The Toronto Sun reported on December 27, 1992 that Grayce Baxter had sent her parents plane tickets so they could spend Christmas with her in Toronto. They flew in from Clearwater, B.C. Their daughter was not there.
Her concierge told the Sun he noticed she was missing before anyone else did. Friends came by and were worried. Her cat was inside the condominium, left unfed for days. She had planned a Christmas party for December 18 and had taken her antique dining chairs in for refinishing. She never picked them up.
She was born Grant Baxter. “She was once a he,” the Sun’s column said. The Star repeated it in three stories, each time with the words “born a male” and the name Grant. According to the Sun, a Vancouver doctor referred her in 1985 to a clinic in the United States for a sex-change operation. She came to Toronto about four years before she disappeared, telling her parents she wanted a change of pace and a computer job. Police told the Sun she was working as an expensive call girl from the start.
Det. Reg Pitts of Metro Police told the Sun that her parents had understood her struggles growing up and helped arrange the surgery. “They were 100% behind it,” he said. “Most parents walk away, but they didn’t.” He said her mother handed him a formal portrait of her daughter and said, “This is my daughter.”
A subhead in the Sun’s story read “Call girl from the start.” Baxter had told her parents she was a corporate computer executive, the Sun reported, and police had since told them she was a high-priced call girl. Pitts said she was “living the big lie.” The Sun wrote that her “carefully woven life of lies” had unravelled.
Baxter worked as a prostitute through two escort agencies, police said, and specialized as a dominatrix. Police told the Star she charged $350 to $400 an hour. The Star reported that she had a roster of about 100 clients, many of them wealthy married businessmen who wanted domination. She rented a condominium on the 32nd floor of the World Trade Centre residences on Queen’s Quay for $1,200 a month, the Sun reported, and drove a 1989 black BMW. She always had the car valet-parked and always set her suite alarm. Michele Mandel wrote in the Sun in 2014 that she also carried a stun gun and a can of mace to her calls.
On December 8 she was at a friend’s home in Mississauga. About 3 a.m., one of the agencies paged her, police said. She left in a low-cut black mini-dress and a full-length silver fox fur coat. Two days later her BMW was found abandoned in the parking lot of the Gerrard Square mall, at Gerrard Street and Pape Avenue. The Sun reported that the inside of the car showed no sign of violence.
On December 29 the Star quoted a friend who gave her name as Mary, 27. Mary also worked as a prostitute and asked the Star not to use her real name. She said Baxter used crack cocaine and had a drug problem that may have played a role in her disappearance. Det. Sgt. Tony Warr of the homicide squad said police had not heard of any drug problem. On December 31 the Star reported that police would not say whether the disappearance was tied to her work, but that one source said she was a drug user who may have angered a pusher.
The same Star story reported that Det. Jim McDermott and Warr had found her client list and hoped customers would call police. If they did not, McDermott said, detectives would have to seek them out, which “could be embarrassing in some cases.” The Star’s sources described what call girls usually do before a call: leave the customer’s name and destination with an agency or a friend, and check the telephone number. “This didn’t appear to happen in this instance,” the Star wrote. Police suspected foul play.
On the same page, the Star’s year-end count showed 64 homicides in Metro Toronto in 1992, down from 89 the year before.
On Friday, January 8, 1993, one month to the day after Baxter vanished, Metro homicide detectives arrested Patrick Daniel Johnson, 23, at his apartment on Wynford Heights Crescent and charged him with first-degree murder. They had not found her body. “We’re confident we’ll recover a body,” Warr told the Sun.
Johnson was a part-time guard at the Toronto (Don) Jail and a native of Abbotsford, B.C., the Star reported. Police said he was a client of Baxter’s. Warr told the Sun that detectives did not know Johnson had been her client until near the time of his arrest. They were “just about to start” contacting the names on her list when they were led to him.
The papers described her this way the next morning. The Star: “Client of transsexual charged with murder.” The Sun: “Jailer held in call-girl death,” over a first paragraph that called Baxter a “missing transsexual call girl.” The Globe and Mail described her in a short item as “known to have been working as a high-priced prostitute” and “reported to have had a sex-change operation about seven years ago.” The Sun counted her as Metro’s 65th homicide of 1992.
On January 12, Johnson appeared before Justice of the Peace Bob Piccinin, who put the case over to January 19. Warr said police were working on the assumption that Baxter was killed in the apartment. “We’re assuming that. That’s what we’re trying to prove,” he told the Star. A police officer had guarded the door of Johnson’s 14th-floor apartment since the arrest, and the identification unit was still working inside. Baxter’s parents were still in Metro. The Star reported that they had flown in from Clearwater after learning she had disappeared. “They’re devastated right now,” Warr said.
On Monday, January 18, homicide detectives began digging through the Brock West landfill in Pickering with bulldozers and garden hoes, the Star reported. Warr told reporters at a news conference on top of the landfill that police believed Baxter’s body had been put in a dumpster behind a North York apartment building. From there, he said, it was trucked to a transfer depot on Bermondsey Road, compacted, and taken to the dump at Brock Road and Concession 3. “We believe the body is here,” he said. The search area was about the size of a football field and held about 8,000 tonnes of garbage, the site engineer said. Warr said it could take a month. Police would not say whether their information had come from Johnson.
On February 5, Xtra! published a letter from Andrew Sorfleet, who signed it “Will” and wrote that he worked in the same trade. He had been booked with Baxter on a call. “Everyone knew Grayce,” he wrote. She loved men and women, he said, and was well known in the gay community. “She was beautiful and she was proud.” He wrote that newspaper headlines had made the reality of their lives sensational, and that sex workers were expected to accept violence as part of the job. He said they would not.
The Globe and Mail reported on March 17 that Metro police had called off the search at the Pickering dump, where crews had been moving tonnes of garbage and clay since mid-January. The Star reported that police had sifted through millions of kilograms of garbage in eight weeks. “It would be impractical to search the whole dump,” Warr told the Star. He made clear he believed her body was still there. A preliminary hearing on the first-degree murder charge was set for May 18.
On Monday, April 18, 1994, as his trial was about to begin, Johnson, 24, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Mr. Justice David Watt of the Ontario Court (General Division) sentenced him to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 10 years. He also barred Johnson for life from possessing firearms, ammunition or explosives, the Star reported.
Deputy Crown attorney Frank Armstrong read an agreed statement of facts. The night before her death, he said, Baxter attended a stag party at a Mississauga hotel and then visited friends nearby. Driving east on Highway 401 about 3 a.m., she spoke to Johnson on her cellular phone and arranged to go to his apartment. She arrived about 3:30 a.m. and agreed to a 45-minute sexual encounter for $200.
Johnson had difficulty reaching orgasm and became angry when Baxter said his time was up, the court heard. A struggle followed. Johnson choked her to death. He cut the body into several parts with a hacksaw, wrapped them in garbage bags with some of her personal effects, and put them in a dumpster behind the building. Eleven days later he pawned a diamond ring and a Rolex watch for $1,650, the Star reported.
A cellular telephone record linking Baxter’s phone to Johnson was the break in the case, Warr said. Police approached Johnson on January 7 with the record, according to the agreed facts. He agreed to take a polygraph examination the next day. When officers arrived on January 8, they found him with injuries to his wrists, ankle and neck that he had inflicted on himself. The Star described them as non-life-threatening. In a statement to police, quoted in the agreed facts, Johnson said, “You know I did it.” The Star’s version of the statement continued: “It was an accident. It just went too far.”
The Star’s report, published April 20, carried the subhead “Transsexual’s dismembered body buried in Pickering dump.” Baxter’s mother, contacted at home, would not talk about her daughter or the man convicted of killing her. She told the Star she did not like the stories the media had printed. “There were a lot of lies,” she said. Warr said there had been “a lot of speculation” about her client list and that he did not know whether any famous people were on it. He said he did not really care.
The Sun wrote in 2014 that police never found any trace of her.
The record disagrees with itself. The Sun printed her middle name as both Elisabeth and Elizabeth, and her street name appears as Candice in the Star and Candace in the Sun. Her age is given as 26, 27 or 28, and her height as six feet, six feet one or six feet two. The Star said Johnson was a part-time guard, and the Globe and Mail called him a former contract worker at the jail. The Sun in 1992 said her parents arrived for a planned Christmas visit; the Star in 1993 said they flew in after she disappeared. The Star said Johnson pawned the ring and watch eleven days after the killing, while the Sun in 2014 gave the date as December 21. The Sun in 2014 also put a different timetable on the night: a call from an escort agency after 1:30 a.m., a client meeting at a Mississauga hotel that fell through, and a call from Johnson at 2 a.m. that Baxter returned 46 minutes later. What survives is mostly what police and reporters said about her.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Grayce Elisabeth Baxter (Elizabeth in some Sun stories); also called Candace (Candice in the Star); born Grant Baxter |
| Age | 26 (27 or 28 in some reports) |
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Prostitute (call girl and dominatrix), working through two escort agencies |
| Date of death | December 8, 1992 (the date police gave; early morning) |
| Manner of death | Strangulation (“choked,” per the Star) |
| Location | Johnson’s 14th-floor apartment, 55 Wynford Heights Crescent, North York (Don Mills in the Globe and Mail) |
| Accused | Patrick Daniel Johnson, 23 at arrest, part-time guard at the Toronto (Don) Jail |
| Charge | First-degree murder |
| Crown counsel | Frank Armstrong, deputy Crown attorney |
| Judge | Mr. Justice David Watt, Ontario Court (General Division) |
| Verdict | Guilty plea to second-degree murder, April 18, 1994 |
| Sentence | Life, no parole eligibility for 10 years, April 18, 1994; lifetime ban on firearms, ammunition and explosives |
Sources
- Toronto Sun, December 27, 1992, p. 5 (Michele Mandel)
- Toronto Star, December 29, 1992, p. A5
- Toronto Star, December 31, 1992, p. A6
- Toronto Sun, January 9, 1993, p. 5 (John Schmied)
- The Globe and Mail, January 9, 1993, p. A15
- Toronto Star, January 9, 1993, p. A20
- Toronto Star, January 13, 1993, p. E8
- The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1993, p. A12
- Toronto Star, January 19, 1993, p. A8
- Xtra!, February 5, 1993, p. 7
- The Globe and Mail, March 17, 1993, p. A12
- Toronto Star, March 18, 1993, p. A28
- The Globe and Mail, April 19, 1994, p. A3
- Toronto Star, April 20, 1994, p. A8
- Toronto Sun, June 7, 2014 (Michele Mandel)
- Photograph: Dale Brazao, Toronto Star (Pickering landfill search), January 19, 1993
Murder Village Map
*We list Grayce Baxter’s birth name for genealogical searches