At about 11 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 18 1949 the owner of Roach's Taxi was in the dispatch office on the second floor of the Lyceum Theatre building when he heard a call over the public address system from the company's cab stand downstairs. The voice said simply "Cab!" Soon afterward 39-year-old Harold Hamilton returned from an airport trip and Roach directed him to pick up the fare at the cab stand. Mr. Hamilton subsequently radioed that he was "going out Dawson Road". A young woman acquaintance recognized Hamilton and waved at him as he drove by. She later reported that two men were sitting in the back seat. At about 2 p.m. separate telephone calls to Roach's Taxi and to the police reported an abandoned cab with its motor running parked against a pasture gate just inside the city's western limits. One caller said that his sons had seen the cab there while they played in a nearby field between 11:30 and noon. Mr. Hamilton's body was found face down at the edge of the private road about 200 feet from the taxi. He had been shot seven times in the back, neck and head, apparently while he lay helpless on the ground. No blood was found inside the taxi, but blood spots indicated that Mr. Hamilton had tried to escape by dodging around the taxi and then running down the road. His body had been dragged to the roadside. His empty wallet was later found in the area, along with five spent casings from a .22 calibre pistol. It was believed that Mr. Hamilton was carrying between $70 and $100 at the time of his death. Police were given descriptions of the men seen riding in the back of the taxi, along with a detailed description of a man seen waiting at the Roach taxi stand shortly before Mr. Hamilton arrived. The descriptions tallied with descriptions of two thugs who earlier attacked a young Winnipeg man on a freight train between North Bay and White River, Ontario. The young man was beaten unconscious and had his skull fractured by the two assailants who then locked him inside the boxcar. He managed to attract the attention of railway employees at White River who took him to hospital. Police believed the two men left the train at Port Arthur and then killed Mr. Hamilton. Born in Fort William, Mr. Hamilton was married with a sixteen-year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son. He had driven for Roach's Taxi for four years, briefly owning his own cab during that time. He was described as "a good living, steady, reliable driver, a good family man, and easy to get along with." He was normally assigned to airport runs; the cab stand pickup was the first such call he had handled in some time. [Next column]

Lyceum Theatre, circa 1937. Photo by G. Lovelady. Roach's Taxi waiting room is on the main floor to the right of the entrance. The dispatch office is upstairs. The Lyceum is now a historic site. (Source: Thunder Bay Museum, accession number 984.53.204 A.) The police commission and the Twin Cities Taxi Association each offered rewards of $500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Mr. Hamilton's murderers. In October 1968, searchers looking for a missing 13-year-old boy in the area near where Mr. Hamilton was killed discovered a .22 calibre rifle which was wrapped in a raincoat and partially buried. The rifle was sent to Toronto for ballistic examination to determine if it was linked to Hamilton's murder.