At about 10:45 on the morning of Friday, October 30, 1953, Robert Cowan was driving his tractor along the 10th Concession of Innisfil Township, toward the village of Stroud. He saw a coat in the ditch. “I stopped to have a closer look, saw the legs and recognized the body of a man,” he told the Toronto Daily Star.
The man lay in a water-filled ditch on the south side of the road. He had been shot five times. His pockets had been turned inside out. Constable Roy Ferguson and OPP Sgt. Al Ayerst found a .32 shell and a cartridge clip by the roadside, and a trail of blood from the middle of the road to the ditch. The body had been dragged.
Powder marks on his vest showed that the shot through his heart was fired at very close range. A tooth and a piece of his denture lay several feet away. He had a deep cut over his left eye and scratches on his left wrist.
The night before, Marion Gibbons, 9, and her brother Donald, 13, had been in bed in their farmhouse about 400 yards away. Marion told the Star she heard a shot, then a motor start, then another shot, a car door slam and a car racing away. The children thought it was a hunter shooting skunks or groundhogs. A neighbour, Mrs. Pearl Ayres, heard two shots and also thought it was hunters. It was about 9:45 on Thursday night, October 29.
Nothing on the body gave a name. Police found a Toronto streetcar ticket, the stub of a 35-cent theatre ticket and a chain letter. The letter promised “relief and happiness” to the tired businessman who passed it on. His shirt carried a laundry mark.
Barrie residents thought he might be a civilian cook from Camp Borden, until the cook was seen in Barrie. A Stroud merchant thought he was a calendar salesman, until the salesman was found at home in Pickering. More than 25 bartenders from Barrie, Allandale and Bradford viewed the body at Jennett’s funeral home in Barrie. None of them knew him.
Toronto police checked gamblers and men with gang connections. They told the Star the killing resembled that of Louis Wernick, a figure in the narcotics trade who had been shot and dumped on an Etobicoke road nine years earlier. “We think it might be one of the Toronto gangsters who has been taken for a ride,” said OPP Chief Inspector Wilford Franks.
Late on Saturday, October 31, C. W. LeBlanc, a messenger at a Toronto investment brokerage, identified the body. The dead man was his fellow messenger, Fred “Scotty” Cameron, 57. A King Street West tailor’s records showed Cameron had bought the $110 suit he died in. A key found in his clothing fit his room on Isabella Street.
The Globe and Mail reported that LeBlanc also told police it was a gangland killing, and that he expected to be attacked too. The firm and the police both discounted it.
In his uniform, Cameron carried documents and bonds to other brokerage houses, trust companies and banks, and took the firm’s mail to the post office each night. He earned $65 a week. He paid $5 for a small room under the stairs of a rooming house on Isabella Street, in what is now Toronto’s Gay Village.
The Globe and Mail reported that he was a bachelor. It said he had played professional soccer in England, served in the army in the First World War, and come to Toronto from a steel firm in the United States. A firm official told the paper Cameron was the last man one would expect to be murdered.
On Monday, November 2, the Star ran two stories about him on its front page. Edwin Feeny’s was headed “Quiet Worker, ‘Don Juan’ By Night, Seek Woman.” Feeny wrote that by night Cameron was “a free-and-easy Don Juan” who put on his one good suit and went out “in quest of young, female companions.” Other roomers said he went out at night in search of girls 18 to 25 and never brought them back.
Ernest Wright, manager of a downtown bowling centre, described a tall, slim woman of about 25 with red-tinted hair who bowled with Cameron every Wednesday night. “You noticed them because he was twice her age,” Wright said.
Gwyn Thomas’s story beside it was headed “Seek Mystery Girl.” Police told the Star that people said Cameron “seemed to be fond of young women,” but no one knew any of their names. Police said everything about his life showed a desire to hide his past. He carried nothing with his name on it. In his room they found a passport showing he had come to Canada in 1936.
Police also learned he was not a bachelor. He had been separated from his wife for ten years, and sometimes called himself a widower. Two nephews in Toronto, William and James Mitchell, said they knew only that she was alive.
The one friend Cameron had in the rooming house was John Quigley, a barber who had come from England about 30 months earlier. “He never discussed women with me,” Quigley told the Star. He said he saw Cameron almost every evening, but could not say he ever knew him. He told the Globe and Mail that Cameron was shrewd, secretive, confused and lonely, and seemed inwardly disturbed, “as though he had a premonition of a violent end.”
Police said the scratches on Cameron’s wrists might have come from long nails, and that they were not overlooking the possibility that a woman was in on the killing. On November 3, the province posted a $1,000 reward. Police told the Star they were looking into “lure” girls, who pick men up and drive them to lonely spots to be robbed. They added that Cameron was probably “too canny” to go on such a trip with a strange girl.
The same day, OPP Inspector Alex McLeod said the search for the bowling woman had been dropped on the basis of mistaken identity. Police were still looking for Cameron’s wife in and around Toronto.
On November 5, McLeod and Toronto Det.-Sgt. Bernard Simmonds questioned two young Toronto men, Francis Ian Robertson and William Stephen Kingsley, and released them. They questioned them again on November 9. Within days, police went back to the concession road with a Canadian Army mine detector and recovered parts of a .32 automatic pistol.
On Wednesday, November 25, they made the arrests. Kingsley lived with his family, eight children, in a five-room flat that McLeod described in court as “an old tenement.” When Simmonds came for him, his mother asked whether her son would be coming back soon. “Well, I don’t know,” Simmonds told her.
Robertson was not home when police arrived at his flat. They waited nearly an hour with his wife and child. He came in from work carrying a parcel of groceries. Told of the charge, his wife said, “That’s ridiculous, you police are crazy.”
Police seized Robertson’s father’s car. There was blood in the trunk. The next day, in Barrie magistrate’s court, Robertson, 20, of Runnymede Road, and Kingsley, 18, of Woodgreen Place, were charged with murder. Toronto’s chief of detectives, Alex McCathie, said robbery had been established as the motive. On February 3, 1954, Magistrate Gordon Foster committed both for trial.
The trial opened in Barrie on March 9, before Mr. Justice H. A. Aylen and an all-male jury, six of them farmers. People lined the courthouse hallways before court opened. The sheriff, former Ontario premier E. C. Drury, had the courtroom cleared while the jury was chosen.
The Crown prosecutor, W. M. Thompson, told the jury the two had driven Cameron from Toronto, robbed him and killed him. Then he asked a question. “How could two young men get a man of Cameron’s age to go for a ride in the country?” Some men, he said, were “afflicted with homosexuality.” The Crown’s case was that, knowing this, Cameron “would be a very willing victim.” It was the prosecution that first raised Cameron’s sexuality at the trial.
Stephen Dunn, who ran a pool room at Queen and Yonge, testified that Cameron was strong and liked to arm-wrestle. He said Cameron bought soft drinks for the teenagers who came to the pool room, and often flashed large amounts of money. Dunn last saw him on October 29 at about 7:30 p.m.
The provincial pathologist, Dr. Chester McLean, described Cameron as robust and heavily built, about 60 and in good health. There were marks of violence about his face. Injuries to his left hand were consistent with a man struggling inside the trunk of a car. The shot to the head, fired at very close range, probably killed him. Dr. Noble Sharp testified that much of the blood in the trunk had been rubbed by some moving object.
On March 11, OPP Sgt. A. E. Ayers testified that he had hidden behind the cells in the Barrie lockup and listened to the two youths talk. He heard Robertson say he hoped for a jury with women on it. “They don’t like queers,” Robertson said.
Two of Kingsley’s co-workers at the Canadian Pacific Express depot testified the same day. Victor Kemp said that on October 30, Kingsley handed him a newspaper with the story of the killing and told him he did it. Kingsley complained the paper had it wrong: the body was left in a water-filled ditch, not propped against a fence, and the shots were fired at 9:50.
Kenneth Shank said Kingsley asked him for an alibi, then told him he had shot Cameron in front of a downtown Toronto poolroom, with the gun against Cameron’s stomach, while a buddy raced the motor of a car at the curb. Cameron was taken up the Barrie highway in the trunk. At the 10th Concession they opened it, and Cameron came toward them with his arms spread out. He was shot again and tossed into the ditch. The depot’s supply agent testified that a .32 Savage automatic was missing from a strongbox of guns held for repair.
On March 12, Morley Swallows, serving four months in the Barrie jail on a drunk charge, testified that both youths had talked freely about the shooting in the cells.
On Saturday, March 13, Justice Aylen admitted Kingsley’s statement to police. It told of his first meetings with Cameron and of homosexual relations between them. In it, Kingsley said he shot Cameron twice. They put him in the trunk, still alive, and drove up the Barrie highway while he pounded on the sides. “It was awful to hear him yell,” Kingsley said.
The statement quoted Robertson telling Kingsley not to feel sorry for “the old bastard.” When they opened the trunk on a side road, Robertson hit Cameron a couple of times, then shot him as he walked toward him. “We’ve got to make it look like a gang killing,” Robertson said. Kingsley went over to where Cameron lay on the grass and shot him again. They took his watch. In his pockets they found $14. Robertson later sold the watch for $20.
On March 16, Robertson took the stand and repudiated his statement. He said he had gone to the poolroom to trade Kingsley the pistol for a rifle his father wanted for a hunting trip, and had borrowed his father’s car for the errand. His father confirmed he had lent the car for the rifle. When his son came home late that night, the father testified, he said, “Don’t think I had any fun tonight either, pop.”
Robertson now said Kingsley fired all five shots, at the ditch, while he lay winded from a blow Cameron had given him. He had put robbery in his statement, he said, “because I didn’t want it thought that it was a sadistic killing.” He had told the man in the next cell he fired shots because he “wanted to look big in his eyes.”
According to the Globe and Mail’s account of his evidence, Robertson told the jury Cameron made advances to the two of them on the Barrie highway. When the car had engine trouble, Cameron approached Kingsley, and Robertson said Cameron was “gettin’ chummy; let’s leave him.” A fight followed, then shots. He said there had been no homosexual assault on him.
Kingsley testified that the first shot was an accident, fired as he pulled the gun from his pocket during a fight between Robertson and Cameron. He said he fired the last shot because Robertson ordered him to. In his statement he had given robbery as the motive. On the stand, he said the killing was the result of “improper advances” by Cameron.
Thompson called Robertson’s account a physical impossibility. Kingsley was too short to have fired the shot that went downward through the top of Cameron’s head. “No one changed their story more than Robertson,” the prosecutor said.
In closing, Robertson’s counsel, G. D. Finlayson, said his client had thrown away his best defence by denying that Cameron attempted a homosexual attack, a defence that “would have been a good defence for murder.” He called Kingsley “a poor, pathetic, 120 lbs. of nobody.”
Norman Borins, for Kingsley, built his defence on Cameron’s sexuality. He told the jury Cameron had carried on homosexual practices with Kingsley since the boy was 15. The Star reported the age as barely 16. Borins called them “filthy, degrading acts.” He said Cameron’s advances that night were “extreme provocation,” amounting to “gross indecency, which could put a man in prison for many years.” In 1954, gross indecency between men was a crime in Canada.
Borins described the back alleys Kingsley grew up in, full of drunks from the beverage rooms. Kingsley’s mother had testified that her son never went out with girls and was not accepted by other boys. Borins asked the jurors to give Kingsley the consideration they would give “any young man near and dear to you.”
Thompson answered that Cameron was a bad character, but a human being entitled to live. “It is not the law a man can be killed because he is a homosexual,” he said. Cameron might have been cured or imprisoned, he added, but death was not the answer. The two had acted together to get money from Cameron, through his “depravity” or with a loaded gun. If they did not mean to rob him, Thompson asked, why take him out in the country?
On March 17, Justice Aylen charged the jury. He warned of the danger, in a case like this, of prejudice affecting their judgment, and asked them to decide only on the evidence. If they believed Kingsley, Kingsley was not to blame. If they believed Robertson, Robertson was not to blame. If they believed both, nobody was. “But Cameron is dead,” he said. He called it “almost fantastic” that Kingsley could have fired the shots the way Robertson described, and said the statements the two gave police seemed much more probable.
The jury was called back once for further instruction after 70 minutes out. Shortly after 7 p.m., after eight hours, it returned. Both youths were not guilty of murder and guilty of manslaughter. Their parents and Robertson’s 17-year-old wife, Rose, broke into smiles.
On March 19, Justice Aylen sentenced each to 20 years. He told Kingsley he had come “awfully close” to a death sentence, and that there was ample evidence on which the jury could have found him guilty of murder. The jury, he said, had taken “a very charitable view.” He told Robertson, the father of a 10-month-old child, that in some ways he was more to blame. Kingsley thanked the judge for a fair trial. His mother burst into tears.
The Canadian Press story on the sentencing described Cameron as the man “who the accused said had homosexual tendencies.”
On May 12, 1954, Globe and Mail columnist J. V. McAree printed a letter from Jack Hambleton, who had covered the trial for the paper. Hambleton wrote that the only person who actually accused Cameron of being homosexual was one of the youths accused of killing him. Asked on the stand whether he thought Cameron was homosexual, Simmonds had answered, “I think he was.” Hambleton added that this was no evidence at all.
There was no other evidence but Kingsley’s, Hambleton wrote, and Kingsley had changed his story so many times that no one could keep up with it. In the meantime, Cameron’s reputation had been “blasted forever.” McAree’s column that day ran under the headline “Dead Men Don’t Care.”
Where Cameron was first shot is told at least four ways. Kingsley told Shank it happened on a Toronto sidewalk. His statement put it some distance south of where the body was found. On the stand, he placed it on a side road after a fight. Robertson swore every shot was fired at the ditch.
We have found no trace of the young woman who bowled with Cameron on Wednesday nights. The police dropped that search three days after the body was found. We have found no trace of his wife.
The record disagrees about who he was. The papers called him a Scot and a former English policeman. They said he played soccer in England, and for St. Mirren of Paisley. He came to Canada 25 years before his death, or from a steel firm in the United States, or in 1936, as his passport showed. He was 57, or about 60. One paper called him Jock, another Frederick.
Whether Fred Cameron had sex with men rests on the word of two men on trial for killing him. The reporter who covered the trial said so in print two months later.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Fred “Scotty” Cameron; Frederick in one report, “Jock” in another |
| Born | Scotland, according to most reports |
| Age | 57; estimates ranged from 55 to 60 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Messenger, Toronto investment brokerage firm |
| Date of death | October 29, 1953 |
| Manner of death | Shot five times |
| Location | Ditch on the 10th Concession, Innisfil Township, near Stroud, Ontario; Kingsley told a co-worker the first shot was fired in downtown Toronto |
| Accused | Francis Ian Robertson, 20 or 21, and William Stephen Kingsley, 18 or 19, both of Toronto |
| Charge | Murder |
| Defence counsel | G. D. Finlayson (Robertson); Norman Borins (Kingsley) |
| Crown counsel | W. M. Thompson |
| Judge | Mr. Justice H. A. Aylen |
| Verdict | Manslaughter, both accused, March 17, 1954 |
| Sentence | 20 years each, March 19, 1954 |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, October 31, 1953, p. 1
- Toronto Daily Star, October 31, 1953, pp. 1 and 3
- The Globe and Mail, November 2, 1953, pp. 1–2
- Toronto Daily Star, November 2, 1953, pp. 1–2
- The Globe and Mail, November 3, 1953, p. 5
- Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1953, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, November 4, 1953, p. 28
- The Globe and Mail, November 27, 1953, p. 8
- The Globe and Mail, February 4, 1954, pp. 1–2
- The Globe and Mail, March 10, 1954, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, March 11, 1954, p. 9
- The Globe and Mail, March 12, 1954, p. 7
- Toronto Daily Star, March 12, 1954, pp. 1–2
- The Globe and Mail, March 13, 1954, p. 5
- The Globe and Mail, March 15, 1954, p. 12 (Canadian Press)
- Toronto Daily Star, March 16, 1954, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, March 17, 1954, p. 9
- Toronto Daily Star, March 17, 1954, p. 2
- The Globe and Mail, March 18, 1954, pp. 1–2
- The Globe and Mail, March 20, 1954, p. 4 (Canadian Press)
- The Globe and Mail, May 12, 1954, p. 6 (J. V. McAree)
- Photographs: Toronto Daily Star (Robertson and Kingsley, during the trial; Cameron, November 2, 1953); The Globe and Mail, February 4, 1954 (Kingsley)
Murder Village Map