Life after Life
Fifty years ago this month, Wayne Ford, 16, killed his mother in their Willowdale home and dumped her body in Lake Couchiching. The crime shocked Toronto. The Star tracks down Ford, who was convicted of murder, spent a decade in jail, led a notorious pris
It was the summer of 1963 and it was still, mostly, Toronto the Good. Something like the following story couldn’t happen here. A character like Wayne Ford, seemingly lifted from a dime-store detective novel, wasn’t supposed to exist, especially in a sleepy suburb like Willowdale.
Behind the white picket fence and neatly trimmed hedges in this quiet neighbourhood, Ford was operating a brothel out of the family bungalow. He carried a sawed-off shotgun. He’d shot a friend with a rifle during one raucous house party. He’d imported handguns into Canada from Buffalo. He was dealing in drugs, booze and instant gratification. The residence at 21 Kingsdale Ave., just off Yonge St., north of Sheppard Ave., was a destination for anyone looking for a good time. Or trouble. Ford had just turned 17. “My house was Disneyland,” he says now of that teenage thrill ride. “And I was Walt Disney.”
He would go on to rob banks, agree to undertake a contract killing and break another man’s legs for cash.
But it would be 31⁄ years before Ford’s
2 most shocking crime came to light, before the badly decomposed body of his mother, Minnie Ford, floated to the surface of Lake Couchiching.
Ford put his mother in the lake that lies north of Toronto 50 years ago, on Victoria Day, when he was only 16. He first entombed her body in a large plywood tea crate. Then, shrouded by moonlight, he pushed that weighted, wooden box into the murky waters. He had killed her with a baseball bat at lunchtime and left her sprawled on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.
Then he returned to his Grade 10 afternoon classes at Earl Haig Secondary School. He then came home to clean up the mess and drag his mother down the basement steps, her head bouncing off each one with a sickening thud.
He then scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the kitchen linoleum. He sanded and repainted the stairs at least three times.
With the body disposed of in the waters near the family cottage, Ford quit school and flicked the switch on a reckless crime spree.
“I became a very bad person,” he says now. “I’ve done a lot of rotten s---, most of which I’ve got away with.”
It wasn’t difficult for the police to find Ford after they’d recovered Minnie Ford’s body and finally had enough evidence to charge him with capital murder in 1966. He was already in Kingston Penitentiary, serving a sentence for escaping from the Burwash reformatory.
The disappearance of and search for Minnie Ford, the wealthy widow of a respected Toronto businessman, was front-page news that shook and captivated the city a halfcentury ago. The arrest of her son, and the ghastly actions of the Hollywood-handsome 16-year-old killer, made it one of Toronto’s most sensational and grisly murder cases.
Ford would eventually be declared a “lost cause writeoff’ by the system. A court-ordered psychiatric test presented during his trial stated he was the most dangerous type of aggressive psychopath. But perhaps everyone can be redeemed.
Maybe even the seemingly worst among us has value.
WAYNE FORD BELIEVES in salvation. But not in the religious sense. He never had much time for God.
He wheels his dinged-up red and silver 1996 Chevrolet Silverado pickup through the streets of Vancouver, the driver’s seat pushed way back so that, even with a six-foot-three, 265-pound frame, he can steer with his arms straight. That extended cab was important to Ford when he bought this beast five years ago with eight $100 bills. Not only can he stretch out, but it also allows him to pack more junk behind him.
Ford has been out of prison for almost 38 years. Fifty years after his mother’s death, he still reports to a parole officer once every three months. He says he hasn’t been involved in any crime — if you don’t count his leadership role in the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary riot — since he made the decision to go straight, to do his best impression of a “square john,” as he calls a law-abiding person, after the preliminary hearing for his mom’s murder.
Today, Ford is carrying around the front end of a three-wheeled motorcycle, an apartment-sized washer and dryer that are destined for recycling, various hunks of metal, car parts, a large fan and some furniture he’ll drop off at the John Howard Society as a donation for use in a halfway house.
At 66, Ford still relishes work. He uses his truck to cart away dead appliances and furniture from empty apartments when a renter skips out. He also picks up personal effects when the resident of a halfway house messes up and is returned to incarceration. The contents go to storage, but he keeps much of what isn’t claimed, selling some at flea markets, passing other things to charities and keeping some for himself.
Ford spent more than a decade in prison, until he was released in 1975. He loves answering to no one and being self-employed. He is also unencumbered by vices which, he says, impair freedom. He gave up cigarettes when he first went to jail in 1965. He stopped drugs in 1985 and hasn’t had alcohol since 1996. He has no credit cards. He carries no debt. He never married and has no children. He lives alone.
“I’m addicted to freedom; it’s my drug of choice,” he says. “I had to go to prison and lose my freedom to learn what freedom was and to gain an appreciation of freedom. So when I was in prison, I knew what I was going to do on the outside — get my freedom.
“I don’t come from a f---ed up childhood, training schools, foster homes and all that crap. I had good parents, lived in suburbia and did all the stereotypical Leave It to Beaver type of s---. We had a summer cottage. We had property in Florida. I’d been to England, Scotland, France, Bahamas, Mexico — upper-middle class. I knew what the world was outside of prison. I tasted it. I liked it. I wanted to return to it.”
FORD IS A BURLY MAN with a full beard he has had since he regained that freedom, and he almost always wears a beat-up black Oakland Raiders baseball cap. He cares nothing for sports but likes the hat.
He looks like the actor Randy Quaid, if Quaid were in the Hells Angels. But there is a little Robin Williams in him, too: he sometimes changes his voice and contorts his face for comic effect when telling stories. He is loquacious, using language cleverly to recount his crimes, the way an athlete might reminisce about a favourite game. The F-word is a staple, as a noun, a verb and an adjective. He’s quick to laugh at himself.
His rough-hewn biker looks and his humour were huge attributes in the other work he cherishes. For four years he was a Life Line In-Reach worker, earning $38,000 a year going into prisons to deliver straight talk to the inmates about the realities of prison life and what it takes to get out and stay out.
Sometimes he would help a prisoner prepare for his parole hearing; he might even speak on the inmate’s behalf. The federal government killed the program on Aug. 31 last year, but Ford hopes to get back into that line of work if the John Howard Society of the Fraser Valley ever receives the funding to hire him. He was good at it. “He could discuss accountability without a moralistic overtone,” says Maggie Aronoff, executive director at the John Howard Society, who oversaw Ford’s counselling work.
“He didn’t come across as something the inmates couldn’t be. He offered them rare insight into possibly having a place outside the walls without abandoning who they are. We had to battle to defend his non-conformity but it really wasn’t relevant.”
Ford says he understood the mindset of the lifer.
“They don’t want to hear bulls---,” he says. “They want to hear how to do it; how to get out and stay out.
“I’d tell guys to make a choice. I don’t care what your emotions are: don’t rob banks, stop stabbing people, stop stealing. I’d ask guys, ‘What do you want out of life? What do you enjoy? Have obtainable goals. Always want a crumb more or maybe a whole loaf. Greed is good. Just don’t take from somebody else.’
“To me, every inmate should crave, like a f---in’ heroin addict, what I’ve got.”
PAUL HENRY GREW UP in North Toronto. He would meet Ford as a prison psychologist at Kingston Penitentiary in March 1971, three weeks before a bloody riot erupted there, roiled for four days and left two inmates dead.
But Henry knew of Ford long before he opened his file, even before the teenager killed his mother. Henry is two years older than Ford, and although they attended different high schools and grew up in different neighbourhoods, tales of the troubled teen spread along the student grapevine during the early ’60s. Ford was legendary, says Henry, and not in a good way.
“He had a reputation for being absolutely crazy, dangerous and nonsensical, someone you avoided,” recalls Henry. “He had a terrible, terrible reputation, even in North Toronto. He was scary. The craziest guy in the city is the only way to describe him.”
Ford’s life is weirdly intertwined with Henry’s. Henry’s best friend, Skip Stanowski, left St. Michael’s College School to attend Ford’s Earl Haig, although they didn’t meet there. Later, he was a counsellor at the halfway house in Windsor where Ford was a resident after his prison release in 1975. Stanowski would later marry Ford’s first parole officer.
“He was kind of a James Dean,” recalls Stanowski. “Rebellious. He had sideburns before anyone had sideburns. He had long hair before anyone had long hair. Most people had buzz cuts in those times. They’d go to church and have a tie on. He had tattoos. He didn’t conform.”
Henry recalls that prison testing showed Ford had a “top percentile” IQ and, when he did meet him, it became instantly obvious that he was dealing with a very smart man.
“But he was different. He was a risk taker. Then I think he found criminality . . . was a real exciting lifestyle for him. I think he thrived on the excitement he got from it.”
Wayne Ford clearly recalls the first time he broke the law. He was 8 years old and in a grocery store near his home with a friend. He spied one of those oversized chocolate bars, a Jersey Milk the size of a licence plate. But the boys had no money. He and his buddy dared each other to take it. Ford won.
“I look around and stuff it down the front of my pants, put the T-shirt over it and we walk out, stiff-armed like we’re Joe Cool but actually, we’re scared s---less. We run behind some other stores and break out the chocolate bar,” he continues, now emphasizing each word for impact. “That was the besttasting chocolate bar I’d had in my life. Why? Because I stole it.”
Ford says he graduated from stealing candy to shoplifting Dinky Toys — “I was a voracious collector as a kid.”
And comic books. He started to learn about commerce. “I wouldn’t steal one comic book. I’d steal 10 and sell nine. Now you have the comic book and money.
“Then, when I was 11or12, I was stealing bicycles. Steal a bike to use it. Steal a bike to sell it. Steal a bike to trade for something.”
Ford then became enthralled by AMT plastic model cars but says they were too hard to pocket because they were sold in large boxes. So he kept lifting Dinky Toys, comics and fishing lures. Sometimes he and his buddies would split up and hold a contest to see who could steal the most.
“We were all trading,” he says. “My parents weren’t analyzing what was going on because all the kids were doing the same thing. It was like the drug trade but it was the stolen stuff trade.”
Ford’s rebellious behaviour increased during his teens. When he was 14, an older friend taught him to drive and he began stealing cars. He remembers walking by a store window, seeing a shirt he liked and then returning with a lead pipe at night to do a smash-and-grab. It was a heavy shirt, blue velour. “I put it on and it felt like silk,” he says. Despite this, Ford describes himself as “pathologically bashful and shy” as a kid, the type of boy who couldn’t stand in front of a class and read his homework because overwhelming fear would make the words “swim on the page.”
He was also growing at an accelerated rate. When his parents measured him on his14th birthday, he had topped six feet and was 161 pounds. That allowed him to hang out with older kids, he remembers. While still only 14, he was at the Brunswick House on Bloor St. W. with a friend and the friend’s father, and the waitress automatically put a large beer in front of him.
“I learned that at14, I’m passing for 21(the drinking age at the time). Kids in the community would come to me when they found this out and pay me to go to the liquor store to buy booze. They would say, ‘Keep the change and come drink with us,’ so I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ ” he says, rubbing his hands together.
“It’s starting to bring me out of who I was. It also started to get me into stuff.
“I start going into downtown Toronto. I go to the Brunswick because they know me and they serve me. I don’t tell nobody nothing.”
He said he began hanging out with university students, even though he had no idea what they were talking about most of the time.
“I’m way out of my depth and I like it,” he says. “I want all the stuff that 20- and 21-year-olds have. This is where I want to go. So, in that way, I matured too quick.”
FORD SAYS THAT HENRY, in his role as prison psychologist, later helped him understand his behaviour at this stage. The inhibited, pubescent Ford was in conflict with his physically mature self. Inside, Ford confessed, he was hurting — “like being rubbed raw by sandpaper” — as he struggled to fit in and prove his worth to the older kids.
“On my 16th birthday, I’m six-foot-three and 195 pounds,” he says. “I’m a troubled kid and I don’t know it. I’m loving everything but I’m struggling with a lot of stuff inside because, really, I’m still just a little kid who wants to be an adult. I get into s--- left, right and centre.”
Every teen, Ford believes, pushes back against the rules and against his parents. He just happened to take more pleasure from his form of defiance — crime and stealing — than most.
“I absolutely loved it,” he says. “I was a very, very rebellious person. I’d always do what was forbidden. It felt better. It tasted better. It was more fun. You’re pulling one over on the adults. I don’t think there’s any big mystery. It’s just the way I was. I liked being that way.”
Ford began hanging out with the Para-Dice Riders and was offered the chance to strike (go on probation) with the Toron-
‘I had good parents, lived in suburbia and did all the stereotypical Leave It to Beaver type of s---.’ WAYNE FORD ON HIS UPBRINGING
to bike gang. He knew he was too young but kept his mouth shut. He wanted to hang out with the “bad” guys.
He got into the Yorkville drug scene and began bringing marijuana back to Willowdale to sell. More than once, he was driven home by the police.
“Everything was reachable on the other side of the table,” he says. “I could reach over and get it because I’m big and I’m passing for older.
“I love to eat at smorgasbords. A little of this, a little of that. Life to me was like that and I wanted to try a little of everything.”
When Ford was 16, a family tragedy caused him to slip further into the criminal abyss. His father, only 52, died of a heart attack while the family was on vacation in Florida. Lorne Ford owned a BA service station on Yonge St., operated the local motor vehicle licensing bureau and was president of the Toronto Businessmen’s Association. He was a war veteran and a highly ranked Shriner, and he sponsored baseball and hockey teams in the area.
Ford’s father was the one person in his life who tried to govern the teenager’s behaviour. Sometimes, the teen would be locked out of the house if he came home late. A couple of times he spent the night sleeping in the car. Sometimes the father would spank his son.
“My dad is the alpha in the family,” Ford recalls. “When my dad dies, there’s no alpha. There’s no control. My mother was deeply devastated by my father’s death. They were a welded couple. I was like a third wheel. My parents were very, very loving parents but when my dad died, half of my mother died and she withdrew into herself.
“She’s not paying attention to me. I feel freer now. I could do any damn thing I want.”
THERE IS NO ONE who understands Ford and his criminal history better than Paul Henry. Not only did he counsel Ford as prison psychologist, but he was also instrumental in getting him released on an experimental parole program in the mid-1970s. The two have remained friends. Ford spent two weeks at Henry’s Shadow Lake cottage in Ontario last summer.
“Looking back on it, the dad was a really strong factor here,” says Henry. “He died nine months before the murder (of the mother) occurred. I’ve always maintained that both Wayne and his mother went goofy after his dad died. They were absolute idiots towards each other. Neither one grieved properly. They were both out of control.”
Wayne had no desire to curtail his growing freedom, and Minnie Ford, then 55, showed no ability to rein in an unruly son who couldn’t fill the void left in the house by the death of her husband.
“The whole thing is horrific, putting your mother in Lake Couchiching for three years because you didn’t want to do life in prison,” says Henry.
“Everybody thought he did it for the money because they were a well-to-do family.
“It was front page for months and years — the disappearance of Minnie Ford. It was the case of the ’60s.
“The (Steven) Truscott case was the case of the ’50s. Wayne was the ’60s. And (Peter) Demeter in the ’70s. It was fascinating.”
The family’s worth was estimated at more than $100,000, most of it in Florida real estate. But what happened that spring afternoon had little to do with money.
The fractious relationship between Wayne Ford and his mother came to a violent and horrific end on May 16, 1963, the Thursday preceding the Victoria Day holiday weekend.
Ford had crashed the family car, a green 1959 Cadillac, two weeks earlier. The repairs cost $1,600, a huge amount of money in those days. Ford had planned to see a movie with his friends that Thursday night, and when he returned home at lunchtime to see the car in the driveway for the first time since the accident, his first thought was “drive-in.” He asked to borrow the car. Minnie Ford was incensed at his gall and got into a heated argument with her son.
During Ford’s trial in 1967, four years after Minnie Ford’s death, he testified that during the exchange his mother began raising all the differences between them, including, according to reports in the Toronto Daily Star, his wildlooking clothes, his long hair, his poor marks at school and the various troubles he’d been in.
Then, the paper reported, Ford said she called him “a little punk . . . a juvenile delinquent . . . (She) said I was too big for my britches.”
Ford, in his testimony, said he yelled back, “Go to hell, ya old bitch.”
At that point, Ford said, “She slapped my face.
“I slapped her right back,” he testified. “She was yelling very loud. She put her hand to her cheek and stepped back a couple of steps. She had a very astonished look on her face . . . yelled something at me.
“She made a quick movement to her right and when she turned around, she had an ice pick in her right hand.”
Ford testified that he bolted for his bedroom.
“She came right after me. She was yelling and screaming at me . . .”
He said he grabbed the first thing he could find, a miniature baseball bat his father had given him, described in court as a 19-inch (48-centimetre) sawed-off bat. “I was afraid of that ice pick,” he testified. “I never saw her quite so mad. My mother was swinging at me with that ice pick. I was trying to knock it out of her hand.”
The argument worked its way back to the kitchen and during the fight, according to his testimony, Ford was backed up against the sink and the ice pick “grazed” his arm.
When asked by his lawyer how he felt about that, Ford told court: “I felt the pain. I felt angry.”
Ford said he landed “a few blows” to his mother’s head, one on the left temple. He testified that he was swinging the bat “hard” and hit his mother three or four times.
Minnie Ford crumpled to the kitchen floor.
“She drops like a rock,” he says now with the detached emotion one might use to describe a scene in a movie.
Ford tells the story today much as he did on the witness stand. Now he says he pushed his mother at the start of the argument; then it was a slap. But the result was the same. Either way, then and now, he is adamant he had no intention of hurting his mother, but she was out of control and he was trying to defend himself.
The death, he says, was an accident. He says he loved his mother. It’s what he did with the body that was macabre and that made it difficult for a jury to believe that his actions were defensible at trial four years later.
“He didn’t mean to kill her,” says Henry. “It was manslaughter, and if he’d picked up the phone and called the police, he would have got seven, eight, 10 years for it. He knew he was in trouble and he was afraid he was going to get life.”
Ford didn’t summon the police or an ambulance. Instead, he called upon his best friends to help dispose of the evidence and concoct a story about where his mother had gone.
FORD SAYS HE IS NOT SURE what happened during the 15 or 20 minutes after his mother hit the floor. He says he sat in a kitchen chair beside her body in a daze, aware that time had passed only when he looked at the clock.
“I remember getting up and taking a few steps, because the phone was in the front hall, just inside the front door, and I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get the ambulance,’ ” he says now. “Then I stopped and thought, ‘Wait a minute, you’re going to be in trouble here. Sit back down and think about this. How am I going to do this? I’ve got to go back to school, pretend everything is normal, then come home at the end of the day and deal with this.’
“Which is what I did. I came home, pulled the body downstairs, put it in a tea chest. There was blood from the kitchen in the hall, down the stairs, to the landing and across the basement floor into the laundry room. I washed all of this.
“Within the week, I painted everything that was painted. I scrubbed everything two or three times. The stairs going down, I repainted three or four times, all the way down to the bottom.”
Ford’s account varies from what his two best friends said on the stand, but what is clear is that he indeed called his buddies to help dispose of the body. One
was 16, the other 15.
(The Star was unable to contact either for this story so they have not been identified.)
While Ford recalls taking the body to the basement by himself, the 16-year-old testified that Ford picked him up in the Cadillac after school on the day of the murder and told him what he had done. The teen said he was “shocked and afraid.”
“(Ford) told me I was going to his place (to) help him get rid of the body,” he testified. “When we got there, Wayne said his mother was in the kitchen, to come on up.
“I saw the body lying on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. I saw a sheet. It was all red, the colour of blood. It was thrown over something.
“Wayne asked me if I wanted to see her. I said I didn’t, but he walked over and pulled off the sheet anyway.”
The teen testified that there was the body of a woman on the floor, but he couldn’t see her face. Someone had placed a bag over it.
“I threw up in the sink,” he continued on the stand. “Wayne said he’d take the body to the basement. He grabbed the arms, me the legs and the sheet was left behind. I went first, I had the legs. The head kept hitting the stairs . . . the blood kept coming out.
“Wayne got the body by the arms and dragged it to the back of the basement. There was a smear of blood about a foot wide where the body was dragged.”
The teen said he was sick again, this time in the laundry tub. He testified that he and Ford then jammed the body into the large plywood box, stamped “fragile” on the side, that had been beside the furnace.
The 16-year-old testified that Ford gave him a heavy metal bar to smash out his mother’s teeth. That way, if the body was ever found, it would be more difficult to identify. The 16-year-old said he was intimidated by Ford who, he testified, had threatened him with a gun. Afraid, the teen said he lied to Ford, claiming he had indeed knocked out her teeth.
THE TWO THEN LOADED the plywood box containing the body in the trunk of the Cadillac and drove to the Ford family cottage at Lake Couchiching. The teen testified that Ford got a shovel there and they then drove to a treed area near a rifle range outside Orillia. Ford tried to dig a hole in the middle of the road, telling his pal it was the last place anyone would look. Frustrated at the difficult digging, Ford’s friend testified, they took the body back to the cottage, put it in the garage and drove back to Willowdale.
They went back to school the next morning, a Friday, to keep things looking normal.
They then departed for a cottage weekend with another friend, age 15, in tow.
The younger friend testified that Ford told him what he had done, then took him to the garage and said, “The body’s in there. Now take a look.”
The younger teen testified that there was a large object scrunched up in the box, out of which came “the smell of something that’s dead and been decayed.” He said he recognized the smell because he had come upon a corpse in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel.
The 15-year-old testified that Ford said he would kill him if he didn’t help dispose of the body. The three then worked together to get rid of the box.
“There was an old child’s wagon,” Ford says now, picking up the story. “My wagon from when I was a child. So, in the middle of the night, we take the box out of the garage and put it on the wagon. I pull the wagon while (the two friends) steady the box because the ground is a little rough.
“The property is up high and you have to go down this long path to get to the dock. We take it out on the dock. I get in the boat, they hand the box over. We go out to the middle of the lake and then we fire the box over the side and it sinks. It was very cold and clinical.”
According to press reports from Ford’s trial, the disposal of Minnie Ford’s body would have been comical if it wasn’t so gruesome.
The15-year-old testified that, when Ford gave the box a shove, it knocked off the back of the old, flat-bottomed boat, which started sinking. Ford jumped to the bobbing box containing his mother, holding the gun he was carrying out of the water. The improvised coffin went under in a matter of moments and Ford pulled his arm away, accidentally firing his pistol in the process. With Ford and the youth now clinging to the mostly submerged boat, the 16-year-old swam to shore and returned with another boat to rescue the pair.
Ford concocted a story that his mother was supposed to join them at the cottage but didn’t show. He told anyone who asked that she’d met a man and headed for Florida where the family owned property. But did the teen seriously believe the body would stay hidden forever?
“I didn’t even think about that. It’s like, get it gone. Get rid of it. Maybe I thought sometime in the far future they’d find it. F--- it. Worry about it then. I really didn’t think about it after that,” he says now.
“It’s gone, let’s get on with our lives . . . People would say to me, ‘Where’s your ma?’ I wouldn’t think, ‘She’s in the middle of the lake.’ It’s like, ‘I don’t know, check Florida.’ It was like out of sight, out of mind. It was out of sight, down at the bottom of the lake.”
BUT AS THE POLICE BEGAN investigating Minnie Ford’s sudden disappearance, they found she did not pack a suitcase for a trip. The second family car remained in the garage. Records showed she was neither using her credit cards nor had she withdrawn any money from her bank account. The mystery gripped Toronto as police searched from Fort Myers, Fla., where the Ford family owned real estate, to the bottom of wells in North York and around Orillia near the family cottage.
They couldn’t find the woman who had vanished without a clue.
“To me, when my dad is gone, fun went from first gear to third gear because I can get away with more,” Wayne Ford recalls. “Now my Ma is gone and there is no governing of me. I’m completely on my own and I can do any f---in’ thing I want.”
“The candy store is wide open and there’s nobody there. All the cabinets are unlocked. I can take anything I want. That’s how I looked at life. I went in and reached for handfuls.”
Ford quit school. He said he was going to fail Grade10 anyway. He turned17 in early June and embarked on a crime spree that was broken only by parties at the house.
“I was a royal s---head in a lot of ways and I was Mr. Stupid Teenager times 10 that went bananas into criminality, which is what I wanted.
“I wanted to be a criminal. I also thought I’d get killed and I really didn’t care, I would just hold on to my life as long as I can, pull as much crime as I can and have as much fun as I can and then get killed. A cop would kill me, a drug dealer would kill me, a biker would kill me. I’d break into a house or a factory and get killed. That’s fine. I just hoped I’d die quick.”
“At 17, I honestly did not believe I would live to be 21.” So Ford crammed in as much as he could. He spirited guns out of Buffalo, buying them there for $15 each and selling them for up to $60 here.
He learned how to use a blind mule. He would wire guns under a car he’d deduced was headed for Toronto while it was parked at a motel near the border. Ford would watch the car all night and then follow the unsuspecting driver through customs towards home until the car was parked again and he could recover the weapons.
“I’m not Al Capone or nothing,” he says. “It was just one of those things that was interesting to do.”
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prostitutes to set up me, where there were strangers looking for d a party. And often a 7-year-old kid. It’s the ’m living the life of oze, selling booze. I’m n. I’m selling pot. A on. I’m getting all the What’s fun, let’s do it.’ I’m making money ust spending it as fast n’t care. I don’t know xcept I like what I’m
BED four banks — he e or how much he got ther attempt. There eak-and-enters and s. He learned to pass n’t enjoy it.
agreed to “croak a t the man who combacked out. He did shot another in the d another, he says, all ality on the street go to 19. It’s like I took a in everything I could. riod, I was not a nice ht train going towards e committed crimes t, Henry has another sit down to chat on a ver afternoon. get going in so many Ford wonders aloud. myself killed?” caught,” says Henry, a psychologist with es. ?” ,” continues Ford. ere I am. It was a way h.” bsolutely, maniacally se you didn’t mean to your mother and you and pressure on you he papers on a daily at some degree of my ve behaviour was ac- fore muttering, “I’ve t on for size before. but I knew I didn’t fter a pause. “When
feel guilty, I should cident? I should feel I didn’t mean to do? ilty for taking a confeel guilt for taking uy’s legs. If I accidenyou, I’ll apologize but guilty. If I break the face out with it, yes, I g you feel when you other person. If it’s an dn’t feel guilt for that. t your head up your ou didn’t mean to do
his conscience, was cops hated me so his face lighting up at ember one time, the ouse and I’m in my king a cigar. I got my , on my arm and I go the house. These are one cop pulls out the ad it. Capital murder,
cop says. ‘There’s a little box that says the date. It’s blank. When we’ve got you, we’ll fill it out and we’ll hand it to you.’
“I blew a big puff of smoke at them and said, ‘Until then, get the f--- out of my house.’ I’m an idiot, a really big idiot. I remember his face went red. I’m laughing at him, smiling and smoking my cigar.”
It was only a matter of time before Ford’s arrogance and recklessness became his undoing.
On July 25, police arrested Ford, charging him with criminal negligence after another teen was shot in the house during a brandy-fuelled night of revelry. In the newspaper story the next day, police had said they made several calls to the Kingsdale Ave. home since the disappearance of Minnie Ford.
“I’ve got four buddies over and we’re drinking and we’re goofy kids,” recalls Ford. “Then I had to go and shoot one in the foot with a .22 because we’re drunk out of our brains.”
THE BOYS, ACCORDING TO A report in the Star, were trying to shoot a corn cob pipe out of each other’s mouths with a .22-calibre rifle. Ford recalls the victim was standing on a hardwood stool when one of his bullets hit the stool and a fragment ricocheted into the boy’s foot.
Ford was already on probation for possessing stolen goods and a sawed-off shotgun, and he had been charged a few months earlier with carrying a concealed weapon. He would get three months in jail for criminal negligence in the shooting of his friend and in that time a trust company took over the estate and rented out the house.
Ford’s party was over before the summer ended.
When Ford was released, he found employment as an industrial spray painter, but the lure of life’s darker side remained a temptation.
“I got a job and apartment and all that but what I want to do is crime,” he says. He surfaced again in the Toronto press when he was arrested in February 1964 for vagrancy. He’d spent a night sleeping in an apartment lobby where he was to meet a friend for some sort of deal. He can’t remember what.
In May, he was charged with underage drinking. On June 9, his 18th birthday, he was sentenced to a year after he and one of his two close friends were found guilty of possessing stolen goods, theft and willful damage following a series of cottage break-ins in the Orillia area.
Upon his release, he moved to California for what could have been a fresh start. But Ford was deported, he believes because U.S. Immigration was tipped off by one of Minnie Ford’s sisters. Just two weeks after returning to Canada, in late 1965, he was arrested for breaking into storage lockers on Yonge St.
Ford was convicted of theft and possession of stolen property and sent to Ontario’s Burwash reformatory, near Sudbury, for a two-year sentence. On May 17, 1966, three years after he killed his mother, Ford and another inmate escaped from the prison sawmill at Burwash. He had 17 months remaining on his sentence.
“I use the term ‘escape’ very, very loosely,” he says. “It’s literally that we walked away from an outside gang. When the guard wasn’t looking, we just ran around the corner and into the bush.”
They walked as far as they could overnight along train tracks — Ford figures about 16 kilometres — breaking into cottages for supplies or clothes. They stole a gun, a boat and a car. The big plan was to get to Miami and then on to the Bahamas. Instead, they got as far as the front door of a pool hall on Danforth Ave. across from the Shoppers World mall, where they were recognized by a police officer and arrested.
“My sentence was six months for escaping lawful custody plus the remainder of my provincial time. If you escape . . . you automatically went into maximum security.”
Ford was sent to Kingston Penitentiary. He had just turned 20. His mother was still considered a missing person.
Despite being barely out of his teens and good-looking, the adjustment to penitentiary life was relatively easy for Ford. He says he wasn’t bothered by the “chicken hawks,” the older prisoners who prey on younger ones for sex.
“I’m not overly impressed or overly scared. I was a little scared but I’d done county jail time, I’d done reformatory time and I’m a big kid. I’m six-foot-three, 20 years old and about 230 pounds, something like that. I was in pretty good shape. I’d been a criminal most of my life, hung out with outlaw bikers, carried a sawedoff 12-gauge since I was16. Shot a couple of people. Stabbed a couple of people. I’d taken a contract kill. I’m not somebody to f--- with. I’m a nutbar. I know who I am.
“You don’t walk in and say, ‘Hey everybody, you f--- with me and I’ll kill you.’ But you spread the word. You establish yourself through the grapevine. You let it be known.
“If you try to play a bad guy and you get called out and you don’t back it up, you’re going into protective custody. The whole joint is coming at you.
“If you say you’re in for a certain type of crime and they find out you’re in for a different type of crime, like a sex beef or whatever, you’re going into protective custody. In Kingston, people didn’t fight, they killed.
“I remember getting the guided tour when I was fish, a new guy. The guard takes the fish around and says that’s the gym, that’s the hospital, that’s the church, that’s the car wash — that’s where you went for a shower . . . once a week.
“We’re walking down the west roadway that went from the prison block to the shop block. There’s wheelbarrows, the old wooden ones, and they’re painted white with a red cross on them.
“The guard says, ‘Do you see these wheelbarrows? They’re for when somebody gets stabbed. We put the body in the wheelbarrow and we wheel them up to the hospital.’
“I’m like, ‘Yeah right. F--- off.’ Until maybe a year later, I’m walking down the same goddamn path, a bunch of us in a line and a guy goes down with a shank stuck in him. They pick him up, put him in a wheelbarrow and just wheel him away, like that. It’s like nothing.”
‘I finally said, if I want to live, if I want to have any kind of life, I’ll have to accept this whole thing.’
WAYNE FORD
ON FACING HIS SENTENCE
Ford says he doesn’t remember anyone dying while he was in, other than in the 1971 riot, but he does remember one lifer being thrown over a fourth-floor railing and holding on until he was rescued. Another was tossed over and somehow survived. He said knifings happened now and again but no one was stabbed to death.
KP, as the prisoners called it, was a working prison, and Ford worked in various shops during his stay, an experience that he says was extremely helpful to him when he would eventually get his release.
He took up reading — “in the penitentiary, everybody reads.” He believed he would do his time and resume his criminal life.
That was his plan until Nov. 23, 1966, when that same piece of paper, detailing a murder charge, was brought by police to Kingston Penitentiary. This time the date was filled in.
Minnie Ford’s body had been found on Oct. 16. A cottager was walking along Cumberland Beach on Lake Couchiching and came upon an object that he’d first assumed to be a mannequin. A dramatic drop in water levels that autumn help expose the corpse, which was on its side in a sitting position. About 25 metres further along the beach, in shallow water, investigators also found pieces of a large plywood crate.
The body was missing its left hand, had only four teeth and was covered in tattered undergarments. Fat from the body had seeped out and covered it in a waxlike substance called adipocere, giving it the appearance of being covered in plaster.
One of Minnie Ford’s sisters, Melissa Brad, told the Daily Star that she’d always suspected her sibling’s body would be found in the lake and she never believed Minnie had gone away with another man.
“She loved her son too much to do anything like that,” she said.
WAYNE FORD WAS CHARGEDwith capital murder, a charge that Canada no longer has. “The cops say to me, ‘We know what went down. We know this was some sort of a fight and you killed her in a fight. Plead guilty and we’ll give you 15 years for manslaughter.’ I said, ‘Go f--- yourself.’ It irked me and it still irks me today that here’s these cops that are saying, we know it was a fight and you didn’t mean to kill her but if you don’t co-operate, we’ll give you life. I don’t figure the Canadian justice system is going to find me guilty of a murder that’s not murder. It’s not bravado. It’s just me being pigheaded.”
Ford was moved to the Don Jail to await his preliminary hearing, cocky as ever. He didn’t know that his two best pals, the teens who had helped him hide his mother’s body in the lake, were lined up to testify against him. Nor was he aware that detectives had gone through his former home and found human blood in nine places, including under the metal strip at the top of the basement stairs.
“I still don’t figure I’m going down on murder so I think it’s just a big hoot,” he says. “But the day of my preliminary hearing is when it really hit.”
Ford was overwhelmed by the evidence the prosecutors had accumulated. And he was stunned to see his friends had rolled over.
Of his former friends, Ford says, “I wanted to slit their throats.” But he came to understand that they gave evidence to save themselves from being charged with being accessory to murder after the fact.
Later, at two in the morning, Ford learned he would go to trial on a charge of capital murder, murder that was planned and deliberate, a charge that no longer exists in Canadian law. The trial, in May of 1967, would be a slam dunk for the prosecution.
Both boys testified that Ford said he hit his mother with an ice pick. “I hit her, I hit her again, but she wouldn’t go down,” the 16-year-old testified, recounting what Ford had told him.
“I started to strangle her and she didn’t go down. There was an ice pick, so I stuck her in the head. It wouldn’t come out. The handle broke off.” FORD DENIED HITTING HIS MOTHER with the ice pick or strangling her. A doctor testifying at the subsequent trial said it was impossible to determine whether Minnie Ford had been killed by strangulation, a spike-like object driven into her skull or from heavy blows that shattered most of her facial bones.
The defence argued that a broken hyoid bone in Minnie Ford’s neck, which might have indicated she was throttled, was caused by an anchor that was initially tied there to weigh down the body. And as for the ice pick, Ford’s lawyers explained that it was tossed in the makeshift coffin with the body and could have ended up anywhere.
On the stand, Ford admitted killing his mother but maintained he loved her and he had never hit her before. He said they argued two or three times a week and he resented her habit of spying on him by looking through his wallet. He also said his mother had previously threatened him with a frying pan and a rolling pin. But during those confrontations, he was able to walk away.
This time, he said, his mother, five-footsix and 140 pounds, was blocking his exit. When asked why he didn’t disarm her. Ford testified: “I’m no judo expert.”
At the end of the trial, the jury was presented with three potential verdicts for Ford. It could find him guilty of noncapital murder, guilty of manslaughter or not guilty. He could not be convicted of capital murder due to his young age.
Ford, nearly 21, was convicted of noncapital murder. The all-male jury needed just seven hours to decide his fate. Ford, it is reported, didn’t raise an eyebrow when the verdict was read.
He was sentenced to life in prison and returned to Kingston Penitentiary.
“The person I became during that fouryear period warranted a life sentence,” says Ford. “The ultimate irony is I got a life sentence for something I didn’t deserve a life sentence for. But I got a life sentence for what I became. I became a coldly clinical, calculating criminal. Not talented. But bold. I had no limits.”
FORD NOW CALLS EVERYTHING after the preliminary hearing “anticlimactic.” After that court date, he says, he spent five days in the Don Jail basically going insane, unable to eat or sleep. He saw no way out and considered suicide but ultimately, he jokes, he liked himself too much.
That’s when he made a stunning, out-ofcharacter, life-changing decision. He vowed to go straight. “At first, I think about escape because I did it before. But, I thought, if I try to escape — and I’ll kill any f---in’ son of a bitch that tries to stop me — where do I go? Get to another country? I don’t know other languages. I don’t know how to make my way except to steal, then I’d be doing time in another friggin’ country.”
“I struggle with this for five days. I finally said, if I want to live, if I want to have any kind of life, I’ll have to accept this whole thing, go to the penitentiary, do at least 10 years and get on life parole and go square john.”
Ford eventually penned a letter, dated Feb. 2, from the Don Jail, to the two homicide detectives who arrested him, a letter that was later entered as evidence in court: Dear Sirs: This letter is to inform you that I intend to plead guilty to the charge of capital murder. I wish to wave (sic) all evidence in this matter in court also and ask that this case be pushed through court quickly as possible.
I am not receiving any visits or mail as of today. There is no need for anyone to visit me now. I remain, Wayne L. Ford
During the trial, at which Ford pleaded not guilty, he was hit by another grim reality. After going through pretrial psychiatric assessment at Ontario Hospital at Penetanguishene, Ford was found legally sane but labelled the most dangerous type of psychopath who, according to one psychiatrist at his trial, was capable of “not being in control,” and in an argument like the one he was in with his mother, could have been “overwhelmed by aggressive impulses . . . not fully aware . . . lashing out.”
“They brand me, on the stand, as a nontreatable psychopath,” Ford says now. “They said a bunch of other words I don’t
understand.
“I’m 20. I do remember this. They said to the shrink later on, ‘What does this mean as far as release goes?’ ”
“‘Wayne Ford is 20 years old’ — this is the shrink talking. ‘If he goes through normal male menopause in middle age, (at) 40 to 45, his psychopathy level will drop down to manageable terms and he can be considered for parole.’ I’m 20. He’s talking 40 to 45. “It’s like being tossed in the garbage can.” Inmate 2778 adopted a different attitude when he returned to Kingston Penitentiary during Canada’s Centennial year. After all, he was going to be there for much longer than he originally anticipated. In 1975, Paul Henry had an outlandish idea. The Special Release Project would take eight of the Ontario prison system’s most hardened criminals — murderers, armed robbers and habitual criminals doing 12 years to life — and move them en masse from their cells and settle them in a halfway house in Windsor, on temporary day parole. Each had to be past his full parole date. “The most desirable thing was that the prison system regarded you as a writeoff, a lost cause writeoff,” Henry recalls. “I went to John Williams, the police chief in Windsor, and made the presentation in terms of what was going on. I remember him telling me to take my project to Inuvik and try it there.”
“Not one of the guys had been on the street in 10 years. Who would want that coming to your city? Nobody.”
Henry, though, was able to sell the Parole Board of Canada on the idea. Henry’s reasoning was that the prisoners would be so desperate to succeed in the outside world that they would support each other and find strength together.
“I tell inmates about the program now and they call me a liar,” says Ford. “It’s only been done once in Canadian history.” Henry wanted to include Ford in the program. He ultimately proved to be the hardest to get out because of the nature of his crime, his initial psychiatric assessment and that little matter of being one of the leaders in a prison riot.
BOTH THE PSYCHOLOGIST AND THE PRISONER had moved from the Kingston Penitentiary to Millhaven Institution after the prisoner mutiny. And Henry was fascinated by the criminal he remembered from his teens.
“He was portrayed as someone who had zero hope and the worst human being that ever lived,” says Henry. “I’m talking about growing up in the city. People would have thought that with him, they locked the door and threw away the key. But that perception was not the reality.”
Instead, Henry found Ford to be a compassionate man with “great values” that, ironically, Henry believed had been passed on from his parents. He said Ford was “an absolutely great human being” who clearly understood the difference between right and wrong. Henry arranged to have Ford reassessed by psychiatrists.
The standard test administered was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, 567 questions that gave mentalhealth professionals a reading on someone’s psychopathic behaviour and their levels of depression, hysteria, paranoia and a raft of psychoses. There was also the 16pf, a series of multiple-choice questions that categorized personality.
Henry says a person’s results can be affected by his circumstances, and he reasoned that Ford’s “rebellious attitude” when he was first tested would have skewed the results to show him as being more of a psychopath than he actually was.
“He wouldn’t have cared about the test. He wouldn’t have cared how he was being assessed. He sensed everything was closing in on him at that point. He didn’t feel he belonged in a maximum-security mental-health centre undergoing tests. He was completely unco-operative.”
After several years in prison, with Ford’s attitude focused on trying to regain his freedom, it was found that his aggressive psychopathy had diminished and he was almost normal.
Ford was allowed to participate in the program. “He got very normal very quickly when he recognized he had to change his attitude100 per cent if he wanted to get out,” says Henry. “This was a guy who knew what he wanted. He wanted to get out and stay out. And he knew life meant life, unless he changed his ways. He understood the dynamic of a life sentence.”
Henry’s program was a mixed success. One of the prisoners opted to return to prison before he even got to Windsor, when he realized he wasn’t going to be able to cope outside the walls. The other seven made it through the six months at St. Leonard’s, the halfway house where Henry was executive director, and moved from day parole to full parole.
Ultimately, however, Ford was the only one who remained on the outside in the long term. He was also the only one serving a life sentence.
In Windsor, he was employed as a welder and worked with renovators, hauling away debris. He also started his own small-building demolition company. Ford was then, as he is now, a man with a truck.
Sometimes professors in the law school at the University of Windsor would bring him in as a living show-and-tell, to answer questions on law and deviant criminal behaviour from an insider’s perspective. He would later take criminology classes there himself, though he didn’t finish his degree.
Marg Stanowski was only 22 and one of Canada’s first female parole officers when she was assigned to the special project in Windsor. She’d seen Ford’s file and understood why there was “a great deal of reservation” about releasing him, but she said he became “a model parolee” because he was so desperate to retain his freedom.
“I designed this program for him to go into the high schools in Windsor to really talk about the implications of criminal involvement, what brought him to crime and how terrible penitentiary was,” she recalls.
“He would paint this landscape for the kids of being in his cell and he talked about being alone and being afraid, taking all the glamour out of crime.”
Says Henry: “This is a guy who really exemplifies what parole is about. This is a guy that did a 180 with his life. Lifers are the best parole risks. He engenders trust.”
Ford was also on the steering committee for a fledgling project called Lifeline that had its roots at St. Leonard’s.
“I hate to say it, but prison is the best thing that happened to me,” he says now. “That’s how f---ed up I was as a kid. That’s how stupid I was.”
Murderer. Riot ringleader. Lifer on the street for more than 30 years. Ford had instant credibility when he walked into a British Columbia prison to counsel — perhaps, more accu- rately, to confront — prisoners, mostly lifers, on the realities of prison survival and parole.
His mind is like a Rolodex of incarceration information and he can quote numbers on crime rates, prison numbers and recidivism. What really eats at him, and what he shares with the inmates, is that almost 30 per cent of lifers will be kept in jail beyond their full parole date. They are held back from full parole for an average of five extra years even though, he notes, lifers are the least likely to re-offend. He shares the grim statistics, but his main message to inmates was to offer “hope” the way Henry gave him hope in the ’70s. He felt he was helping prisoners, particularly the lifers, some of whom he still corresponds with even though he’s not officially employed.
“I got out with all this help and I learned how to be normal with all that help. As I internalized it and learned it, I learned how to pass it on to others.”
In his counselling, Ford says, he want-
‘I’ve been on parole for 38 years. I know how to be a good boy and not violate the law.’ WAYNE FORD ON LIFE TODAY
ed “all the bad guys” because he felt he understood them and could help them. “I would sit down and within five minutes I’d establish myself. A guy would sit down and I’d lean right into him.”
“I’d say, ‘I’m a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, just like you. I know how to do time. Nobody f---s with me. I’ll take anybody out of the picture that f---s with me. I’ve been on the street 30 years. How can I help you?’ I’ve got him,” says Ford.
“He thinks he’s bad but I was in 10 and out 30. I tell him I did all my time in maximum security and I tell the guy I was a ringleader in the riot and everybody knows about the Kingston riot. I held six guards hostage in the riot. I own this guy right away. ‘Oh, man, tell me about it. Oh, man.’ My job was so easy. I almost felt guilty that they gave me a paycheque, but not quite.”
So what was the message that Mr. Bad Ass Riot Ringleader passed on to the prisoners? Surprisingly, perhaps, it was to be compliant. Ford says he told the prisoners the reality of when they could actually expect to get parole and how they could help themselves move toward the exit.
So what’s the secret? Ford leans in, much as he would with a prisoner. “No drugs. No booze. No gambling. No contraband. No assaults. Don’t threaten anybody. Be pleasant with staff and inmates. I don’t care if you like it or not, that’s how you do your time and stay out of s---.
“And if you do it from Day 1, you don’t get tagged as a troublemaker. If you don’t get tagged as a troublemaker, you’re going to get, in time, from maximum to medium. Keep doing the same thing, you’ll go from medium to minimum, then to escorted temporary absences, then day parole to a halfway house and then you’ll get full parole like me.
“I teach a guy not to be a closed, hard-assed con. ‘F--- you, screw. F--- this. F--that.’ I would say, ‘It doesn’t matter if you like the screw — be polite. Then he’s no longer your enemy. You ask him please and you say thank you. I don’t care whether you hate doing it. It doesn’t matter, just do it. You have to establish with the other inmates that you’re not a wimp but you still have to be polite. Co-operate with the system.’
“But I would tell guys, ‘Don’t rat out. If you see somebody stab another inmate, shut your f---in’ face. Because if you get tagged as a rat, you’re f---ed forever.’ I’m not supposed to say it because I’m telling another inmate not to rat out anoth- er inmate but I do because it’s a reality.
“You cannot go in there and be a bad ass and hope to get out. You cannot go in and be a stool pigeon and expect to live.” He says that if you get out, and stay straight, after a while the system loses interest in you. “It’s easy to do,” he says. “But you have to be your own screw 24/7.”
Ford has been that for years, living in Coquitlam now in a mobile home park where he relishes his freedom.
“I’m OK financially,” he says. “I’m a cheap son of a bitch. I don’t spend money on stuff. I own a $30,000 mobile home. It’s nothing but I own it outright. I own my motorcycle outright. I own my pickup outright. I absolutely despise debt. If I can’t buy it for cash, I won’t buy it.”
FORD’S GOAL IS TO CONTINUE as an advocate for prisoners and their rights through counselling and public speaking. He just needs someone to hire him. He also dreams of opening his own halfway house, like the one that helped him, and running it the way Henry ran St. Leonard’s House in Windsor. He’s just not sure how to get people interested in the project or arrange the funding.
Ford eases his way along a narrow path that snakes through his home, past the buckets of electrical cords, dresser knobs, copper pieces and assorted brica-brac of abandoned apartments.
“I’m not a hoarder, just a businessman. To me, it’s all money. Every piece of furniture I have came out of a job.”
It looks like the home of a hoarder. There is stuff everywhere. And then there is stuff piled on top of that stuff. The clutter can be “overwhelming,” Ford says.
“I have 15 full toolboxes but I haven’t seen them in three years,” he says looking around. “I can’t even get in that bedroom. It just filled up. I haven’t been in there in a year.”
Ford said it is worse than usual these days because there is no longer a convenient flea market nearby where he can take his wares.
“Hence, my own goddamn house is jammed to the rafters.” Ford reaches into one of the boxes stacked in the kitchen and pulls out a lava lamp — “You probably haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he says — and then suddenly remembers he has 24 ornamental throwing knives somewhere and starts rummaging. “I’m a pack rat in some ways,” he says. “I lose track of stuff.
“My house looks like an explosion in a garbage dump. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m not embarrassed by it. I’m a stereotypical bachelor. I don’t answer to anybody. But I do stub my toes a lot.”
Ford says he’s happy with his life. He has a passion for three-wheeled motorcycles, often riding one that he has made or modified himself, and he belongs to the Sober Riders Motorcycle Association. He loves to attend auto shows and swap meets for car and bike parts. He figures he’s owned more than 1,000 trucks, cars, vans, motorcycles, boats and trailers since he was paroled and he has posed for photos with most of them.
Sometimes he’ll pile furniture or household items in front of his home and allow the neighbours to take what they want. He lives frugally but he said he likes money and gets excited by a good deal. Recently, he collected nine abandoned bicycles from apartment buildings to which he is contracted. He took them to an auction house and got $75 for them.
“I just love that I get paid to take them away and I take them to auction and I get paid again,” he says. “That takes the place of stealing. And it’s legal.”
Ford typically works one day a week visiting the apartment buildings — usually Saturdays when the traffic in and out of Vancouver is more manageable — and collects an old age pension and unemployment insurance.
He’s says he’s in bed most nights by 9:30.
“I don’t care what you write,” he says. “I’m not interested in vindication.
“I have a life sentence and I can’t get out from underneath it. But I’ve been on parole for 38 years. I know how to be a good boy and not violate the law. I know how to get along with people in the community.
“I can get along with all people from Hells Angels to inmates in a penitentiary to the guards. I was charged and tried for capital murder but found guilty of non-capital murder mandatorily because I was 16 . . . I was a s---head that turned my life around. But there are a helluva lot of people who have overcome a helluva lot more than me.” FORD STILL HAS HIS REBELLIOUS-side, but now he rages against the system. He’s angry that prisoners are kept in well past their parole date because, he believes, the government is making money off them. He notes that even though the crime rate is falling, there are more prison housing units being built and little is being done to help inmates reintegrate into society. He is incensed that 61 per cent of the 5,200 lifers in Canada remain behind bars even though statistics show they are the least likely to commit another crime.
Ford said he has had girlfriends but is adamant that there is never anything binding. “If we like being together, we’ll be together,” he says of his attitude toward relationships. “If you want to leave, leave. If I want to leave, I’m leaving. I’m not going to be imprisoned by a woman and I’ve never thought a woman should be imprisoned by me.”
Ford still must meet with a parole officer every three months.
In his home, there are Dinky Toys gathering dust on a shelf. He’s acquired them, legally this time, while cleaning out apartments. He picks one up and chuckles, knowing without saying anything that this visitor will get the joke.
A pop psychologist could write a treatise analyzing the difficulty Ford has throwing things away. After all, everything has value. Everything, and everyone, is salvageable.