community, would rather see the muscular man who preyed upon and brutalized so many smaller and weaker individuals than himself leave prison not in a cab, but a body bag.
“This is just one of at least three cold cases involving victims with ties to Toronto’s gay communities,” stated Xtra! following the unveiling of the clay reconstruction of the face of the Markham victim. “In two other cases, forensic sculptures, like the one of the Markham man, have led police to identify long-nameless victims.”7 As one of Canada’s leading gay and lesbian newspapers, Xtra! has published a number of stories over the years into the investigations of the murders of Hovey and Jones, and any possible connection to James Henry Greenidge, and the attacks on other young gay men in Toronto in the sixties and seventies.8
Back in 1977, Greenidge was transferred to a minimum security institution in Ontario. During that time, he went on numerous, unescorted weekend passes, presumably to visit a friend in Toronto. It is believed Greenidge only visited his friend one time, leaving many other weekends during that year unaccounted for.
Over the years, Greenidge, the model prisoner, has come up for parole a number of times. Although considerably older than he was in the late sixties during the Summer of Love, many police officers consider him as dangerous as ever if he is released back into society. Although police have re-interviewed Greenidge, he is unlikely to admit any involvement in the murders that occurred while he was free and out on the streets. If he killed these young men it will remain a secret, one he will take to his grave.
Back in 1967, Richard Hovey was just one of thousands who made the migration to Yorkville’s music scene. Some old-timers still remember him, the sharp-looking kid full of talent and musical promise. Back east, his former bandmates from Teddy and the Royals kept a reel-to-reel tape of their band practice from the mid-sixties. The reel was tucked away in an attic for decades and has made the technological transference over the years from reel-to-reel to cassette tape, then onto CD. It contains several original songs by members of the group, with titles like “I Love You So” and “You Say That You Love Me.” They were recorded over forty years ago, alongside cover versions of songs like “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles, and “Heart Full of Soul” by the Yardbirds.
In an old black and white photo, Hovey is pictured standing alongside his bandmates holding his prized guitar in his right hand. The instrument was his pride and joy. Although it was just a plain-looking electric guitar he’d bought at Sears, Hovey painted it white and modified it to look like an expensive Fender. Left hand in his pocket, he is pictured wearing a dark suit and white turtleneck, his hair is combed forward in a mod style. He has the wide-eyed look of a boy trying to be a man, someone whose life was full of promise. Friends suspected that dream would never come true when he failed to pick up his guitar from the Mynah Bird back in 1967. The people who knew him realized he would leave just about anything behind, but not his guitar, not even if his life depended on it.
While reconstructing the faces of these two dead boys, forensic artist Peter Thompson remained clinical and dispassionate. For him, Hovey finally became real when he listened to the CD of old some songs by Teddy and the Royals, recorded in mono, which have a haunted, otherworldly sound to them. “And that’s when I went, ‘Oh my God,’ because you’re hearing this man, Mr. Hovey, actually do something in the past. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and at no other time did I feel that way, until I heard him playing his guitar.”
After Hovey’s remains were identified, Thompson spent four hours — “from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.” according to his notes — carefully removing all the clay and hair from the skulls of the two young men he had so painstakingly applied, the boys who would later be identified as Richard “Dickie” Hovey and Eric Jones. Bit by bit, the clay and depth markers came off, until nothing remained but two whitish skulls, smiling up at him. By the time Thompson was finished, the remains looked exactly the way they did when he received them. The process of giving these teenagers their faces back had been meticulously documented on paper and in numerous photographs, from the moment they arrived at his office in boxes sealed with police tape to the moment of completion. It simply wasn’t necessary leave the clay in place any longer. Thompson worked on the two reconstructions for about a month while working on another major case, and now his job had come to an end. One thing was certain: he could not give these young men their lives back, but after forty years he helped give them their names. The skull and bones were no longer those of strangers, but two teenaged boys brutally murdered sometime during the Summer of Love.
Hovey’s remains were carefully packed into a box, sent back to his family in New Brunswick, and buried next to his mother and father. His killer remains at large, but at least now Richard James Hovey is home again.
Chapter 2 Catherine Edith Potter and Lee Rita Kirk (1971)
ALL MURDERS ARE MONSTROUS, yet it is especially disturbing when the lives of children are taken, the reason — if there possibly can be one — for killing them is left unanswered. Cold cases remain open in police files, but solving them often proves to be far more difficult than many of today’s television shows and movies would have us believe. Forensic technology has made tremendous advancements over the years, but the detectives who relentlessly pursued the original investigations retire, leads evaporate, and police are faced with the urgency of solving recent homicides. Older cases may not be entirely forgotten, but unless there are some new developments murders that took place decades ago continue to languish in cardboard boxes in police storage units, silently waiting for new information to come along.
Back in 1971 two teenagers — Catherine Edith Potter and Lee Rita Kirk — were found murdered in a gravel pit in Pickering, Ontario, the motives for their deaths unknown. The girls were young; Potter was just thirteen, while Kirk was fifteen. The media has a habit of playing up where a victim was found, and soon Potter and Kirk became known not by their names but where their battered bodies were discovered. The mystery of the Gravel Pit Murders was born.
As with any investigation, police needed to retrace the steps that could possibly lead these two youngsters to where their remains were dumped; a shallow, weed-filled pit about three miles north of the Highway 401–Liverpool Road cloverleaf. Detectives quickly learned both Catherine and Lee were wards of the Children’s Aid Society, and had been living in a group home on Rochelle Crescent in Toronto. The couple supervising the girls, Mr. and Mrs. Robert McMaster, said they were good kids who caused no problems while in the home, where they lived along with four other youngsters. Both girls were in school, Catherine in grade eight at Woodbine Junior High School, and Lee in grade nine at Georges Vanier Secondary School. Both were described as carefree, and got along well with others in class.
(Ontario Provincial Police)
Just fifteen at the time of her murder, Lee Rita Kirk was found next to her friend Catherine Edith Potter in a Pickering, Ontario, gravel pit on October 3, 1971. She had been beaten and strangled.
The evening of Friday October 1, 1971, the pair ate a spaghetti dinner at the home of their foster family. Leaving the house around 6:30, the girls got a ride with their foster father and were dropped off at the corner of Yonge Street and Finch Avenue in the north end of Toronto. All the residents in the group home were free to come and go, but they were expected to say where they were heading and what time they’d be back. The girls had made plans to visit Kirk’s biological father in Richmond Hill that evening, and said they would return home no later than 11 p.m. It was an exceptionally warm night for October, 76°F, and the pair were going to take a bus the rest of the distance. When McMaster said goodbye to the two, there was no way he could imagine it was the last time he would see them alive.
