What Happened to Mickey?. Peter McSherry
plot with a woman who was not his legally-married wife.
The Windsor news story was Page One in all three dailies for a week and appeared semi-regularly after that till February 23, 1939, when the Toronto Police arrested two brothers for the murder. After that the focus became the alleged murderers, not the murder or its solution. Windsor’s life was picked over thoroughly, beginning with his childhood in a hard-scrabble section of Parkdale. He had worked as a bartender in the Ocean House at Sunnyside before the Ontario Temperance Act came on in 1916, affording him the opportunity to make a lot more money selling liquor illegally than ever he had made doing so within the law.[11] By 1923, Windsor was worth enough to put a down payment on the Briar Hill Avenue house. He was by then long-since split from his wife and four children, and was living with Lavina “Violet” Frawley, the lady in the grave, who had predeceased him by a year and a week. When Ontario Temperance ended in 1927, Windsor adapted and set up his bookmaking business. A story that he was worth $100,000 before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was likely a pressman’s exaggeration. It seems impossible to credit stories such as the one that named Windsor as an associate of William “The Butcher” Leuchter, a Rocco Perri acolyte who was blown up in a car full of alcohol near Ann Arbor, Michigan, on November 30, 1938. More likely Jimmy Windsor’s long-before OTA career was that of a “one bottle man” who had quietly delivered liquor throughout Parkdale in an old car — and merely made an independent, if mildly illegal, living.
In the first week’s news there were several alternate theories as to why the bookie died. To some, including two of the eyewitnesses to the killing, the killer’s level of anger seemed to suggest a personal hatred of Windsor himself — revenge for some previous wrong or slight. There was a pressman’s yarn that said Windsor died for switching allegiance from one American gang to another, that three killers from Buffalo, in company with a Toronto “fingerman,” had done the murder. Then there were “the bag” stories — that “the bag” the killer was after was a small cloth pouch in which Windsor carried diamonds and other jewels in a hidden pocket in his trousers, and also the more likely tale that “the bag” was merely a bag-like, box-shaped carrying device in which Bar-B-Q receipts were taken home, a practice Windsor had discontinued months before. Inevitably, there was the suggestion that the bookie had brought about his own death by welching on a bet. Which his friends and professional acquaintances said he would never do. The most obvious thought, that Windsor was merely the victim of a robbery, got little mention, as the murderers hadn’t bothered to snatch jewellery that was very apparently worn by the three women in the house.
Eventually the public got tired of the murder story, as the public always does. There wasn’t much more to report or to invent. There were other stories that unsettled readers more, especially having to do with the impending war in Europe. Still, when 47 days after the event, the Toronto Police charged Donald “Mickey” MacDonald, a well-known local thief, and his teenaged brother, Alex, with the murder, Toronto breathed a small sigh of relief. Things would be that much safer on Glen Road, in Toronto the Good, for a little while longer.
CHAPTER THREE
Mickey at the Corner
(1907–1938)
In May 1939, as part of the Windsor Murder investigation, Detective-Sergeant Alex McCathie summed up the man thought to be James Windsor’s actual killer in a report to Chief Inspector John Chisholm:
Donald (Mickey) McDonald has been known to me for a number of years, and during that time has always been engaged in criminal activities. On his own admission, these activities have covered the past fifteen years.... His known associates are practically all criminals and prostitutes, and to my knowledge he has never been engaged in any legitimate employment.[1]
Prior to the winter of 1938–1939, Mickey McDonald was seen by the Toronto Police as a small-time criminal of a type that was apt to become dangerous. As Toronto detectives knew him, Mickey was not a particularly clever thief. He drank too much, he talked too much, and, especially when drunk, was given to outbursts of erratic violence. By February 23, 1939, the day of his arrest for murder, Mickey had spent nearly seven of the preceding 15 years behind bars and he was then under sentence of another two years. Worse, from the police point of view, he had recently been arrested in possession of a revolver, with the apparent intention of using it to commit a crime.
In appearance, the adult Donald McDonald was medium-sized, fair-skinned, dark-haired, and clear of hazel eye. He dressed well and was almost always neat and trim. His left cheek wore a small, not unattractive mole. People noticed his normally pleasant demeanour, his usual politeness, and his outgoing manner. In the Toronto underworld of the day, such as it was, Mickey was thought to be both good-looking and dapper. Many women were charmed by him, to the extent that it was claimed he had numerous affairs and assignations. Detective-Sergeant John Nimmo, who became his eventual nemesis, at least twice testified to Mickey’s sense of humour when under the influence of alcohol. “He is very funny,” Nimmo observed in court. “In fact, better than going to a show.”[2]
He was born Donald John MacDonald on April 11, 1907, in Scotland, likely in the Highland city of Inverness, from where his parents, Alexander Robertson MacDonald and Margaret Renfrew MacDonald, originated. In March 1911, Donald’s father, looking for a better life for his family, came to Canada, alone, on board the 10,000-ton steamer Megantic, Liverpool to Halifax, as a “British Settler Third Class” — in ship’s steerage — with the equivalent of $88 Canadian on his person. MacDonald’s ticket into Canada was that he was prepared to work for a specified time as “a farm servant” in the Toronto area. By the summer of 1914, Alexander, his wife Margaret, known as “Maggie,” and their several youngsters, including “Donnie,” were settled together in a house at 7 Bird Avenue, near Dufferin Street and St. Clair Avenue, in Toronto’s west end.[3] The MacDonalds would eventually issue 10 children over a 24-year period, 9 of whom — 6 girls and 3 boys — lived to adulthood. Donald was the oldest boy.
After 1916, Alexander MacDonald laboured 25 years, shoeing delivery-wagon horses for the Canada Bread Company and, according to himself in May 1939, never missed a day’s work. Nor did he ever miss Sunday worship. He was a stern, square, God-fearing Scot and an active member of the Church of God, a conservative evangelical congregation then much given to tract distribution and street-corner preaching. According to a story, Mickey’s father, whose fixed sense of right and wrong was easily brought forth, was himself a street-corner preacher.
Donald attended Hughes and Earlscourt schools and got an elementary education in normal fashion. Even then, people noticed his politeness and outgoing personality. But by the time he reached the age of eleven, something had started to go wrong. The boy was stealing. His Juvenile Court record shows that he was convicted of six offences in the five years before he reached the age of sixteen. Theft, trespassing, shopbreaking and theft, disorderly conduct, and theft again were the charges. The worst happened in August 1919, when, aged 12, “Donnie” — his mother’s name for him — was put on probation and his father had to make restitution to a shopkeeper whose store was broken into. Otherwise, there were warnings, $2 fines, and another probation.
Age 14 and no longer in school, Donald reached a point in life where he was quite normally expected to work and bring home his wages. According to what he later told a counsellor in reformatory, he began work by labouring six months at the Dominion Shipbuilding Yards, where he was paid $14.40 a week. After that, he was a bellboy on a passenger ship that ran between Toronto and Prescott, Ontario, in the Thousand Islands. At other times, so he said, he was the driver of a Canada Bread Company truck and a chauffeur.
About this time, Donnie decided he would rather be “Donald McDonald” than “Donald MacDonald” and, later, he would consistently misrepresent that he was born in Canada, not Scotland. His religion, likely never practised, had become “Presbyterian,” his mother’s church, not the Church of God, to which he had been taken as a boy. His father’s thick Scottish brogue he probably did not like either. Years later, he said that he left home at sixteen.
In September 1925 came the first of Donald’s many appearances in Toronto Police Court. Aged 18, he had stolen the motorcar of a Lansdowne Avenue doctor, crashed it into another vehicle, then attacked the other driver. Magistrate J. Edmund