According to the old saying, “It’s not what you know, but who you know that counts.” Or, sometimes, “It’s who your mother knows.” In the spring of 1952, lawyer John Josiah Robinette was burning the midnight oil in his office when one of the cleaners, a woman named Elizabeth Lesso, approached him with a request. Her son, she explained by way of an introduction, was a good boy. However, he was in trouble and he needed a lawyer. Would Mr. Robinette please help him? She then revealed that her son’s name was Steve Suchan, and that he had been charged with the slaying of Toronto policeman Edmund Tong.
As George D. Finlayson reports in John J. Robinette, Peerless Mentor: An Appreciation, Lesso broke down in tears, saying, “He is charged with another man, and the other man is a very bad man.”
Robinette felt sorry for her. He agreed to take on the case.
Remember the eminent lawyer who struggled in vain to save Frank McCullough from the hangman’s noose in 1919, after McCullough shot Detective Frank Williams? That was Thomas Cowper Robinette. John Josiah was his son. Now, in a strange parallel thirty-three years later, Robinette the younger was also engaged in defending a cop-killer.
As it turned out, J.J. had a little longer to prepare his brief than he had anticipated. On September 8, one day before the grand jury was due to convene to consider the indictment of Suchan and Lennie Jackson for murder, something unexpected happened.
Following the gang’s first escape, Boyd had again found himself locked up in the Don Jail. This time, the authorities were taking no chances. Boyd occupied one of four cells in No. 9 Hospital, a former infirmary on the second level. It was also known as “death row” because of its location just a few steps away from the gallows chamber (previously a latrine), and because prisoners convicted of murder generally ended up spending time there before they were executed. The walls and ceilings of the cells were made of metal, with steel doors and grilles. High up on the east wall of a narrow corridor in front of the cells was a small window. It had been fitted with double bars, a necessary measure because it was just a short drop to the top of a wall that intersected with the outer wall of the jail. For extra security, a microphone connected to the governor’s office was installed in a screened air vent in the corridor so guards could listen to whatever might be going on. A heavy oak door separated this area from the landing accessible to the general inmate population. There was a new alarm system in place. At night, an armed guard was stationed in the grounds outside the walls of the jail, and two policemen kept watch at the rear of the building.
On May 14, Willie Jackson was back in the Don, transferred from the Kingston Penitentiary to face charges for two robberies in late 1951. Boyd was amazed and delighted to find his pal occupying one of the vacant cells in No. 9 Hospital. In June and August respectively, the two other members of the gang, Suchan and Lennie Jackson, their injuries healed, were also assigned cells on death row. Prison officials breathed sighs of relief. All four desperadoes were now housed in the most secure and heavily monitored section of the jail.
Lennie arrived without his prosthesis but with a burning desire to get out. It was the amiable Willie who came up with the tools to make this happen. Boyd claimed that Willie was given a small piece of flat steel, a file, and a hacksaw blade by his lawyer — something that the lawyer vehemently denied. Boyd gave two different accounts of how they had acquired the master key to their cells. According to one version, Willie playfully snatched the key that opened all four cell doors from one of the guards and imprinted the shape on his hand. After some trial and error, Boyd managed to use this impression as a template to replicate the key on the piece of flat steel. However, he gave the police a different version: he had made the key by “observing the key which was brought in by the guards.” Improbable as both these stories seem to be, the fact was that the men were finally able to let themselves in and out of their cells whenever they wanted.
They now had the means — and, as it turned out, the opportunity — to prepare for a getaway. For two hours each morning, while the guards were busy arranging transportation to court and breakfast for the other inmates, the oak door that separated death row from the rest of the floor was locked. So the gang was free to work without human surveillance. While Boyd and Willie took turns at sawing on the bars of the window in the corridor, Suchan and Lennie took turns at holding a pillow over the screened air vent to muffle the microphone. They started with one of the outer bars and, when that was just about cut through, proceeded to hack away at the matching inner bar. After each session, Boyd would conceal the cuts with a mixture of dirt and soap, the same ploy that had worked so successfully during their first escape. The process was agonizingly slow, and they lived in fear that a zealous and sharp-eyed guard would spot their handiwork and sound the alarm.
On a late August morning, they were ready to go. Once the oak door was shut and locked at 4:45 a.m., Boyd removed the two bars and started to wriggle through the opening. To his horror, he got stuck halfway. The aperture was too narrow.
“So I got hold of Willie and I said, ‘You try it, Willie,’” Boyd said in an interview with authors Marjorie Lamb and Barry Pearson. “Just to make sure, I thought, I’ll put lots of butter on his hips. So there’s Willie, bare naked, and he’s got — we’re rubbing butter on his hips. We tried to shove him through and he wouldn’t go through.’”
Boyd may not have known it at the time, but the window he was trying to squeeze his buttered friend through just happened to be the same one that Frank McCullough had used for his jailbreak thirty-three years earlier. When Major Basher was appointed governor, he had ordered it to be bricked up. However, when the large room was converted into four separate death cells in 1934, jail authorities had unbricked the escape window to allow in more light and air. Because of that dangerously close wall outside, they added another set of bars, making it the only window in the whole building with a double layer of bars.
Back to the drawing board: the gang would have to put back the severed bars and hope they wouldn’t fall out and that the cuts wouldn’t show. Then they needed to saw through another two bars. It took two more nail-biting weeks for them to finish the job. In the early morning of September 8, they were finally on the move. Not much preparation was needed. Lennie put a couple of pairs of thick socks, some strips of newspaper, and his enamel drinking cup over his stump. Boyd removed the bars and scrambled out the window and onto the wall. The rest of them followed.
According to Boyd, he was merely acting in an advisory role; he had no intention of actually decamping with the others. “Each of them went through quite easily,” he told Lamb and Pearson, “although Suchan was fairly snug. I’m sitting (outside) waiting for them to come out, and then I was going to go back in again, and lock myself up and lock their cells too, so that it’s a real mystery [to the authorities].”
His fellow escapees were not entirely convinced that this was a sensible plan. “Gee, are you sure you want to do that?… You know what’s gonna happen when they find us missing? What’re they going to do to you?”
Boyd said that he was just about to squeeze his way back into the building when Suchan noticed a policeman down below, outside the prison wall, whistling and talking to himself. “We laid there — and it’s getting daylight,” said Boyd. “Boy, the dawn is rising and it’s getting so light that we can see each other’s faces clearly. We could see people walking … the odd car’s passing…. Then I realized I was stuck. I had to go too. And I thought, ‘What the hell. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.’”
The foursome hesitated for several more heart-stopping minutes — should they go back inside? If they did, they were toast. Then the policeman went over to a door in the wall, tapped to be let in, and was gone. The gangsters dropped as quietly as possible off the eighteen-foot-high outer wall and scuttled into the dense bush of the nearby Don Valley.
By 7:00 a.m., the day guards sounded the alarm. Within minutes jail officials and police were swarming all over the scene, searching the grounds and the roof. Ace crime reporter Jocko Thomas, who was sent by his newspaper to cover the story, remembered an inmate yelling out a window, “Hey, you flatfeet, they’re not here, they’re gone!” A despondent police inspector beside Thomas said to him: “I think he’s right.”
For two days the gang moved north through the Don Valley, which was wild and undeveloped in the early 1950s — no paved pathways through the ravines to make for an easy passage, and the Don Valley Parkway, the expressway that now bisects the valley, was still years away from completion.
“Even without his foot Lennie moved pretty good up the Don Valley,” Boyd told Vallée. “He never let anything slow him down. But he was suffering terribly from hay fever and asthma and he seemed like a beaten man. He was never the same after he was shot up in Montreal.”
On Wednesday morning they stumbled across an abandoned barn on Leslie Street in northern Toronto, where they took refuge. They subsisted on food stolen from neighbouring farms until Friday, when Willie made a sortie and returned with groceries and cigarettes.
But time was running out. The escapees had been spotted in the area, and the sightings reported to the police. These civic acts were no doubt fuelled by the generous reward ($26,000!) being offered for information leading to the gang’s arrest. Police efforts, which had dropped to a simmer, came fiercely back to the boil.
The newly minted CBC English television network ran a report on the Boyd Gang’s September 16 takedown. Enthralled viewers were treated to a (completely fictitious) police chase, a car being forced off the road, and motorcycle police riding in tandem, searching for the suspects.
In a hard-hitting article beneath the headline “Not So Tough,” which ran in the Globe and Mail on September 18, Frank Tumpane revealed that the truth was far more prosaic:
Everybody — police officers included — had given us to understand this quartet would act, when cornered, like Hollywood’s notion of last-ditch gunmen. You would have thought they were Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Jack Dalton with Boyd, of course, completing the program as Robin Hood.
But instead of that it turns out they weren’t so tough after all when confronted by a couple of determined policemen who had guns in their hands and knew how to use them.… The glamour boys were unkempt, unshorn, unshaved and hungry when the police finally found them. Their days of freedom they spent in an abandoned barn, eating canned beans and stolen apples to keep alive. How’s that for the glamorous, plush life of Canada’s so-called master criminals?
The Boyd Gang’s Leonard “Tough Lennie” Jackson escaped twice from the Don Jail. He faced trial in September 1952 for the murder of Toronto police officer Eddie Tong.
The saga of the Boyd Gang had now reached its final chapter — which was short but not sweet.
The day after they were recaptured, Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan were arraigned on murder charges. At that point, Suchan, or Suchan’s mother, rather, had already retained lawyer John Robinette. Jackson had no counsel. This was before free legal aid was available in Ontario, and he apparently could not afford a lawyer.
The judge assigned to their case, Chief Justice James Chalmers McRuer, also known as “Hanging Jim” and “Vinegar Jim,” was a man in a hurry. He waved away all requests for adjournment, and the trial date was set for September 22. The judge was not without scruples, however. As J. Patrick Boyer describes in his book A Passion for Justice, McRuer spent one of his lunch hours wandering through the corridors of Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto until he managed to snag a young barrister, Arthur Maloney, whom he persuaded to take on Jackson’s case without a fee. A daunting challenge, as Maloney was given mere days to prepare for this high-profile and high-stakes murder case. As always, a guilty verdict would mean an automatic death sentence.
In March 1952, Boyd Gang member Valent Lesso, alias Steve Suchan, shot and grievously wounded Eddie Tong, who later died of his wounds. Along with Lennie Jackson, Suchan was tried for murder in September 1952.
In court, Justice McRuer lived up to both of his nicknames: as the case proceeded, it became clear that he was unsympathetic towards the accused, if not downright hostile. It didn’t help that Jackson incriminated himself under cross-examination. But, ultimately, none of this made any difference. The Crown’s case was so strong that the defence lawyers, brilliant as they were, were powerless to save their clients from the gallows. The pair was found guilty of murder, and their appeals were dismissed.
Boyd and Willie Jackson were both tried for a potpourri of bank robbery offences. Boyd ended up with eight life sentences and Jackson got thirty years. Both men were paroled in 1966.
Suchan and Lennie Jackson were hanged back-to-back at the Don Jail in the early morning of December 16, 1952. “As a sidelight on the state of civilization in the City of Toronto, capital of Ontario, Canada, in the year of Our Lord 1952,” fumed J.V. McAree in a blistering article three days later, “a future historian is likely to note that on a winter night a crowd of 1,000 people, including children and babes in arms, assembled before the Toronto jail where two murderers were to be hanged. These people could see nothing of the execution; if they could their numbers might have been swollen by another 50,000.”
Even before the foursome met their respective fates, the fallout from their exploits had been enormous. Suspensions and dismissals were the order of the day among jail and other officials suspected or accused of negligence or corruption. And the report of a Royal Commission into conditions at the Don had just been published. Perhaps that would go some way to uncovering what one reporter in the age of Boyd referred to as “the inadequacy of the present old pile of stones,” whose “usefulness was outlived long ago.”