Late on the night of Tuesday, May 3, 1960, a young man walked into a restaurant on North Yonge Street. His right hand was badly cut. He said later that he had come in to call the police. He met an officer coming through the door.
Police testified that he alternately laughed and cried. As they took him to the Willowdale police station, and then to North York Branson Hospital for the cut hand, he kept shouting that he had killed a man. At the hospital, Const. James Love questioned him.
He was Joseph Normandin, of Montreal. The papers gave his age as 20 and as 21.
Insp. Arthur Walmer and Dets. John Fallis and Donald Davidge went to a basement apartment on Farnham Avenue and broke down the door. Alexander Bakalis, 40, a clothing salesman, lay face down on the living room floor. A steak knife was still in his back. A butcher knife lay beside the body. He was wearing only a dressing gown. The Telegram reported that he lived alone.
The Telegram reported that he had been stabbed eight times in the back. The next morning the Globe and Mail, citing police, gave the number as ten.
The Telegram’s headline that afternoon was “Best Pal Charged In Slaying.” It called Normandin the dead man’s best friend. Nothing reported at the trial supports that. In Normandin’s own account, he met Bakalis at the Ford Hotel, drank beer with him and went home with him.
On May 4, Normandin appeared before Magistrate J. L. Prentice. He was remanded without bail to May 11.
The Ford Hotel stood at the northeast corner of Bay and Dundas, across from the bus terminal. It had opened in 1928, billed as the city’s most luxurious hotel. John Markovitch, a waiter there, later testified that Bakalis came often to the hotel’s cocktail lounge. On the night of May 3, Markovitch served him and Normandin. The Globe and Mail reported that each man had seven or eight bottles of beer. The Telegram reported Markovitch saying neither was drunk when they left, about 11 p.m.
They went to Bakalis’s apartment. Police said the stabbing followed a violent argument just before midnight. Normandin’s statement does not mention an argument. He said that while he was there, he formed the idea of killing Bakalis. He drove a steak knife into his back, and the handle snapped off.
“He got up like he hadn’t been touched,” Normandin said. Bakalis went into the hallway. Normandin tried to pull him back, and Bakalis slipped out of his grasp and fell. Normandin dragged him back into the apartment and took the butcher knife. “I just kept on stabbing,” he said. “Then I had to clean up.”
He changed into Bakalis’s clothing and took $5 from the dead man. Then he left the city. “I just got outside of town and then it hit me, what I had done.”
Det. Sgt. Edward Towgood asked him why he had wanted to kill Bakalis. Normandin answered: “I think it was because he represented to me what I was trying to escape from.” He added that in the past year he had been in two mental institutions for cutting himself with a razor blade.
Normandin was charged with murder. In 1960, the Criminal Code prescribed death as the punishment for murder. The division into capital and non-capital murder did not take effect until September 1961.
The trial opened on Monday, September 19, before Mr. Justice F. H. Barlow in the Ontario Supreme Court. The provincial pathologist, Dr. Chester McLean, testified that Bakalis died of a massive hemorrhage following multiple stab wounds.
On the second day, Markovitch took the stand. He described Bakalis as a frequent customer who “was a known homosexual.” He said Bakalis was usually in the company of younger men. The next day the Telegram’s headline read “Steak Knife Victim Named Homosexual.” The Globe and Mail’s read “Waiter Testifies Murder Victim Was Homosexual.”
The jury was sent out that afternoon while counsel argued over whether Normandin’s remarks to Const. Love could be heard. After a trial within a trial, Barlow ruled his statement admissible.
On September 21, Crown counsel Arthur Klein read the statement to the jury. Normandin said he went to Bakalis’s apartment because Bakalis was a homosexual and “I needed the money.” The Telegram reported that he went there to earn some money, and that he said he had earned his living this way for the past five years.
There was no defence. When the time came to present one, defence counsel Garry Braund told the court that Normandin had instructed him to plead guilty to manslaughter. Barlow said a murder verdict was not warranted, given the evidence about Normandin’s mental condition and his drinking. The judge and the jury accepted the plea.
Normandin was sentenced on the morning of Friday, September 23. The Globe and Mail described him as slim, pale and youthful-looking. He sat impassively. The Telegram wrote that he didn’t bat an eye.
Klein told the court that Normandin was fortunate he had not been convicted of murder. Psychiatrists, he said, had described him as a “pathological personality” who would have a desire to kill. He asked that Normandin be confined permanently for the protection of the public.
Braund called a psychiatrist, Dr. K. G. Gray. Gray said treatment might bring some improvement, but he could not say how much. He said Normandin was not a confirmed homosexual. Part of his trouble, Gray said, came from mental conflicts that produced anxiety and guilt.
Braund then turned to the dead man. The Globe and Mail reported his argument this way: Bakalis was “a homosexual, a class of man whose victims were generally boys.” He had perverted many boys, Braund said, but in Normandin he had picked someone ill and abnormal. Braund told the court his client could love no one. He could not find Normandin’s father, “who is no good,” and Normandin’s mother was in jail somewhere.
The case for leniency rested on Bakalis’s homosexuality. Braund cast the man who had been stabbed in the back as the predator, and the man who stabbed him as the boy he had preyed on. He asked for a sentence that would not leave Normandin still more embittered against society.
Barlow said he had been impressed by the psychiatrists’ evidence. “Many factors enter into this sentence,” he said. “The sentence must act as a deterrent to others and as a protection to the public. Everybody should know they can’t take the law into their own hands.”
The Globe and Mail reported the rest in a single sentence. Bakalis was a homosexual, said His Lordship, and the case was one of the worst he had dealt with. The report does not make clear how the judge connected the two.
Barlow sentenced Normandin to life imprisonment.
Everything the record says about Alexander Bakalis came from the police, a waiter and the man who killed him, or from counsel arguing over that man’s sentence. No family appears in the reports. No one is quoted speaking for him. We have found no record of where he was born, and no obituary.
The record also disagrees with itself. Bakalis appears as 40 and as 39. Normandin appears as 20 and as 21. The wounds number eight or ten. One Telegram report placed the apartment on Yonge Street. The Star spelled the victim’s name Balaskis.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Alexander Bakalis |
| Age | 40 (39 in one report) |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Clothing salesman |
| Date of death | May 3, 1960 |
| Manner of death | Stabbing |
| Location | Basement apartment, Farnham Avenue |
| Accused | Joseph Normandin, 20 or 21, of Montreal |
| Charge | Murder |
| Defence counsel | Garry Braund (also spelled Gary) |
| Crown counsel | Arthur Klein (A. O. Klein) |
| Judge | Mr. Justice F. H. Barlow |
| Verdict | Guilty plea to manslaughter, accepted by judge and jury, September 21, 1960 |
| Sentence | Life imprisonment, September 23, 1960 |
Sources
- The Telegram (Toronto), May 4, 1960, p. 2
- The Globe and Mail, May 5, 1960, p. 5
- The Globe and Mail, September 20, 1960, p. 5
- The Globe and Mail, September 21, 1960, p. 4
- The Telegram (Toronto), September 21, 1960, p. 10
- The Globe and Mail, September 22, 1960, p. 11
- The Telegram (Toronto), September 23, 1960, p. 2
- Toronto Daily Star, September 23, 1960, p. 8
- The Globe and Mail, September 24, 1960, p. 4
- Photograph: Toronto Star (Ford Hotel)
- On the Ford Hotel: Doug Taylor, “The old Ford Hotel—Toronto,” Historic Toronto, February 19, 2016
- On capital punishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Canada
Murder Village Map