Teen’s kidnapping mystery never solved
Girl, 17, disappeared after being taken from boyfriend’s car in unsolved 1953 case
On the evening of Dec. 6, 1953, a bloodied 19-year-old James Wilson arrived at the Scarborough police station and reported his 17-year-old girlfriend Marion McDowell had been forcibly removed from his car by a masked bandit when they were parked in a secluded lover’s lane.
Wilson was immediately a suspect in this missing-person case, but police soon determined his head wounds could not have been self-inflicted and the search was on for the amiable East York typist and the man who abducted her that night.
The McDowell assault and kidnapping resulted in the largest manhunt of its time in Toronto and Ontario. An intensive and exhaustive search began that night and continued unabated for two months and then continued intermittently. Crank calls and fake ransom demands, an astrologer’s predictions as well as a once-famed Scotland Yard detective summoned to join the hunt all added to the family’s anguish.
As days passed, school boys, boy scouts, motorcycle groups and soldiers all joined in the search.
Marion’s disappearance drove her mother, Florence McDowell, to have a mental breakdown and prompted her older brother to join the police force.
No trace of Marion McDowell has ever been found. Now, almost 65 years later, the abduction of the young blue-eyed, blond woman remains one of the oldest unsolved cold cases in Toronto’s history. Police and newspaper reports from that time depict the final known moments of Marion McDowell’s life as ones of violence and fear.
Marion Joan McDowell worked as a typist at a photo engraving firm on Mutual St., and lived with her family — father Ross, mother Florence and brother Ross Jr. — on Oak Park Ave. in East York. She was by all reports a typical girl of the era. Described in news reports as friendly, athletic, boisterous and a bit of a tomboy, she enjoyed tennis, swimming, rollerskating, pinball and music and relished riding as a passenger on motorcycles.
Marion followed the fashion trends of the day and that snowless Sunday night when she went for a drive with her boyfriend, Jimmy Wilson, she was wearing a white blouse, black wool skirt and bobby sox-style ballerina shoes and simple jewelry — a silver wrist chain with a heart on it and a ring with her initials M.M. on a left-hand finger. She wore a sweater under her blue coat and carried a purse. Jimmy, whom she’d met a few months before — they had gone on four dates — picked her up at her home at about 7 p.m. About an hour later, he parked his 1942 Plymouth coupe in a secluded lover’s lane near a few other cars on Danforth Rd., north of Eglinton Ave. E. in Scarborough.
About 90 minutes after they arrived, a man hooded in a balaclava opened their car door, waved a gun and told Jimmy to get out of the car. The masked man demanded Jimmy’s wallet and once Jimmy handed it over (it contained $10), he was told to turn around and the bandit searched Jimmy’s pockets. The next thing Jimmy felt were two blows to the back of his head.
Jimmy told the Toronto Star on Dec. 7, “When I came to, I was in the back of my car in a field and the motor was running and Marion was sprawled on top of me. I think she was unconscious. She wasn’t moving.”
Jimmy said he was slipping in and out of a daze. He recalled that the bandit dragged Marion from his car and put her in the trunk of another car parked about four feet away and then drove off through a narrow lane.
Once Jimmy was able to regain his wits, he crawled into the driver’s seat and tried to follow, but the other car had too much of a head start, and he lost it, Jimmy told the Star.
So he drove home and told his father, Archie Wilson, what had happened. He then went to the Scarborough Police station.
Jimmy described the masked suspect as about five-foot-eight with a narrow face.
Jimmy was at the station for eight hours. During that time, police searched his car and found his wallet containing $10 and Marion’s blue coat, sweater and purse. The rear seat was bloodstained.
Jimmy was taken to Toronto East General hospital and required 17 stitches to close the two wounds on the back of his head. He had lost a pint of blood, police said. Police organized a search of the area that night. Marion’s father, Ross, a foreman in a lingerie factory, stayed out all night and the next morning searching, the Star reported.
East York police appealed to the public for information and within 24 hours of Marion’s disappearance, police set up a province-wide search. Posters were distributed to every police station in Canada, offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to Marion’s discovery and capture of her abductor.
Scores of volunteers from all walks of life came forward to search for the missing girl, including high school students who took the day off from classes on Dec. 8 to search for Marion until dusk around Scarborough Township.
In the days to come, volunteers dragged ponds, looked down open wells and flew over forests and farmlands surrounding the crime scene. The search extended to cottage country as far as Lake Simcoe, with the thought that the kidnapper may be hiding out in one of the summer homes.
Two-thousand men and soldiers, combing all of Scarborough came out on Saturday, Dec. 12. Ham radio operators set up a network of stations to report any news to central headquarters, a drugstore on Kingston Rd.
In another attempt to crack the case, a story in the Toronto Star in January 1954 revealed that police inspector Harold Adamson had escorted Jimmy to Buffalo, N.Y., to undergo a lie-detector test, which were not legal in Canada at the time.
Jimmy “passed with flying colours,” Buffalo police told investigators.
About four days after Marion’s disappearance, the family was tormented by crank phone calls.
“This is the kidnapper. I’m getting ready to murder your daughter,” said one caller before breaking into maniacal laughter.
During several such calls, Ross Sr. could hear voices in the background saying, “Let’s kill her now.”
One person, hoping to profit from the family’s grief, sent police a note stating he had valuable information that would only be divulged if $50,000 in $2 bills was dropped at the corner of Don Mills Rd. and Yonge St.
Marion’s father arrived at the appointed place but no one turned up.
A well-known Toronto astrologer, A. Frederick Jackson, director of the Jackson Psychic School Inc., said the stars revealed that Marion had drowned after being attacked and that her body may never be found. She lay in a river or creek near a stone bridge, not far from where she was abducted. The astrologer described the suspect as “a former false friend, of short stature.”
Eight months passed with no leads in sight when the Toronto Telegram newspaper, at Marion’s father’s insistence, hired celebrated crime solver Robert Fabian, the former chief of London’s Scotland Yard, to shine a light on the investigation.
Fabian, 53, who went by his last name, had been a detective on the Yard’s murder squad and was considered a modern Sherlock Holmes. He had penned a book, Fabian of the Yard, and a weekly television show of the same name had followed.
The pipe-smoking detective arrived in Toronto on his way to a conference in New Orleans and trip to Hollywood to consult on a film based on his book.
Fabian visited and reconstructed the crime scene where Marion had disappeared. He was quoted in the Telegram saying no stranger in the area could have been responsible for Marion’s attack and abduction and concluded that the perpetrator must have been a “sex-fiend.”
The Telegram had set up a tip line for the detective to talk to witnesses but nothing came from it.
Meanwhile, the police, unimpressed by what they saw as nothing but a publicity stunt, were inundated with sightings of Marion. They followed up hundreds of leads, but to no avail.
The Star, forever in competition with the Telegram, reported the police’s belief that Marion had been murdered at the scene, as large quantities of blood were found in the boyfriend’s car. The Star had been previously withholding this information out of respect for the family.
The Telegram countered with Fabian’s opinion that Marion was still alive.
On Sept. 4, 1954, less than a month after the celebrated detective took Toronto by storm, Fabian quit his search and left the city. Despite the media hype, the Star reported that police said Fabian failed to find a substantial clue.
Years later — according to author Silvia Pettem’s book Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe (2009, Taylor Trade Publishing) — a retired Telegram reporter would confess to making up all the copy material that had been attributed to Fabian, calling the detective’s concocted investigation “facts from a Scotch bottle.”
Marion’s only sibling, Ross Jr., who was 21 when she disappeared, would go on to join the East York Police Department the summer following Marion’s disappearance in what would prove a lifelong career, as well as an unending search for his missing sister.
“When I came to, I was in the back of my car in a field and the motor was running and Marion was sprawled on top of me. I think she was unconscious. She wasn’t moving.” JIMMY WILSON MARION’S BOYFRIEND