The unsolved murder of Carmine Lapello took place in 1917 but it is very much an active case as far as his family is concerned. The victim's grand nephew, Joe Lapello (himself a former Toronto taxi driver) has made it his mission to track down the killer or at least to learn more about the motive and circumstances that led to Carmine's death. Despite the passage of time Joe Lapello has turned up a number of intriguing facts about the murder and the police investigation that were not publicly known in 1917. However, before looking at these facts, it will be useful to begin with what readers of the Toronto papers learned about the crime in days following its discovery. Carmine Lapello, 20, began calling himself Tony Ross when he went into the taxi business. Like many other entrepreneurs he may have found his heritage to be a liability and that an English-sounding name made business dealings easier at a time when an indiscriminate hostility to "foreigners" was exacerbated by the war. He owned two cars, one of which was usually driven by an employee named Stanley Boulton. Although Mr. Lapello 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 Mr. Lapello in Mr. Lapello's car on the taxi stand just south of the King Edward Hotel. Pills went to school with Mr. Lapello and had known him for fourteen years. A couple approached Mr. Lapello's side of the car. As the woman stopped beside Mr. Lapello 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." Mr. Lapello's car was one of two green ones that frequented the stand, the other belonging to a driver named Frank Lumbard. Mr. Lapello told the woman that the man who drove her must have been "my driver, Edgar" (Edgar Bridges). Neither Mr. Lapello 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 Mr. Lapello said "I take them" and told the woman to get in. Just then another driver, Steven Jeans pulled onto the stand. Mr. Lapello 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 Mr. Lapello'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 Mr. Lapello'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. Mr. Lapello 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 Mr. Lapello 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. Mr. Lapello 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. [Next column]

Carmine Lapello. (Source: Toronto Daily Star, July 20, 1917, p. 1) She and others testified that after the annulment Mr. Lapello made harassing phone calls to her and her father and a male friend. Mr. Lapello once tried to scare off the man by pretending to be an agent of the Black Hand. A fellow driver claimed that Mr. Lapello 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 Mr. Lapello'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 Carmine Lapello, Harry Strom or John Rolland murders. The speculation was unsupported by evidence and the known facts of the case remained as they were in 1917. Now, nearly a century after Carmine's death, Joe Lapello has unearthed some interesting documents detailing the Ontario Provincial Police investigation. One document, dated August 11-12, 1917, reported a conversation that a Canadian Army Service Corps private had with a woman on a train from Montréal to Toronto. The woman offered the soldier $5.00 to pick up a trunk for her. She claimed that she was afraid to pick it up herself because about a week earlier she and her husband took a ride to a Toronto park in a taxi. During the trip the driver said something to make her husband angry and she left the car. The next day she learned about Carmine Lapello's death. The investigator who wrote the report was unable to trace the woman in Toronto and believed she had returned to Montréal. Another police report revealed the unpublished information that "the pants on the body were open in front and the shirt pulled up and the privates hanging out". Other documents reported on potential suspects: a man identified by an informant as the killer and a couple of female suspects who were thought to be the mysterious woman who drove away in Carmine Lapello's car. These new details raise more questions than answers but his analysis so far has convinced Joe Lapello that "This was no random act. I believe Tony was the target that night and that his murder was planned. The motive may have been revenge for something that he may have done to someone's wife." Anyone with information about the Carmine Lapello murder can contact Joe Lapello at joelapello@gmail.com.