Canada: ONTARIO: Crime Wave

Traditionally law-abiding Canadians have long been proud of the fact that their country has had far less crime than its U.S. neighbor. Last week they began to wonder: a wave of murder and robbery had suddenly swept across Ontario. On both sides of the border people asked themselves if this was the start of the often-forecast, greatly feared surge of postwar crime.

At Bob-Lo amusement park at the mouth of the Detroit River in Lake Erie, bandits escaped with $10,000. There were bank stickups at Blenheim and at Bath. Two gunmen took $11,000 from messengers of a Toronto trucking company. Then four gunmen, surprised while robbing a Toronto automobile dealer’s office, shot it out with police and escaped.

In lusty Windsor itself, across the river from Detroit, things were even worse. First, a lonely, tipsy man was stabbed and critically wounded on a deserted street for no reason that police could find. Several days later the stabbed body of a mechanic was found in a weed-grown field. Then, within 150 yards of the same spot, the body of Canadian Sergeant Hugh Blackwood Price was found; he, too, had been knifed. Next, a night watchman at a Windsor garage was brutally clubbed to death with a hammer, apparently by would-be robbers.

With the murders came a rash of rumors, cranks and pranks. A note pinned up in a public lavatory boasted about the murders over the signature, “Slasher Evans.” A young Detroit girl received a phone call threatening her life. One fearful insomniac sought police protection because he heard mysterious noises in the night. Every prostrate drunk brought forth a murder rumor. Mystic-minded citizens noted that all the murders had occurred under a full moon.

Windsor’s harassed 109-man police force called in U.S. and Canadian detective help, rounded up some 30 suspects (at week’s end, police admitted that none of the suspects looked likely). In London, Ontario, a meeting of police chiefs was told that the worst might be yet to come, that an upsurge of crime might be expected in the troublesome demobilization and reconversion days that lay ahead.