In the Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, spends nearly 20 years carving a hole in the wall of his cell beneath a poster of Rita Hayworth and later, Raquel Welch.
That was fiction, but what if I told you that a Toronto gang completed not just one, but two escapes of legendary proportions in less than a year?
Andy used a rock hammer to carve a path to freedom.
But he wasn’t so notorious that fans smuggled in the tools for him.
He also didn’t carve out a key or hide a hacksaw in a wooden leg
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are filing away the bars on our history cell[3] to find our path to freedom with famous bank robbers.
This is the story of the Boyd Gang!
The Boyd Gang is made up of four men.
Edwin Boyd.
Willie Jackson.
Lenny Jackson.
Steve Suchan.
A series of life choices led them towards each other, beginning one of the most notorious crimes and manhunts in Toronto’s history.
Edwin Boyd was born on April 2, 1914, and while his father Glover was fighting in Europe. He didn’t get to meet his son until he returned home from the First World War.
Schooling was difficult for Edwin. As a child his family moved several times to stay ahead of the bill collectors.
Eventually, Edwin found some consistency when he attended Earl Beatty Public School in Toronto’s east end. There he joined the school’s soccer team and the YMCA’s marching band.
This was torn apart in early 1930 when Edwin and his brothers Gord and Norm contracted scarlet fever which then spread to his mother, who sadly died from the disease.
Her death caused a downward spiral in the family.
Edwin’s education suffered, his father couldn’t find work and eventually, a teenaged Edwin was forced to leave home.
Soon after in 1933, he was arrested for the first time on a charge of vagrancy.
When the Second World War began, Edwin joined the Royal Canadian Regiment. He didn’t see much combat, but he met his first wife, Doreen Thompson, while stationed in Surrey, England.
They married in late-1940 and nine months later, a baby named Edwin Jr. was born.
Once again, any sense of stability in Edwin’s life was ripped from him only two days later.
As the young family recovered German bombers were once again flying over England, dropping hundreds of bombs during the Blitz.
Air raid sirens sounded, a bomb exploded near to where Edwin and his family were hiding.
Baby Edwin died from a cerebral hemorrhage from the blast.
Doreen and Edwin remained together while he served in England with the Canadian Provost Corps, military police for the Canadian Army.
On Dec. 21, 1943, the couple had twins.
Then less than two years later and sixteen days after VE Day, Edwin returned to Canada with his wife and two sons.
His time in the army ended May 24, 1945
But that didn’t mean he was safe.
Money was hard to come by and disillusioned by his options after the war Edwin saw no alternative other than a life of crime.
Using a German luger pistol, Edwin robbed the Toronto branch of the Bank of Montreal on Sept. 9, 1949.
Edwin made $3,000 from the robbery, nearly $40,000 today.
He teamed up with Howard Gault and the two began robbing banks in the Toronto area as police hunted for them.
Howard got caught during a robbery and gave up his accomplice immediately.
Edwin was swiftly arrested and sent to the Don Jail.
Located to the east of the Don River, on Gerrard Street East, The Don Jail was one of the most famous jails in Canadian history.
Known officially as the Toronto Jail, it was built in 1864 and was originally designed as a reform prison. Called the “Palace for Prisoners”, it didn’t take long for the jail to develop a much more notorious reputation.
Through the years, overcrowding became a serious problem while Edwin was incarcerated; 400 prisoners lived in a space meant for 250.
Some who entered its walls, never left.
Until Canada stopped practicing capital punishment in the mid-1960s, the jail was the site of 26 hangings.
The last two men to serve a death sentence, Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas, were hanged at the Don Jail.
This is where Boyd would serve his time and where his life changed forever.
Not because he saw the error of his ways and but because of who he met
They were Lenny Jackson and Willie Jackson, two men who were unrelated but shared a last name, and a love of crime.
Lenny Jackson was an eighth-grade dropout who spent most of his young life working various jobs.
In 1937, he was arrested for breaking and entering and theft.
He was sentenced to two years in the Kingston Penitentiary.
When he got out, he spent the next few years wandering around North America, stealing when he needed to.
Whenever he was arrested for vagrancy, he gave a different name to the police.
Then the Second World War broke out and a 17-year-old Lenny enlisted with the Royal Regiment of Canada with whom he spent four years.
He never saw action because he was chronically ill with bronchitis.
He was discharged in 1944, and he joined the Merchant Navy and at one point survived the sinking of his ship by a German U-Boat.
After the war, he went back to living the life of a hobo and wandered around the country until one day in 1948.
That year, with no date specified, Lenny was hanging around the train tracks in Toronto hoping to hop on a westbound train.
As he raced alongside the train, he jumped up to grab the ladder, but his foot missed the step.
Hanging on the ladder struggling to hold on as his body bounced off the train, he lost his grip and hit the ground.
As he gathered himself, his ankle throbbed in pain.
That’s when he saw.
His left foot was sitting a few feet away.
Taken to the hospital by witnesses, his leg was cleanly amputated, and he spent six months recovering in bed.
After his release, he took a hairdressing course and became employed at his mother Lillian’s hairdressing shop.
He was unhappy and bored.
So, Lenny Jackson left the comfort of his mother’s shop to work as a barboy at a tavern.
And for a while it appeared to be the right choice.
He met Ann Roberts, who became his future wife and a waiter at the bar, called Big Jack, said everybody got along with Lenny.
Things seemed to be going well, customers liked him, including
Detective Edmund Tong of the Toronto Police who frequented the bar.
Remember that name… because as nice as his job was, Lenny couldn’t stop himself from dabbling back into the familiar… and that was a life of crime.
While working at the tavern, he met several nefarious men and together they began robbing businesses.
On May 10, they went into Woodbridge, Ontario, robbed a bank and made $9,464.
On July 2, they tried their luck again.
They headed back to Woodbridge to the same bank.
They walked in wearing Halloween masks and coveralls.
No one recognized them as the robbers from a month earlier… until…., one of them asked for Mrs. Bell, an employee at the bank.
That’s when staff knew these were the same bank robbers.
The men left with $6,000 but as they fled, the bank alarm went off and the clerk at the nearby drug store called the police.
The men evaded capture for weeks, but their luck ran out on July 30, 1951.
Lenny didn’t know it, but his bar regular, Detective Tong, had been working the case since May and acting on a tip, stormed Lenny’s hideout.
Lenny Jackson was on his way to the Don jail and a date with destiny
Willie Jackson was born near to where he would spend a lot of his life… the Don Jail.
As a kid, he skipped school so often that the Children’s Aid Society had to assign someone to supervise him.
It didn’t take long before he was in reform school because he had been caught stealing from a store.
From this point on, Willie had a pattern.
He would steal from a store or home, get caught, go to jail and after a few months or years he would be released.
Then it was rinse and repeat.
In early 1951, he went out, he assaulted an elderly man by hitting him with a beer bottle to rob him.
He was arrested and this time he was sentenced to serve seven years at Kingston Penitentiary and 20 strokes of the strap for the crime.
On Oct. 25, 1951, he was sent to the Don Jail pending an appeal.
The last of our ne’er-do-wells in today’s story is Val Lesso.
Unlike the others, he was born half a world away in Czechoslovakia and came to Canada when he was eight.
Growing up in a mining town, he was described as a quiet boy who was a gifted violinist as a child.
Nicknamed Val because he was born on Valentine’s Day, he came to Toronto in 1946 to pursue musical training.
Unfortunately, Val was unable to make a living as a violinist and in 1949 he traded in his precious violin for a handgun.
He developed the alias Steve Suchan to pass bad cheques around the city.
On March 3, 1950, he was found guilty of six counts of fraud, attempted fraud and issuing bad cheques.
Sentenced to nine months, he began working at the King Edward Hotel as an elevator operator when he got out.
Things were going well.
He had a girlfriend, Anna, and he was even promoted.
But the lure of a life of crime was too much for Steve.
Steve Suchan left the man people once knew as Val behind for good, much like Jimmy McGill did in favor of Saul Goodman.
In the spring of 1951, he met Lenny Jackson and they occasionally robbed banks together.
When Lenny was arrested, Steve was not yet known to the police as a bank robber, so he flew under the radar.
He and Anna also became close with Mary Mitchell, who was Lenny’s friend.
She sometimes delivered messages from Lenny to Steve, and before long, they started an affair.
Steve was a man on the outside and he began to plot an escape.
Meanwhile, inside the crowded Don Jail, the other three men were becoming acquainted.
By chance, Willie Jackson, Lenny Jackson and Edwin Boyd were placed in cells next to each other.
They quickly became friends, and found they had similar interests.
They liked stealing and wanted to do it again.
To do that, they needed to get out of jail.
As it turned out, Lenny’s prosthetic leg was their ticket to freedom.
One day, while sitting with Edwin Boyd in a cell, Lenny looked around for a guard.
Seeing none, he grabbed his leg, took it off the stump and revealed what was inside, Edwin saw a hacksaw that had been smuggled in.
This was the perfect opportunity to hatch an escape plan, and with Willie and Lenny, they put a plan in motion.
It was a simple enough plan.
They would cut the bars on their cell with the hacksaw.
It would take them weeks to slowly cut the bars off their windows.
Each evening, they put soap mixed with dirt to conceal the cut marks from any suspecting guards.
This was a plan that Lenny had tried to implement once before.
In September 1951, he had been sawing through the bars and planned to escape during Princess Elizabeth’s visit to Toronto.
Everyone would be distracted, and he could slip into the crowd unnoticed.
The escape attempt was discovered before it could be implemented.
The guards couldn’t pinpoint the prisoners responsible, because there was no evidence of the tool used.
That evidence was hidden in the hollow leg of Lenny Jackson.
On the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 4, prisoners were playing cards and talking loudly in the corridor. Working in shifts, the three men sawed at the final bit of the bar on the window.
The other prisoners knew what they were up to, and they made enough noise to drown out the noise.
Once they had cut through the bar that afternoon, the men went to cells to grab bed sheets that they tied together to create a rope. They tied the sheet rope to one of the bars of the window and threw it out into the night.
The escape was on.
At 5 p.m. that day, roll call was done before supper was served to the inmates.
Officer Alfred M. Bennett walked down the corridor calling out names.
Each time, the inmate responded with “present!”
As he got to Edwin Boyd’s cell he called out, “Boyd, Edwin”
A reply of “Present!” was called out.
Officer Bennett never looked up to see who said it.
He continued down the line.
“Jackson, Leonard”, Officer Bennett said.
Silence.
He looked up from his list as a call of “Present!” rang out.
Officer Bennett continued on.
“Jackson, William R.!”
Once again, he heard “Present!”
After this, the inmates were sent to eat their supper.
At 8:10 p.m., Officer Bennett walked down Corridor Three and he suddenly felt a cold breeze, something was different. The Don Jail was cold, but not that cold.
He walked up to the third last window.
Bennett put his hand up towards the window.
Instead of glass resisting his touch, his hand went straight through.
He also noticed that this window had one less bar than the rest and a bed sheet tied to it.
Bennett immediately called the other guards and told them to lock up the jail.
When prisoners returned to their cells, Bennett saw that three were empty.
The cells of Edwin Boyd, Willie Jackson and Lenny Jackson.
It was a jail break!
I’ve been watching a lot of Monk lately, so indulge me in my summation.
Here’s what happened.
After the three men threw out the sheet rope, Edwin Boyd was the first to climb out the window and down the side of the wall.
He was followed by the other two men.
With no guards around, the men had to be quick.
Not only was there a risk of getting caught, but it was November and absolutely freezing and they were only wearing light prison clothes.
As the men shivered, they ran to the outer stone walls of the Don Jail.
They were five metres high, and they had no way to scale them, especially for Lenny Jackson and his wooden leg.
With a second sheet rope they brought with them; the men formed a loop on the end. Lenny Jackson braced himself against the wall as Edwin Boyd climbed up onto his shoulders. Using them as a ladder, Willie Jackson climbed up both men to reach a decorative cornice built where the walls met.
There, he looped the sheet rope and one by one they climbed down the other side of the wall and into the night.
When they reached the spot where Steve Suchan was to meet them but…he wasn’t there.
After several anxious minutes, Suchan arrived with the getaway car.
The men climbed in and drove away to a hideout in the city.
For the next few weeks, police in Toronto searched high and low for the men but came up short.
News spread and police in Vancouver looked for the men on a tip that they were heading there.
But nothing came of the searches.
The Boyd Gang had been born and they were ready to go on an epic crime spree.
Take three accomplished bank robbers, a getaway driver, put them together, and do you get?
Bank robberies.
Once they escaped, The Boyd Gang robbed one bank on the day out, making $4,200.
Then they laid low for the next few weeks, until they were ready to strike again.
They walked into the Leaside Branch of the Royal Bank and came away with $46,207.
Witness descriptions of the gang’s leader sounded a lot like Edwin Boyd to the police.
With the heat on them, they had to lay low for awhile once more and this time away from Toronto.
The men left with their wives and girlfriends and headed to Montreal.
While Lenny Jackson and Edwin Boyd did their best to keep their newly stolen fortune under wraps, Steve Suchan and Willie Jackson were spending money like there was no tomorrow.
In Montreal, Steve rented a posh apartment, while Willie hit up nightclubs.
That proved to be his undoing.
On Dec. 18, 1951, he was on a date with a woman at a Montreal nightclub, and at one point he got up to use the bathroom.
While at the urinal, Willie felt the barrel of a handgun press into his side.
Someone had recognized him.
Within minutes police swarmed and Willie’s time on the lam was over. [4]
It also meant that the police shifted their search for the Boyd Gang away from Toronto and squarely towards Montreal.
By Christmas the three remaining fugitives were back in Toronto, trying to stay one step ahead of the police.
They celebrated Christmas and the New Year, and then the three remaining members of the Boyd Gang struck again.
On Jan. 25, they walked into the Kingston Road Bank and came away with $10,400.
Police suspected that the Boyd Gang was responsible, but they had no new leads and Willie Jackson wasn’t talking.
For the next few weeks, the men and their spouses went back and forth between Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Buffalo.
But the noose of the law was tightening around them.
With each bank robbery, the risk of capture grew.
And the man leading the investigations knew very well who he was dealing with… he was one of Lenny Jackson’s former customers:
Detective Edmund Tong.
On March 6, 1952, Detective Edmund Tong and his partner, Sgt. Roy Perry, were driving along Dundas Street when they saw a black sedan with two men they recognized inside.
As the two cars pulled up to a light next to each other, Tong opened his police car door and told Steve Suchan and Lenny Jackson to pull over.
The black sedan began to move towards the curb as Tong walked just behind it. The police car, driven by Sgt. Perry followed close behind.
For whatever reason, maybe because he knew Lenny Jackson and didn’t believe he was violent, Tong never pulled a weapon or called for back up.
Meanwhile, Steve Suchan was driving the car and was freaking out.
He had just had a baby with his girlfriend Anna, and no one in his larger friend circle and his family knew about his side hustle as a bank robber.
For months he had fun stealing money from banks and throwing it around lavishly.
Now, he was faced with the prospect of not only going to jail but going away for a very long time.
Filled with panic, Steve Suchan grabbed his gun and fired his weapon.
Maybe he was hoping to scare him, or maybe he simply wasn’t thinking.
Either way, the bullet hit Detective Tong tearing through his left lung and into his spinal cord.
He collapsed immediately.
At this point, Suchan had lost all reason, and fired several shots at the police cruiser. Sgt. Perry was hit in the arm.
Then Suchan took off, just as police arrived.
They had receiving calls from residents about gunshots.
Tong was on the ground bleeding and struggling to breathe.
With what strength he could muster, Detective Tong told them Steve Suchan shot him.
There was no stopping drag net now.
Two police officers had been shot, and across eastern Canada, bulletins went out with the description of Steve Suchan and Lenny Jackson.
Both men had left for Montreal and arrived early the next day.
Steve Suchan began to feel as though he was safe once again.
Little did he know that police were staking out his apartment.
When he went to get a meal that night, two officers entered his apartment and waited.
At 9:32 p.m. Steve Suchan returned and as he set items down, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
He grabbed his gun and as he turned, he saw a flash and then felt a stinging pain in his chest.
Two more shots hit him in the hand and the lower abdomen.
As he lay on the floor, Suchan asked police to shoot him in the head.
They told him they had every intention of making sure he lived.
The bullet to his chest missed his heart by only one inch and Suchan survived his injuries.
Time was ticking for the Boyd Gang.
Lenny Jackson and Edwin Boyd’s days were numbered, and it wouldn’t be long before they were behind bars.
On March 9, a woman recognized Lenny Jackson from a picture in the paper and informed police he was living in her apartment building.
Detective Jack Gillespie, who knew Lenny, led the squad to capture him.
As he walked up to the apartment, he saw the door was ajar.
Gillespie slowly pushed it open just as Lenny turned a corner.
The two men saw each other, and Lenny instantly knew this was the end.
He grabbed a gun and shot at Gillespie’s head, missing it by inches.
The police squad jumped to either side of the door as officers outside fired at the windows.
Lenny then grabbed his wife by the waist and put her in front of him using her as a shield and walked towards the door as she kicked and screamed to be let go.
She got free just as tear gas canisters busted through the windows.
Gillespie called to Lenny to surrender. He wanted to make sure he was taken alive, but Lenny didn’t listen.
He kept firing at the windows and door.
Then, Lenny’s wife told him to remember the baby and that she was pregnant.
Suddenly, clarity hit him.
He told Gillespie that his wife was coming out with the guns and that he was giving himself up.
Now the last free member of the gang was Edwin Boyd.
And the hunt for him was ON.
Edwin had not been involved in the shootings, but he was still a criminal on the loose.
Knowing he was in Montreal; police raided several places in the hopes of catching him, but they were unsuccessful.
To get Edwin Boyd, police enlisted the help of his brother Gordon.
Gordon didn’t want to sell out his brother but worried that if Edwin didn’t give himself up, he would die in a gun fight like Lenny and Steve Suchan nearly had.
Before long, police had enough tips that they knew where Edwin was located.
In the early hours of March 14, they walked into his apartment and found him asleep in bed with his wife.
Edwin surrendered without a struggle.
His capture was such big news that Mayor Allan Lamport arranged to be notified immediately and drove to the apartment building as newspapers captured photos of Edwin being led out of the building by police and the mayor.
Edwin and his fellow gang members once again at the Don Jail.
Then came the news everyone had dreaded.
After 17 days fighting for his life and in and out of consciousness, Detective Tong finally succumbed to his wounds and passed away.
Meanwhile inside the Don Jail, Edwin Boyd settled down to spend many years behind bars.
He was soon overjoyed to find out that a neighbouring cell house fellow gang member Willie Jackson, who had spent the past few months awaiting trial.
Soon enough, Lenny Jackson and Steve Suchan were put in cells nearby.
The new arrivals didn’t know that both Willie Jackson and Edwin Boyd were hatching a new escape plan.
For weeks, Willie and Edwin had been observing the key used by guards to open cells in their block.
The two men were going to copy that key.
As often happens with famous criminals, the gang had discovered that they had fans.
One man came to visit Willie and told him he would do anything to help him.
Soon enough, Willie’s visitor returned with a shoehorn and file.
Their cell block was guarded by an older man who was friendly with prisoners.
He enjoyed chatting with them and Willie developed a rapport with him playing a goofball prisoner.
At the same time Willie dehydrated himself for days.
An opportunity presented itself while the guard was locking up Steve Suchan.
Willie grabbed the key and jokingly told the guard he wanted to do the lock up.
The guard thought nothing of it and laughed off the incident.
What he didn’t know was that Willie had grabbed the key and created an impression of it on his dehydrated skin.
Back in his cell, he grabbed a pencil and traced the shape onto paper.
Now they had to make the key.
They immediately encountered a challenge.
A microphone hung over their cells so guards could listen in and hear if they were trying to escape again.
To mask the noise of making the key, Willie and Edwin would go to the toilet every so often and flush it.
While one flushed the other would file the shoehorn given to Willie in the shape of the key.
Unfortunately, the shoehorn was too thin, and Willie then had his fan get a piece of metal that was just the right size.
Once it was procured the men once again began the slow process of carving out their key.
By this point, Lenny and Steve were in on the plan and helped by making noise.
With the key finally made, Willie’s fan next brought in a hacksaw.
I have to say, whoever was doing visitor inspections was sleeping on the job because imagine how suspicious it would be to smuggle in a hacksaw.
Regardless, the gang now had one in hand, and they used a pillow to muffle the microphone as they sawed away at the bar in the window just as they had before.
It took them a month and in the early morning light of Sept. 8, 1952, each man climbed through the window and walked along the ledge outside of their cell block.
As they crept along the wall, a police officer stood below them whistling to himself.
And in a stroke of luck, the police officer suddenly left to go get a coffee from inside to warm his bones from the cool morning air.
The men got down the outside wall and ran for freedom. Their plan was to separate in the streets and then meet at a cache of food and guns left by Willie’s fan.
Two hours later at 7 a.m., their escape was discovered.
That night, in the very first television newscast by the CBC, Lorne Greene related the news to viewers.
You might remember Lorne Greene from my episode about him in 2023. He went on to play Ben Cartwright on Bonanza and had a long and successful television career well into the 1980s.
The escape led to one of the largest manhunts in Canadian history to that point, hundreds of officers were on the lookout for the men.
The Royal Canadian Air Force even loaned police a helicopter to be an eye in the sky.
Roadblocks were set up, barns searched, and farmers kept a look out for anyone who looked suspicious.
There would be no time for bank robberies for the gang this time. They were on the lam and any move could be risky.
The three men were hiding in woods outside Toronto where they remained undiscovered for over a week.
On Sept. 16, the men felt confident enough that they went out in search of a car to travel to northern Ontario.
Willie had been caught while getting food from a store, but the others were still on the run.
As they waited, a farmer nearby had seen four men wandering around an abandoned house near his property.
Inside, he had found four straw pallets and a simple dinner.
He searched the barn and found that someone had been walking on the straw.
The farmer called the North York police and told them about his discovery.
Meanwhile, a pipeline crew had also been observing the men and contacted police.
They blocked the road to prevent the escapees from fleeing and waited for police to arrive. Led by Detective Bert Trotter, police went to the barn, but it appeared abandoned.
As they walked in and looked around, above them three men looked down through the cracks.
Detective Trotter walked up to the second level and saw three dark figures in the barn’s upper level.
He drew his gun, and the remaining gang members knew this time there would be no escape.
All four men were soon back at the Don Jail where Mayor Allan Lamport made sure to do another photo-op with them for newspapers.
Upon returning home, Detective Trotter was given a hero’s welcome.
He picked his wife Shirley in his arms as news cameras flashed around him.
As can often happen, the fugitives became folk heroes to some people.
Teenage girls gathered at the North York station clapping and screaming that they wanted Boyd.
There would be no more epic escapes and the Boyd Gang…. was no more.
But what happened to the men after their return to the Don Jail?
Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan were tried for murder. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death.
They were hanged on Dec. 16, 1952, at the Don Jail, where so many others had met a similar fate.
Willie Jackson was sentenced to 31 years in prison. He was released on parole in 1966.
Edwin was released in 1962 but he returned shortly after because of parole violations and was finally freed in 1966 when he left Toronto.
He began using the name John and moved to Canada’s west coast.
Edwin Boyd spent years driving a bus for people with disabilities.
He and his wife eventually divorced, and he remarried. This time he met his bride on the bus he drove and for the next 35 years, he took care of her until they both moved into a retirement home.
Near the end of his life, Edwin Boyd contacted a CBC producer and told him that before he began a life as a bank robber, he had killed a couple in High Park and left their bodies in the trunk of a car.
This fit the story of the murder of Iris Scott and George Vigus, who were killed on Sept. 11, 1947.
Police began a formal investigation, but it was cut short on May 17, 2002, when Edwin Boyd died.
But the stories of his legendary escapes from prison live on.
