The increasing use of automobiles by criminals in the 1920s has been noted in this column on several occasions over the past few years.
The criminal element embraced new technology more quickly than the authorities during the early 20th century, and took advantage of that state of affairs to make quick strikes at banks and stores, and to evade authorities for a sufficient time to make their escape to another jurisdiction.
One of the best known, and probably the most brazen, of the criminals to operate in Ontario in the 1920s was a fellow named Orval Shaw.
Wellington County did not witness his greatest exploits, but he did make his appearance locally. His reputation preceded him, and the very mention of his name seemed to make law enforcement officials tremble and act as if they were totally inept.
Shaw undertook his initial exploits in southwestern Ontario, in his native Kent County, in 1927 and 1928. Reputedly, he made his headquarters in a dense swamp there known locally as “Skunk’s Misery.”
The law soon caught up with Orval, and in the fall of 1928 he found himself living in a small room at the Kent County jail in Chatham, awaiting trial for his escapades. Not satisfied with the accommodations, he managed to break out in mid-December of 1928, with an accomplice named “Trusty” Dick Brennan.
The two men seemed to have vanished without a trace, but within days the police were investigating a trail of crimes in Oxford, Waterloo, and Wellington Counties.
On New Year’s morning, acting on tips, they focused their search on Puslinch Township. They found nothing, but continued the search for more than a week.
The pair had surfaced in late December at a farm near Glencoe, but the farmer recognized them from photos published in newspapers, and they took off. A short time later they stole a late-model car in Glencoe.
On New Year’s morning at about 3am Constable Byrne of Kitchener was returning from a dance in Aberfoyle. He stopped to offer assistance to a couple of men standing beside their car at the side of the road. The men responded rudely to Byrne’s questions. He was in civilian clothes, and the men obviously did not realize he was a police officer. Then one of the pair pulled out a pistol and suggested that he move along.
Byrne did as requested, but stopped at the first public telephone he saw, and contacted the provincial police in Guelph. Soon Officer McMurray was speeding toward Aberfoyle. Byrne and McMurray quickly located their prey and gave chase. Shaw and Brennan ditched the car and took off into a dense swamp. The officers gave chase but lost the trail.
In the abandoned stolen car they found a quantity of food, a huge stash of shotgun shells, and two pistols. The police identified the food as having been stolen in Morriston, and the ammunition had come from a hardware store robbery in Elora. Not found were three shotguns stolen in the Elora robbery.
The police officers concluded that Shaw and Brennan had a hideout somewhere in Puslinch, where they had stashed the missing shotguns. Constable McMurray spent several days searching for the Puslinch hideout. He found nothing. If it did exist, the fugitives were very skilled in hiding it from detection.
For more than two months there were no positive sightings of the two men, but the series of minor robberies and unsolved car thefts continued. Various witnesses swore that they had spotted Orval Shaw, but he evaded the long arm of the law.
On March 30, Shaw made a short visit to the Homewood Sanitarium in Guelph. He had worked there for a time in 1924, and was simply visiting some of his old co-workers. He was dressed in the uniform of an officer of the British Army. The clothes were very likely stolen; Shaw had no military experience.
After a brief chat with the Homewood employees, he got back into the expensive sedan he was driving and took off, heading north. One of the men he was talking to turned out not to be a good friend. As soon as Orval was out of sight he alerted the police. Immediately several squad cars headed to the north end of Guelph and then turned toward Kitchener, where they believed he was likely to head. But as was always the case with Orval, he eluded them.
In fact, Orval had not left the Royal City at all. He had circled to the south of town, and was knocking on doors, posing as a federal government officer, collecting fees for the operation of radio receivers. Though the regulation was largely ignored, at that time the law required that a licence be purchased to operate a radio receiver.
Orval was taking advantage of the widespread evasion of the fee, and was collecting two dollars from a number of Guelph residents. He made an error, though. The fee was only one dollar, and an astute resident, suspecting that Orval was not a federal agent, began to question him.
True to form, Orval quickly gave up the scheme, and headed out of town, this time toward Orangeville on Highway 24. By then the police had given up on their pursuit of him on Highway 7, and were having a little more success in following him east of Guelph, where several witnesses identified the stolen car Orval was driving as having passed in that direction.
They believed he had stopped in the hamlet of Everton, and were parked at the side of the highway just north of Everton waiting for him to resume his journey. But as usual, Orval Shaw was a step or two ahead of the police.
He had not gone into Everton, but instead had stopped somewhere to the east. When he resumed his journey he headed back toward Guelph. As he approached the intersection with the road to Everton he spotted the two cars comprising the police welcoming committee. He immediately accelerated, passing the police cars at high speed. And as usual, luck was with him. Both cars were parked heading in the other direction.
The officers identified the driver and the car as it flew past them. They immediately attempted to follow, but in his haste, the driver of the first car stalled as he attempted to turn around, and he flooded the engine in his attempts to restart. The stalled car blocked the road, preventing the other patrol car from passing and following Orval. He got away again.
When police pieced Orval’s recent escapades together, they realized that he had widened his sphere of activity. He had recently stolen a car in Barrie, but had abandoned it in a pursuit, and had taken off into a swamp.
He had managed, possibly by hitchhiking, to get to Guelph, where he had stolen the car he used in his most recent activities. A few days after the Eramosa Township adventure there had been a series of store thefts in Hespeler. Police linked Orval to those, though without definitive proof.
Then the trail grew cold again. Authorities were convinced that Orval was holed up at a hideout in the swamp in Puslinch, but there were no further sightings of him in Wellington County.
Orval Shaw’s career as a car thief and burglar, and most of all as a fugitive, is one of the more spectacular ones in Ontario history, and goes far beyond the borders of Wellington County.
His exploits form a chapter in the book, The Desperate Ones by Edward Butts, published seven or eight years ago. Readers can look there to learn more about this character.