“You cut off his legs..
You cut off his arms...
You cut off his head...
How could you Mrs Dick?
How could you Mrs Dick?”

In March of 1946, schoolyards across Hamilton, Ontario would be hearing this song from their students for months after the disembodied torso of John Dick, a street car conductor, was found at the side of what Hamilton locals refer to as “the Mountain”. The body (well, body part) was found by a group of five children, who first believed what they’d seen to be a headless pig. The other body parts were nowhere to be found, and investigators found a deep wound in the abdomen that led them to believe the murderer had attempted to cut the torso in half. 

Dick’s cousin, Alexander Kammerer, told investigators that Dick had been missing for ten days, and had been living with him since his marriage had failed. Dick’s marriage had been far from conventional—him and his wife Evelyn lives in separate homes for a month into their marriage before Evelyn purchased a home for them, leaving Dick’s name off of the mortgage. The two lived together, along with Evelyn’s daughter from a previous relationship, in a house on Carrick Avenue for only about three months before Dick left. 

Unsurprisingly, Evelyn quickly became a suspect in the investigation, behaving incredibly strangely when investigators questioned her. She brushed off their questions, proceeding to tell a bizarre story about an Italian hit man coming to their door and threatening to “fix” Dick for “messing around with his wife”. Evelyn’s story became even stranger after police found blood covering the front seat of a car she’d borrowed, with seat covers missing and bloody clothing in the back of the car. Evelyn’s response? The blood belonged to her daughter Heather, who had cut herself. She then told police that she had received a call from a man claiming Dick had gotten a woman pregnant and that he would “get what was coming to him”. Even stranger, apparently this man also asked her to borrow a car, which she actually agreed to; when the man showed up, he carried a large sack which he claimed contained Dick’s remains. 

Evelyn Dick continued to bring the police on a wild goose chase, even adding another Italian hit man, hired by her former lover Bill Bohozuk, to the story—but it was all for nothing. While Evelyn was dragging the police around Hamilton, officers investigating the Dicks’ home found a suitcase filled with both concrete and the remains of Evelyn’s infant son, who had been born two years prior. The rest of the evidence was found in Evelyn’s father Donald McLean’s basement: a revolver, saws, and Dick’s bloodstained shoes. 

Evelyn Dick, Bill Bohozuk, and Donald McLean were all charged for the murder of John Dick. 

Why did they do it? It’s unclear whether any of Evelyn’s stories had truth in them, but while she may not have been the one to actually kill and dismember John Dick, she was responsible for the death of her son, for which she was sentenced to life in Kingston’s Prison for Women. Unfortunately, she only served eleven years of this sentence, after which she was paroled and never heard from again. 

Sources:
1. The 'Torso' Murder. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060902232234/http://home.cogeco.ca/~mrcarle/evelyn.htm.
2. https://evelyndick.com/

Kira Frazer

The 30 rats in a trench coat that form the entity known as Kira Frazer emerged from the sewers on Halloween of ‘97, and have been wreaking havoc upon humanity ever since. She hopes to be the first rat-formed-entity to get a college diploma.