On the morning of Wednesday, February 11, 1976, a young man went to a rented bungalow on Elmhurst Avenue in Willowdale. He had lived in the house himself until about seven months earlier. He found James Douglas Taylor dead in the bedroom.
The Toronto Police Service file records a call at about 10:20 a.m., and officers finding a man inside with blunt trauma, obviously dead. The Toronto Star reported the body was found about 10:30 a.m.
Taylor was 41. He was a self-employed painter and decorator. He had rented the bungalow for about a year. He was unmarried and lived alone.
He had been beaten with a baseball bat. The bat was found in the bathroom. His body was nude. The house had been ransacked, and police could not say whether anything had been taken.
Police told the Star he had been killed during the weekend, three days before he was found.
The Globe and Mail reported the death the next morning in two sentences, under the headline “Man, 41, found slain.” It said an autopsy showed Taylor died of multiple blows to the head. It placed the discovery in the afternoon.
On the night of Thursday, February 26, Metro police arrested a 22-year-old man on Yonge Street north of Eglinton and charged him with murder in the death of Carol Lynn Millar, 25, whose beaten and strangled body had been found in a compost heap in Alexander Muir Park on February 8. He was the second man arrested on a murder charge in Metro within thirty hours.
The Star ran that story the next day. Its last sentence read that still under investigation was the February 11 slaying of James Douglas Taylor, 41, killed by a baseball bat in his Elmhurst Avenue home in North York.
Nothing further was reported for almost two years.
On December 15, 1977, Neil Wilkinson, 35, was found beaten and nude in his Charles Street apartment, after his employer called police to say he had not been at work for four days. The Star reported it the next morning under the headline “Homosexual killer may be stalking city.” Police said three other men might also have been victims of killers who prey on homosexuals to rob them: Bernard Guay, 63, of Jarvis Street, beaten and robbed in Allan Gardens that March; James Robert Kennedy, 49, a federal civil servant found nude and strangled in his Carlton Street apartment in September 1976; and James Douglas Taylor, 41, a house painter, found at his Elmhurst Avenue home in February 1976. All the victims had been robbed. None of the killings had been solved.
That was the first time the papers placed Taylor among killings of gay men. The 1976 reporting had not described him that way. What it had given readers was that he was unmarried, that he lived alone, that he was found nude, and that the young man who found him had lived in his house and was not related to him.
On May 1, 1978, the Star devoted a page to ten unsolved murders and appealed to readers for help. Taylor’s was the tenth, under the heading “Man with a tic sought in bludgeoning.” Police were looking for a young man with a nervous tic that made him blink continually. They had descriptions of two men seen at Taylor’s home hours before he was believed to have been killed, on the weekend of February 7. The killing was not discovered until the following Wednesday, when a friend called at the house. A sketch ran with the item.
On September 22, 1978, the Star reported that thirteen homosexuals had been murdered in Metro in three and a half years. Staff Sgt. Bernard Nadeau of the homicide squad described young men who made a living off homosexuals, and said a victim might try to prevent the robbery. Rev. Brent Hawkes said the killings had made gay men “very cautious,” and that many were reluctant to go to the police. Taylor appeared in the list of the unsolved, a painter and decorator beaten to death with a baseball bat at his North York home.
On November 26, 1978, William Duncan Robinson was stabbed to death in his Vaughan Road apartment. The Star called it the fourteenth homosexual killing in three and a half years. Taylor was a line in that list too.
In February 1979, the Body Politic published Robin Hardy’s account of the fourteen deaths. Eight remained unsolved. Hardy wrote that what ran through all of them was overkill: the victims stabbed, bludgeoned or beaten well past the point of death. Inspector Hobson of the homicide division would not say whether the killings were connected. Taylor’s appears there in a sentence, found in his home on February 11, 1976, beaten to death with a baseball bat.
On the night of Saturday, September 6, 1980, Taylor’s brother met a man for the first time in a Danforth Avenue beverage room. Early the following Sunday, Claire Taylor, 47, also a painter and decorator, was beaten to death with a hammer at his North York home. A man was charged with second-degree murder. Reporting it, the Star went back over the brother’s killing four years earlier: neighbours had told police that a pick-up truck was seen at the house, and the murder was never solved.
The Toronto Police Service still carries the case as Homicide #6/1976, and gives Taylor’s age as 42. Every newspaper gave 41.
The record disagrees with itself. Taylor appears as a house painter and as a self-employed painter and decorator, in a bungalow and in an apartment, in Willowdale and in North York. His death appears as February 11, the day he was found, and as the weekend of February 7.
Rev. Brent Hawkes said gay men are reluctant to work with the police because of the negative stigma of homosexuality [at the time], and the increase in violence was making gay men “very cautious.”
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | James Douglas Taylor |
| Age | 41 (42 in the Toronto Police Service listing) |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Self-employed painter and decorator |
| Date of death | Weekend of February 7-8, 1976; body found February 11, 1976 |
| Manner of death | Blunt force, baseball bat |
| Location | His rented bungalow on Elmhurst Avenue near Quilter Road, Willowdale |
| Accused | None charged |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, February 12, 1976, p. 5
- Toronto Star, February 12, 1976, p. A15
- Toronto Star, February 27, 1976, p. A2
- Toronto Star, December 16, 1977, p. C1
- Toronto Star, May 1, 1978, p. B4
- Toronto Star, September 22, 1978, p. A3
- Toronto Star, November 29, 1978, p. A3
- The Body Politic, no. 50, February 1979, p. 20 (Robin Hardy, “Overkill: Murder in Toronto-the-Good”)
- Toronto Star, September 8, 1980, p. A3
- Toronto Police Service, Cold Case Files, Homicide #6/1976
Murder Village Map