Wrong Side of the Law Page 18
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 detective
s 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.
This was a significant find. So far all of the evidence the police had collected was circumstantial. They had nothing that conclusively tied the suspect to the crimes. A competent defence lawyer would be able to challenge everything, even the finger and palm prints on the Meteor.
At the time of his arrest, McAuliffe was wearing a grey coat that had been stolen from a farm bunkhouse and he had no shirt. The coat and shirt Larry Holmes had found were positively identified as the ones the bank robber had worn. Most important was a thumbnail-size bit of tinfoil a constable found in the coat pocket. On it was a partial fingerprint that matched the print of the little finger of McAuliffe’s left hand. The police now had proof, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that McAuliffe was the gunman.
McAuliffe’s second pistol and the Sten gun that was the actual murder weapon were never found, but the Crown prosecutor had all the evidence he needed to make a strong case. McAuliffe went to trial in the Norfolk County Courthouse in Simcoe on September 5. He was defended by W.E. Ross, a young Simcoe lawyer involved in just his second important case. Ross made an argument for self-defence. McAuliffe fired back, he said, after Lierman had shot at him first.
There was conflicting testimony over whether or not Lierman had actually fired his gun. Witnesses had seen him holding the gun out the window of the Plymouth and said they had heard shots. But had those sounds of gunfire actually come from the .22 rifle? The constable who had first examined Lierman’s rifle at the murder scene testified that the gun hadn’t been recently fired and that it was in fact inoperable. The constable had found the rifle on the back seat of the Plymouth. Had the killer thrown it there after shooting the two men? Or had a wounded Lierman tossed it back there in a desperate attempt to show the bandit advancing on him and Goddyn with a Sten gun that they were unarmed?
McAuliffe was silent and presented a calm expression as more than sixty witnesses gave their testimony and Crown Attorney D.E.W. Tisdale introduced 102 exhibits. The jury retired on September 14 and took only three hours to reach a verdict of guilty on both charges of first-degree murder. When Mr. Justice R.W. Treleaven sentenced him to hang, McAuliffe’s only betrayal of emotion was a slight twitching in his face.
The execution date was set for December 19. On October 3, with his case now in the hands of the highly respected Arthur Maloney, K.C., of Toronto, McAuliffe submitted a “Pauper’s Appeal” on the argument that the trial judge erred on some points of law in his instructions to the jury. It was rejected first by the Supreme Court of Ontario and then by the Supreme Court of Canada. On December 4, when McAuliffe learned of the final failure of his appeal, he nonchalantly said, “Well, that’s that.”
Like so many other condemned prisoners, McAuliffe spent his last days seeking comfort in religion. He was visited by the aunt who had raised him, and by his father and sister, all of whom refused to believe he was guilty of murder. His only other visitor was a Roman Catholic priest. Because he was scheduled to hang six days before Christmas, McAuliffe’s jailers said they would provide him with an early Christmas dinner if he wanted it. He didn’t.
Nobody in Simcoe doubted that McAuliffe was guilty of murder, but the idea of a hanging taking place in their community didn’t sit well with many of the residents. Some were opposed to capital punishment and called it “a barbaric hand-me-down from the stone age.” Hundreds of them signed a petition — in vain — to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Others felt that “a central place of execution should be established where local people are not forced to participate in the affairs.” Two hours before the execution, the municipal council made a request — which was granted — that the custom of having church bells toll to announce the carrying out of the death sentence not be observed.
Inside the jail, McAuliffe had to listen to the sounds of the gallows being constructed within a few feet of his cell. When the dreadful moment came for that last walk, he was offered a glass of whiskey, but refused it. McAuliffe went to his death without a word. The trap was dropped at 12:31 a.m. It wasn’t a “clean” hanging. The executioner botched the job, and McAuliffe slowly strangled for seventeen minutes before he was pronounced dead.
The body was placed in a cheap casket that police officers accompanied under cover of darkness to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery. The constables needed flashlights to pick their way through the pathways of the snow-covered graveyard. Art Lierman and Bill Goddyn, who had bravely, if foolishly, met their deaths in pursuit of a criminal, had been laid to rest surrounded by mourning family and friends. For Joseph Herbert McAuliffe, the end result of that lethal pursuit was an unmarked grave.
Chapter 11
Lucien Rivard:
The Great Escape
On March 2, 1965, Montreal’s old Bordeaux Jail was the scene of an escape that would go on record as one of the most infamous in Canadian history. The ease with which two prisoners made their break was embarrassing enough for authorities at many levels of government. But what rocked the nation and brought about an international scandal was the fact that one of the escapees, Lucien Rivard, was already a key figure in allegations of political corruption that threatened to bring down the Liberal government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.
Rivard, age forty-nine, had been in Bordeaux for almost ten months, fighting extradition to the United States where he was wanted on charges of drug trafficking. His fellow jail-breaker, Andre Durocher, age twenty-eight, had been sentenced to five years for robbery with violence. According to the story that appeared in the newspapers, at 6:20 p.m., Rivard and Durocher received permission from a guard, Sergeant Roger Beaupre, to get a hose so they could flood the jail’s hockey rink. Ten minutes later, guard Noel Bonneville escorted Rivard and Durocher to the boiler room where the hose was stored. Durocher suddenly pulled a gun on him. “No tricks,” Durocher warned. “This is serious.” The weapon was made of wood and covered with black shoe polish, but it looked real enough to the guard. Rivard and Durocher tied him up with electric wire, along with two boiler attendants. Then they smashed through the door leading to the guards’ target-practice room.
Guard Roland Gadoury was patrolling the lower inside jail wall at 7:15 when the two prisoners jumped him. They bound him with electric wire and black tape and took his twelve-gauge shotgun. Rivard and Durocher squirrelled their way across a ladder from the lower interior wall to the top of the twenty-foot-high main outside wall. Then they used the hose as a rope to slide down to the ground.
This story has become almost legendary. But how much of it is true is questionable. It was a spring night, with the temperature at 40 Fahrenheit (4.4 Celsius); not idea
l for flooding an outdoor ice rink. (Inmates played broomball on it, not hockey, which the administration considered too rough.) Two days after the escape, a Bordeaux guard who preferred to remain anonymous told Toronto Star reporter David Proulx that it would have been impossible for Rivard and Durocher to have escaped without inside help. The going rate for buying one’s way out of Bordeaux, he said, was $10,000. Rivard had access to that kind of money. He had plenty of it stashed away — proceeds from his various criminal activities. He also had strong contacts among the gang bosses of Montreal’s notorious east end.
The escapees did in fact use a hose to get down from the top of the wall. A photograph of the wooden gun appeared in newspapers. Rivard worked in the jail’s woodshop and could have made it there. But the hockey rink story seemed too contrived to many officials. There would be a lengthy investigation into just what happened before Rivard and Durocher went over the wall.
Once they were out of the jail, the two men ran across fields until they came to the intersection of Edmond Valade and Poincaré Streets, where there was a traffic signal. The first car to stop was a Dodge convertible driven by an accountant named Jacques Bourgeois, who was on his way to do some after-hours work at his office. Before he knew what was happening, both doors flew open and someone shouted, “Grab him!”
1952 police photo of Lucien Rivard, the career criminal whose escape from jail almost brought down a government.