By Mark Bonokoski
For the Toronto Sun
Tue, March 1, 2005
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Mark_Bonokoski/2005/03/01/94593\
8.html
On the day Archie McDougall's body was found, his face horribly mutilated by a
knife, two of his nephews were rousted from their mother's home as suspects in
his murder.
Larry Mullins was 21, his brother John 19. They were also innocent.
The night before, however, they had been drinking with their uncle at the old
Jolly Miller Tavern in Hog's Hollow. 'The next morning, the stabbed body of the
much-loved custodian at the Loretto Abbey private school for girls was
discovered by a school nun in a park across the street.
As far as the police were concerned, the two were the last to see their uncle
alive, and therefore the prime suspects in a murder that had all the brutal
ugliness of psychopathic overkill.
But they weren't.
The last person to see him alive had also been drinking in the Jolly Miller that
night, unnoticed and therefore undetected, and would follow him up the path
towards the school grounds where McDougall boarded and knife him to death for
what amounted to pocket change.
And that person was Douglas Lawrence McCaul -- a once-closeted transvestite and
psychopath who was ruled criminally insane years ago but who has since returned
to the public fore as the appellant in a writ recently presented to the Ontario
Court of Appeal.
McCaul, now 52, wants to be transferred out of the maximum-security wing of the
Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre and moved to a medium-security mental
facility, where he can have more freedom.
He has been inside Penetang, virtually non-stop, since being found not guilty by
reason of insanity for the 1976 beating death of Carol Millar, a 26-year-old
alcoholic whose frozen body was found in a compost heap.
But this is not about McCaul; this is about the man he killed five years before
he killed Carol Millar. This is about Archie McDougall.
Loved family, kids
"Archie was very, very kind, much like all my father's brothers," said his
niece, Mary Mullins, mother of the two original suspects. "His life was his
family. He loved family and he loved kids."
Larry Mullins, now 56 and a successful real estate agent, sat in his mother's
house the other day and reflected on the uncle whom he and his brother last saw
at the Jolly Miller Tavern.
"My brother and I asked him if he wanted us to walk him home," he said. "But he
said no, even though he didn't like walking through that park at night.
"And I still feel guilty to this day. And so does my brother, John. If we had
only walked him home ... if, if, if."
For almost 12 years, the Mullins family believed the murder of Archie McDougall
was in a cold-case file -- unsolved.
Then, in 1987, they read in my column about how a man in the maximum-security
wing at Penetang had summoned homicide officers and how, at the end of that day,
the cops had the man who killed Archie McDougall.
'I pray at night'
And that man was Douglas McCaul.
"I pray at night that McCaul's appeal will be denied," said Virginia Kanary,
another of McDougall's nieces. "No member of our family can see a day where
McCaul could ever be considered rehabilitated.
"For the injuries he inflicted on my uncle, and to show no mercy or remorse, and
then to go and do the same to Carol Lynn Millar, well, this is a very sick, sick
man."
McDougall was born in the Cape Breton town of Glace Bay, the last of seven boys.
He was wounded overseas in World War II, returned home to work the Cape Breton
coal mines, where his face was smashed in during a mining accident -- a face
broken so badly that steel wires and a metal plate were required to reconstruct
it ... the same steel wires and metal plate that Douglas McCaul would later
gouge out with his knife.
After that, he joined a brother working the ships on the Great Lakes, then it
was off to Toronto, where he worked for years as a meter reader and then
custodian for Consumers Gas before signing on at Loretto Abbey.
And they loved him so much there that they ran his picture in their yearbook.
"Uncle Archie would never come visit without a roll of quarters in his pocket to
hand out to the kids," recalled Larry Mullins. "A quarter was a lot of money
back in those days. You could buy a chocolate bar and a pop and still have
change left over."
Looking back, Larry Mullins still carries anger over how the police treated him
and his brother when they were considered the prime suspects.
'We're all there'
What angers him the most, however, is how he and his family spent all those
years thinking Archie McDougall's murderer was still on the loose -- only to
find out in a newspaper column penned by me in 1987 that his killer had
confessed back in 1976.
"I don't believe for a moment that attempts were made to get in touch with us,"
he said. "All the police had to do was go to the phone book. We're all there."
Because he had already been found not guilty by reason of insanity for the death
of Carol Millar, McCaul was never officially charged with Archie McDougall's
murder.
It has nevertheless been marked "solved."
