HUNTER: North Bay killer who escaped terrorized cottage country in the summer of '75
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Carol Ann MacWilliams and her brother-in-law, Jack MacWilliams, were part of a rough party crowd who did their boozing at the Continental Hotel in North Bay.
But sometime during the summer of 1969, things soured. There were whispers that sex worker Carol was singing to the cops about the group’s criminal activities.
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That November, officers discovered the bodies of the MacWilliams, lying face down in about two feet of water in the North River. Carol was shot twice in the head with a .38 calibre revolver, while Jack had been shot through the mouth.
Both were very dead.
The investigation was stuck on cold until 1975, when the MacWilliams coterie of low-rent pals were arrested. One of the killers was hyper-violent Donald Kelly, 37, a lifelong criminal.
He had attempted to murder Carol Ann MacWilliams a month before the 20-year-old was shot to death putting him in the spotlight.
But on Aug. 2, 1975, while awaiting his murder trial, Kelly overpowered a guard and escaped from the North Bay Jail and vanished into the prodigious Northern Ontario bush. the North Bay Nugget reported that Kelly had a hit list of six cops he wanted to kill.
“He has said he has a score to settle with them,” Sgt. Ron Bailey of the North Bay Police told reporters at the time. “He is heavily armed and in his own backyard, which he knows like the back of his hand.”
Kelly stole vehicles and broke into cottages where he hid out.
More than 150 cops, using dogs, helicopters and roadblocks, spent days scouring the difficult terrain. Cottagers, tourists and locals alike went home or booked motel rooms, and panic was in the air.
Then, as today, the escaped killer’s mother could not understand how her boy could be involved in such violent events.
“He’s a good boy. I can’t understand this. I know he was bitter about some things, but I know he would never hurt anyone,” the devoted mother said.
But at one cottage, Kelly took 10 hostages. He released them unharmed.
Hostage Maureen Belanger, 20, of North Bay, said, “he was really good to us. One time, he laid a loaded gun on my lap while he loaded another gun he had. There was a lot of joking, and it seemed that he didn’t want to hurt any of us.”
But another said, Kelly warned his captives, “he had nothing to lose.”
For nearly a month, the double killer evaded the posse in the boreal forest. And the world was watching.
Finally, the dragnet tracked him to a cabin in Skead, about 30 km northeast of Sudbury. It would be here that Kelly would make his last stand in a blazing shootout with cops.
The desperado shot and killed an OPP police dog during the shootout before taking a bullet himself and surrendering. One former cop later quipped that there was more public outrage over the death of the dog than Kelly’s myriad other crimes.
Back in custody, Kelly was convicted in 1976 of robbery, kidnapping, forcible confinement and murder, and sentenced to life in prison.
Kelly died in a British Columbia prison in 2009 of natural causes. He was 71.
In North Bay, he is remembered for the wild escape from justice in the hot summer of 1975. The MacWilliams don’t seem to be remembered at all.
@HunterTOSun
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