Was there a prior Gay Village serial killer?

Seven men connected to area were violently killed between 1975 and 1978

Whoever killed nightclub manager Alexander (Sandy) Romeo LeBlanc clearly wanted to hurt him as deeply as possible.

LeBlanc, 29, was stabbed more than 100 times and severely beaten before his body was found by friends on the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 20, 1978, in his apartment at 16 St. Joseph Court (now Street). His home was near Studio II, a disco he ran in the Gay Village.

“That’s a classical example of overkill,” said Jooyoung Lee, a University of Toronto associate professor of sociology.

“The person committing that violence is going far beyond what it would take to kill that person,” said Lee, who teaches a course on serial homicides.

LeBlanc’s killing remains one of seven unsolved murders of men connected to the Gay Village from 1975 to 1978, according to police cold case files and media reports.

The seven cold cases connected to the Gay Village from 1975 to 1978 all showed extreme, upclose violence. All of the victims were stabbed, strangled and/or beaten. Some of them were also tied.

“Classically, you attack what you can’t stand within yourself,” said Kristopher Wells, an LGBTQ advocate and associate professor of health and community studies at Edmonton’s MacEwan University.

In LeBlanc’s case, his carpet was so drenched in blood it reportedly made a squishing sound when police walked on it. Bloody footprints led to a window and then an alley. Police following them never found his killer.

Decades later, serial killer Bruce McArthur preyed on men connected with the Toronto Gay’s Village, admitting to eight murders between 2010 and 2017.

McArthur pleaded guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 25 years. But he’s never been connected to the deaths in the 1970s.

Lee said it’s possible there was another serial killer preying upon the Village in the mid-’70s. “There could have been somebody else at the time,” Lee said. The victims could have been slain by different killers. Whatever the case, it’s a deeply troubling statistic. “This is a lot (of murders) within a relatively short time period within a small community,” Lee said.

The murders were committed at a time when the community was particularly isolated and vulnerable, Wells said. “In those times, it was very easy to prey on the people in the LGBTQ community,” Wells said.

LeBlanc was a well-known figure downtown, and his other clubs included Club David’s, at 16 Phipps St., near Yonge and Wellesley streets.

His murder set off waves of shock downtown.

The Body Politic, a now-defunct LGBTQ magazine, raised the serial killer possibility in February 1979 when it asked: “Could they have been committed by one man? The police aren’t saying. But the crimes do show a certain similarity.”

No link to McArthur was found in the other cold case homicides downtown, Toronto police acting Det. Sgt. Stephen Smith said in an email.

“During the Bruce McArthur investigation we commenced a cold case project and reinvestigated the murders of 22 men in the downtown core to ensure none had a link to McArthur,” Smith said. “None of the cases we investigated were considered linked.”

DNA evidence was found in four of those 22 cases, and none of that was linked to any other cases, Smith said.

Cases involving serial killers cases are rare and extremely tough to investigate, Lee said. Homicide departments typically lack officers experienced in such work. “They’re kind of learning on the go,” Lee said.

Wells added: “What we learned from the McArthur case is that people prey on the most vulnerable in our society.”

It wasn’t until 1969 that being gay stopped being a criminal offence in Canada, after then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau said: “Take this thing on homosexuality. I think that the view we take here is that there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Before 1969, sex acts between consenting same-sex adults were punishable by up to 14 years in prison, even when conducted in private. Non-heterosexuals in the public service, police and the military were subject to prosecution as “security risks.”

While it was a massive step forward, decriminalizing homosexuality didn’t suddenly change society. “A change in the laws doesn’t magically change peoples’ thoughts,” Lee said. “It takes a long time.” Gay bathhouses were raided in Toronto sporadically in the 1970s, culminating in 1981 with the largest police raid in Toronto history, called “Operation Soap.”

Some 300 gay and bisexual men were arrested under “bawdy house,” or brothel, laws. Most were eventually acquitted, but not before humiliation, job loss and even suicide.

“The police hunted and persecuted LGBTQ people,” Wells said. “The question is, whose lives matter in our society … For a long time, queer lives didn’t matter.”

That’s not just painful, but also dangerous, Lee said. “Dehumanization is a precursor to not only active violence, but passive violence like neglect,” Lee said, adding this can include turning a blind eye to the suffering of others, like murdered and missing Indigenous women.

The unsolved murders from 1975 to 1978 also include:

> Part-time University of Toronto history lecturer Arthur Harold (Hal) Walkley, 52, who was found naked and stabbed multiple times in his apartment on Borden Street near Bloor Street West on Feb. 18, 1975. His wallet and credit cards were stolen.

> CBC technician Frederick John Fontaine, 32, who was found severely beaten in the washroom of the St. Charles Tavern in the heart of the 1970s gay community on Dec. 20, 1975. He was treated for skull and facial fractures and died in hospital on July 15, 1976.

> Painter and decorator James Douglas Taylor, 42, was beaten to death with a baseball bat on Feb. 11, 1976, in his rental bungalow on Elmhurst Avenue in North York.

> Federal income tax employee James Stewart Kennedy, 59, whose naked body was discovered after he was strangled with a bath towel and beaten on Sept. 20, 1976, in his apartment on Jarvis Street, just south of Gerrard Street.

> Financial analyst Brian Dana Latocki, 25, who was tied to his bed, strangled, and stabbed on Jan. 25, 1977, in a one-bedroom apartment at 141 Erskine Ave., near Yonge and Eglinton. He spent his last night at the St. Charles Tavern.

> Loblaws accounting worker William Duncan Robinson, 25, was stabbed to death on Nov. 28, 1978, in an apartment near Bathurst Street and St. Clair Avenue. Police probed whether he met his killer at a gay bar in the Yonge and College streets area.

Wells noted that only one in 10 hate crime are reported.

He pointed to the 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, which stated: “Compared with heterosexual Canadians, sexual minority Canadians were more likely to report having been violently victimized in their lifetime and were more likely to have experienced inappropriate behaviours in public and online. At the same time, sexual minority Canadians were less likely to report having been physically assaulted to the police.”

Lee said society needs to get better at identifying bullying at a young age as there’s routinely a long trail of red flags before serial killers begin to take lives. By the time they kill, “it’s not the first time they’ve thought about it, fantasized about it,” Lee said.

Despite the grim statistics, Wells said things have improved since the mid-1970s when the Gay Village cold case murders occurred.

“I’m optimistic,” Wells said. “I like to think our society has evolved since the 1970s … Are we there yet with social equality? No.”