The firing of the allegedly incompetent Clifford Blackburn, deputy governor of the Don Jail, may have been met with intense hostility from prominent Conservatives in May 1935, but no one of any political stripe could have disapproved of Walter Leigh Rayfield, the man appointed to replace him.
“Because of his experience and interest in his fellow men it is expected he will be a very capable deputy governor,” said Provincial Secretary Harry Nixon.
The Liberal Party had swept into provincial power in 1934 and Rayfield’s appointment was in line with a new policy of selecting war heroes to fill vacancies in the civil service.
But Captain Rayfield was not just your ordinary war hero. He had earned the right to tack the rare and coveted initials VC (Victoria Cross) after his name.
Born in Richmond-on-Thames, England, in 1881, Rayfield came to Canada as a youth. During the First World War, he enlisted in the Canadian army and by September 1918 was a private with the British Columbia Regiment of the Seventh Battalion Canadian Infantry. In the course of two long days near Arras in northern France, he performed three separate exceptional acts of valour: he rushed a trench full of German soldiers, bayoneting two and taking ten prisoner; he neutralized an enemy sniper and captured another thirty Germans; and, he left cover under heavy machine-gun fire to rescue a gravely wounded comrade. For his service and bravery, Rayfield received the Victoria Cross, the highest honour awarded to members of the British armed forces. The last paragraph of his citation read: “His indomitable courage, cool foresight, and daring reconnaissance were invaluable to his Company Commander and an inspiration to all ranks.” After the war, his good deeds continued: he was in charge of transferring “shell-shocked” and other severely disabled soldiers to military hospitals.
Prior to his appointment as deputy governor of the jail, Rayfield had served for a short period as sergeant-at-arms of the Ontario legislature, where, to the surprise and admiration of the press, he had come to work in mufti; that is, wearing a regular or civilian suit instead of his military uniform. Newspapers praised “his quiet and unassuming manner and his failure to attempt commercialization of his decoration, [which had] earned the respect of his fellow citizens in peacetime just as his valor won their admiration in war.” His past professional record in agriculture, in the armed forces, as one of the officials in charge of the post-war reintegration of soldiers, and as an employee of the Toronto Harbour Commission were clear evidence of “diversified ability.” In short, it was expected that the deputy governorship of the jail would be in very safe hands.
After serving as deputy for five years, Rayfield was promoted to governor in February 1940 when the incumbent, Harry Denning, retired with serious heart problems and took to his bed.
A year later, Rayfield was fielding some very bad press. A newly released prisoner accused guards of beating and torturing an inmate named Hugh Alexander “Bill” Newell, a twenty-seven-year-old airman serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. At the time, Newell was in the Don awaiting a second trial for murdering his estranged wife, Anne, who had been strangled with her own silk stocking. Her body was found in a clump of bushes on Toronto’s Centre Island. Newell was by then living with another woman.
The ex-prisoner, Michael Kelly, claimed that “six burly guards” had dragged Newell out of chapel and thrown him into the death cell — “undeservedly,” according to Newell’s lawyer, as he had not yet been convicted. Kelly alleged that Newell kept shouting, “You’re breaking my arms!”
Capt. Walter Rayfield, VC, governor of the Don Jail from 1940 to 1949. When serving as sergeant-at-arms at the Ontario legislature in 1935, he impressed reporters by dressing in mufti; that is, in a regular suit instead of his military uniform.
The truth was probably a lot more nuanced. Bill Newell was an angry man with a disruptive personality. Soon after his arrival at the Don, he was placed in a detention cell for hurling his food on the floor in a fit of rage. He accused the police of framing him, and at his first trial, he yelled at his own lawyer, called the crown attorney a liar, and accused the judge of “turning prosecutor.” Losing patience, the judge rebuked him for being arrogant and impertinent.
“I can’t make any statement,” was Governor Rayfield’s curt reply when asked to comment on Kelly’s accusations.
Kelly, on the other hand, had no compunction about making lots of statements. “The guards are to blame for all the mistreatment that Newell or anybody else gets at the jail,” he announced. “The inspector of prisons never gets to see any of these things. The governor’s a good man, but he doesn’t know what’s going on behind his back.”
The allegation that Rayfield was a good, but clueless, man must have stung.
Ongoing criticism of Rayfield’s workplace included this from a former deputy provincial secretary: “The outmoded Don Jail has resumed its original status as the main reformative institution in an area containing a third of Ontario’s population, and it is crowded till the walls bulge.” In 1944 a Globe and Mail reporter and photographer were invited on a rare “frank and open” tour of the jail, with no special preparations made in advance. The pair found the jail “spotless but outmoded.” It was so clean because there was no shortage of labour to keep it so. However, there was not enough work to engage the entire jail population, and most of the inmates spent their time sitting in the corridors and “gossiping.” Once again, the lack of toilet facilities was highlighted. Only four cells in the whole building, the death cells, had private toilets. (And if you weren’t one of those with the luxury of death-cell accommodation, you still had your trusty “portable facilities” at night time — read, “pails” — to fall back on.) The jail, according to the article, was a space waster. It had “a huge central area which towers to the roof and which is topped by an ancient skylight.” Officials at the provincial secretary’s office at Queen’s Park who administered the institution wanted something different: a modern jail near a highway to facilitate transportation of prisoners to the courts, “which wouldn’t waste space, heat, or staff labor [sic].” In the meantime, officials pointed out, the facilities were just about the same as those “enjoyed by a lot of pioneers and a lot of rural Canadians today.”
In short: it was business as usual at the antiquated, overcrowded, malodorous institution.
However, what took place on June 10, 1944, with the news media dominated by harrowing stories of the D-Day invasion and the Allied struggle to liberate Western Europe, was anything but business as usual.
That night, there was a bloody battle in the hospital ward of the Don Jail.
For one horrible moment, Governor Rayfield must have thought he had been plunged back into a war zone. “The first thing I noticed when I walked into the ward was blood on the floor, just inside the door,” he said. “It looked as if a man bled for some time. Then I saw the body of the guard lying on the floor. I put my hand on his chest, and in my opinion the guard was already dead.”
The dead man was forty-seven-year-old Robert H. Canning, a veteran of the First World War who had recently been discharged from the army and had been working at the jail for just two months. Canning was found tied to heating pipes with a leather strap. His head had apparently been battered with an iron pipe found nearby. A post-mortem later revealed the cause of death as asphyxiation from pressure applied to his throat, severe enough to break his larynx.
The men accused of killing Canning were Allan Baldwin, thirty-two, who was in the Don pending appeal of his conviction for bank robbery and receiving stolen goods, and William J. O’Sullivan, twenty- one, convicted of armed robbery. After battering, choking, and tying up the bleeding Canning with bedclothes, the two men spent the next hour frenziedly sawing through the iron bars on one of the windows with a hacksaw blade. Baldwin then climbed through the fourth-floor window, letting himself down on a rope made of knotted sheets stripped from the beds. The makeshift rope broke and he plummeted down the last twenty feet or so, breaking his arm. O’Sullivan obviously thought better of following him, and when the alarm buzzer was eventually pressed, possibly by O’Sullivan himself, jail guards who rushed to the scene found him fully clad, boots and all, lying on his bed.
Baldwin’s flight triggered a twenty-two-hour manhunt throughout Toronto and its surroundings, involving more than two hundred members of the city, suburban, and provincial police forces. Ten carloads of officers, led by the chief constable himself, converged on the Humber Bay area, where they eventually found the escapee hiding under the Dundas Street West bridge. Although he was armed with a fully loaded revolver, he offered no resistance.
Baldwin and O’Sullivan were tried for murder in October 1944.
“I pointed my finger at O’Sullivan who was reclining on the third bed inside the ward and told him ‘you know something about this,’” Rayfield testified in court. “He just smiled.”
There were two orderlies and five other inmates, reportedly mentally ill, in the ward that evening. Not one of them sounded the alarm. “I couldn’t understand how this thing could have happened,” said Rayfield. “I thought some effort should have been made to save this man’s life.”
“Did you think it was strange they didn’t help?” asked O’Sullivan’s lawyer.
“No,” said Rayfield. “Not after I was told they were bound up and threatened.”
“They were probably all scared to death,” commented the judge. “They were not well to start with. They had seen the knife [in O’Sullivan’s hand], and had been told to stay out of it. It was serious from the start.”
After eleven hours of deliberation, the jury could not reach an agreement.
At the men’s second trial, in March 1945, Rayfield told the judge and jury that hacksaw blades like the one the defendants had used to cut through the window bars were quite regularly smuggled into the jail. “We’re up against that all the time,” he said.
Although both men protested that Canning’s death was accidental and that they had only intended to tie him up, they both received a verdict of manslaughter. The judge sentenced Baldwin to twenty-five years and O’Sullivan to ten, to be served concurrently with their existing sentences. This would, in effect, add six years to their original terms. “I think the jury has taken an extremely lenient view of your case. I have no sympathy with you at all,” Mr. Justice McFarland told Baldwin curtly. He was slightly more sympathetic toward O’Sullivan — the plan had been conceived by Baldwin, he noted, “although you may have been the willing assistant.”
This violent and sensational case made media waves, and legal history, for another reason as well: Baldwin’s lawyer was Vera Parsons, the first woman ever to defend a person tried for murder before an assize or circuit court jury in Ontario. The press commented admiringly on her blondish hair and “peculiar” shade of green-brown eyes, and the fact, as the Globe and Mail put it, that she didn’t fit “into the average conception of a woman lawyer who usually is pictured as of somewhat severe mein [sic], bespectacled, and with a penchant for tailored business suits.” Also mentioned was that Parsons just happened to be an extremely talented and dedicated professional with more than twenty years’ experience at the bar, who excelled as a trial lawyer.
At the time of the jailbreak, the mayor of Toronto, Frederick Conboy, announced that he intended to lodge a protest with provincial and federal authorities. “Many of these [desperate criminals] appeal their cases without any hope of winning the appeal, but with the intention of plotting their escape,” he fumed. “When they are sentenced to Kingston Penitentiary they should be sent there and brought back for a new trial if necessary. When held at Don Jail they are a menace to the guards and to the citizens generally.”
Prophetic words.
Just one year later, they would return to haunt provincial, city, and jail officials when another group of desperate, Kingston-type criminals would put the security of the Don Jail and the competence of its custodians to the test.