Shortly after midnight on Sunday, June 25, 1967, people living in the apartment building at 100 Maitland Street heard a man yelling. The sound came from the 10th floor, through an open door to a balcony. Police later said at least half a dozen people heard him. No one phoned the police.
At about 12:45 a.m., Rene Cote, 34, a hairdresser, came home to the apartment he shared with Gabriel Brunet. The door was unlocked and all the lights were on, he later testified. Brunet lay naked on the bedroom floor beside his bed. There was blood on the wall.
Brunet was 35. He worked as a bartender at the Steak Pit Tavern and Dining Room on Bay Street. The Globe and Mail reported that he had come to Toronto from Manitoba some time earlier.
Police said he had been stabbed first in the living room and had left a trail of blood as he fled to the bedroom. They said he had not worked at the Steak Pit that Saturday night and believed he had come home late. Months later, Cote testified that Brunet had left that afternoon for a Bay Street restaurant where he worked as a waiter.
The Globe described the apartment as “expensively furnished” and listed what was in it. There was a gold brocade chesterfield suite, thick broadloom, mahogany furniture, etchings and prints. A 30-inch red Chinese horse stood on one table and a stone totem on another. The door-knocker was the brass head of a Sphinx. Detectives carried out a crystal cocktail set and a beer box of knives and curios for fingerprinting.
Neither paper said in June that Brunet was gay. The inventory of his furniture said it for them.
Reporters went door to door the next day. Most tenants said they had heard nothing, or that police had told them not to talk. Neighbours two doors away said Brunet and Cote “kept to themselves.” A woman on the ninth floor said, “We were watching TV.” A teacher in the apartment next door said she did not know the two men personally, only their music. She described it as “classical and western.” The building superintendent, W. Juby, said police had told staff to make no comment. “I don’t know anything about them,” he said.
Inspector George Sellars, head of the homicide squad, told reporters the building’s construction made it difficult to tell where a sound was coming from.
The Toronto Daily Star called it Metro’s fifth slaying in three weeks. On June 27, a Star editorial compared it to the killing of Kitty Genovese in New York three years earlier, whose screams had been heard by at least 37 neighbours. Toronto, the paper wrote, had told itself that could never happen here. It called the tenants’ indifference “something relatively new.” On June 30 the Star printed a reply from a reader, Gary Lloyd Gottlieb, who argued that man’s inhumanity to man was nothing new.
On July 10, the Star reported the stabbing of Agnes Bilobram in her home. A tenant had heard screams and gone back to sleep, thinking someone was having a nightmare. The paper set her death beside Brunet’s. It was Metro’s 15th murder of the year.
The same day, the Star reported an arrest in the Brunet case. About two weeks after the killing, Dennis Henry Robertson, 20, walked into Calgary police headquarters and confessed to three housebreakings. A Calgary officer thought he resembled the composite drawing issued by Toronto police. Det.-Sgt. Mark Dodson and Det. Jack Evans flew to Calgary, questioned him for three hours and charged him with capital murder.
The preliminary hearing opened on October 20 before Magistrate S. Tupper Bigelow. In June, Cote had told police he did not know many of Brunet’s acquaintances. Now he described Brunet as a homosexual who invited “strangers—mostly tough young men” to the apartment every week. He said he had seen Robertson there once, three or four months before the killing. The Star reported his evidence that Robertson was one of many young men Brunet brought home.
A pathologist testified that Brunet had about 45 stab wounds and died from loss of blood. On October 24, Bigelow reduced the charge to non-capital murder and committed Robertson for trial.
The trial opened in the Ontario Supreme Court on November 27, before Mr. Justice Donald Morand. Crown counsel Peter Rickaby told the court that Brunet and Cote had a homosexual relationship.
John Szalai, 31, testified that he had heard a man’s screams high in the building but could not find where they came from. “I didn’t do anything about the screams,” he said. Neighbours told the court they heard running, muffled cries and screams that lasted about 15 seconds. A witness, Albert George Webb, 19, did not appear when his name was called, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest.
On December 1, Det.-Sgt. Dodson read the jury what he said Robertson had told him. Robertson had asked Brunet for a bed for the night. He lost his temper, the Star reported, because “the victim, a homosexual, kept bothering him” when he wanted to sleep. In the kitchen, Robertson picked up a knife and warned he would use it. “He grabbed my arm,” Dodson quoted him as saying. Robertson said he kept stabbing “until my arm got sore.” Afterward, by his account, he washed, changed his clothes in an east-end flophouse, drifted around Toronto for a week, and hitchhiked to Calgary.
The Star’s headline the next morning read: “He died for ‘pestering’ court told.” Calgary detectives testified that Robertson told them he killed Brunet “because he wouldn’t leave me alone.”
That was the story the prosecution’s own evidence put before the jury: a gay man who would not stop, and a young man who snapped. Robertson did not tell it himself. On December 4 he testified that he had admitted the killing to Calgary police because he was tired. He said he knew Brunet and had been in the apartment twice before, but denied being there that night. He said he had spent it with Webb and two girls.
The Star described Robertson as “slim, good looking” and “baby-faced.”
The jury deliberated for nine hours on December 6. Three times it came back to the courtroom to have evidence reread or to ask for direction. It could not agree, and the judge dismissed it. A new trial was ordered.
The second trial came before Mr. Justice Abraham Lieff in February 1968. Lieff refused to let the jury hear Robertson’s statements to police in Calgary and Toronto. Robertson, he found, had been questioned for three hours in a “compulsive atmosphere” and improperly warned. Lieff said he did not fault the way police took the statement. But when the Toronto detectives arrived in Calgary, they should have told Robertson to disregard everything he had said to Calgary police and begin again for the record.
The statements were the basis of the Crown’s case. On February 9, 1968, Lieff directed the jury to acquit.
Robertson, “pale and shaken” in the Star’s words, shook hands with his lawyer, Nick McRae. He left court to stay with his foster parents in Bay Ridges, Ontario. The Star’s report called him a “Calgary transient.” It called Brunet “a homosexual.”
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Gabriel Brunet |
| Age | 35 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Bartender, Steak Pit Tavern and Dining Room, Bay Street |
| Date of death | June 25, 1967 (shortly after midnight; some reports give June 24) |
| Manner of death | Stabbed |
| Location | 100 Maitland Street, 10th floor |
| Accused | Dennis Henry Robertson, 20 |
| Charge | Capital murder, reduced to non-capital murder |
| Defence counsel | Nick McRae (second trial) |
| Crown counsel | Peter Rickaby (first trial) |
| Judge | Mr. Justice Donald Morand (first trial); Mr. Justice Abraham Lieff (second trial) |
| Verdict | First trial: jury could not agree. Second trial: directed verdict of acquittal, February 9, 1968 |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, August 3, 1960, p. 5
- The Globe and Mail, June 26, 1967, p. 5
- Toronto Daily Star, June 26, 1967, pp. 1, 2 and 28
- Toronto Daily Star, June 27, 1967, editorial page
- Toronto Daily Star, June 28, 1967, p. 27
- Toronto Daily Star, June 30, 1967, p. 6
- Toronto Daily Star, July 10, 1967, p. 25, and Bilobram report continued from p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, October 21, 1967, p. 10
- Toronto Daily Star, October 21, 1967, p. 55
- The Globe and Mail, October 25, 1967, p. 5
- Toronto Daily Star, October 25, 1967, p. 44
- Toronto Daily Star, November 28, 1967, p. 9
- Toronto Daily Star, December 2, 1967, p. 60
- Toronto Daily Star, December 5, 1967, p. 32
- Toronto Daily Star, December 7, 1967, p. 52
- Toronto Daily Star, February 10, 1968, p. 12
- Photograph: John McNeill, The Globe and Mail (Brunet’s cat)
Murder Village Map