At about 2:30 a.m. on Monday, June 13, 1938, Sudbury taxi driver George Sogol was sleeping in his cab on his company's stand when two men rattled the locked doors in an attempt to waken him. Mr. Sogol was too sleepy to respond and the men walked across the street to a rival stand where Nick Loncar was parked. Mr. Loncar drove away soon afterward. Mr. Loncar was a popular member of Sudbury's Yugoslav community. When his empty car was found later Monday morning on Regent Street search parties made up of friends and acquaintances scoured the bush country outside of town. At about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday one of the searchers found Mr. Loncar's body on a little-used side road leading off the main Long Lake Road. Mr. Loncar was dead of a single gun shot that went through his nose into his head. He had also been badly beaten. Mr. and Mrs. J. Doughty had been homesteading for three weeks only a few hundred yards from where Mr. Loncar's body was found. Mrs. Doughty told police that on the morning of Mr. Loncar's death she and her husband heard people arguing and shouting. One of them was a woman. "She was saying she wanted to go home, and we thought she was drunk. Her language was so terrible, I turned to my husband and said 'Isn't it too bad to hear a woman using such language.'" Mr. Loncar had turned to taxi driving after being laid off the previous summer from the Coppercliff smelter. Two women claimed that Mr. Loncar had donated blood for transfusions that they needed. "Last spring when he gave me blood he saved my life," said Mrs. Mike Krivokuca. "And just at Christmas he gave me a pint of blood. He was the best-hearted man I ever knew."

Durham Street, Sudbury ON, circa 1940 (Source: Collection of Brigitte Labby via Sudbury.com, March 10, 2020) Police arrested two men for possession of a revolver, but they were evidently not involved in Mr. Loncar's murder. The following September a Sudbury meat market proprietor received a threatening note, crudely written in red ink, which said "You'll get the same as Nick Mr. Loncar, the taxi driver, got if you don't get out of town." In earlier weeks similar letters had been sent to a local miner and the manager of the credit bureau.