At 3:43 a.m. on Tuesday, February 18, 1975, Toronto police headquarters took an emergency call. The caller, a man, would not give his name. He said there was “trouble” at 286 Borden St., near Bloor Street West.
Police later traced the call to a phone booth about a mile away. A squad car went to the house. The officers found it locked and silent, and they left.
Harold Walkley was on the second floor. The Toronto Star later reported that he was lying in his own blood as the officers drove away.
Shortly afterward the owner of the house came home. He shared the house with Walkley. He found Walkley in his bedroom, naked, stabbed in the back and chest.
Walkley was taken to Toronto Western Hospital. The Globe and Mail reported he was dead on arrival at 4:15 a.m. He had been stabbed four times in the back and once in the chest.
No knife was found. Credit cards were missing. A wallet holding the house owner’s credit cards had been taken from the pocket of a coat left in the hallway.
Walkley was 51. He taught history part-time at the University of Toronto. The Body Politic, a gay liberation journal, later described him as a history teacher much involved in neighbourhood politics.
He had spent the evening at the Quest Tavern, 665 Yonge St. According to the Body Politic, he stayed until closing. He was last seen getting into a cab near the bar, apparently alone.
The Globe and Mail gave the killing three sentences on page 5, under the heading Inside Metro. It gave his name, age, street, wounds and the time he was pronounced dead. It said nothing about where he had spent the night. The next item concerned a rent dispute on Everden Road.
At the beginning of April, the case appeared to break. One of the house owner’s stolen cards, an American Express card, was used four times at stores in Moncton, N.B. The Star reported that the man who used it was in his 20s, about five feet eight inches tall, slightly built and about 150 pounds. A young blonde woman was with him.
Staff-Sgt. Donald Sangster went to Moncton immediately. He visited the stores and toured local motels to see whether the card had been used again. Police checked a possible suspect in Fredericton. He had an alibi.
Sangster pointed out that the man with the card was not necessarily the killer. He might have bought it from the killer or on the black market, or stolen it himself.
The 3:43 call had been recorded. Detectives led by Sangster toured taxi firms across Metro and played the caller’s voice to cab dispatchers. Police believed Walkley had taken a taxi home from the bar. No company had a record of the trip, and the driver was never traced.
By October 1975 a $2,000 reward was on offer for information in Walkley’s death. The Star listed it on October 23 with other outstanding rewards in Metro killings. Four of the others were $10,000 each.
On December 20, 1975, Fred Fontaine, a CBC technician, was beaten in the washroom of the St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street. He died in hospital months later.
On February 11, 1976, James Taylor, a 41-year-old painter and decorator, was found in his home. He had been beaten to death with a baseball bat.
On May 1, 1976, the Star ran a full page headed “Unsolved.” Ten killings in Metro since the start of 1975 had produced no arrest, and the homicide squad appealed to readers for help. Walkley was item seven, under the headline “Voice on tape may be clue.”
The Star wrote that Walkley had been “savagely knifed.” It called him a former part-time lecturer. It identified the Quest only as “a Yonge St. bar.” It did not say he was gay.
In September 1976, a caretaker found James Kennedy, 49, a federal civil servant, dead in his apartment on Jarvis Street. He was nude, with a towel knotted around his neck, and had been beaten about the face. His credit cards were missing. He had last been seen at the St. Charles Tavern. Neighbours described him as “a recluse.”
On January 25, 1977, Brian Latocki, a 24-year-old bank analyst, was found tied to the bed in his Erskine Avenue apartment. He had been beaten, strangled and stabbed. An autopsy put his death at January 22. He had last been seen at the St. Charles.
In March 1977 the Body Politic put the three cases on its front page under the headline “Three murders still unsolved.” Walkley, Kennedy and Latocki had each been found naked in his bedroom. Each had been robbed. Each was gay and had been to a gay bar the night before he died. The paper reported that Metro homicide was considering whether one person was responsible for all three.
The Body Politic wrote that the Kennedy and Walkley investigations had run into blind alleys, largely for lack of information. It said gay men were reluctant to come forward. They mistrusted the police, and they feared being called as witnesses and exposed in court.
Det.-Sgt. Bernard Nadeau, who was investigating the Latocki case, told the paper that part of the difficulty came from the way police had treated some gay people in the past.
In December 1977, Neil Wilkinson, 35, a data processor with the Royal Bank, left the Parkside Tavern on Yonge Street after 1 a.m. on December 9 and walked south alone. He was found on December 15, stabbed and beaten to death on the bed in his Charles Street apartment. He had been robbed.
On January 5, 1978, the Globe and Mail reported that Insp. George Sellars of the homicide division was linking Wilkinson’s death to Walkley’s, Kennedy’s and Latocki’s. Sellars said he had not proved one person did all four. “They sure are similar,” he said.
The paper wrote that the first three victims were homosexuals. Sellars said he did not know Wilkinson’s sexual orientation, but that Wilkinson had been known to frequent the Parkside and the St. Charles. The headline read “Inspector ties slaying to deaths of 3 gays.” In the same report Walkley became “Professor Arthur Harold Walkley.”
The theory did not pan out.
On February 13, 1978, Donald Rochester was shot while working as a night porter at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club. In September 1978, Sandy LeBlanc, a well-known figure on the gay club scene, was found in his St. Joseph Street apartment. He had been stabbed more than 100 times.
On November 28, 1978, police found Duncan Robinson, 24, stabbed in the bedroom of his Vaughan Road apartment. The next day the Star headline read “Homosexual killing 14th in 3½ years.” Police counted 14 such killings among 128 in Metro, half of them unsolved. The Star listed Walkley among “the other unsolved homosexual slayings.”
In February 1979, the Body Politic published “Overkill,” by Robin Hardy. Hardy counted fourteen gay men murdered in Toronto since February 18, 1975, the day Walkley died. Eight of the killings were unsolved. Insp. Hobson of homicide refused to connect them.
Hardy interviewed John Allan Lee, a sociologist, author of Getting Sex and a friend of Walkley’s. Lee sorted the victims into two groups. The first were young men who did not know how to cruise safely. The second were “desperate, unattractive and usually older men.”
“Harold fell into the second category,” Lee said. For some time before his death, Lee said, Walkley would take anyone home. He was getting older, losing his looks and lonely, and he had trouble finding lovers he was compatible with. By closing time, Lee said, he would settle for anything.
Lee recalled a party Walkley attended shortly before his death. Someone put on a record, “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You.” Walkley stood up and yelled, “Yeah, and how do you find someone to love?”
Hardy called these “old and weary stereotypes” of gay men, and wrote that they still had some basis in reality.
The same issue reported a police raid on the Barracks, a Toronto bathhouse. Hardy noted that police were asking gay men to come forward with information while raiding the baths.
In January 2018, Toronto police arrested Bruce McArthur and later charged him with six counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of men from the Gay Village. McArthur had been working in Toronto in the 1970s. CBC reported he had not been linked to any of the earlier killings.
Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga, the lead investigator, told CBC’s The Fifth Estate that police had pulled the 1970s cases. They were going through them “with a fine-toothed comb” to see whether there were any links.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Arthur Harold Walkley |
| Age | 51 (given as 52 in some sources) |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Part-time history lecturer, University of Toronto |
| Date of death | February 18, 1975 |
| Manner of death | Stabbing |
| Location | 286 Borden St. |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, February 19, 1975, p. 5
- Toronto Star, October 23, 1975, p. B6
- Toronto Star, May 1, 1976, p. B4
- The Body Politic, No. 31, March 1977, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, January 5, 1978, p. F6
- Toronto Star, November 29, 1978, p. A3
- The Body Politic, No. 50, February 1979, p. 20
- Toronto Police Service, Cold Case Files, Homicide #5/1975
- CBC News, “It happened before,” April 4, 2018: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/toronto-gay-village-killings
- Matchbook, The Quest Tavern, 665 Yonge St., Toronto
- Photograph of Harold Walkley: Toronto Police
Murder Village Map