On the morning of Monday, September 20, 1976, John Fretz, the superintendent at 262 Jarvis Street, went into a sixth-floor apartment. Another tenant had complained that its door had been open since Sunday. It was unlocked.
Inside was the nude body of the man who lived there, James Stewart Kennedy.
“When I found him he had a towel around his neck and his face was all bashed in,” Fretz told the Toronto Sun. Police responded to the 911 call at about 8 a.m.
An autopsy that day found that Kennedy had been strangled. He had been beaten before he died.
The newspapers gave his age as 49. The Toronto Police cold case file gives 59. He had come to Toronto from Manitoba about ten years earlier. In 1969 he joined the federal Department of National Revenue, where he supervised the storage unit at its office on Adelaide Street West. For two years he had lived alone in the small apartment on Jarvis, just south of Gerrard.
His boss, Jim Penney, told the Sun that Kennedy was “very quiet” and “very reliable.” That was why, he said, he had wondered when Kennedy didn’t phone in that morning. A co-worker who had known him since 1969 called him “a nice guy.” “I don’t know why anyone would want to murder him,” he told the Sun. “We were all friends.”
Police said Kennedy was last seen alive on Saturday. They did not say where.
The Sun ran the story on Tuesday under the headline “Civil servant found beaten and strangled.” Its first sentence called him a “loner,” in quotation marks, without saying whose word it was. It added that he was a bachelor who lived by himself. The Toronto Star also called him a bachelor. Homicide officers told the Star they had so far found no motive.
The Sun counted it as the 38th murder of the year in Metro. The Star reported it beside the killing of Mary Frances McKenna, 37, found stabbed in her Broadway Avenue apartment the same day, and called the two the 38th and 39th.
No paper that week linked Kennedy’s death to earlier ones. In February 1975, Arthur Harold (Hal) Walkley, a part-time University of Toronto history lecturer, had been stabbed at his Borden Street home. In December 1975, Fred Fontaine, a CBC technician, was beaten in the washroom of the St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street. He lay in a coma for months and died on July 15, 1976, two months before Kennedy. In February 1976, James Douglas Taylor, a painter and decorator, was beaten with a baseball bat in his North York home.
On the night of Friday, January 21, 1977, Brian Latocki, a financial analyst at the Toronto-Dominion Bank, was seen leaving the St. Charles Tavern. On January 25 police found him tied to the bed in his Erskine Avenue apartment. He had been tortured, strangled and stabbed.
In March 1977, The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay liberation journal, put Latocki, Kennedy and Walkley together on its front page under the headline “Three murders still unsolved.” Each man, it reported, had been found naked in his bedroom. Each had been robbed, and each had been to a gay bar the night before he died.
The paper’s account of Kennedy added details the dailies had not printed. His neighbours said he lived an “almost reclusive” life. He was last seen at the St. Charles the night before he was killed. His credit cards had been stolen. Police, the paper said, suspected the man who killed Latocki.
Its timing differed from the 1976 reports. The Body Politic gave September 20 as the day he was killed and said the caretaker found him several days later.
The paper reported that police were hampered by the reluctance of gay men to come forward. Det. Sgt. Bernard Nadeau, who was investigating Latocki’s death, told it that any gay witness would be treated in confidence.
On December 15, 1977, Neil Wilkinson, 35, a data processor at the Royal Bank, was found dead in his Charles Street East apartment after his employer called police. The next day the Star’s headline read “Homosexual killer may be stalking city.” Police said Wilkinson and Latocki had frequented Yonge Street homosexual bars. Three other men, they said, may have been victims of killers who “prey on homosexuals to rob them.” The three were Bernard Guay, 63, found beaten and robbed in Allan Gardens on March 5, 1977; Taylor; and Kennedy.
The Star named him James Robert Kennedy. In 1976 neither daily had used the word homosexual about him. It entered his story in their pages fifteen months later, when police added his name to a list.
On January 5, 1978, the Globe and Mail reported that Inspector George Sellars of the homicide squad had tied four killings together: Walkley, Kennedy, Latocki and Wilkinson. He had not proved they were the work of one person, he said. “They sure are similar.” The Globe stated that homosexuals were the first three victims. Sellars said he did not know Wilkinson’s sexual orientation, but that he was known to hang out at the Parkside and St. Charles taverns. The Globe also called Kennedy James Robert, 49, a federal civil servant.
On September 20, 1978, two years to the day after Kennedy was found, Alexander (Sandy) LeBlanc, manager of the Studio II disco, was found stabbed more than 100 times in his St. Joseph Street apartment. On November 28, William Duncan Robinson was found stabbed in his apartment on Vaughan Road. Police said they believed he had left the St. Charles with another man.
The next day the Star called Robinson’s death the 14th homosexual killing in three and a half years, half of them unsolved. Kennedy appeared on its list as a 49-year-old “federal income tax employee” strangled with a towel.
In February 1979, The Body Politic published Robin Hardy’s “Overkill: Murder in Toronto-the-Good.” Hardy counted 14 gay men murdered since February 1975, with eight cases unsolved. He wrote that the caretaker found Kennedy on September 20, nude, with a towel knotted around his neck and his credit cards missing. Neighbours called him “a recluse.” He had last been seen at the St. Charles the night before he was killed.
Inspector Hobson of homicide told Hardy that in several of the murders the victim was last seen at the St. Charles and met his killer there. He would not connect the unsolved cases. Hardy noted that while police were asking gay men to come forward, they were also raiding the baths. The same issue’s cover showed police at the Barracks.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | James Stewart Kennedy; given as James Robert Kennedy in the Toronto Star (1977) and the Globe and Mail (1978) |
| Age | 49 (59 in the Toronto Police cold case file) |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Supervisor, storage unit, Department of National Revenue, Adelaide Street West |
| Date of death | Found September 20, 1976; last seen alive Saturday, September 18 |
| Manner of death | Strangulation; beaten before death |
| Location | Sixth-floor apartment, 262 Jarvis Street |
Sources
- Toronto Sun, September 21, 1976, p. 2
- Toronto Star, September 21, 1976, p. A2
- The Body Politic, No. 31, March 1977, p. 1
- Toronto Star, December 16, 1977, p. C1
- The Globe and Mail, January 5, 1978, p. F6
- Toronto Star, November 29, 1978, p. A3
- The Body Politic, No. 50, February 1979, pp. 19–20
- Toronto Police Service, Cold Case Files, Homicide #38/1976
- CBC News, “It happened before,” April 4, 2018
- National Post, “Are the unknown victims of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur hidden among these 22 cold cases?”, June 15, 2018
- Photographs: St. Charles Tavern, City of Toronto Archives; James Kennedy as a young man, Toronto Police Service (via National Post)
Murder Village Map