Wrong Side of the Law Page 16

  While Layng was being buried with military honours and the families of the slain couple were making their own funeral arrangements, Toronto Mayor Hiram McCallum ordered an “all-out police drive” to find all unlicensed guns in the city. “Anyone with a gun is a potential murderer,” he said. “Any gun is a potential murder weapon.”

  The McKays’ car was thoroughly examined for fingerprints, but none that were found on it matched anything in police files. Investigators from the Toronto Police Department, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the RCMP were all working on the case. The only clue connecting the murders was the calibre of the bullets that had killed the victims, but the police strongly suspected they had all been fired by the same person.

  Officers travelled the highway between Toronto and Minesing, stopping at every house and business to ask if anyone had seen the McKays or the black Dodge. They received conflicting reports. Witnesses in Bradford said they had seen three people in the Dodge. But a waitress in a restaurant in Newtonbrook on the outskirts of Toronto said the couple had stopped there at 11:15 Monday night and that they were alone. She said Robert had hot dogs and coffee, and Gloria had a hamburger and a Coke. She chatted with them for about fifteen minutes. They told her they were on their way to Toronto.

  Asked why she remembered the couple out of all the people she had served that night, the waitress said she recalled Robert’s red hair and Gloria’s dimples. She’d also heard the barking of a small dog coming from their car, which was parked close to the front door. The waitress said the two seemed very weary. After eating, they left the restaurant and drove away. The waitress believed she was the last person, besides the killer, to see Robert and Gloria McKay alive.

  The police had a tangle of clues, some of which made no sense. They heard rumours that the couple had picked up a hitchhiker. Could the hitchhiker have been the man who killed Layng? If so, why would he flee Toronto and then return? If he killed the McKays to get their car, why did he abandon it? Baffled, the police issued a strong warning to motorists not to pick up hitchhikers.

  The investigation seemed to have reached a dead end, when the work of Sergeant Payne began to produce results. Payne could see that the suit jacket he’d found had been tailor-made. With samples of material in hand, Payne and his team of detectives visited tailor shops all over the city. After two weeks they found a tailor in Toronto’s east end who had made the suit three years earlier for a client named Stanley Buckowski. Similar sleuthing revealed that the reading glasses had been prescribed for Jean Buckowski.

  Police now had a name for the number-one suspect in the Layng murder, though as yet they had no solid evidence connecting him to the McKay slayings. Nor did they have any idea where Buckowski was. Information was sent to police departments across Canada and in the United States, but for the time being the trail was cold.

  Buckowski had in fact fled to the United States, perhaps by way of Montreal. He went first to New York and then to New Orleans where Jean joined him. He was using narcotics again, and got money by armed robbery and burglary. In January of 1950, the fugitive couple arrived in Los Angeles where they rented an apartment.

  On the evening of February 1, the Buckowskis were strolling down an L.A. street when Stanley spotted a darkened house that looked like a good prospect for a robbery. Leaving Jean to stand watch on the sidewalk, he went to the front entrance and rang the doorbell. Nobody answered, so Buckowski cut the telephone wire and then broke in through the back door.

  The lone occupant was an eighty-year-old widow named Helen Edmunds. Evidently she was asleep and hadn’t heard the doorbell, but was awakened by the sound of breaking glass when Buckowski smashed the window in the back door. Mrs. Edmunds surprised Buckowski as he was going through a desk in the living room and he shot her. Buckowski would later offer the excuse that in the darkness, he thought he’d been confronted by a man. “She had a voice like a cement mixer,” he said.

  Buckowski fled the house empty-handed. “I had to shoot,” he told Jean. The next morning neighbours found Helen Edmunds’s body. The killer had placed the dead or dying old woman on her bed.

  Buckowski knew that the Los Angeles police had little to go on in the Edmunds murder case. He wasn’t known to local authorities, and he had outsmarted police before. Los Angeles was lucrative territory for a stickup man and burglar, so why move on to another city? Buckowski continued stealing and his confidence that he’d never be caught was his undoing.

  One night, at the scene of an aborted burglary, police found a broken rope dangling from a skylight. They deduced that the intruder had fallen and could have been hurt. They checked out hospital emergency wards and in one ward they found that a man calling himself Frank Miller had been there with a fractured ankle on the night of the break-in. He’d left with his foot in a walking cast. A few weeks later, acting on a tip, police arrested Buckowski when he was buying heroin in L.A.’s skid row district.

  The police put Buckowski in a hospital room with an officer standing guard outside the door. His ankle still hadn’t healed, and there was the possibility of him going into withdrawal. The room was on the ninth floor, so the police didn’t think it likely that he’d try to escape.

  They were wrong. Buckowski tied blankets together and hung the makeshift ladder out the window. He climbed down to the end, still about thirty feet from the ground. In spite of his injured ankle he dropped down and disappeared into the night.

  For about two months the police found no trace of the “cat burglar” they knew as Frank Miller. Then in May, a sharp-eyed officer patrolling Sunset Boulevard spotted a man whose face resembled one on a wanted poster in his precinct house. The suspect was sitting in a car. As the officer approached, the man jumped out of the car and bolted into a nearby park. He tried to hide in a wooded area that was soon surrounded by police.

  Called upon to come out with his hands up, Buckowski chose to shoot it out. He had five pistols. The gunfight lasted until Buckowski ran out of ammunition. Amazingly, no one was hit by all the flying lead. With his last shot spent and nowhere to run, Buckowski finally surrendered. This time he was locked up in jail. When police searched Buckowski’s apartment, they found a small arsenal of firearms.

  Strictly as a matter of routine, the Los Angeles police sent Buckowski’s fingerprints to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Months earlier, during the investigation into the Layng murder, the RCMP had at last found in their files a record of Buckowski’s fingerprints from one of his earlier arrests and had sent a copy to the FBI. In those days before computers revolutionized detective work, many weeks passed before somebody in FBI headquarters matched the fingerprints from the Los Angeles police with the set from the RCMP. The American Feds informed the Mounties that Stanley Buckowski was in a Los Angeles jail. The Mounties passed that information on to the Toronto Police Department.

  The Toronto police had three unsolved murders on their hands and were relieved at the news that Buckowski had been arrested in California. He could be extradited and tried for the murder of Alfred Layng. But they still needed evidence to support their belief that Buckowski was also responsible for the McKay murders. This brought about a strange twist in international police co-operation that brought the L.A. police back to the Helen Edmunds murder case.

  The examination of the McKays’ car had turned up a palm print that didn’t match anything the Toronto police had on file. They asked the Los Angeles police to send them Buckowski’s palm print. The request was granted; the print matched the one taken from the Dodge. Now Buckowski could be tied to the McKay murders. Canadian authorities wanted Stanley Buckowski back in Ontario as soon as extradition could be arranged. But upon learning that he was wanted for murder in Canada, the Americans thought it might be worthwhile to do some back-checking on the person they had in jail. They had a handful of charges against him, including burglary and escaping custody, but a character like that might have been responsible for even worse crimes during his time in the United States.

  First,
a ballistics test showed that a .38 pistol taken from Buckowski’s apartment had fired the bullet that killed Helen Edmunds. The only fingerprints on it were his. Then the police found Buckowski’s palm print on a large piece of broken glass from Mrs. Edmunds’s back door. The Los Angeles authorities told the Toronto police they wouldn’t be sending Stanley Buckowski back to Canada. He would be tried in California for the murder of Helen Edmunds.

  Buckowski admitted he had committed many robberies in the United States, but denied ever being in the Edmunds house. He said it wasn’t his practice to cut telephone wires and smash windows. He also claimed he’d acquired the .38 pistol a month after the death of Mrs. Edmunds. However, under questioning, Jean confessed she had stood watch in front of the house while Stanley broke in. She was placed under arrest and charged with accessory to murder.

  Stanley and Jean were tried together in a Los Angeles courtroom in late November 1950. Jean was acquitted and deported to Canada. Stanley was found guilty and sentenced to death in the gas chamber. His defence counsel entered an appeal for a new trial based on the circumstantial nature of some of the state’s evidence. A principal point was Buckowski’s insistence that he had stolen the .38 in a burglary after the murder. But he wouldn’t give any details as to exactly when and where he’d acquired the gun. The appeal went through the long, time-consuming process of legal channels and was finally denied by the Supreme Court of California. Buckowski’s home for the next year and a half would be a cell on death row in California’s notorious San Quentin Penitentiary.

  Death row inmates usually sought every possible legal avenue to postpone the execution date in hope of having the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. A case could drag through the courts for years. Buckowski wanted none of that. As far as he was concerned, the sooner it was all over, the better. He was anything but contrite and subdued as he awaited his fate. He loudly cursed the guards and his death row neighbours. During the daily one-hour period the men had in the exercise yard, Buckowski picked fights and once knocked another prisoner’s teeth out.

  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 span
iel, 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.”