Written By Alice Gibb
One November 5, 1926, William Martin went into work early. At 5 a.m., he entered the offices of Lucan Milling Company, a firm he co-owned with S.E. Chown. Just as Martin went to light his lantern, someone flashed an electric torch into his face, practically blinding him. In almost no time, Martin found himself lying on the office floor, his hands and feet bound. He saw enough to realize that he had two attackers – and from a brief glance of the one man’s face, Martin was certain that at least one of his attackers was not a local resident.
On that Friday morning, the two men broke into four offices in Lucan – including the milling company and H.B. Langford Lumber. Their “haul” at the mill was $107 in cash but they overlooked $700 worth of Victory Bonds, also locked away in the safe. When the robbers pounded off the combination of the small safe at Langford’s, they found the safe didn’t contain anything worth taking. They also entered Joseph Hodgins hardware store and then broke open a gas pump in front of the A.K. Hodgins’
garage, and filled their car’s tank.
Earlier that night, the men had also broken into the safe at Huron Motor Sales Company in Goderich, and hundreds of dollars in cash was missing from that break-in.
In less than two weeks, police announced that one Douglas Simpson, 28, a resident of William Street in London, had been arrested as a suspect in the robberies. A married man, who owned his home and had one child, Simpson was taken into custody by officers while sitting in his car. It was reported that tools that could be used for safe cracking were found in the trunk of Simpson’s car. But because police really didn’t have enough evidence to press formal charges, Simpson was locked up in the county jail on the charge of vagrancy.
Simpson, a short man who weighed about 145 pounds and was described as a printer by trade, had been unemployed for some months. Even when bail was refused, Simpson remained calm and denied any involvement with the Lucan robberies.
By November 17, the picture changed. Simpson’s picture was published on the front page of the London Free Press.
The suspect was hardly the innocent he claimed to be. In fact, his real name was not Simpson, but Douglas Kew. In 1920, Kew had been sentenced to six years in Kingston Penitentiary on charges of robbery while armed, shop breaking and car theft. He had served three years behind bars before being paroled. Police also revealed that Kew was a suspect in several London robberies including the blowing of the Canadian Oil Company’s safe in Pottersburg during the summer. By the time the second suspect in the robberies was arrested, Free Press readers were treated to a tale that sounded like something dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.
