Was cop killed by a crook, a lover or someone else?
Undercover OPP officer lived double or triple life; his murder still a mystery
Funerals for slain police officers are generally large, impossibleto-miss public events, with marching drummers and pipers and slow-moving police cruisers and motorcycles with flashing lights. But relatively few mourners showed up to the send-off of Ontario Provincial Police undercover cop William McIntyre, who died when someone put a bullet between his eyes.
Notably absent at the Dodsworth and Brown funeral home in Burlington on April 26, 1984, were members of McIntyre’s small and elite unit, nicknamed “The Sultans,” who infiltrated and stalked drug dealers, mobsters and bikers.
Members of the Sultans — who got their name from the Dire Straits song “Sultans of Swing,” which they particularly enjoyed — couldn’t afford the risk of appearing in news photographs or being publicly seen by curious criminals.
McIntyre, 32, prided himself on not looking anything like a cop, although he had been one for almost a dozen years and earned an exemplary record.
He was bearded, unkemptlooking and large, which explained his nickname: “Large.”
The bachelor lived a double — perhaps even triple — life.
His killer was equally secretive, locking the door on the way out of McIntyre’s apartment at The Villas condo complex at 1300 Marlborough Crt. in Oakville after shooting him on Saturday, April 21, 1984.
There have been no arrests in the three dozen years since his death, and the Sultans have long since disbanded.
Over the years, two competing theories have emerged to explain McIntyre’s murder and both have serious flaws.
The first is that he was slain by someone he put in prison through his undercover work.
The other is that he was killed by a gay lover who was afraid of being outed.
The first theory usually centres around Rex Yates, a brilliant but unstable Orangeville loner who did prison time for cracking a safe and weapons offences. Yates was facing trial in late 1984 and McIntyre was the key Crown witness against him.
McIntyre was expected to testify about what he heard when he posed as a biker and spent time with Yates and an accomplice in a holding cell at the Orangeville courthouse in July 1983.
Yates clearly had the skills to slip into McIntyre’s apartment — he was a good enough locksmith to crack open the CIBC vault in Orangeville and steal $173,000 in cash and cheques.
Yates’ mind — and home — were scary places. When police searched his home in August 1984, they found an illegal .22calibre, semi-automatic Beretta pistol, key-cutting equipment, numerous locks and a rack of keys, handcuffs, chloroform, a rope ladder and running shoes with oversized soles, designed to throw off forensics specialists.
Testing on the Beretta determined it wasn’t the murder weapon.
Yates said he immediately recognized McIntyre was a cop while in the Orangeville holding cell and refused to speak to him.
McIntyre did have a jailhouse conversation with Joseph Hall, 19, who had served as Yates’ lookout in the bank robbery. Not long after that, Hall agreed to testify against Yates. And shortly after that, he and Yates were both released on bail pending their trial.
Hall was nervous enough about his former partner that he had five locks on the front door of his Orangeville home and slept with a baseball bat by his bed.
Hall was killed on Nov. 23, 1983, by a fire that tore through his bedroom. The fire was started by a heater at the foot of his bed, burning gasoline when it was designed for kerosine.
Hall’s death — which was ruled accidental — meant McIntyre was the only witness left to testify against Yates.
Exactly when McIntyre died isn’t clear.
A woman later told police that she saw him leaning over his balcony railing at about 9:30 a.m. on the day his body was found. She said he was chatting with someone in his late teens or early 20s and they seemed to be on friendly terms. The young man held a motorcycle helmet under his arm.
McIntyre’s body was found by fellow Sultans about five hours later.
That same day in Orangeville, Yates was seen in town by several people — including police officers. That left a tight, but not impossible, timeline for him to drive 80 kilometres from Orangeville, kill McIntyre, and escape.
But there’s no hope Yates will ever clarify things. He died in a mysterious boating mishap six months after he was released from prison in 1990, after time in Millhaven and Collins Bay penitentiaries for the bank heist and weapons offences.
Police said he and a friend, who also drowned, were suspected of burglarizing U.S. cottages in the Thousand Islands near Kingston.
An autopsy found no signs of foul play on either body.
The second theory for McIntyre’s murder is an intensely personal one. It states that he was ready to come out of the closet as a gay man and that he might be talking about the sex lives of fellow officers.
His sister, Sally Ward, who has since died, called this suggestion “ridiculous.”
Whatever his sexuality, McIntyre certainly had a reputation for loyalty and discretion.
To appreciate the enduring power of this theory, one has to think back to the climate regarding sexuality back in 1984, especially among police.
McIntyre began his policing career on May 1, 1972, just three years after Canada decriminalized sex between same-sex adults.
It wasn’t until 1981 that Toronto had its first Pride Parade, and it drew just 1,000 marchers to protest bathhouse raids.
The gay murder theory was supported for a time by the testimony of former RCMP constable Arturo Nuosci, who implicated a former male lover and another man in McIntyre’s death and was later sentenced to 90 days in jail for making up evidence.
In 1992, the Hamilton Spectator quoted Halton police Insp. John van der Lelie as saying: “In this case, it looks like a homosexual murder and it probably was.”
Despite all of the mystery, a few things are known for sure.
McIntyre was wearing just his jeans and socks when he was shot near his bedroom door. He had been packing a suitcase for an out-of-town assignment.
There were three cigarette butts in a living room ashtray — two Belvederes and one Export A. McIntyre wasn’t known to be a smoker.
In April 2020, Halton police and the Ontario Provincial Police announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of McIntyre’s killer.