gun. The man still put up a fight and the struggle took them right out the front door to the sidewalk. Buckowski was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. He was still only fifteen years old.

  By the time Buckowski was released, he was a hardened criminal and considered himself a big shot. He went back to the gangs that hung out at Bloor and Bathurst. Burglary was his main source of income. Buckowski did, however, make one attempt to turn his life around.

  When Canada declared war on Germany, thousands of young Canadian men enlisted to fight Hitler’s Nazis. Buckowski joined the RCAF and was posted to a base in Saskatchewan. Instead of redeeming himself, though, he took a personal turn for the worse when he discovered narcotics and became addicted. He convinced a nurse to supply him with drugs and took advantage of his relationship with her to steal from the dispensary. He had learned that he could make easy money selling drugs.

  Buckowski was transferred back to Toronto. He was still in the Air Force when he got married. After he left the RCAF, Buckowski and his wife Jean settled into an apartment in Toronto. Jean worked as a waitress and Stanley burglarized homes. He still didn’t like the idea of getting a job himself, and he had an expensive drug habit.

  The police were soon on to Buckowski. One night in April 1945, they picked him up while he was walking along Yonge Street. They searched his home and found a stash of jewellery, cameras, and seven bottles of whiskey that had been stolen from a house on Castle Frank Drive. Buckowski was convicted on two charges of burglary and sentenced to eighteen months at the Burwash Industrial Farm, a provincial correctional institution near Sudbury.

  “I didn’t get along very well there,” Buckowski recalled later. “Out in the woods you had cold dinners in twenty degrees below zero. The warden was a tough guy. All he knew was the strap.” According to Buckowski, Burwash made him “paranoiac.”

  Buckowski had trouble with a hip injury he’d received as a boy and Burwash didn’t have the medical facilities to treat it. Jean made frequent trips to the parole board on his behalf. He was finally released on the condition that he check into Toronto’s Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital.

  Buckowski’s stay at Burwash had cured him of his drug dependency, but the series of operations he underwent on his hip increased his emotional problems. When he got out of the hospital he resolved to stay away from his old hang-outs and “the boys.” Jean tried to make him stay home in the evenings, but she was now doing shift work as a hotel switchboard operator, and couldn’t always be there. Sitting alone, Buckowski would drink heavily. By his own admission, Buckowski “got nasty” when he was drinking, and would beat his dog.

  Restlessness and booze finally got the better of him and Buckowski started hanging out with his old crowd. Soon he was robbing again. Among the plunder from his burglaries was a pair of pistols. He kept them in a locker at the College Street YMCA so Jean wouldn’t know about them and they wouldn’t be in his home if the police came snooping. Buckowski got the idea that with the guns he could make a lot of money fast, and then “retire.”

  Buckowski’s first target was the Alhambra Theatre. He stuck up the manager and got away with his pockets stuffed with cash. It had been too easy! Not long after, one night while Jean was at work, Buckowski got drunk and then robbed the Downtown Theatre at gunpoint. He easily made his getaway in a cab, with more than $4,000.

  Buckowski bought a new car. He had several thousand dollars in his bank account. A smart professional criminal might have lain low and enjoyed the swag. But the two successful robberies had gone to his head. Buckowski had seen how busy the Loblaw Groceteria was on a Saturday and thought a holdup would net him $4,000. On that fateful July afternoon, he picked up his guns from the YMCA locker, braced his nerves with a few shots of whiskey, and then headed for Parliament Street.

  It was through sheer luck that Buckowski escaped the police after shooting Alfred Layng. When he got home that night, Jean was at work. Thoroughly shaken over what had happened, Buckowski drank until he passed out. Early the next morning he got into his new car and drove to Wasaga Beach and rented a cabin. He thought it would be a good place to hide out until things blew over.

  While Buckowski was holed up in Wasaga Beach, a few miles away, Robert Smith McKay and his wife Gloria were enjoying a “working holiday.” Twenty-five-year old Robert was an RCAF veteran who had served in India during the Second World War and was now employed as a mechanic and electrician. Gloria, twenty-three, worked in a financial office on Bay Street. Because they were saving up to make a down payment on a house, the young couple didn’t go out much. However, on weekends they liked to drive up to the hamlet of Minesing, where Robert’s uncle, Nicholas Langelaan, owned a farm. Mr. Langelaan had injured his back and was in a cast, so Robert did farm work for him. To the McKays, the weekend trips to the farm were a welcome opportunity to get away from the city for a couple of days.

  On the evening of Friday, July 29, Robert and Gloria packed up their car, a black 1942 Dodge sedan, and drove away from their flat on Emerson Avenue in Toronto. As always, they took their little spaniel, Toby. On Saturday, while Robert did chores, Gloria went to nearby Barrie where she bought pink and blue cotton material to make dresses for herself and Mrs. Langelaan. She finished both dresses before it was time to go back to Toronto.

  It was a long weekend, and neither Robert nor Gloria had to be back at work until Tuesday. On Monday they talked about playing hooky from work for a day and not driving home until Tuesday evening. However, by Monday night they had changed their minds and decided they’d better head for home so they could go to work Tuesday morning. They said goodbye to Robert’s aunt and uncle, promising to return in a couple of weeks, and drove away at 9:00 p.m. Gloria was wearing the new dress she had just made. On the back seat next to Toby was a .22 rifle she had given Robert as a gift for their fifth wedding anniversary, coming up on August 5. The couple never saw that anniversary. They didn’t even make it back to Emerson Avenue.

  At about 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 2, a bricklayer named Charles Edwards was working on a house near the end of Saguenay Avenue, a dead-end street near the intersection of Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue in the municipality of North York. He took a few minutes’ break from his work to walk down a path into a wooded ravine at the bottom of the street. He hadn’t gone very far when he almost stumbled over what he first thought was a sleeping man. Edwards said, “Pardon me.” Then he saw the blood.

  Edwards hurried back to the construction site and told his foreman there was a dead man in the ravine. The foreman called the police. Edwards later told a reporter, “He scared the life out of me. I can still see his wide, glassy eyes staring at me … It was an awful shock. I’ll remember seeing the body lying there, more like a ghost than the body of a human.”

  The man had been shot three times. Police quickly determined that he had not been killed at the site where the body had been found. There was no blood on
the surrounding ground or bushes, and the way the shirt was pulled up from the waist indicated that the body had been dragged there. A wallet police found near the body was empty and it was evident that someone had gone through the dead man’s pockets. Then a local resident turned in a woman’s purse he had found in the ravine that morning. In the purse was a driver’s licence belonging to Gloria McKay. The dead man was soon identified as her husband Robert.

  Police began a sweep of Toronto, looking for a black 1942 Dodge sedan. Two constables found it just after 1:00 on the morning of August 3 in the parking lot behind the Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital. Wrapped in a blanket, and jammed into the floor space between the front and back seats, with a suitcase covering it, was the body of Gloria McKay. She had been shot twice. The .22 rifle was under her body. The front seat was soaked with blood and somebody had used Robert’s jacket to sit on at the steering wheel to avoid getting their pants bloody. Toby was tied to a bumper, whimpering, but unharmed. The car had probably not been there very long, or somebody would have noticed the dog. A constable was heard to say that he wished the dog could talk.

  Forensic examinations showed that Robert and Gloria had died at about the same time. That meant the killer had driven around Toronto with Gloria’s body still in the car after he had dumped Robert’s body. There was no evidence that Gloria had been sexually assaulted. Oddly, there was still money in her purse, while Robert’s wallet had been cleaned out. It was all very intriguing to investigators. The one solid fact they had was that the McKays had been killed with .38 bullets, the same calibre as the slugs that had been removed from Alfred Layng’s body. All of the bullets were sent to an RCMP lab for ballistics study.