A TEENAGE GIRL’S SECRET LIFE
The gripping story of how a ‘frail slip of femininity’ became Toronto’s first documented ‘girl bandit.’
A “frail slip of femininity” she was. Good Christian girl, hard worker, member of the church choir. Hardly the stuff of an armed bank robber.
Yet that was the accusation against17-year-old Kathleen Boyle as she entered a packed Toronto courtroom on April 25, 1930, amid the curious stares of spectators, lawyers and journalists.
“She looked little more than a high school girl. She might have been a demure domestic or a waitress,” a Toronto Daily Star reporter observed.
With dark hair wisping around her stylish felt toque, “she looked like anything in the world but a bold bandit,” the account read.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Toronto’s first-documented “girl bandit” stuck a nickel-plated revolver “into the face of an astonished teller” at the Canadian Bank of Commerce at Dundas St. W. and Gladstone Ave., according to the newspaper.
Her accomplice, brother-in-law Cecil Irving, ordered employees into the vault as he fired a warning shot from his rifle that lodged in the portrait of bank president Sir John Aird.
Irving, 25, stuffed close to $3,000 in his pockets before the pair fled outside to a borrowed sedan and drove to a Queen St. restaurant. Moments after entering the café, they ran out the back door, spurring a suspicious bystander to call police.
Abit of detective work led to a sawed-off Winchester hidden in the café and the quick identification of two suspects. Less than three hours after the mid-afternoon holdup, police arrested Boyle at her sister’s home on Gladstone and a drunken Irving at a friend’s house down the road.
As police began their interrogation, it became clear Boyle was no Bonnie in the making, although Irving’s Clyde — a “good-looking chap with a flair of fair hair” — had a lengthy criminal record.
“As she told her story,” the Star’s report went, “she continually bit her lips. Her eyes were edged with red.”
Irving, a meat salesman who was married to her sister Patricia, had persuaded her to help with the robbery to get money for his family, Boyle told police. “I am a fool.”
They had driven around for two hours before he decided on a bank in his own neighbourhood.
“I went in first and asked for change of a $5 bill,” Boyle explained. Irving followed, shooing everyone to the back, then grabbing cash from the teller’s cage while she guarded the door.
She told detectives she was nervous during the caper. “I did not know what I was doing. I seemed as if I was in a trance.”
Patricia Irving, the mother of a new baby, later told reporters her husband had never been in trouble before but was worried about an unpaid $150 hospital bill from his appendicitis operation. He blamed drunkenness for the stickup, she said. And her sister?
“Kathleen wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Mrs. Irving responded. “She came over to visit me from Buffalo just two weeks ago and everything seemed fine.”
Boyle, who was born in Hamilton and had five siblings, lived in Buffalo with her family. She worked part-time on an assembly line to help with household finances.
Stunned by their daughter’s arrest, her parents maintained her innocence to a Star reporter who visited them in Buffalo.
“She was a good-living kid, did not run around with any boyfriends and had never been away from home before,” Thomas Boyle declared.
But he admitted Kathleen took off to visit her sister Patricia in Toronto after he thrashed her for coming home late from a dance hall.
The factory worker was quick to point a finger at his no-good son-in-law, saying he’d had nothing to do with Patricia since she married him.
Kathleen’s mother believed sibling love was behind the alleged crime.
“She is so good-hearted. There isn’t anything in the world she wouldn’t do for all her sisters.”
Other interviews revealed an “unsophisticated child” who was afraid of guns.
“A tire explosion will nearly send her into fits of fear,” said 18-year-old friend Leonard Spence, while Boyle’s priest called her “an intelligent, upright girl.”
Aformer co-worker was similarly flummoxed by the teenager’s turnabout.
“I never once saw her lose her lovely manners,” Sabina Sellers attested. “She attended mass every morning; took her salary home to her parents every week; and behaved . . . like a good girl should.”
A prominent Toronto resident who saw her picture in the paper shared the view that she had been “led astray by evil influences” and arranged to pay for a defence lawyer.
Four days after the robbery, Boyle was “the picture of misery” as she reappeared in court, where her statement and Irving’s were read out. He planned the robbery and provided Boyle’s revolver, which wasn’t loaded, the judge heard. Police said the $2,867 (about $40,000 in today’s dollars) stolen by the gun-toting felons was all recovered except for the beer money Irving spent after the heist.
Letters of support described Boyle as a “good Christian girl” who came from a decent family.
Heeding pleas for leniency, the judge sentenced her to two years less a day in reformatory. Irving was given 15 years in penitentiary and 30 straps in three instalments.
Boyle was sent off to a women’s reformatory where she passed the time doing needlework. In March 1931, deportation orders came through and the one-time girl bandit, who had served less than a year of her sentence, disappeared back to Buffalo.