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…
