Some more capsule murder summaries. Again, if anyone knows of any of these cases having been solved, please speak up.
●Sometime around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 28th, 1987, 21-year-old receptionist Margaret McWilliam was raped and strangled to death while out for an evening jog in Warden Woods park in the Scarborough section of Toronto. Her body was found in the northeast sector of the park not far from subway tracks. Police found a clear footprint at the scene and were able to identify the type of shoes worn by the killer as rare Bata grey and white high-top sneakers with the letters AAU on the heel. They also had a composite drawn of a young man - a “witness” - wearing a red cap, who was seen leaving the park around 8 p.m. At one point police suspected the crime may have been committed by Frederick Merrill, an American fugitive featured on “America’s Most Wanted”, who was in Toronto at the time of McWilliams’s murder.
●On Tuesday, October 7th, 1975, 33-year-old data processing student Albert Chan was shot to death in the underground parking garage of his apartment building on Isabella St. in downtown Toronto. The killer stole Chan’s car and dumped it near the intersection of Carlton and Metcalfe Sts., not far from the crime scene.
●On Thursday, April 24th, 1980, Brink’s security guard Larry Roberts, 29, was gunned down with a machine gun in a well-planned robbery at Agincourt Mall, which is located at 3850 Sheppard Ave. E. in the Scarborough section of Toronto. His partner, 51-year-old Ted Montgomery, was shot and wounded. Multiple witnesses watched the incident go down as the three robbers grabbed the $178,500 the Brink’s men were transporting, dashed through a library and out the west side of the mall, jumped a fence that separated the mall from a nursing home, hopped into a car, and screeched out onto Bonis Ave. where they disappeared. A police manhunt failed to find the culprits, but police later found two cars nearby that had been stolen in Montreal and used by the robbers. The robbers were all described as white males between their late twenties and early forties. The gunman was described by witnesses as 40-45 years old, 175 pounds, with a short, stocky build, an olive complexion, a dark moustache and eyebrows, a strong jaw, a broad face. One accomplice was in his late-20s, 175 lbs, with a medium build and light to medium brown hair. The third man was described as 5’5” to 5’8”, 175 lbs, stocky, with medium to light hair. An investigation led police to believe the robbers were from Montreal, since the crime bore hallmarks of similar robberies there.
●Shortly before 8 a.m. on Thursday, February 10th, 1983, 42-year-old Philip Rimmington, Toronto’s deputy planning commissioner, was shot dead with a .22 handgun in the parking garage of the apartment building where he lived at 231 Balliol St., near Mt. Pleasant Rd. A nearby resident reported seeing a grey-haired man in his mid-50s fleeing the garage through a staircase at the northeast corner of the building shortly after the shooting. There were also reports that police had been called in weeks prior to the crime to investigate a stranger lurking around the parking area.
Rimmington, who was separated from his wife, with whom he had a 12-year-old daughter, was well-liked by his colleagues and was active in sports. In searching for a motive, police learned Rimmington did not have a tendency to engage in partisan political discussions or activities, so the possibility of angering someone through his work at city hall was virtually ruled out. Three guns owned by the victim were discovered missing, and for a time there was speculation he was shot with one of his own weapons.
●Maintenance man Donald Gibbons, 33, was stabbed to death with a butcher knife on July 18th, 1971 after chasing a man he believed was stealing a TV set from his apartment above a deli at Queen St. E. and Pape Ave. The killer ended up stealing a tape recorder and an amplifier belonging to Gibbons.