We don’t usually associate dramatic crimes with Canadian small towns like Elora and Fergus.
In the American Wild West, bandits like the James-Younger gang plundered banks. During the Great Depression, small town banks in the American Midwest were targeted by desperadoes like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde.
People don’t picture that happening here.
In the 19th century, crime in this district was usually of the type carried out by small-time thieves like the young woman who sometimes called herself Alice Juley, and at other times Jesse Piper.
Whatever her real name was, according to the local press, “Alice” was about 20 years old and “of a prepossessing appearance” when she arrived in Fergus in June of 1881. A watchmaker named John Vanstone hired her as a domestic. Alice soon absconded with a valise full of Mrs. Vanstone’s clothing.
Vanstone and the town constable caught up with Alice a couple of days later in Garafraxa with the stolen property still in her possession. She wasn’t in custody for long when she attempted to escape.
Alice was a strong woman who “assumed a fighting attitude” and threw a guard to the floor. When a second guard came to assist his colleague, Alice declared “that them nor no other damned man would put handcuffs on her.”
She was subdued and taken to the county jail in Guelph. Authorities learned that Alice was an escapee from the Mercer Reformatory in Toronto. She was tried and sent back.
Then there was the case of Elora wood dealer Henry Rose. In May of 1894, Rose claimed he was driving his buggy along the Guelph Road to the home of John Maitland to pay him a large sum of money he owed, when he was waylaid by three highwaymen.
One of them, a tall man with a dark complexion and a dark moustache, held a revolver on him. Another thug threw him to the ground and blindfolded him. They forced him into a rig driven by a third man. The ruffians told him to stay quiet or they’d blow his brains out. They drove off with Rose as a prisoner.
Rose said the bandits robbed him and released him in a swamp near Woodstock. He returned to Elora by train and reported the crime.
Guelph police chief Frederick Randall and a county constable named Elliott investigated. They went to the place where Rose said he’d been ambushed and found no evidence at all of the crime. The officers suspected Rose had made the whole story up. The money that had supposedly been stolen was still in his house.
However, one day in 1943 local police had a real crime to deal with when a gang of hoodlums pulled a heist in Fergus.
At about two o’clock on the morning of Sept. 22, a 1941 Ford that had been stolen in Toronto rolled into the sleeping town. It pulled up to the Fergus Dairy and Creamery on St. Andrew’s Street. The three men in the car weren’t there for milk and butter. They gained entry by smashing a pane of glass in the front door. This was the latest in a series of raids in which dairies had been targeted in Elmira, Hanover and Creemore.
J. Brooks, who lived close to the dairy, was up at that late hour because his wife was ill. He thought he heard a noise and looked out a window. He saw a car parked in front of the dairy but didn’t think there was anything suspicious about that. Brooks didn’t call the police.
Inside the dairy, the robbers apparently knew exactly what they were looking for. They went straight for the company safe, which they placed on a dolly they’d stolen in Arthur. They wheeled the safe outside, loaded it into the car and sped away, leaving the dolly behind.
Soon after, a night constable named Dowling discovered the burglary and contacted the police.
Officers from Ontario Provincial Police detachments in Guelph and other nearby communities joined Fergus chief constable Justin C. Foreman in tracking the culprits down. On the First Line Road in Garafraxa Township they found the abandoned car and the safe. The steel box had been broken open with crowbars and sledgehammers and plundered of $1,000 in cash (over $17,000 today), as well as gasoline ration books and postage stamps. The thieves obviously had a second getaway car waiting for them.
Police cordoned off a wide area, hoping to catch the robbers in a dragnet. However, there was no sign of them by the following day. It seemed they’d given the cops the slip. Then came the sort of news Canadians usually associated with American gangster stories.
On Highway 7 outside Brampton, a car failed to stop for an OPP officer and roared past him. The officer fired at the vehicle. One of his bullets blew out a rear tire, and the car went into a ditch. Three men got out with guns in hand and exchanged shots with the constable without hitting him. Then they fled into the bush. That car had also been stolen in Toronto.
Thirty police officers assisted by dozens of armed farmers and bloodhounds from the reformatory in Guelph scoured the area without success. Then the police had a phone call from a farmer near Norval who told them three strangers had stopped at his house. One of them was wounded. He administered first aid and the men disappeared back into the woods.
Police set up headquarters in the Norval Hotel. They were reinforced by OPP squads from Toronto, Brampton, Guelph and Kitchener. Their search area included Caledon and the Forks of the Credit River and reached as far as Orangeville.
Then some boys reported seeing three strangers in a swampy area in the woods near Norval.
Police converged on that area. The woods suddenly echoed with gunfire. Thirty-two shots were fired in the brief gun battle between the police and the fugitives. None of the officers were hit. The police thought one of the suspects had been hit but couldn’t confirm that.
Amazingly, the robbers managed to escape yet again.
While officers were slogging through the swamp searching for the bandits, someone stole a truck in Brampton. That truck was found on a side street in Toronto. The fugitives had lost themselves in the big city.
Weeks later the OPP captured several men suspected of pulling robberies across Southern Ontario, including the Fergus heist. They were convicted and sentenced to prison terms.
