On May 15, 1968, a man ploughing a field near Schomberg, Ontario, found a human skeleton lying against a wire fence in a hedgerow. The spot was on the west side of Sideroad 17 in Tecumseth Township, about two kilometres north of Highway 9.
The Ontario Provincial Police later described what was there. The body had lain on its left side with the arms behind the back. A white shoelace was wrapped twice around one wrist and knotted. Police thought the wrists might have been tied together with it. There were no clothes on the body or near it.
The field belonged to Beverley Wray, who grew hay on it. He told the Toronto Star in 2006 that his family had noticed a smell and taken it for their septic tank. Men working on the property found the body. He thought it might be a homeless person.
On May 17, 1968, the Star put the story on its front page. Provincial police pointed to “similar sinister circumstances” in an earlier case. On December 17, 1967, a partridge hunter had found the remains of another young man in a wooded area of Balsam Lake Provincial Park, near Coboconk. That body was also naked. A length of twine lay with it, knotted in a loop beside the hand and wrist bones, the OPP later said. Police in 1968 believed both were teenage boys victimized by a “sex deviate,” the Star reported.
Dr. Fred Jaffe of the Centre of Forensic Sciences said the Schomberg remains were those of a young person whose wisdom teeth had not developed. He had long brown hair.
Neither young man matched a missing-person report. Their remains went to the chief coroner’s office in Toronto, unclaimed and unnamed.
The young man at Schomberg was Richard Hovey. His family called him Dickie. He was the older of two sons of Melvin and Phyllis Hovey of Marysville, New Brunswick, a small community now part of Fredericton. He had two sisters.
He played guitar. In Fredericton he played in a band called Teddy and the Royals. Its drummer, Terry Arnold, told the Globe and Mail in 2006 that he often pictured Hovey turning up in Marysville one day and announcing, “Here I am boys; I’m back.” A childhood friend, Brian Stewart, said Hovey would rather play than go to school.
He bought an electric guitar at Sears and worked on it himself to make it look like a Fender, OPP Det. Insp. Dave Quigley said in 2006.
In 1966 or 1967, police said, he hitchhiked to Toronto. He went to Yorkville. Police said he got some gigs at the Mynah Bird, a rock club at the corner of Yorkville Avenue and Hazelton, and was living in the area. The Star wrote that it was not known whether he played in a band or picked up session work.
In early August 1967, the Globe and Mail’s nightlife columnist, Blaik Kirby, described the Mynah Bird as a “fetid room in a former Victorian home.” Patrons walked in past a tank of piranha and the caged mynah bird the place was named for. That week the bill was three would-be folk singers and, as usual, a topless dancer.
By the time he disappeared, Hovey was struggling to survive and sometimes playing at clubs in Yorkville, the Globe and Mail wrote in a 2006 editorial. In 2017, the writer James Dubro told the Toronto Sun that Hovey was a straight young man who sometimes “hustled on the side to make a buck.”
He was last known to be in Yorkville in the late spring or early summer of 1967, police said. His family never heard from him again. His father took his worries to the local RCMP detachment, the Star reported, but the information was never filed as an official missing-person report.
That summer, police later said, a man was picking up young men downtown and taking them to rural areas, where he attacked them.
Bob Tivey met him. Tivey later told Xtra that the man offered him a ride to Expo 67 in Montreal. Tivey accepted, then got cold feet.
On July 14, 1967, William Howells, 21, of Oakwood Avenue, was stabbed in the throat on a side road north of Barrie. His hands had been tied behind his back. A farmer found him in a roadside ditch. He survived. He had met his attacker at a Toronto theatre.
On July 15, the naked, decomposed body of Robert James Mortimore, 17, was found in a field in Markham Township. His brother Reginald, 18, had reported him missing two days earlier. Police identified Mortimore by his fingerprints and by part of a birth certificate found in his killer’s car.
The man police arrested that July was James Henry Greenidge, 28, a computer operator who lived on Cambridge Avenue.
On June 25, 1968, six weeks after the skeleton was found at Schomberg, Greenidge stood before Mr. Justice W. A. Donohue. He was already serving ten years after pleading guilty to the attempted murder of Howells. In Mortimore’s death he had been charged with non-capital murder. Crown counsel James Crossland accepted a plea of guilty to manslaughter. Directed by the judge, the jury returned its verdict without leaving the box.
Greenidge had given police a statement. He said he and Mortimore drove to a gravel road off Markham Road, where Mortimore asked him for $20. Greenidge said he sneered at him. Mortimore cut at him with a small penknife. Greenidge said he slapped and punched him, then took the knife and “poked him with it a couple of times.”
Inspector W. H. Armstrong of the provincial police told defence counsel Arthur Maloney that Mortimore was known to supplement his earnings “by homosexual activities.” The killing of a 17-year-old was explained to the court as a quarrel over $20 between a man and a boy who sold sex.
Crossland told the judge that Greenidge’s record included convictions for theft, rape and assault. Greenidge was sentenced to seven years for manslaughter. The Globe and Mail reported that the term was consecutive to the ten.
The Globe’s report did not mention the remains found at Schomberg or at Coboconk.
Greenidge was paroled in 1977, Xtra later reported. In 1981, in Vancouver, he raped and killed Elizabeth Fells, 24. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1982 and sentenced to life. The judge called it a “brutal, callous and appalling rape and murder.” By 2007 he was known as James Gordon Henry.
The bones from Schomberg stayed at the coroner’s office.
In late 2005, OPP investigators reviewed the files and decided to reopen both cases. New autopsies were done in July 2006. An artist with the Canadian Forces National Investigative Service made facial reconstructions of both young men.
On November 9, 2006, OPP Sgt. Bob Paterson told the Star that police had new information linking the deaths to attacks on young men known to frequent the Church and Wellesley area. He would not deny a gay connection. Asked whether the young men had been victims of sex slayings, he said, “That’s a pretty fair assumption.”
On November 14, the OPP showed the reconstructions at a news conference in Orillia. Police estimated that the young man found at Schomberg had been between 18 and 25. Quigley, the lead investigator, said a sexual predator had been working in the area in the summer of 1967. “I think he did have a type — young, petite men,” he said.
Police would not name the convicted man. The Star found his name in its own 1967 clippings. Julian Fantino, newly appointed OPP commissioner, raised the possibility of a serial killer.
City councillor Kyle Rae, who represented the downtown ward where Greenidge’s known victims had been approached, told the Star the community was very closeted at the time. “Men weren’t even allowed to dance together in the clubs,” he said.
The Star’s columnist Rosie DiManno wrote that the young men may have gone with their killer willingly at first, “perhaps offering their fine young bodies for pleasure.” She also wrote that there was no evidence homophobia had compromised the police investigations of 1967.
Police also showed the reconstructions to Prime Timers, a social group for older gay men, at The 519 community centre. Tivey was there. He asked why the man convicted of the 1967 attacks was not considered a suspect, Xtra reported.
Within 24 hours of the news conference, police had about 30 tips. Two of them mattered. A sibling and a friend, unknown to each other, had each recognized the face on the OPP’s website. Quigley went to New Brunswick for blood samples from Hovey’s brother and sister. On December 13, the Centre of Forensic Sciences confirmed the identification. Two days later, his remains were flown home to Fredericton.
On December 19, the OPP announced the name in Orillia. Supt. Angie Howe, head of the OPP Behavioural Sciences Unit, stood beside a reward board showing the reconstruction and a family photograph. In a statement, the family said they were relieved to “bring our brother home after years of anguish.”
Both parents had died. “His father died looking for him,” Mona Hovey, a distant relative and friend, told the Globe and Mail. Quigley said the siblings had all told him the same thing: they did not know whether this was good news or bad news.
Asked whether police would question the man convicted in the 1967 attacks, Quigley told the Alliston Herald, “That part of the investigation is not something I am prepared to talk about.”
The papers now had a name and a photograph. The Star called Hovey an aspiring rock star from the Maritimes and a prodigal son. The Globe and Mail called him a gifted guitarist chasing big-city dreams. The same Star story described the killer as a predator “trolling for pretty, slightly built young men.”
Quigley said Hovey’s guitar had never surfaced. He asked anyone who had known Hovey in Toronto to come forward. On December 28, the province offered a $50,000 reward.
In February 2007, DiManno reported that Quigley had interviewed Greenidge. What was said had not been disclosed, and Greenidge had not been charged. She reported that Greenidge had given his motive for killing Mortimore as “feeling guilty” for being with a male prostitute. Victims like Hovey, she wrote, had simply vanished, unmourned.
On March 9, 2009, the OPP identified the young man from Balsam Lake as Eric Jones, 18, of Noelville, Ontario. Police now called Greenidge a person of interest, the Star reported. The OPP told Xtra they had no forensic evidence linking him to the deaths of Hovey or Jones. Police “need to know of his activities from witnesses,” Quigley said.
By 2026, no one had been charged with killing Richard Hovey.
Police never determined a cause of death. They could say only that he probably died in the late spring or early summer of 1967. They asked the public where he had lived and worked in Toronto. His guitar was never found.
The record disagrees with itself. Police said he came to Toronto in 1966 or 1967. The OPP’s 2006 account has the body lying on its left side; its reward poster has it face down. The OPP described a shoelace knotted around one wrist; later stories said his wrists were bound with a shoelace, or with twine, and one said barbed wire. Jaffe described long brown hair in 1968; police said blond in 2006. One paper reported that his father filed a missing-person report with the RCMP; another said the report was never filed. In 2006 police estimated his age at 18 to 25. He was 17.
The record of Greenidge’s crimes is no steadier. Howells appears as Howell, and as 21 or 25. Greenidge’s arrest appears as July 1967 and as 1968. The 2006 coverage reported concurrent terms of ten and seven years; the Globe and Mail in 1968 reported consecutive ones. The Globe and Mail later dated his release to 1978 and the Vancouver killing to 1980, and Xtra once named the woman he killed Virginia Fells.
What survives is mostly what police said once they had a name for the bones, nearly four decades after anyone last saw him.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Richard “Dickie” Hovey |
| Age | 17 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Musician (guitarist) |
| Date of death | Late spring or early summer 1967 (police estimate); remains found May 15, 1968 |
| Manner of death | Undetermined |
| Location | Lot 17, Concession 2, Tecumseth Township (now New Tecumseth), west side of Sideroad 17, near Schomberg |
| Person of interest | James Henry Greenidge, later James Gordon Henry (named by police, 2009); never charged in Hovey’s death as of 2009 |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, August 3, 1967, p. 11
- The Globe and Mail, June 26, 1968, p. 2
- Toronto Star, November 10, 2006, p. B4
- Toronto Star, November 15, 2006, p. A2
- Ontario Provincial Police news release and backgrounder, December 19, 2006 (as published by SooToday.com)
- Toronto Star, December 20, 2006, pp. A1 and A24
- The Globe and Mail, December 20, 2006, p. A17
- Alliston Herald, December 20, 2006
- The Globe and Mail, December 21, 2006, p. A20
- Ontario Provincial Police, GHQ Special Circular 06-20, December 28, 2006
- Toronto Star, February 5, 2007, p. A2
- Xtra, May 8, 2008
- Xtra, March 9, 2009
- Toronto Star, March 10, 2009, p. GT4
- The Globe and Mail, March 10, 2009, p. A13
- Toronto Sun, December 16, 2017
- Photographs: Bill Sandford for the Toronto Star (facial reconstructions with Master Cpl. Peter Thompson; Supt. Angie Howe with the reward board); Julie Langpeter, Orillia Packet and Times/CP (reconstructions); Hovey family photographs released by the Ontario Provincial Police; James Henry Greenidge, 1976, as published in the Toronto Star, February 5, 2007
Murder Village Map
You have the wrong date of body discovery on the map – should be May 1968.
Fixed, thanks
Dickie Hovey was my cousin. His parents passed away without ever knowing what had happened to their son. He was loved by everyone who knew him. James Henry never got out of jail and passed away in July 2019.
I am sorry your relatives and family have gone through such pain. And thank you for letting me know about the killer’s passing – I will include that in an update.