At the very end, I ask Murdoch if he hoped I wouldn’t write his story.
I felt a wave of darkness and regret.
He asked me not to do it. Give me a reason.
Ken Murdoch: Hamilton-born, living in Western Canada under a false name.
His memories include friendship and love. And beatings and murders.
In articles, he was called Mob Muscle, Hitman and contract killer; one of the most prolific in Canadian history, who brazenly executed a legendary criminal boss in a mafia war.
Over the years, I have interviewed half a dozen men who have killed.
I believed that I wanted to study the human condition. Maybe I wanted to feel restless.
Crime stories can offer rays of redemption in the dark if you look closely.
But where was the redemption, the higher level in Murdoch’s story?
Something else weighed on me, and it wasn’t the bloody book.
The killers I interviewed were fueled either by greed, extremist faith, rage or revenge.
And Murdoch? None of the above.
I talked to him on the phone for hours and urged him in my passive way – an old habit – to make me stop.
“I’m not hoping for anything,” he said in response to my question. “You’re from The Spectator. This is my hometown. I’m just telling you what you want to know. “
He did not ask.
He told me what I wanted to know.
And what I did not expect.
You can start the story in 1977: a mother and son riding in the Oldsmobile east on Highway 401, Lake Ontario filling the horizon, calm and blue and still as a picture.
It may not seem like an unusual scene, except that 15-year-old Ken Murdoch is behind the wheel. He has no license or experience, other than driving his second father’s car, Burt, in the driveway at the age of eight.
Ken’s mother invites him to walk past a large platform he is watching; for the first time he tried to cross the highway and pulled it.
He drove his mother three hours from Hamilton to Collins Bay Federal Prison in Kingston to visit one of her boyfriends, John Akister. Big John weighs six feet, 300 pounds and is serving 11 years for an armed robbery of a bank in Hamilton.
He is also like a stepfather. Eventually, Ken starts calling him “the old man.”
You can start the story 10 years earlier.
A shot echoes.
Red everywhere.
Murdoch is five or six years old and peeked out of his bedroom on the main floor of a house in Hamilton’s Lake Ontario beach area.
She sees him all over the kitchen.
A large glass bottle of Heinz ketchup shattered and was shot.
Big John and Burt are in the house drinking with Ken’s mother, Edna, as they often do.
Ken runs through the front door, down the boulevard, up the alley and hides under the parked car of neighbor Johnny Evans, who is half of the Love Brothers, a professional duo.
“I was a kid, I thought someone was dead,” Murdoch said.
He hides while Stan Murdoch comes looking for him. Stan is also a stepfather.
Ken Murdoch was born two weeks before Christmas in 1962. His home is in the shadow of Burlington Skyway, then four years old and not yet twinned.
The frequent humming of J-brakes, resembling a hammer, of trucks thundering over the bridge, was one of his earliest memories.
The beach, the huge sandy beach that separates Hamilton Harbor from the lake, has always been a separate community, with unique characters and close-knit neighbors.
There has long been an edge on the beach. Historically, it was an outpost, separated from the city, with its own police and residents who were called “swamp dwellers”.
The club of the first biker gang in Canada, the Red Devils, was located 200 meters down the boulevard from Murdoch’s first school. In 1984, the house was filled with 20 rounds of semi-automatic rifle, killing a motorcyclist standing at the bar.
Hamilton is a port city with a long history of organized crime, whose mafia families bear names such as Lupino, Papalia and Musitano.
In the 1920s, the ban spawned infamous local bootleggers such as Rocco Perry and Antonio Papalia, men who immigrated from the same region of southern Italy, smuggled alcohol into the United States by land and water, and expanded their drug and extortion businesses. .
Perry and Papalia worked side by side, but Papalia is said to have played a role in the rifle murder of Perry’s wife, Bessie, who was also his partner in the crime. In 1944, Perry disappeared, ending up, according to many, at the bottom of the harbor in cement shoes. Antonio Papalia’s 20-year-old son, Johnny Papalia, was rumored to be at fault.
Mafia violence will increase and decrease over the years, but never completely fade. In the 1970s and early 1980s, restaurant mafia explosions gave Hamilton a new nickname: “The City of Bombs.”
Murdoch, whose roots are Scottish-Irish, does not share blood ties with any of the criminal families. But one day he would feel an almost family bond of loyalty.
Beachfront resident Edna Godbout gave birth to her first child, a boy, by husband Stan Murdoch, but gave him up for adoption. When she was 20 and still with Stan, she became pregnant by a man named Jim, who drove a truck in and out of her life. She kept this second child and named him Ken.
She had a third child, a boy, with Jim again, and adopted him.
And then she and Stan had a girl and a fifth child, a boy, and she kept both.
Ken grew up with his half-brother and half-sister.
At various times, Stan lived in the house, as did Bert – who ran a beach boat business called Bert’s Boats – and John Akister, who shot the ketchup bottle.
All with One and the children under one roof.
“It was a strange situation,” Murdoch said.
He thought of Stan mostly as his father.
“Stan worked in Dofasco, he was a calm, excellent man. If he loses his temper, this is something you need to worry about. But man never did, that’s the job.
Jim, Murdoch’s biological father, never lived there. Murdoch saw him once or twice when he was little.
His mother was the only constant presence.
“When she wasn’t drinking, she was perfect. But when she drank, she was a vicious drunk. You had to put your finger in the water to check the temperature before approaching it.
She often hit Ken either with a broom or over the back of his neck with a strip of plastic trail from his Hot Wheels car kit.
He says Burt hit him too, though not as much as his mother.
When his mother bought his younger brother a bicycle, she warned him not to touch it.
The first thing that came out of the old lady’s mouth was, “I’ll kick your ass if I see you near the bike.”
He still drove it. She lost him and stabbed him violently. Bruises everywhere.
Stan pulled her away from me. I was six or seven. When he cleaned me, I remember her coming in and saying she was sorry.
He watched his mother and Burt fight. He saw her shoot and responded.
Not long after the ketchup bottle incident, Edna boarded Ken with a family who lived near the beach.
A year later, he returned, and she placed him in a new family, a 30-minute drive to a farm in Flamborough, northwest of Hamilton.
He liked it there. Every morning he traveled by bus to nearby Greensville School in Dundas.
And then his mother brought him back.
Murdoch did not know his grandparents. One didn’t seem to get along with her mother either.
Her mother, Hazel, a typical farmer’s wife, was about four feet tall, but she carried a big stick, this one.
One eventually married Burt, Stan left.
Big John Akister, meanwhile, was writing letters to One of the Prisons, and when he came out, Hamilton police detectives kept an eye on him.
“The cops came around the house, sat on the front porch and talked to the old man and the old lady.
The beach has some good memories of Murdoch. Simpler times. As a child, he set up skittles in the bowling alley at the beach amusement park.
Bert and Edna moved the family to the North End. Things have changed.
Murdoch was bullied in 5th grade at Centennial Elementary School. He was an easy target for the older boys: a newcomer to the neighborhood and an older child nearly six feet tall, but unwilling or able to fight back.
The boys continued to fight him at Ainslie Wood High School on Main Street West when it was a vocational high school for men in the late 1970s.
One day, when he was about 16 and his family lived on Burlington Street, Murdoch walked out the door of a variety store with a friend.
“I went out with an ice cream cone and went down the stairs, turned the corner and the next thing I know I’m on the ground. A man punched me in the back. “
As he focused, he lay on his back, the ice cream melting on his chest.
He felt as if a switch had rolled inside.
“It was the last straw. I had a samurai sword at home. I went, took it, and went to look for the man, but I did not find him.
“You want him dead, he’s dead.”
Murdoch took boxing lessons at a James Street North boys’ club and taekwondo and karate classes at Dan Warner’s gym on Barton Street East.
After graduating from high school, he took courses in fiberglass construction at Mohawk College to work in the boat business, which Bert sold to Ken’s son-in-law, a man Murdoch admired for his work ethic. He loved working for him, and that drove his mother crazy.
“She was angry that I was working there because I was not on her side. I said, “Which country?”
His mother started asking him for money. There was enough. He left his home and took an apartment.
In addition to learning martial arts, Murdoch lifted weights like a demon.
Eventually, in his 20s, he reached the point where he could push a 500-pound bench and squat 600, like a powerful footballer or bodybuilder.
But he didn’t hammer iron to prove how much he could lift, or for sports.
Murdoch was raised with violence that always hovered in his peripheral vision.
He became firm, quick and ready.
You can start the story on Saturday, …
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