At about two in the morning on Wednesday, July 27, 1949, three visitors from Montreal were walking along the boardwalk at Kew Beach, looking for shelter for the night. Ralph Cragg was with Marion Nelson and her brother Herbert. They came upon a man lying motionless by the boardwalk.
A young man stepped out of the darkness. “That’s my friend,” he told them. “He’s drunk.”
The three walked on and slept at the foot of Kenilworth Avenue. Shortly after dawn, Cragg went back to the spot. The body had been shoved under the boardwalk. He ran to call the police.
The man under the boardwalk was Jack Hern, a 37-year-old dining car steward with the Canadian National Railways. He had been beaten to death. His pants were missing.
Hern was born William Gordon Leslie Hern at Toronto General Hospital on August 18, 1911. The newspapers reversed his names to Leslie William Gordon. Family and friends called him Jack. When he died he was three weeks short of 38, though the papers gave his age as 36 or 38.
Hern worked as a steward on CN dining cars. He was unmarried and lived with his parents. The Globe and Mail called him a “flashy railway dining car steward,” and the wire services repeated the inventory: the flashy clothes, the expensive watch, the big car.
His mother, named in the papers in the style of the day as Mrs. Llewellyn Hern, and his cousin, Lulu MacMillan, said he was friendly and too generous. They had warned him that acting like a millionaire was dangerous, especially since he was not wealthy. He often picked up men he had never met and drove them around in his car. Sometimes he brought them home to his parents’ house for the night or the weekend.
The weekend before he died, he brought home a young labourer. The two spent a couple of days driving around and staying at the Hern house. His mother said his companions were usually “up and away” before she saw them. When she did see them, some struck her as undesirable company for her son.
His last night began in a Bay Street hotel tavern. On Tuesday, July 26, he was drinking there with a friend, Joseph John Osborne, 47. At a nearby table sat a dark-haired young man who gave his name as Louis Martinello. Hern offered him a ride, and he accepted. The two left together in Hern’s car.
Osborne had turned down the same offer. He later told the court he was getting old and didn’t stay out so late any more.
The car went east to Kew Beach. Sometime before 2 a.m., on the sand by the boardwalk, Hern was beaten to death.
The pathologist, Dr. W. Burry, testified that Hern’s left eye was closed and his left cheekbone broken. There were numerous cuts a fall could not explain, and four teeth had been knocked from his dental plate. The blows caused a cerebral hemorrhage, and that killed him.
The first reports called it a “spike slaying.” Police thought at first that Hern had been shot. They then suggested a spike or small knife, or that his head had been struck against a nail in the boardwalk. By the time the case reached court, the evidence pointed to a beating.
For all his flashy clothes and his watch, Hern was carrying only $50. Police said the motive was robbery.
Two days later, on Friday night, July 29, Det.-Sgt. Tong and Det. Bernard Simmonds walked into another Bay Street tavern and arrested their suspect. He was sitting with Osborne, Hern’s friend from the night of the killing.
He gave his name as Louis Martinello and was charged under it. Under questioning he admitted he was Harvey Southerby, 21, a former auto worker from Windsor. He had been in Toronto about a month and had no job. He first told police he had never met Hern. Then he said he had met him in a tavern and spent some time drinking with him.
Cragg and the Nelsons were brought in to view a lineup. At trial, the two detectives disagreed under oath about whether Marion Nelson had picked him out.
In Windsor, Southerby’s father, J. E. Southerby, told reporters his son liked to live fast. Harvey was a bright boy who couldn’t settle down, he said. He was expelled from school, drifted into pool halls and gambling, and joined the navy at 16. Within weeks he was out again after, in his father’s words, “something happened there.”
Police held to robbery as the motive. But they told reporters they were working on other angles, and declined to say what those were.
Within days, the case was overshadowed. Hern’s death had opened an unprecedented run of killings in Toronto. On the same day, July 27, Arthur Wickert was shot during a quarrel in a west-central home. On Saturday, July 30, a gunman killed Alfred Layng, an RCAF veteran, as Layng tried to stop a grocery store robbery. On August 2 and 3, Robert and Gloria McKay, a young married couple, were found shot, he in a North York gully, she in the back of their car. On August 5, truck driver Douglas Graham was shot near his Etobicoke home, and his 16-year-old son was charged.
Six killings in about ten days made front pages across the country. Rewards climbed, and a city controller proposed a $100,000 fund for catching killers. In Etobicoke, a neighbour heard Graham crying for help and was too frightened to open her door.
In that coverage, Hern was a line near the bottom, one of “two other slayings” where an arrest had already been made. The Chief Constable pointed to those quick arrests as proof the city had no cause for alarm. The provincial pathologist suggested the summer heat might be behind the whole wave.
While Toronto panicked, Jack Hern’s killing was filed as the one that was solved.
The other angle police had refused to discuss surfaced at the preliminary hearing on August 25. Southerby’s lawyer, C. L. Dubin, drew from Inspector John Nimmo an admission: Southerby had told police that Hern attacked him that night. The Globe and Mail called it the first indication of any motive.
Charles Leonard Dubin was 28 and five years at the bar. He would later become Chief Justice of Ontario.
Ralph Cragg spent an hour on the stand at that hearing. He lost his temper more than once. At one point he shouted at counsel, asking whether they meant to accuse him.
Southerby went on trial for murder in late October, before Mr. Justice Schroeder. For most of the second day, the jury sat outside while Dubin and Crown counsel W. O. Gibson argued over what evidence it could hear. After the judge ruled, Dubin was allowed to ask Osborne whether Hern had a reputation for picking up young men and taking them home.
“I had heard that he had that reputation,” Osborne said.
That was the defence. Hern was no longer a generous man robbed and killed by a stranger. He was a man who had made an advance, and Southerby was a young man who had reacted to it. In 1949, sex between men was a crime in Canada. A jury could be invited to see the killing as a response rather than a murder.
The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter.
On November 4, 1949, Justice Schroeder sentenced Southerby to ten years in the penitentiary. He told him he was extremely fortunate the jury had not convicted him of murder. The attack was brutal and could not be justified, the judge said, but he had to deal with the case on the basis of the verdict.
The judge noted that Southerby came from a good home and had refused his parents’ control. He said Southerby had given way to his own selfish whims, but was not beyond redemption. Southerby’s father pleaded for mercy and said the family would be waiting when he came out.
The Globe and Mail ran the sentence in a single item alongside a rape conviction from the same courtroom. The judge saved his harshest words that day for the other man.
What Southerby said happened on the sand is lost. The surviving reports give only his claim that Hern attacked him.
We don’t know what became of him. A ten-year sentence would have seen him released by the late 1950s. We have found no trace of him after 1949.
We have found no obituary for Jack Hern.
The record also disagrees with itself. Southerby appears as Harvey Edward, Edward and Harvey Louis Southerby, aged 21 or 20. Hern appears as 36 and as 38. What survives is mostly what police, lawyers and reporters chose to say about two men, one of whom could no longer answer.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Leslie William Gordon (Jack) Hern; registered at birth as William Gordon Leslie Hern |
| Born | August 18, 1911, Toronto General Hospital |
| Age | 37 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Dining car steward, Canadian National Railways |
| Date of death | July 27, 1949 |
| Manner of death | Blunt force |
| Location | Kew Beach, under the boardwalk near Kenilworth Avenue |
| Accused | Harvey Southerby, alias Louis Martinello, 20 or 21, of Windsor |
| Charge | Murder |
| Defence counsel | C. L. Dubin |
| Crown counsel | W. O. Gibson |
| Judge | Mr. Justice Schroeder |
| Verdict | Manslaughter |
| Sentence | 10 years, November 4, 1949 |
Sources
- Ontario birth registration no. 7182, Toronto, 1911 (William Gordon Leslie Hern)
- The Globe and Mail, July 30, 1949, pp. 1–2
- The Globe and Mail, August 1, 1949, p. 2 (Canadian Press, Windsor)
- Winnipeg Free Press, August 1, 1949 (Canadian Press)
- Canadian Press wire, August 3, 1949, and Associated Press wire as published in the Bradford Era (Pennsylvania), August 4, 1949, p. 16
- Winnipeg Free Press, August 4, 1949, p. 1, and August 5, 1949, pp. 1 and 9
- The Lethbridge Herald, August 5, 1949, pp. 1–2, and August 13, 1949
- Toronto Daily Star, August 5, 1949, p. 34
- The Globe and Mail, August 26, 1949, p. 5
- Toronto Daily Star, September 8, 1949, p. 2
- The Globe and Mail, October 26, 1949, p. 5
- Toronto Daily Star, October 27, 1949, p. 1
- Toronto Daily Star, November 4, 1949, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, November 5, 1949, p. 5
- Photographs: Toronto Daily Star (Kew Beach); Central Press Canadian (Southerby)
- On Charles Dubin: Charles Dubin; Eulogy, Court of Appeal for Ontario