Wrong Side of the Law (17 page)

On the evening of Friday, July 29, Robert and Gloria packed up their car, a black 1942 Dodge sedan, and drove away from their flat on Emerson Avenue in Toronto. As always, they took their little spaniel, Toby. On Saturday, while Robert did chores, Gloria went to nearby Barrie where she bought pink and blue cotton material to make dresses for herself and Mrs. Langelaan. She finished both dresses before it was time to go back to Toronto.

It was a long weekend, and neither Robert nor Gloria had to be back at work until Tuesday. On Monday they talked about playing hooky from work for a day and not driving home until Tuesday evening. However, by Monday night they had changed their minds and decided they’d better head for home so they could go to work Tuesday morning. They said goodbye to Robert’s aunt and uncle, promising to return in a couple of weeks, and drove away at 9:00 p.m. Gloria was wearing the new dress she had just made. On the back seat next to Toby was a .22 rifle she had given Robert as a gift for their fifth wedding anniversary, coming up on August 5. The couple never saw that anniversary. They didn’t even make it back to Emerson Avenue.

At about 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 2, a bricklayer named Charles Edwards was working on a house near the end of Saguenay Avenue, a dead-end street near the intersection of Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue in the municipality of North York. He took a few minutes’ break from his work to walk down a path into a wooded ravine at the bottom of the street. He hadn’t gone very far when he almost stumbled over what he first thought was a sleeping man. Edwards said, “Pardon me.” Then he saw the blood.

Edwards hurried back to the construction site and told his foreman there was a dead man in the ravine. The foreman called the police. Edwards later told a reporter, “He scared the life out of me. I can still see his wide, glassy eyes staring at me … It was an awful shock. I’ll remember seeing the body lying there, more like a ghost than the body of a human.”

The man had been shot three times. Police quickly determined that he had not been killed at the site where the body had been found. There was no blood on the surrounding ground or bushes, and the way the shirt was pulled up from the waist indicated that the body had been dragged there. A wallet police found near the body was empty and it was evident that someone had gone through the dead man’s pockets. Then a local resident turned in a woman’s purse he had found in the ravine that morning. In the purse was a driver’s licence belonging to Gloria McKay. The dead man was soon identified as her husband Robert.

Police began a sweep of Toronto, looking for a black 1942 Dodge sedan. Two constables found it just after 1:00 on the morning of August 3 in the parking lot behind the Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital. Wrapped in a blanket, and jammed into the floor space between the front and back seats, with a suitcase covering it, was the body of Gloria McKay. She had been shot twice. The .22 rifle was under her body. The front seat was soaked with blood and somebody had used Robert’s jacket to sit on at the steering wheel to avoid getting their pants bloody. Toby was tied to a bumper, whimpering, but unharmed. The car had probably not been there very long, or somebody would have noticed the dog. A constable was heard to say that he wished the dog could talk.

Forensic examinations showed that Robert and Gloria had died at about the same time. That meant the killer had driven around Toronto with Gloria’s body still in the car after he had dumped Robert’s body. There was no evidence that Gloria had been sexually assaulted. Oddly, there was still money in her purse, while Robert’s wallet had been cleaned out. It was all very intriguing to investigators. The one solid fact they had was that the McKays had been killed with .38 bullets, the same calibre as the slugs that had been removed from Alfred Layng’s body. All of the bullets were sent to an RCMP lab for ballistics study.

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.