Part 6: Next Christmas 

On Tuesday, December 21, 1982, after a series of 10 abortive court appearances due to ongoing congestion within the court system, Leslie Sheppard finally had his moment of truth before York County Court Judge Ted Wren. Sheppard faced a two-to-three-year prison sentence for being an accessory after the fact to the escape of the four convicts from the Don Jail on December 25, 1981.

Rewind to December 1981: Things were looking bright for Sheppard. He was working full time as a printer for York Litho and had just purchased a $100,000 house in Pickering, where he was living with his 10-year-old son. Determined to pay off his mortgage as quickly as possible, he took a second job moonlighting for Diamond Taxis in Toronto. His first day on the job would be December 25. He reckoned that spending Christmas away from his family would be a hardship but well worth his while.

He was wrong.

After he had dropped off just his second fare of the night at Riverdale Hospital, four men, uttering dark threats, scrambled into his cab on the narrow roadway between the hospital and the Don Jail. It took Sheppard mere moments to realize that his vehicle had been commandeered by a quartet of jail breakers.

He was ordered to drive along Gerrard Street East and pull over near Parliament Street. He pleaded with the bandits not to steal his cab and gave back the $10 fare one of them had thrust at him. Three of them got out, warning him to keep his mouth shut. The fourth, Andre Hirsh, rode for a few blocks further and told Sheppard to mislead the police if questioned as to where he had been dropped off.

Sheppard was stopped by police a few minutes later, and he identified himself as the man who had just picked up the escapees outside the jail. It was during the interview that followed that Sheppard, still trembling from his terrifying encounter, committed the grave error that would plunge him into a year of misery and chaos: he lied. He concocted the story that he had dropped all four men off at Gerrard and Sherbourne streets, believing that they were being pursued by bikers. And that they had paid for their ride — $1.70 plus a 30-cent tip.

Sheppard dreaded getting involved, and dreaded even more what might happen if the convicts decided to wreak revenge on him for helping the cops. Over a period of four miserable days, he came to the realization that he had been more than foolish, and he went into a police station to ’fess up. The police were skeptical of his belated efforts to change his story. From their point of view, he was not an innocent victim but someone who had aided inmates to escape.

Sheppard’s annus horribilis had begun.

Over the next 12 months, he was overwhelmed both financially and emotionally. He had to sell his house to cover the thousands of dollars he spent on legal fees. He was depressed, fearful of going out, and terrified that, in spite of being innocent, he would be sent to jail.

His lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, called him “the ultimate victim of circumstances — this poor sap who walked into an utter horror story.”

On Tuesday, December 21, 1982, the judge agreed with Greenspan. His client was acquitted of all charges.

And a delighted Sheppard told the Toronto Star’s Ellie Tesher, “Now I believe in Christmas again.”

Read the full story:

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Part 4: The Third Man 

By December 28, 1981, Don Jail escapees Terry Musgrave and Randy Garrison were both safely behind bars. On January 3, 1982, by pure accident, the next fugitive was ushered back into the fold.

That Sunday, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) detachment at Lindsay received a tip from a sharp-eyed cottager in Kenrei Park, a small community some 5 kilometres north of Lindsay, that someone appeared to be occupying a cottage that should, rightly, have been unoccupied. Three officers paid a visit to the community to check things out; there was indeed a trespasser. After surrounding the cottage, they took the intruder into custody. The man was alone and unarmed, and he offered no resistance.

It was only after the arrest that the OPP established his identity — Brian William Bush, who had been charged with robbery and possessing restricted weapons. Metro Toronto Police had earlier described Bush as “very dangerous”; their Lindsay counterparts must have thanked their lucky stars that he had none of those lethal weapons on his person at the time.

On February 9, Bush was convicted for his part in the bungled Leaside bank robbery in March 1981 that left one of his fellow bandits dead and two others wounded in a shootout with police. This was his third robbery conviction. As reported in the Toronto Star, a stern Judge Hugh Locke told the court that Bush regarded “jail as an occupational hazard. He knew there were weapons being used. He is a very dangerous man with dire prospects for rehabilitation.” He sentenced Bush to 11 years in prison.

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Part 3: Two Down, Two to Go

Unquestionably the baddest of the jail-breaking bunch was the first to be picked up by Metro police. Convicted murderer Terry Musgrave, that “cold-blooded killer,” was spotted by two uniformed policemen outside a shopping plaza on Jane Street in North York. He was arrested at gunpoint.

Handcuffed and in shackles, Musgrave appeared in court at College Park in Toronto on December 29. His charges, as might be presumed, were serious: escaping custody and possession of a prohibited weapon – a sawed-off .22-calibre rifle. He was eager to get things over with. (“I don’t want a lawyer. I plead guilty.”) At the judge’s insistence, he agreed to have his case remanded for a week — both to consult a lawyer and to get treatment for a foot fracture. He had broken a bone when jumping over the Don wall.

The second fugitive to be corralled was Randy Garrison, who surrendered on December 28, after just three days on the lam. Garrison had telephoned his father, Ernest, asking him to arrange for two officers to meet him at a streetlight on the corner of Driftwood and Finch avenues in North York.

Sergeant Don Bell and Constable Steve McAteer duly “went and stood there.” And, in true noir fashion, “Garrison just appeared out of the darkness.”

Garrison was exhausted. Since his escape, he had managed to snatch just a couple of hours’ sleep each night. He was also scared, after reading newspaper reports that he was regarded as a suspect in a robbery at a York borough gas station the day before. Three bandits in ski-masks had bound and gagged the attendant and threatened him with a knife. Garrison later swore to both the police and his father that he had played no part in that robbery. His overriding fear was that the longer he stayed on the run the more he would be blamed for any crimes committed in the future. The police believed his story.

The police also believed that he had nothing to do with planning the jail break.

Garrison was “the odd man out,” said Sergeant Bell. “We felt he would be the one who would give himself up.”

At Garrison’s trial on January 26, 1982, Bell told the court that the hapless inmate first learned of the “elaborate escape plan” on Christmas Day, when he was transferred to a segregated (and poorly supervised) area on the second-floor of the Don Jail where Musgrave, Hirsh, and Bush were already sequestered. When his three fellow escapees piled into the taxi after the escape, Garrison tried to run away. But the taxi drew up beside him and someone called out: “Randy, get in.” As evidence of Garrison’s reluctance, Bell testified that police had found a note on his person written on the back on a cigarette box. It read: “I Terry Musgrave forced Randy Garrison to go with us.” Musgrave later confirmed that he had indeed written it.

Garrison, who pleaded guilty to being “at large,” was sentenced to three months in jail, to be added to the three years he was already serving for the gas station robbery in 1979.

Terry Musgrave and Randy Garrison, both back inside.

And then there were two…

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Part 2: The Rogues’ Gallery (Dec 26)

Ranked from bad to worst, the four criminals who scaled the wall of Toronto’s Don Jail and hopped into a conveniently idling cab on the night of December 25, 1981, were Randolph “Randy” Garrison, Brian William Bush, Andre Hirsh, and Terrance “Terry” Derek Musgrave. All of them were in their 20s. All had based their criminous activities in Toronto or neighbouring cities like North York (not part of the city of Toronto at the time), and their combined rap sheets contained more than 80 offences.

Randy Garrison of Toronto, aged 23, had received a three-year prison sentence for robbing a Kingston Road service station in 1979 and was facing a further trial at the time on charges of robbery and assault causing bodily harm.

Brian Bush was a 27-year-old Scarborough man awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and possession of a restricted weapon. Bush’s claim to fame — or infamy — was his membership of the Dirty Tricks Gang, so called because of the creative diversionary tactics they adopted while carrying out their heists. Their preferred modus operandi when making a getaway by car was to scatter planks or lengths of hose studded with nails on the roadway to puncture the tires of pursuing vehicles. Bush was arrested after an abortive robbery at a Royal Bank branch in Leaside. Metro Toronto Police had received a “vague tip” that something might be going down, and they were waiting outside the bank as the masked bandits fled with their haul of around $24,000. In the firefight that ensued, police shot one of the robbers dead and wounded two others. Bush was arrested in Yorkville after a high-speed car chase through the city.

Andre Hirsh of Toronto, aged 24, was awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree murder after a bungled holdup at a Weston Road jewelry store in May 1981. When confronted at gunpoint during the robbery, the store owner, 38-year-old Frank Abrams, had flatly refused to hand over any money or jewelry. He was shot outside his store while trying to wrest the firearm from his attacker. A group of bystanders chased Hirsh as he fled and brought him down. Hirsh told police that Abrams “had it coming to him,” adding, “the guy had to play Joe Hero.” Abrams had threatened to fetch his dogs, “so I unloaded on him…not in the head or heart but in the stomach.” The truth was starkly different: Abrams was shot three times, including once through the heart.

And at the top (or bottom) spot, at very worst, was self-confessed killer Terry Musgrave, a 25-year-old from North York. The brutal murder had horrified the city back in January 1981. The victim was Catherine Maruya, the 43-year-old owner of a ceramic studio in North York, who was found bound and gagged at her workplace. She had been stabbed 28 times with a pair of scissors and strangled. Musgrave, described by the prosecutor at his trial as “a cold-blooded killer,” had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He had received an automatic life sentence and was being held at the Don pending the judge’s decision as to the minimum time he would serve.

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Part 1: The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time? 

The front page of Toronto’s Saturday Star on December 26, 1981, recorded the heartwarming story of a Rexdale couple who received the Christmas gift of twin boys. The new parents were understandably overjoyed, as the article put it, when the stork “dropped in” on them not once, but twice. Much less overjoyed was a Toronto taxi driver who had four men drop in on him on Christmas night. This report also appeared on page 1 of the Star, beneath the bold headline “Murderer three others flee Don Jail.”

As 28-year-old Leslie Peter Sheppard of Pickering explained, it was simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was Sheppard’s first day on the job, moonlighting as a cab driver for Diamond Taxis in Toronto. He had just dropped off a fare at Riverdale Hospital on Broadview Avenue north of Gerrard Street East, and, in the spirit of Christmas giving, had escorted the wheelchair-bound patient to the entrance door of the hospital. Returning to his cab, parked on the narrow roadway between the hospital and the red-brick wall of the Toronto (Don) Jail to the south, he began writing up his trip sheet. That was when several men “in the biggest hurry of anyone you ever saw” piled into his cab. The first guy, he told reporters, “was huffing and puffing and said, ‘Help us — the bikers are after us. They want to knife us.’” As if to underscore this statement, he noticed that another of the men was shirtless, with a large slash across his chest and stomach. “Go! Go! Go!” they yelled and he took off, heading west along the laneway, before turning onto Gerrard Street and dropping them off at Sherbourne Street. The fare for the two-to-three-minute ride was $1.70, and he scored a 30-cent tip.

Sheppard told the media that he was gob-smacked to learn, when police stopped him 12 minutes later, that he had inadvertently helped four “extremely dangerous” inmates to escape from the Don Jail.

The desperadoes had squeezed through a narrow ventilation shaft, sawed through a steel bar with a hacksaw, and used a rope of blankets and bedsheets spliced together to reach the yard of the adjoining old Don Jail, closed since 1976. They then scaled a 20-foot wall to freedom — and that conveniently idling taxicab.

A Canada-wide alert was issued, with Metro Toronto Police out in force to follow up on every lead. They warned the public not to confront the escapers or “get them upset in any way.”

On December 29, an astonishing new development hit the headlines: police had charged the so-called “30-cent-tip” cabby with being an accessory after the fact and assisting in an escape. He was to appear in court early in the new year to have a trial date set.

Leslie Peter Sheppard’s long Christmas nightmare had begun.

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