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Carman ("Tony Ross") Leapello
Toronto, ON / June 19, 1917
Carman Leapello, 20, began calling himself Tony Ross when he went into the taxi business. He owned two cars, one of which was usually driven by an employee named Stanley Boulton. Although Leapello was the owner the company was registered in Boulton's name.
At about 12:30 on the morning of Friday, July 19 taxi driver Fred Pills was sitting with Leapello in Leapello's car on the taxi stand just south of the King Edward Hotel. Pills went to school with Leapello and had known him for fourteen years.
A couple approached Leapello's side of the car. As the woman stopped beside Leapello the man continued around to the rear of the car and stood with his back to it. His cap was pulled down and his collar turned up.
The woman's large straw hat had a drooping trim that obscured most of her head. Pills couldn't see her hair or much of her face but he noted that she had prominent front teeth. Pills remembered having seen the woman before. She was "sloppily" dressed in a loose, untidy black skirt. The man was shabbily dressed in grey and had a hump on his back. He did not appear to be a foreigner.
"I want to go to High Park in the green car with the white stripe," the woman said. "I was out in the car with the white stripe two nights ago." Leapello's car was one of two green ones that frequented the stand, the other belonging to a driver named Frank Lumbard.
Leapello told the woman that the man who drove her must have been "my driver, Edgar" (Edgar Bridges). Neither Leapello nor Pills was keen to take the High Park trip and they argued about it briefly. Pills had just finished a four-hour drive and had a headache.
Finally Leapello said "I take them" and told the woman to get in. Just then another driver, Steven Jeans pulled onto the stand. Leapello looked at him as if to ask if he wanted to take the couple. Jeans later testified that he would have taken them but the male passenger shook his head and pointed at Leapello's car. Pills last saw them driving west on King Street. He went home about five minutes later.
Sometime between 5:15 and 5:30 a.m. a workman found Leapello's body on Salisbury Avenue about 50 yards north of Queen Street. His car was parked in the middle of the road about 25 feet away. Leapello had been stabbed fifteen times in the back with a stiletto. His right lung had been punctured twice and his body, which was lying on a blanket, was still warm when police arrived. The post-mortem examiner thought that Leapello could not have been dead more than an hour and a half when found.
Early that morning a nearby resident had heard two men arguing in what he thought might have been Italian. Then, about 4:35 a.m., he heard the sound of a car driving past his house.
Leapello was married three years earlier to the daughter of a university professor but the marriage had been annulled after a year because both of them were under 18. She and others testified that after the annulment Leapello made harassing phone calls to her and her father and a male friend. Leapello once tried to scare off the man by pretending to be an agent of the Black Hand.
A fellow driver claimed that Leapello himself had received an unsigned letter in February threatening his life if he did not stop talking to the police. The letter came from Montréal and was addressed to "Miss Margaret Mulvaney", his former wife.
Police offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of Leapello's killer but the case remained unsolved. In August, 1923, the Toronto Star reported that a former British sailor convicted of killing a London taxicab driver had spent time in Canada and speculated that he might have committed one or more of the Carman Leapello, Harry Strom or John Rowland murders.
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