Wrong Side of the Law Page 17
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.”
Chapter 10
Joseph McAuliffe:
Lethal Pursuit
At 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.
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.