On Saturday, Aug. 18, 1928, residents of the Nickel District picked up their copy of the local newspaper and were immediately shocked by what they saw. Blaring from its front page in large type, the banner headline read: “BANDITS ROB MAIL CAR AND SLAY FARMER” followed by the subheading: “BOARD TRAIN AT ROMFORD AND LOOT BAGS, WITH CLERKS AT GUN’S POINT FOR THREE HOURS.”
Reporters from across Ontario headed north (or south, as the case may be) to report on the tantalizing details of the story, which had just played out along a 100-mile stretch of railway south of the Town of Sudbury.
It included all of the elements necessary to engross readers: A train robbery, a car chase, a gunfight and a murder.
Masked men board the train
The melodrama began shortly after midnight at Romford Junction —which was located on Regional Road 67, just west of Coniston — when two masked and armed men climbed aboard an eastbound transcontinental train of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This area was the railway point of contact between the east-west transcontinental railway that blazed its way through the area in 1883 and the more recently built “Toronto Branch.”
In fact, for a time this stop along the railway was much more important than nearby Coniston.
During the mail exchange, two men entered the mail car and confronted the three clerks working there. After ordering the clerks to stand in the corner with their backs to the interior of the car, the two bandits proceeded to tear open all of the registered mail and stuffed those containing money and other valuables into their pockets.
It was reported (unofficially) on the day of the robbery that two money packets had cleared through the Sudbury Post Office, both originating from banks, one at Sault Ste. Marie and the other Thessalon.
Though the amount of the shipments was not known, authorities privately whispered amongst themselves that had the hold-up occurred on any other night than Friday the "pickings" probably would have been richer. All that was officially reported to be on the car was regular mail from the Sudbury post office and about two dozen registered packages
"Our three mall clerks were held with their backs to the wall of the car while three bandits looted the mails,” said A. M. Gibson, district superintendent of Railway Mail Services after he had received a report of the robbery upon the arrival of the train at Toronto.
He was unable to state the amount taken, though the department was conducting a thorough investigation. He also stated the men in charge of the mail car were not armed.
Clearly, the thieves had acquainted themselves with the mailing system and awaited their opportunity. This train (known as No. 4) only ever made two stops between Sudbury and Parry Sound. The first was at Romford Junction, always a few minutes after midnight, to receive running orders, and the second, at Byng Inlet, for water and coal. Mail from Sudbury to Coniston on No. 4 would be transferred at Romford, and it was during this time that the gunmen jumped aboard.
Quiet crime
The robbery was not detected until the train reached Parry Sound when three other mail clerks boarded the car to report for duty. At this point, brakeman Alfred Armstrong noticed two men jump off the train. The robbery had been pulled off so quietly the passengers on the train knew nothing about it.
“Was there a robbery?" asked one passenger who was interviewed upon arrival. He laughed in derision, thinking that the reporter was joking with him. He could not believe that there had been a robbery. "(If) there was a hold-up, no time was lost. We came right through and everybody was asleep," he finished, while walking away clearly only half-convinced.
Other passengers were also unaware that anything was wrong and everybody was said to have slept peacefully throughout the hold-up. The train’s conductor refused to discuss the robbery beyond saying he had known nothing of it until it had been completed.
The murder
Points all along the line were immediately notified by dispatcher RJ O'Neill in Sudbury. An effort was even made via Capreol on the CNR to rouse the station agent at nearby Waubamik, and while it failed, he was awakened by the sound of revolver shots related to the same incident.
Shortly after 3 a.m., the stillness of the night around the Laird home in Parry Sound was interrupted by attempts to start the vehicle in the driveway. As the car roared away, a sleepy Haughton Laird awoke his elder brother, Walter, to inform him that the blue Buick coupe belonging to their visiting brother-in-law, Lee Lyman, had just been stolen.
The two brothers quickly persuaded Harold Rolland, a boarder, to help in pursuing the stolen Buick using his own vehicle.
Ten miles outside of Parry Sound, the road (now Highway 124) curved sharply at Waubamik. Here, the pursuers found the Buick with its headlights turned off, seemingly abandoned in a ditch. The driver had apparently failed to round the curve and the vehicle crossed the opposing lane to rest on the far side of the road.
By this time, the three men had armed themselves respectively with a jack handle, a wrench and a large spring, in anticipation of a possible confrontation with the car thief. The pursuers (who had overshot the vehicle by 75 yards and had to turn around) returned to the stolen car to discover a scene they had not anticipated.
The Buick's headlights were now on and in the glaring brightness a local farmer, Claude Jackson, was struggling to pull the car free with a horse. His father, Thomas, was pushing the vehicle from behind, while a third man was behind the steering wheel gunning the engine.
Claude Jackson, in an interview with The Star newspaper the same day, gave the following account of what lead up to this moment and what happened next.
"We heard someone knocking at the door at about four o’clock this morning. My father went to the door. There was a foreigner there. He said that his car was stuck in the ditch down on the highway and asked father if he would pull him out. He offered him a lot of money but did not say how much.
"My father agreed to do it and called me. We went out and hitched up the horses and went down to where the car was. It was stuck fast in the ditch. There was just one man with the car.
“We were starting to hitch up to pull the car out, when another car came tearing up the highway with three men in it. As soon as they saw us, they started yelling and pulled up. In this car were the Laird brothers and another man I did not know. Walter Laird leaped out of the car. He said, ‘That is stolen.’
"As he jumped, he was holding a monkey wrench in his hand. When the foreigner saw the other car stopping, he pulled out a gun. Laird yelled, ‘Don't shoot!’, but the foreigner ran behind the car in the ditch and opened fire at once. My father was standing between the car in the ditch and the car that had just pulled up.
"The first shot struck him full in the throat. He staggered a few steps and then fell to the ground. I ran over to him. He was dead. By this time, everyone was yelling and all was confusion. The foreigner kept on firing. The second bullet went through Laird's arm, but he did not stop. All men jumped for the foreigner. They showed plenty of pluck. Another bullet tore through the hand of one of them.
"The men were right on top of the robber now. Laird reached him first and struck him a blow with the monkey wrench. The robber fell to the ground with the three of them on top of him. Another blow with the wrench knocked him senseless.
“They held the foreigner on the ground and then one of the men went for the Provincial Police at McKellar. They came out at once and handcuffed the man. He looked sullen and swore a lot but said little else."
Jackson said that upon searching the car thief, they found a large roll of bills in his pocket. He believed that there was about $1,800 in all.
Police look for leads
The captured robber was brought back under heavy police guard to Parry Sound. He told them that his name was John (Jan) Borowski and he had been born in Poland, although he had been in Canada for almost 15 years.
About a week earlier, he said, he had left Toronto to work as a carpenter at Bala, Ontario. He claimed that he had been in Parry Sound for about two days and was walking towards North Bay when two men, a mustachioed Swede and a clean-shaven Italian, picked him up in a Buick.
In his version of events, Borowski stated that the Swede was driving too fast and that he ditched the car. This man sent him to the farmhouse to get help and gave him the gun and four ammunition clips in case he ran into trouble.
The prisoner said the $1,805 in cash and the other items in his pockets, which police later linked to the train robbery, had been on the front seat when he returned to the vehicle with the farmer and his son.
More than a dozen provincial constables, drawn from as far away as Sudbury, were ordered to the Jackson farm when it was realized that the train robbery and the shooting were connected. The constables scoured the bush with citizen volunteers and roadblocks were set up on all roads out of the area.
By Sunday night, all of the cells in the Parry Sound jail were filled with drifters who had been arrested on charges of vagrancy and trespassing. It became so crowded that cots were placed in the corridors. Every single one was interrogated about the train robbery, but police were reluctant to release any of them, out of fear that they would immediately return to the railway tracks and hinder the search.
The OPP stated at the time, “We are handicapped in our search because we have absolutely no description of the men to go by other than the few rather vague generalities given to us by Borowski after his arrest … We will make an effort to pick a trail which may lead us to the place where they may be hiding and we will keep a sharp lookout for any place where the mail car loot might be cashed.”
Here in the Sudbury area, a Swedish man by the name of John Holm was picked up by guards at Burwash riding north on a CNR flat car. He answered the general description given to the police of one of the fugitive bandits in terms of his build and clothing.Holm claimed, however, that he had stolen a ride from Toronto and described the place where he had been staying on the Friday of the robbery. His story was checked by Toronto police who were satisfied that the man was innocent and had no connection with the crime.
Trial and execution
The trial of Borowski opened in the Parry Sound courthouse on the morning of Tuesday, September 25, 1928, with a request from his lawyer, John Roland Hett, petitioning for an adjournment of at least a month or the relocation of the proceedings to another court.
His main reason for this request, among many others, was the fact that his client had been moved to Toronto's Don Jail after his preliminary hearing, this made attorney-client interactions difficult.
Fearing that John Borowski might attempt a jailbreak, he had been transferred from Parry Sound jail to Don Jail by the OPP. This move was made on the authority of the OPP’s deputy commissioner who stated that it was done as a safeguard against escape as Burowski had been characterized to be “a sullen type of man and a desperate character.”
After his lawyer’s attempt at an adjournment was turned down by the judge, Borowski was ushered into the courtroom. Standing in the dock, he stoically entered a plea of "not guilty" to the charge of murder.
The newspapers reported that the defence planned to call 11 witnesses. The following day, when the trial continued, Borowski ended up being the only defence witness called, and he stuck to the same story he had told since the beginning.
“After I went and got the two Jacksons and the horse, the two fellows had disappeared and when I called no one answered. As I got into the car to help get it out of the ditch, I found a roll of money and some jewelry and put them in my pocket.
“As they were trying to get the car out, four men came up. One of them asked me if I needed help. I said 'no sir' and then one of them jumped on the running board and said 'hands up.' I put up my hands and got out of the car, on the left side, and saw one of the fellows coming around the front of the car, and then somebody shot and hit me in the finger.
“Then I fired four shots, the first one by accident. The second I fired towards the man who was coming around the front of the car. The third hit the young boy, and I fired a fourth into the road as I lay on the ground with one of the fellows on top of me.
“If I had been going to shoot somebody. I would have shot the fellows who were after me, and not the man who was being my friend.'
Crown Attorney Walter Haight spent a good deal of time during his cross-examination delving into the prisoner's background, often drawing evasive answers in return. Haight presented a poster describing Borowski as a wanted man, but the prisoner refused to admit that the images on the poster were of him.
Fingerprints sent to the United States by the OPP showed Borowski (using aliases Stanley Zinwz or John Bryda) had served a three-year term for burglary in New York before being released in 1920. He had then been sentenced to five to seven years of imprisonment in Pennsylvania for assault and battery with intent to kill, but had escaped in July 1926.
Following his cross-examination, Haight called the three mail car clerks to refute Borowski's claim that he had been in Parry Sound when the robbery had been carried out. All three men swore that Borowski had appeared in the mail car at Romford Junction and left when it arrived in Parry Sound.
On the morning of Sept. 27, 1928, after final summations were made, the jury retired at 12:30 p.m. and returned to the courtroom just under three hours later. While Borowski had sat dispassionately throughout the trial, he showed the first sign of emotion while standing in the dock as the jury foreman read out the verdict of guilty.
When asked by Justice Wright if he had anything to say, Borowski made several unsuccessful attempts to speak after wiping away tears. He then said in a low voice, "l believe I have got no justice. l am not guilty of this charge."
Justice Wright then pronounced the sentence that Borowski was to be executed for his crime.
On Dec. 7, 1928, at the Parry Sound Jail, the snow was falling and the wind whipped up as a small gathering awaited for Borowski to appear with his escort. Upon his appearance, he ascended the stairs of the gallows. A short eight seconds later, with the noose around his neck, he fell through the trap door.
The jail surgeon pronounced that death had been instantaneous.
And what about the money and the mysterious accomplice? Besides the $1,800 in Borowski’s possession, the only proceed from the crime that materialized was a single $100 Canadian war bond that someone tried to cash in Detroit in 1928. The bulk of the loot has never been recovered and no additional person was ever charged with the crime.
John Borowski took his secrets with him to his grave.
Jason Marcon is a writer and history enthusiast in Greater Sudbury. He runs the Coniston Historical Group and the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook page. Then & Now is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.