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The Line-up of Sunday, January 22

(January 22, 1939)

Mickey McDonald first knew he had real reason to worry about being charged with the murder of James Windsor on Sunday afternoon, January 22, five days before he was sentenced by Judge Parker to two years in the Elder case. Early that afternoon, together with several other Don Jail inmates, Mickey was suddenly and unexpectedly vanned to Toronto police headquarters to be in an identification line-up that was to be paraded before the five eyewitnesses to the Windsor Murder.

This was a procedure Mickey knew well.

Those to be displayed, whether they were brought to the line-up theatre from the jail, from one of the police stations, or from the detective room at headquarters itself, were taken there by a route that insured they would not encounter any of the witnesses in advance of the “show up” and thereby contaminate their evidence in any subsequent prosecution. Mickey and others from the jail were brought into the building by way of the underground garage, then taken up to the fifth floor in the back-corridor freight elevator.

The line-up room was a long narrow rectangle with a raised platform along the entire length of one wall. A thin wire mesh separated the men on the platform from those who were there to view them, and an array of lights created the effect that the witnesses could see the men in the line-up, but they themselves could only be seen as shadows by those on the other side of the mesh curtain.

When all was in readiness, Mickey and thirteen others were marched through a door onto the platform and told to spread themselves out facing the mesh. Sergeant of Detectives Herbert McCready, in charge of the line-up, called each witness into the room, one at a time, by knocking on a door at the opposite end of the identification room to which those on display had entered. Each time, before he did so, the men on the platform were allowed to re-arrange themselves in any order that suited them. Then, as each witness came in, McCready gave them the same instruction: There are some men lined up here. Look them over carefully and individually, and if there is anyone there who you have seen on any occasion, let me know. After viewing the line-up, each witness left by a door at the opposite end of the room to the door they came in.

Unknown to the police, the five eyewitnesses to Windsor’s death had made a secret agreement among themselves not to identify anyone in the line-up room as instructed by detectives both before and during the viewing. The five were then living under 24-hour-a-day police protection at 247 Briar Hill Avenue, and this would be so until mid-April, 1939, when the house was put up for sale and the entire household, tired of threatening letters and all manner of bothersome strangers at their door, moved. After that, there would be six months more of the same close security at an undisclosed location. All of the eyewitnesses, including Lorraine Bromell, who stayed with the family until the entire ordeal was over, lived in deathly fear that, having seen the face of the angry killer who shot James Windsor, the killer, or killers, or their associates, might return and murder them to prevent their testifying. The agreement was made after Jack McDermott saw, or thought he saw, a man who was in an earlier line-up walking on College Street. Later, in court, the admission of this understanding would serve to weaken the witness value of all five of their positive identifications of the gunman all would identify as James Windsor’s actual killer, and of the blue-eyed man who held those at the dinner table at bay.

Jack McDermott, the first to answer Herbert McCready’s knock, said and did nothing to unnerve Mickey McDonald or anyone else in the identification parade. Later, McDermott would testify that he spotted Mickey as the actual killer of James Windsor the moment he entered the room and, upon a close inspection of the others on the platform, recognized “the man with the yellow gloves” as the blue-eyed gunman. Before leaving the building, McDermott went into Inspector of Detectives John Chisholm’s office and, in the presence of Chief Constable D.C. Draper and Inspector Pat Hogan, notified Chisholm that Donald “Mickey” McDonald was the gunman who shot Windsor and “the man with the yellow gloves” was his accomplice.[1]

The next eyewitness to enter the identification room surely gave Mickey immediate and serious reason to worry. Later, in court, Edith Warner would testify that, upon first spotting a side view of Mickey’s face, she loudly blurted out, “There is the profile of the man that did the killing.”[2]

At this remark, or something like it, Mickey stooped down low on the platform, tried to look under the mesh curtain, and aggressively demanded to know, “Is that me?”

“Yes, that’s you. Now straighten up,” Herbert McCready snapped back sharply.

Edith Warner was too frightened to say anything more.

She would later tell in court, more than once, that she had recognized both Mickey and “the tall man with the yellow gloves” as two of the men who had invaded the Briar Hill Avenue house. She would also testify that she made a positive identification of Mickey McDonald as her brother’s killer in the line-up room. But the written record of the line-up did not show that. Mrs. Warner was recorded as having said that Mickey’s profile was “like the profile of the man I saw at 247 Briar Hill Avenue.”[3]

Evelyn McDermott, who had gotten the best look at the killer’s unmasked face when she answered the knock at the front door, asked Mickey, alone among the fourteen men on the platform, to step forward and smile. She was, of course, looking for the gunman’s supposedly “decayed and wide-apart” teeth, which she would later testify she had described to the police as being merely “black-looking.”[4] Mickey did as asked and Mrs. McDermott said nothing else — in the identification room or after she passed through it. She would later testify that she told her husband at home that she thought she saw two of the gunmen in the line-up parade — the shooter and “the man that held us back.”[5]

Edward Warner went through the room, as he would later testify, noticing Mickey and the second gunman in the same way as all of the others. He too kept to the compact and said nothing until he was back at 247 Briar Hill Avenue.

The last to be called into the identification room was Lorraine Bromell. She did less than Edith Warner or Evelyn McDermott to worry Mickey but more than the two men. As she later testified, one at a time, she asked Mickey, Mickey’s long-time associate Louis Gallow, and “the man with the yellow gloves,” to step forward and show their teeth in a smile. Lorraine would remember that when she asked “the man who did the shooting” to show his teeth, he “stood forward and made some funny little cracks, and made funny faces and said, ‘I am not the man you want’.”[6] The other two men only did as requested, quietly and without attracting unnecessary attention to themselves. Lorraine afterwards identified Mickey and “the man with the yellow gloves,” but not the short, dark-complexioned Louis Gallow, as being two of those who were in the Briar Hill Avenue house. When asked later in court, ‘Why not Gallow, too?’ she answered that she was not sure of him; the others she was sure of.[7]

Thus, none of the five eyewitnesses made an identification of anyone in the line-up parade in the manner that Herbert McCready had instructed them to do. Instead, after collecting all of the positive identifications at the Briar Hill Avenue house, and after the eyewitnesses very likely had discussed the matter among themselves, Jack McDermott telephoned Inspector Chisholm and notified him that all were in agreement that Mickey was the killer and “the man with the yellow gloves” was his armed accomplice.[8]

When questioned later in court about whether anything extraordinary had happened at the line-up on January 22, Mickey said: “One lady asked me to smile, and I smiled. I cracked a joke with her, and says, ‘If you dance, I will smile.’ And she says, ‘No, that is not the man’.”[9] Mickey would also testify that another woman asked two others and himself to step forward and show their teeth.

In the written record of Edith Warner’s answer to Sergeant McCready’s question, “Where did you see this man before?” the witness was recorded as having said, “His profile is like the man I saw at 247 Briar Hill Avenue. I am only going by the profile, because it was only the profile that I saw.” About this, at his later trial for murder, Mickey McDonald would testify that he did not remember hearing those words at all — in effect, that they were a police fabrication, in which Edith Warner had participated.[10]

* * *

In a perverse sense, confinement was good for Mickey. It got him away from liquor and sobered him up, which had the effect of perking up his criminal instincts. Jail got his defensive network functioning. Some of those he met up with on the fifth floor before the line-up — men brought there from elsewhere than the Don Jail — surely caused the inner alarm to go off inside his criminal mind. It was not anxiety that he could express, since those in the line-up were instructed not to talk to each other and, more so, because any accusation in public would serve to label Mickey as guilty himself. More than that, though, his then already burgeoning suspicion might be wrong and, if voiced, whether right or wrong, would likely trigger another kind of major problem. Any criminal who names another as an informer better be ready to fight, or even kill, over it. It’s a dangerous accusation to make because it’s a dangerous thing to be accused of. Mickey, rightly, kept his suspicions to himself.

So far as Mickey was concerned, the most worrisome presence in the line-up was that of Jack Shea, a criminal “friend” and ally who had been wanted for a bank robbery at Port Credit since December 9, 1938. After hiding out in Toronto for six weeks, Shea was arrested on the morning of Saturday, January 21, the day before this line-up. Mickey and the police both knew Shea as many kinds of criminal, including as a smooth and clever con artist. At Port Credit, Shea had moved up to bank robbery with Leo Gauthier, and “the man with the yellow gloves,” and, as a three-time loser, if convicted, was now likely looking at a sentence of 10 to 15 years in “the Big House.” This being a weekend, most likely Mickey came to the line-up not knowing Shea had been arrested while, at the same time, wondering why he, himself, was now suddenly a suspect in the Windsor Murder. Shea’s unexpected presence surely supplied a possible, or probable, answer. Mickey’s big worry about Shea was not only that he now found himself in a line-up of murder suspects right after Shea’s being freshly caught, but that Shea had likely been arrested in an apartment that Mickey had visited several times in the 12 days prior to his giving himself up on the James Elder robbery-with-violence charge. In fact, as both he and Shea would later agree, Mickey had gone to Shea’s apartment on the night of the Windsor Murder. And that would be, as Mickey would have surely considered it might be, the biggest part of the rub.

If Shea had turned “rat,” Mickey knew, he would have had to cough up something big to get consideration for himself on the charge he was now facing. James Windsor’s murderers would do nicely. Had Shea talked to the police about him? And, if so, what would, or could, he have told them? What would, or could, Shea have been able to concoct, if he did not actually know anything solid? Or if Shea was a part of the Windsor Murder himself? Depending on the truth of the matter, some or all of these questions were all over Mickey’s mind a few seconds after he spotted Jack Shea’s presence. Not maybe. Not perhaps. Take it to the bank. Shea would have known, or should have known, what Mickey was thinking — but, like Mickey, he was best off to say nothing and await developments. The situation was like a boxing match where neither competitor ought to lead for fear of a devastating counterpunch.

The criminal world is a world of paranoia. Mickey knew this, too. Jack Shea’s reputation in that world was as solid as his own. Shea was widely thought to be “good people,” “solid,” “a stand-up guy.” Mickey must surely have hoped and considered, as well, that all of these sudden suspicions were only his own paranoid criminal mind acting upon imaginary fears. It had happened before that he had doubted a trusted associate, only to be proven wrong. It is a part of criminal life.

Depending on what Shea really did know, Mickey was surely more than mildly alarmed at Shea’s presence there that afternoon. Edith Warner’s seeming identification of his profile could only have compounded his concern.

Another upsetting presence was that of Louis Gallow, born Luigi Gallo, a short, dark thief of Italian extraction who well fit the description of the man who came in from the hallway and dragged Jimmy Windsor to the spot on the hall floor where he died. Though not under arrest at the moment, Gallow was, in fact, now suspected by the police of being that man. Older than the others, Louis had a criminal record rife with crimes of theft and violence dating back to 1914, and he was known by the police to be a long-time criminal associate of Mickey’s. If Gallow and Mickey were both real parts of the gang that killed Windsor, and Shea knew this, all of what Mickey was thinking about Shea’s presence in the line-up was grossly magnified by Gallow being there, too. Gallow, himself, if he was truly part of the gang that killed Windsor, and if he had reason to think or know that Shea knew this, would have been worried by Shea being there too.

And, so, it was with “the man with the yellow gloves,” whose presence would have disturbed Mickey in the same way as would have Gallow’s — and for family reasons as well. “The man with the yellow gloves” was Mickey’s 19-year-old brother, Alex, who had taken Mickey’s place in the robbery of the Bank of Commerce in Port Credit, since Mickey was indisposed at the time. Alex and Leo Gauthier were already charged with that robbery, and both were out on $7,500 bail on the night of the Windsor Murder, and at the moment, too. At 9 a.m. that Sunday morning, 15 days after Windsor’s death, a dozen detectives, armed with a warrant, had appeared at the Poplar Plains Road house and, as Alexander MacDonald Sr. later said, “without knocking or stopping at the door went from the top to the bottom of the house, and searched it all.”[11] They found nothing. Alex was pulled out of bed and taken to headquarters for questioning, and to be paraded in this line-up. Later that afternoon, Herbert McCready misled Alex by telling him, “You haven’t been identified, so you can go.”

Leo Gauthier was there on Sunday, January 22, too. He and Jack Shea were also being looked at by two victims of the $100 robbery of the Dominion Shoe Repair, at 467 Queen Street East, Toronto, which happened four days before, on the early evening of Wednesday, January 18. The Toronto Police had obtained three search warrants that morning and made simultaneous raids on the living quarters, not only of Alex MacDonald, but of Gauthier and Gallow as well. One consequence was that Mickey was not the only rounder in the identification parade who was worried about Jack Shea. Alex, Gallow, and Gauthier were all thinking similarly, Leo with somewhat less to lose than the others.