The Don Inmates, Guards, Governors and the Gallows
Lorna presented to the North Toronto Historical Society in April 2023 and her talk was summarized in their Summer newsletter.
The article is excerpted here as a pdf .
The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery for the Record Books
In a 300-word early morning dispatch George Gregg, Ottawa correspondent of the Toronto Leader, described what happened next: “At half-past two o’clock this morning Hon. T. D. McGee was shot dead by an unknown assassin, just as he was entering the door of his lodging house. The ball passed through his head and lodged in the door which he was just opening … The body, as I write, is still prostrate on the pavement, hardly yet cold in death.”
‘Old Never-Let-Go’: The (Mostly) True Story of Ontario’s First Detective
Funny, determined, and “schooled in the details of information of every class of crime,” John Wilson Murray in 1875 starting hunting lawbreakers as the provincial detective of OntarioOn February 21, 1890, he received word that two woodsmen had made a grisly discovery: amid a tangle of briars, fallen logs, and dense brush, the body of a man with two bullet holes in the back of his head.
Mean Streets of Toronto: FAN EXPO 2022
Lorna appeared on a true crime panel at FanExpo in Toronto in August. TalkShoe.com and Dundurn Press recorded the session and have released it as a series of podcast episodes from Mean Streets of Toronto.
You can hear Lorna’s readings in Episodes 2 and 5.
‘Loud, Lazy Hoodlums’: The Rise and Fall of Toronto’s Infamous Beanery Gang
On August 21, 1948. At around 11 p.m., close to a hundred belligerent young people fought near Davie’s Dancing Club, on Wasaga Beach. (Courtesy of the Wasaga Beach Archives)
In the late 1940s, they loitered on corners, haunted dance halls, stole cars — and made waves by battling a rival gang at Wasaga Beach
How architect William Thomas helped build Ontario
Left: Toronto’s Don Jail shortly after completion in the 1860s (Wikimedia Commons); right: Portrait of William Thomas, c. 1837 (Toronto Public Library).