John Tavares
My great uncle was a serial killer, and nobody cared. So, when my great uncle was dying from lung cancer, in palliative care on the cancer ward of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, he made his confessions about his retirement activities. He had just retired from the auto assembly line of a multinational automobile manufacturer after thirty-nine years of loyal work in a factory the size of several aircraft hangars and football fields. The auto company insisted he retire, take his pension, and his employee stock purchases, and exit the plant and factory assembly line, and leave the mindless shift work to younger workers. There might have been a dispute between him, his company supervisor, corporate managers in suits, and his union shop stewards. They didn’t appreciate his initiative in attempting to enforce the rules on the length of coffee breaks and lunch breaks and were troubled by his relationship with co-workers. He needed reminders he was not a factory boss. But I believe the main reason for his hastened departure centered around the fact he was rapidly approaching the mandatory age for retirement. He already owned a full pension, and the company believed they could improve productivity by weeding out older workers.
When my grandfather revealed these personal details and this intimate tale, which became more convoluted the deeper I probed, he was in his middle eighties and lived a long and fulfilling life. I thought some of the details he divulged might have been confabulated from some type of dementia, yet undiagnosed. But he produced a neatly typed aging transcript from the nineteen-eighties, the deathbed confessions my grandmother painstakingly reconstructed. The details that text contained corroborated his story. My grandmother found transcription an easy task, but the details provided by her brother-in-law must have been difficult to process, although she had, admittedly, experienced the trauma and terror of German-occupied Netherlands during the Second World War. In any event, when my great uncle revealed this story to them, his surviving family, the record also included cassette tapes, which were well-preserved, and reel-to-reel audiotapes from my grandfather’s high-fidelity tape player, whose rich expense he finally thought he justified, as he put the machine to work producing archival material. I listened carefully to the recordings, as my great uncle interviewed himself and made his confessions on a death bed.
My mother’s father said my great uncle retired with a generous pension, with excellent medical benefits and dental insurance, extended hospital coverage, including private rooms. He started working in the auto plant as a teenager, though, and did not know what to do with his free time. He lost a sense of meaning and purpose in life. He could not figure out how to utilize the skills and experiences he had acquired in a regimented, insular life. He might have watched the news on television, and he had the same black and white television from the sixties, but he was too frugal to buy a new one, despite all the money he saved from his generous paying blue collar job. In fact, he earned more than a plumber, electrician, or even a dentist. That was the way the auto industry worked in those glory days, the heyday for car makers.
Having retired, some might be forgiven for thinking my great uncle would become an avid reader; but he did not read books, never mind classics or literature, although he carefully perused the daily city newspapers. In any event, he found himself driving his Cadillac down to Cherry Beach to watch the sunset. True to his auto manufacturing, car enthusiast, and motor vehicle driving nature, he did not stroll along the beach or sit at a picnic table: he stayed, comfortably reclined, in his car. The snapshots and sepia photos from the early seventies and the disco era show a handsome man, slender but well-built, athletic looking, at least that is what my grandmother thought. It was difficult to disagree with their aesthetic assessment. He was not overweight; in fact, he had little body fat and a muscular build from the strict regimen of exercises he pursued, which he found in a Royal Canadian Air Force training manual, in the discards of his local East York library. He had a crewcut, which always looked fresh, buff, and bristly, and he was always clean shaven. He looked like a police officer, or a military officer without his uniform; he had a military bearing and sometimes people feared him for this reason.
When he retired, though, it took him many months before he finally accepted reality, realizing he would never work another shift at the auto assembly plant. He might never work at any union job again. To console himself, he went on retreat to Cherry Beach, to meditate and find solace. He appreciated the sunset and the ambience, the sandy beaches, the view of Lake Ontario, which was so large and expansive it looked like a sea or an ocean. He also allowed himself a single frosty bottle of Coca Cola, which he savored and enjoyed. But he did not know or understand the nature of the venue or the type of crowd that tended to frequent that secluded corner of the beach at night, an area traditionally referred to as a Lover’s Lane. I would say he was also as much a victim of naivete in this regard. He wore blinders and did not understand or appreciate how others, even his neighbors, whom he dismissed as immigrants, members of ethnic communities, lived or the type of lifestyle they led.
He sipped his Coca Cola, wondering what was happening with these young men in skimpy shorts or light swimsuits appearing out of nowhere, and then the inevitable happened.
A young man from the gold mining community of Red Lake in Northwestern Ontario, in the city to pursue his dreams, and obtain a college education, and find his niche and pot of gold in the large metropolitan cosmopolitan city, as opposed to the remote, rural small town, came up to his open car window. He leaned inside and asked my great uncle if he wanted a blow job. My uncle reached for his magnum handgun from his dash compartment. As the young man recoiled in horror, he shot the youth at point blank range.
Afterwards, my great uncle drove his Cadillac to the automated car wash, as he did late every Sunday when it was empty and abandoned and he didn’t have to cope with lineups and people. He meticulously cleaned, washed, vacuumed, and buffed his luxury car. Then he went home, and went through his grooming and showering routine, shaving, shampooing, dying, trimming, neatly combing, the whole nine yards: he was the neatest, cleanest retired auto worker in the land with the best grooming and oral and personal hygiene. You could have bounced a wrench or the ammo clip for a revolver off his neatly made bed. My grandfather said around this time in his life my great uncle spoke about running for public office, city council for the Borough of East York, or for the board of school trustees. My aunt understood the reason; he was always complaining about the prostitution, massage parlors, porn shops, and sex boutiques downtown on Yonge Street. But that was Yonge Street, or downtown Toronto, not sleepy residential East York, whose downtown was the foodie’s paradise of Greektown, but for some reason my uncle was always drawn to that downtown area of Yonge Street. He always sipped his coffee and read the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun there. He wanted to clean up the city, as if he was talking about New York City with its crime, or Detroit with its riots and ghettos, or Buffalo with its abandoned factories, and not Toronto the good.
My great uncle dictated his confessions in great pain and personal agony to his sister-in-law, my grandfather’s wife. She meticulously took his death-bed confession, peering over her bifocal half-moon spectacles. She listened carefully and scrutinized him, with her pinched expression, as she wrote her transcript in a proper secretary’s shorthand. She wrote while my grandfather tinkered with his reel-to-reel tapes from his high-fidelity stereo system and recorded his monologue in the private hospital room, for which his auto workers union retirement pension healthcare plan paid. My grandmother was so proficient at shorthand she never bothered to refer to the tapes for accuracy or corrections. Then she neatly typed her transcribed notes, written on yellow legal pads, correcting his grammar, diction, and slang and amusing malaprops, and expletives, as if it was a report for the chief executive officer of The Great Canadian Insurance Company, where she worked as a clerk, typist, secretary, and receptionist for thirty-two years. My grandfather believed this was where his brother the plodding, disturbed, obsessively obstinate working-class guy, who clung to middle-class appearances through his powerful union and Generous Motors, lost his sense of perspective. Then again, maybe my great uncle realized the only way he could feasibly clean up the streets was not as a politician but as a serial killer who preyed on what he considered the detritus of society.
On the other hand, probably his response was spontaneous, a response to an offense to his sense of propriety and his routine, his carefully calculated and controlled life.
In any event, my great uncle was on a high: the shooting was not reported in the media. He felt he had done the city, the police service, and even the young man and his family a favor. He did confirm the man’s death when he did buy all the newspapers, including the stodgy Globe, which might be the last place where you found such torrid news, completely lacking in gentility, reported. He found the only mention of the young man’s passing and death was a brief obit with his picture in the newspaper with countless classified ads. The only clue the young man might have been murdered was the adverb “suddenly” and the phrase “on or about.” My great uncle felt primed and pumped; it was as if he had won the lottery; he had gotten his man. And he was prepared for the next man.
He continued to go in the evenings to Cherry Beach. He had designed a special apparatus that would hold his soft ice cream cones beside him on the driver’s seat, a sort of older version of a cupholder, except it was specially designed for soft ice cream cones, so he could set the melting ice cream cone down without worrying about melting ice cream spilling and dripping onto his hands as he drove or sat in his car, his haven. The holder even included a stainless-steel bottom you could remove and rinse and wash. This time he felt more confident and better prepared: the handgun was not in his dash compartment this time but at his side on the car seat. When the young man, in his flip flops, and denim cutoffs, and a hairy chest, cheerily asked him if he wanted a blow job, he pulled out a revolver and shot him in the face. My great uncle did not even pause to see his corpse: pulling the trigger, seeing the bullet splatter his face, and driving away were all sort of one fluid motion. He was merely there to watch the sunset at Cherry Beach. The young man had intruded on his personal space, his life of neat routine and orderliness, as he was trying to appreciate one of his rituals, joys, and pleasures, his soft ice cream cone. The young man in cutoff denims and sandals offended his morals, trespassed on his property, which he vigorously defended—no further moral justification was needed.
My great uncle washed his car at a car wash after he drove along Don Valley and Gardiner Expressway and numerous side streets and avenues in Etobicoke. He wished to drive, to relax, and soothe his fear, and evade any followers, elude any potential pursuit, avoid leaving behind any clues. He also loved to drive and cruise but did not often because he was stingy with gas as he was with money. He washed and detailed his car, cleaning and polishing the windows with window cleaner, buffing the car surface and paint job with wax, polishing the hub cabs, vacuuming the interior and car seats and floor mats, thoroughly. When he arrived at home, he meticulously went through his whole personal grooming routine: cologne, aftershave, hand soap, shaving cream, shampoo, baby oil, scissors for nostril and ear hairs, combs, wipes, toothbrushes, toothpastes, mouthwash, fingernails clipped and buffed, toenails clipped. He was a new man, with every pull of the trigger, and so far, he had not wasted a bullet. He checked the newspapers again, and there was no news of a murder. He simply had the obit with his mugshot in the Toronto Star that said the man died suddenly. Still, he clipped out the obituary as if it were that of a close friend. There was a relationship and a connection there.
My great uncle continued to visit Cherry Beach during that summer of nineteen seventy-two. He confessed that he always had his loaded handgun at his side, with the safety switched off, ready to fire. He said in his detailed and typed confession that he used the .44 magnum because it was the same handgun that Dirty Harry carried. He had purchased the handgun and ammunition during a cross border shopping trip to a gunsmith and firearms dealers’ shop in Buffalo, in upstate New York, at a time when crossing the border for a white middle-class man like him, who drove a Cadillac, purchased at an employee discount, and who worked for General Motors, was a breeze, and didn’t require a passport.
Two weeks passed before another man approached him, in a t-shirt, cropped, and cut-offs, and asked him if he wanted a BJ. When he saw my great uncle yielding the handgun, he said, “Oh, shit, you’re the guy.” This young man ran off in fear and terror, but my uncle leapt out of the driver’s seat, and chased after the young man with the large, formidable revolver in his hand. He shot him once in the back, and then he shot him in the back of the head.
After this incident, my great uncle was shaken; though there were no witnesses, the procedure had not been so simple and routine. The shooting involved a chase, adrenalin, and melodrama, conditions he wished to avoid. Instead of heading to the car wash and washing his car, and doing his own personal grooming afterwards, he went for a drive around the city of Toronto. Then he went to his favorite café on Yonge Street, the café that he admitted was sleazy and frequented by prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers. He drank coffee and brooded on the nature of evil and his own personal culpability as he tried to read the newspaper. When he drove home, he was pulled over by Metro police for a broken taillight, but this rear driver’s side taillight was functioning, illuminating, flickering, flashing properly, so that was when he first feared that he may have aroused some suspicions which caused him to worry and fret more. And, God forbid, that evening, he fell asleep on the couch. When he went downtown for his daily errands, paying bills, banking, he also bought all the daily newspapers. After the latest incident, though, the newspaper did not report a shooting, and there was no report of a killing, not even an obituary, even though he was confident the man was dead. He had seen the blood from the point-blank shot and his blood splattered brain tissue and skull fragments.
At this point my great uncle may have convinced himself he was unstoppable. He was acting as if he was eating a bag of chips whose flavor and taste he found irresistible and addictive, even though he was full, satiated.
So, he went to Cherry Beach again virtually every August night, the formidable magnum handgun at his side, carefully savoring the flavor of his Coca Cola, or sipping his takeout coffee, depending on his mood and the weather: cola if it was hot and sunny; coffee if it was cool and rainy. Whatever the weather, he also slowly savored his soft ice cream cone, which was held in the specially designed soft ice cream cone holder for the front seat of an automobile, which he had designed, and constructed in his woodworking workshop in his garage. He had even considered obtaining a patent for the soft ice cream cone holder. When he discovered how much a qualified patent attorney charged, though, he blanched. The frugal man decided he would attempt to research patent filing on his own in the reference section of the Toronto Public Library.
At Cherry Beach, though, he enjoyed and appreciated the tranquility and beauty of the sunset. When he finished his soft ice cream cone, he gently wiped the corners of his mouth with the paper napkin and brushed away the crumbs from the crispy cone. He moved to his takeout coffee, from a cup holder he also made in his woodworking shop, and he sipped while he read the newspaper. So, he was totally caught off guard when a young woman, topless, leaned over his open window and thrust her breasts into the car window, which he had opened to appreciate the beach ambience and sunset. Startled, caught off guard, he automatically shot her in the chest. The young woman staggered down onto the dirt of the portion of the lot and then he slipped out of the car. As she, wearing a bikini top, whose breasts could not be held by the undersized bra cups, fell to the ground, he shot her again in the chest. The young man with whom she had been playing frisbee fled into the shallow woods and brush around the beach, running along a hidden trail.
After the drive home, he vowed never to kill again. He was shaken and impressed with the young woman’s beauty and physical proportions, and he considered the shooting entirely accidental. The following evening, he took the ferry to Centre Island, where he heard some day trippers discussing the killing of a young woman at Cherry Beach. This was 1972, before the Internet, even before there was much local live news television reporting, although the daily newspapers had a heyday. This time my great uncle avoided the newsprint local news coverage.
That night he took the city ferry across Toronto Harbor to the Islands. He strolled to the end of Centre Island pier, took in the magnificent view of Lake Ontario, moonlit in the darkness, and tossed the handgun into the deep chilly waters.
Then, a peaceful interlude of retirement living transpired during which my great uncle became progressively more ill. He underwent a long and painful struggle with lung cancer, which doctors figured, he somehow acquired as an industrial disease, from Toronto atmospheric pollution and auto emissions. He was a life-long Torontonian, lived near the heavy automotive traffic and motor vehicle commuters of Don Valley Parkway, and never smoked. He inched closer to death. He insisted on making this deathbed confession. Out of familial respect, my grandmother, a sturdy Dutch immigrant woman, took down his confession in shorthand. Then she typed out the transcript on a typewriter she kept at home for afterhours homework from the insurance company head office.
After my great uncle’s death, my grandfather tried to turn the heirloom handgun, leftover ammunition, and carefully transcribed confession to the police. The police said that nothing they or my grandparents did could bring back the victims long gone, and they doubted the veracity of the account. My grandfather thought they should evaluate the bullets and insisted. Even though a bullet match might have solved the case, at first, they stonewalled. Then the police said that the evidence was accidentally destroyed. Still, a firearms officer seized the handgun, justifying the action by saying the weapon was an illegal weapon, possessed unlawfully. This .44 magnum, which my grandfather had considered evidence, was destroyed.
As a first-year filmmaking and documentary student at Humber College, I must admit the story fascinated me. I am intent on making a documentary film about this mysterious aspect of my great uncle’s life. These incidents I have researched in the Toronto Reference Library and university and college libraries, as I combed over the newspaper accounts on microfilm and microfiche and in newswire databases. My next step is to contact the relatives of the victims, who I will attempt to track down from relics in my great uncle’s trophy room, including his scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Those interviews and that research I will undertake if and only if I can obtain funding or grants for the film.
I even surveyed the area at Cherry Beach where these incidents and acts of cold violence were alleged and purported to occur, as I attempted to visualize, frame, story board, and conceive of possible reenactments. I walked and surveyed the shorelines of Cherry Beach during several different seasons in sunshine, cloud, and rain. Once in the beaches area, when I went to pee in the bushes, I spotted a bone. Was this found object a human bone, the bone of a homicide victim, or even a victim of my great uncle? I could only imagine and speculate, but I felt a psychic connection and a certain intuitive connection to the relic, the calcified material. All I could think about was the emptiness in my own life, and its innocence and its youth, and naivete. I was not certain if I was gay, straight, a bisexual, pansexual, or some other gender or orientation. I gently returned the bone to where I had found it in the sand and dirt. I resumed my walk along the chilly abandoned beach with the wind gusts creating a chill. The overcast skies over bleak Lake Ontario and Toronto harbor added to the gloom of my mood and the melancholy turn of my mind.