The Dick Affair

No one knew why Evelyn MacLean,/- 26, sultry-eyed, black-haired, good-looking, had married John Dick, 40, a Hamilton, Ont. tram driver. The only explanation she gave was that "he was a lovely fellow. He used to call and help me with the dishes. He brought soap chips." Nor did there seem to be much reason why hardworking John Dick had married her. Five days after her marriage (in October 1945) she committed adultery. Shortly after, she and John separated.

Yet no one pried into the Dick family affairs until John Dick's crudely hacked body, minus legs, arms and head, was found one day last March on a mountain side a few miles from Hamilton. He had disappeared from his cousin's house, where he lived, a week or so before, on March 6.

Bones in the Cinders. Police learned that Evelyn had borrowed a Packard sedan from a garage proprietor on that day, had returned it later with the front seat covered with blood. In the car, police found John Dick's blue sweater. Out in the back yard of her home, police found bits of human bones mixed with some cinders from the furnace. In her attic, encased in cement in an old suitcase, was the partly mummified body of a baby boy. So the police asked Evelyn some questions.

Yes, she said, she had been friendly with one William Bohozuk, 27, a husky laborer and onetime Leanders Club oarsman. Yes, she and Dick had separated and Bohozuk was the principal reason. Then police arrested Evelyn, Bohozuk and Evelyn's father, Donald MacLean, 68, and charged them all with Dick's murder.

At Evelyn's trial last week hundreds of Hamiltonians, carrying their lunches, pushed and shoved to get in. Meticulously the Crown paraded such revolting exhibits as Evelyn's blood-soaked galoshes, 60 little neatly labeled boxes of bones and bits of teeth. Evelyn's mother told how she had once questioned Evelyn about John Dick's disappearance, was told that Dick was dead, and "to keep my mouth shut."

Salmon in the Cell. Evelyn did not act like a woman on trial for her life. She yawned, drew sketches. In her cell between sessions she burbled delightedly: "I get salmon salads . . . everything I like." She asked for magazines: "You know, love stories. ... Lots of them." She got fan mail, a dozen carnations, a card reading: "Happy Returns."

She concocted several versions of how her husband had been killed. First, it was by "a gang from Windsor," then by a gang hired by Bohozuk. Her final and "corrected" version was that Dick had been killed by Bohozuk himself under the prodding of her father, who paid him $300 or $400 and lent him a gun because "he hated John's guts." In some of the versions, she admitted that she had driven the car (as charged), had had a hand in disposing of the body.

After nine days and 42 witnesses, the case went last week to the twelve-man jury, which needed only an hour and 52 minutes to decide that the Crown's story was the correct one. The verdict : "Guilty." Ontario Supreme Court Justice F. H. Barlow pronounced sentence: ". . . solitary confinement until the seventh day of January, when you shall be taken to the place of execution and there hanged by the neck until dead." (A woman has not been hanged in Canada in eleven years. But four women were under sentence of death in the Dominion last week.) The trial of Bohozuk and Evelyn's father opened next day, then was postponed because Evelyn refused to testify against them.

/- Not to be confused with Washington, D.C. Hostess (Father Struck It Rich) Evalyn Walsh McLean, no kin.

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