Many people bemoan that crimes perpetrated by young people seem to be increasing.
In truth, youthful offenders have always been part of the fabric of our communities. Occasionally there seem to be major increases in such crimes. And often, one or two offenders turn out to be responsible for those crime waves.
One such crime wave plagued the Guelph area in the mid 1920s. On July 12, 1924 a black youth named Victor Goins was arrested for robbery with violence, along with two other black companions, Jim Malotto and John Johnson.
Police were not able to muster sufficient evidence in that case to proceed to court. The three were soon back on the street. Malotto and Johnson decided that their best policy would be to leave town.
Guelph at that time was a much smaller city than it is now, with barely 20,000 people, about a sixth of its present size. Police were familiar with all the petty criminals and trouble makers in town, even when they could not prove cases against them in court.
Young Vic Goins, though, thought he could outsmart the authorities. He was a suspect in several other cases of robbery and theft over the following months, but there was never sufficient evidence to arrest him. Soon he realized that his luck in evading arrest would end, and he moved to Hamilton, but he maintained contact with his Guelph friends and accomplices.
During the early months of 1925, storekeepers along Wyndham Street suffered a rash of break-and-enter incidents and thefts. Police had strong suspicions as to the identity of the criminals, but were unable to gather sufficient evidence until late February. They arrested Harold Goetz and Fred Sauer, Jr. A third suspect was a 15-year-old juvenile, Casimir Carere.
On their day in court the youths were lucky. Although the police, by then, had evidence linking the accused with eight store robberies, Judge Spotton sentenced the two older youths to 60-day sentences, and young Carere to a year’s probation.
Goins, Goetz and two companions raised the stakes a short time later, in May of 1925. Two Acton area farmers, Chester McBain and Ernest Perriman, were driving on a pleasure jaunt east of the city in Eramosa Township.
At an isolated point on a road east of Guelph a group of young men confronted them. The gang assaulted the men, and liberated them of some $400 in cash.
Police were able to put together a plausible scenario quickly. Armed with descriptions from the victims, they zeroed in on their prime suspects, Stan Hodgson, Wilfred Hill, Harold Goetz, Casimir Carere, and Vic Goins. A couple of days later, all five were in the hoosegow. Goins had returned to his home in Hamilton, but the authorities quickly tracked him down.
Goins, as he had several times in the past, proved to be a poor choice as a partner-in-crime.
Once in police custody he proved a most co-operative suspect: as the saying goes, he sang like Beverly Sills.
Goins entered a plea of guilty, and elected summary trial. He provided the police with a signed statement concerning the robbery.
The suspects were not so lucky this time. Except for Wilfred Hill, who would appear the next day in Judge Spotton’s court, they faced hard-nosed magistrate Frederic Watt on their day in court.
He was not impressed that this was not a first-time appearance for any of them in his court. Goetz and Hodgson entered pleas of not guilty, and Goins confirmed his guilty plea. Hodgson told the court he had left the party before the robbery. The victims confirmed that Hodgson was not one of the men who robbed them, and he was released from custody.
Goetz, Carere and Hill had nothing of substance to offer in their defence. Before sentencing, Goins claimed that he had been drunk and therefore was not responsible for his actions. His statement only enraged the magistrate.
Crown Attorney J.M. Kearns pointed out the bad records of all the defendants. Harold Goetz, he noted, he been on the street only a short time after serving a 60-day term for his store robbing spree earlier in the year.
Poor Victor Goins received no leniency for his co-operation with police and his guilty plea. Magistrate Watt sentenced Goins and Goetz to three-year terms at the Portsmouth Penitentiary at Kingston. The two did not bat an eyelash at the news.
Casimir Carere, who was just shy of his 16th birthday, received an indeterminate sentence at St. John’s Industrial School in Mimico. Emotional turmoil was on his face as he heard the news. Perhaps he finally realized the foolishness of his path in crime.
Wilfred Hill appeared before Judge Spotton as scheduled. The judge had obviously discussed the case with Magistrate Watt. He sentenced Hill to the same three-year sentence as Goins and Goetz. Spotton was obviously furious at Hill and all his associates in their crime spree. “I will not lecture you or talk to you about the error of your ways – the sentence can speak for itself,” he told Hill. Like Goetz and Goins, Hill’s face expressed no emotion.
It would seem that for the victims of the robbery, the episode was a bitter lesson. It appears that they had visited a couple of bootleggers, and planned to stop later in the evening at a notorious house of ill repute that did a steady business in the 1920s on the eastern boundary of the Royal City. The robbery put an end to their escapade.
Though the robbers might have been foolish and inept, they managed to hide some of the $400 take. None of them would reveal where the money was. The police managed to recover $20 hidden in Harold Goetz’s shoe.
Wilfred Hill had spent a good portion of his share of the money, drinking himself into a stupor after spending the night at the notorious house that had been the destination of Chester McBain and Ernie Perriman.
The ill-starred Victor Goins had little fun with his share. When he had returned to Hamilton he went to one of the roughest of the speakeasies then in business there, and foolishly flashed the cash to anyone who wanted to see. Unsurprisingly, a short time later he was rolled for the cash by other patrons. He was badly battered when the Hamilton police picked him up and returned him to Guelph and a more safe and secure place in the city jail.
That was the end of the Guelph crime wave of 1924 and 1925. I have not attempted to trace the subsequent lives of the gang after their release from jail. I will leave that task to another researcher.
One of the more interesting aspects of this case is the range of ethnicities of the accused: a black man, an Italian, and a German, as well as three Anglo-Saxon men. Perhaps they were all misfits in the Guelph society of the 1920s, with similar backgrounds that placed them outside the mainstream.
Or perhaps they all sought lifestyles that were more exciting than a routine workday, and were drawn together by the small size of Guelph despite their various ethic origins.