At about noon on Saturday, November 19, 1994, a man walking his dog found a body in a heavily wooded part of a Rosedale ravine. The Toronto Star reported that it was badly decomposed.
An autopsy found that the man had died of head injuries from a severe beating. Police counted the death as Metro Toronto’s 59th homicide of 1994. There had been 58 in all of 1993.
The dead man was Larry Arnold, 46, of Chatham. He had been missing since Friday, October 14. He had family in the Chatham area, but police needed dental records to confirm who he was.
Arnold had worked for the same Chatham company for 25 years. His nephew, Joshua Hind, told CBC News in 2017 that Arnold travelled to Toronto about six times a year. The Star reported that he often stayed with a friend who lived on Jarvis Street. A Metro Crime Stoppers column said he frequented the gay bars and restaurants around Church, Wellesley and Yonge Streets.
On the evening of October 14, Arnold phoned the friend he was staying with. The Star reported that he said he was at a bar and would be home later. He never arrived. A 2017 CBC News story said the broadcaster had reported at the time that a friend received an answering machine message in which Arnold cancelled a dinner and said he was having fun.
According to the Crime Stoppers column, Arnold was last seen that evening at the Traxx Bar at Yonge and Wellesley Streets. He was sitting at a table talking with two young men. He left the bar with one of them. Xtra later reported that the Trax V bar operated at 529 Yonge Street.
A friend reported Arnold missing to police the next day. Police put up posters in the gay community asking for information.
On Tuesday, November 22, detectives held a news conference at the ravine, off Mount Pleasant Road and Roxborough Road. Det. Chris Wilson said the only information police had was that Arnold met someone in a bar and may have left with him. The Star’s headline said police suspected he met his killer in a gay bar. The paper reported that Arnold may have gone to the ravine by car or taxi. It said the body was so decomposed that police could not yet say whether he was killed where it was found.
The Star described the ravine in two ways. In its first report, it said area residents told the paper the wooded area around the walking path “is used by gay men for anonymous sexual encounters.” In its second, it said the park was used by gay men for sexual encounters at night.
Det. David Perry described Arnold as “a very quiet man who kept to himself.” Investigators told the Star he was known to socialize with men his own age and was usually very careful about who he associated with. Perry said police were also considering that the killer lured Arnold to the area with the promise of sex and then robbed him. Police were looking into possible links to reported sex attacks on gay men in the Church and Wellesley area over the previous few months.
Auxiliary officers combed the scene for Arnold’s belongings. The Star said he was last seen wearing a tan leather jacket. A CBC photo caption says a 1994 search for his credit card and jacket turned up nothing, and that a jacket police recovered was not his.
Hind wrote on Twitter in 2017 that police first thought Arnold had died after a quarrel with a lover. He told CBC News that coverage at the time made a point of Arnold’s sexuality. “It was as though his death was just a hook-up gone wrong,” he said.
On April 17, 1995, the Star ran a Metro Crime Stoppers column on the case. It said police had interviewed two people and arrested no one. The column described the two men seen with Arnold. Both were white and had French Canadian accents. One was about 25, 5 feet 9 inches and 190 pounds, with blond curly hair and blue eyes. He wore a red checked lumberjack shirt and a brown sleeveless vest. The other was about 35, 5 feet 10 inches and 170 pounds, with dark hair, dark eyes and a moustache. He wore dark clothing. The column offered a reward of up to $1,000.
Police also asked for help finding Arnold’s jacket. The column described it as waist-length, butterscotch-coloured New Zealand lambskin, with a “Crossings” label.
The Star ran a second Crime Stoppers column on July 31, 1995. It repeated the descriptions and called the jacket suede. Hind later learned that the detective on the case wrote the Crime Stoppers columns. He told CBC News the family believed few other resources went into the investigation. In a Twitter thread, he wrote that Toronto police let the case go cold.
Sara Whitehead, a 20-year-old university student from North Bay, was found dead on August 8, 1997, in bush behind the Northgate Shopping Centre. The Globe and Mail reported that she had been sexually assaulted and killed after leaving a shopping mall.
Paul Allan Hachey, formerly of Sturgeon Falls, was wanted by the Ontario Provincial Police there for stealing a bicycle. The North Bay Nugget reported that the theft happened about a week before Whitehead’s death. In December 1997, Hachey was arrested in Calgary for a violent sexual assault.
The Globe and Mail reported that an officer who heard of the Calgary arrest contacted North Bay police. The Nugget named him as OPP Const. Chris Brown, who learned of the Calgary case in a call from a corrections worker at a Saskatchewan penitentiary. Calgary police sent North Bay a cigarette butt left at their crime scene. North Bay Det. Dan Webber told the Globe, “DNA came back and it was a perfect match.”
On August 17, 1998, Provincial Court Judge Cheryl Daniel in Calgary sentenced Hachey, 31, to 19 years for aggravated sexual assault. He had attacked a 21-year-old woman in the laundry room of her apartment building. Defence and Crown lawyers had made a joint submission for a lighter sentence. Daniel rejected it, citing the need to protect the public. She ordered that he serve at least half.
In May 1999, North Bay police charged Hachey with first-degree murder in Whitehead’s death. The Globe reported that he pleaded guilty and received life with no chance of parole for 25 years. After that, the Globe reported, Hachey admitted to police that he had killed a 46-year-old man in Toronto. He also admitted to sexual assaults in Edmonton. The admissions led to a joint investigation by police in the three cities.
On Thursday, July 5, 2001, Hachey, then 34, stood in a North Bay courtroom and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Arnold’s death. The Globe reported that he received life with no chance of parole for 15 years. The Canadian Press reported that the sentence was 25 years with no chance of parole. The Canadian Press also reported that he received 13 years for three sexual assaults in Edmonton dating to 1988.
The Canadian Press described Hachey as a drifter who hitchhiked across Canada and the United States. It reported that the court heard Hachey met Arnold at one of the gay bars he frequented in Toronto and invited him to a wooded area for sex, intending to rob him. The Globe’s report on the plea said Arnold’s body was found weeks later in a downtown ravine. It did not say where he was last seen.
The radio program This Way Out reported that week that police would not say whether Hachey was being investigated in the killings of other gay men in Toronto around the time of Arnold’s death.
In December 2017, Toronto police announced a review of how they handled the disappearance of Tess Richey, 22, in the Church and Wellesley area. CBC News reported that Richey disappeared in late November and that her body was found days later in a stairwell steps from where she was last seen. Hind compared the case to his uncle’s, which he said was treated as a hook-up gone wrong. He told CBC News that Arnold was the only man Hachey killed and that investigators never found a motive.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Larry Arnold |
| Age | 46 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Employee of a Chatham, Ontario company for 25 years |
| Date of death | October 14, 1994 (Globe and Mail); body found November 19, 1994 |
| Manner of death | Beating; head injuries |
| Location | Rosedale ravine near Mount Pleasant Road and Roxborough Drive, Toronto |
| Accused | Paul Allan Hachey (spelled Alan in the Globe and Mail), 34 at the time of the plea, formerly of Sturgeon Falls, Ontario |
| Charge | Second-degree murder |
| Verdict | Guilty plea, July 5, 2001, North Bay, Ontario |
| Sentence | Life, with no chance of parole for 15 years (Globe and Mail) or 25 years (Canadian Press) |
Sources
- Toronto Star, November 22, 1994, p. A6
- Toronto Star, November 23, 1994, p. A7
- Toronto Star, April 17, 1995, p. A9 [confirm page]
- Toronto Star, July 31, 1995 [page not legible in clipping]
- Lethbridge Herald, August 18, 1998, p. 5 (Canadian Press)
- R. v. Hachey (P.A.) (1998), 227 A.R. 211 (Alta. Prov. Ct.), August 17, 1998
- The Globe and Mail, July 6, 2001, p. A6
- Lethbridge Herald, July 6, 2001, p. 5 (Canadian Press)
- This Way Out, NewsWrap for the week ending July 7, 2001 (program no. 693)
- North Bay Nugget, November 21, 2008
- North Bay Nugget, “Killer pleads guilty of Sara Whitehead’s murder” (undated year-in-review item)
- Xtra, “Alibi closes its doors,” December 17, 2008
- CBC News (Shanifa Nasser), December 10, 2017
- Joshua Hind, Twitter thread, December 4, 2017
- Photographs: Mike Slaughter, Toronto Star (ravine search, November 1994); CBC (search for Arnold’s belongings, 1994)
Murder Village Map