It was Friday night, August 27, 1965, and somewhere along Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, 32-year-old Leslie Alexander Bichener was spending part of his evening at the Danforth Hotel.
The hotel stood at the southwest corner of Danforth Avenue and Dawes Road in Toronto’s east end. It was an old neighborhood establishment with a history stretching back decades. By the mid-1960s, it was still operating as a hotel, offering rooms for rent and having, over the years, featured live entertainment.
What brought Leslie there that particular Friday night is unknown. Perhaps he was meeting friends. Maybe he was a regular. He could have stopped in for a drink or been staying at the hotel. None of those details appear in the information Toronto Police have made public, and after more than sixty years, much of Leslie’s life before that night has become frustratingly difficult to reconstruct.
What police do know is that sometime late that evening, Leslie left the Danforth Hotel. It was the last known sighting of him alive. After he walked through those doors, his trail disappears. Saturday came and went with no publicly documented sighting of Leslie. Then Sunday passed.
Whether anyone was searching for him during that weekend isn’t clear. We don’t know if Leslie was expected home, whether he had plans with friends or family, or if anyone immediately realized something was wrong. Somewhere during those missing hours, however, something terrible happened.
On Monday morning, August 30, at approximately 10:00am, Toronto police received an emergency call that brought officers to the vicinity of Dawes Road and Danforth Avenue. There, inside a vehicle, they found Leslie. He was dead.
Investigators determined that he had suffered blunt-force trauma, and his death was classified as a homicide. But there was something particularly strange about where Leslie was found. The Danforth Hotel—the place where he had last been seen on Friday night—stood at Danforth and Dawes. Three days later, Leslie’s body was discovered inside a vehicle in the vicinity of that very same intersection. Despite the missing weekend separating his disappearance from the discovery of his body, geographically, Leslie may not have travelled very far at all.
Exactly where the vehicle was located has not been revealed in the modern Toronto Police cold-case summary. Neither has one potentially crucial piece of information:
Who owned the vehicle?
Police don’t say whether it belonged to Leslie. They don’t say whether it belonged to someone else, whether it was parked near the hotel, or whether investigators believed it had been moved before Leslie was discovered. We also don’t know whether Leslie was attacked inside the vehicle. He may have been killed somewhere else and placed inside it afterward. Alternatively, whatever confrontation resulted in his death could have happened right there.
The surviving public information simply doesn’t tell us. There is, however, another intriguing detail in the Toronto Police record.
Although Leslie wasn’t discovered until August 30, police list the date of his homicide as August 27, 1965 the same Friday night he was last seen leaving the Danforth Hotel. That could indicate investigators had evidence suggesting Leslie died shortly after he was last seen. Perhaps the condition of his body allowed authorities to estimate his time of death, or perhaps investigators uncovered information during the original investigation that established a more precise timeline.
But Toronto Police haven’t publicly explained the reason for the date, so it remains impossible to know exactly what they learned. If Leslie was indeed killed on August 27, another unsettling question emerges.
Where was he during the following two days? Was the vehicle sitting near Danforth and Dawes throughout the weekend with Leslie already inside? Was it somewhere else before being moved? Did anyone walk past it? Did anyone notice it?
Someone eventually made the emergency call on Monday morning, but the identity of that person and what prompted the call aren’t included in the publicly available case summary. For investigators in 1965, answering these questions would have depended largely upon traditional police work. There were no cellphones to track Leslie’s movements. No GPS records. No text messages revealing who he planned to meet. No widespread surveillance cameras capturing the entrances and parking areas surrounding the Danforth Hotel. Modern DNA profiling didn’t exist.
Detectives would have relied heavily upon witnesses and whatever physical evidence could be recovered. Someone inside the hotel may have seen Leslie that evening. Perhaps someone spoke with him. Someone might have watched him leave. Maybe a patron remembered seeing Leslie with another person, or someone living nearby noticed an unfamiliar vehicle.
Those conversations and witness statements may still exist somewhere in the original investigative file. But whatever investigators learned wasn’t enough to bring Leslie’s killer before a court.
And as the decades passed, Leslie’s murder slowly became a cold case. The buildings changed. The neighborhood changed. Detectives retired. Witnesses grew older. Some undoubtedly died. Yet the case remained.
As of today, Toronto Police list the murder of Leslie Alexander Bichener as Homicide #10/1965.
No killer has been publicly identified.
No motive has been publicly established.
No one has ever been convicted of his murder.
Perhaps the saddest part of Leslie’s story is how little readily accessible information survives about the man himself.
We know Leslie was 32. We know where he spent part of his final evening. We know where he was last seen. And we know how he died.
But we don’t readily know where he worked, where he lived, whether he was married or had children, what he enjoyed doing, or who was waiting for him to return home. There were once people who could have filled pages with stories about Leslie. They knew his personality and his habits. They knew what made him laugh and what irritated him. They knew the sound of his voice.
Somebody may even have known why he was at the Danforth Hotel that Friday night.
More than sixty years later, much of that has disappeared from the public record, leaving behind a photograph, a handful of facts and a homicide number. But Leslie was a person before he became a cold case. And on the night of August 27, 1965, he walked out of a Toronto hotel believing, presumably, that his evening would continue like any other. Something happened after he stepped outside.
Maybe someone was waiting for him. Perhaps he encountered someone shortly afterward. Maybe an argument began somewhere near the hotel or inside the vehicle where he would eventually be found.
There are countless possibilities, but without evidence, they remain only possibilities.
What is known is much simpler. Leslie Alexander Bichener walked out of the Danforth Hotel late on a Friday night. By Monday morning, he was dead inside a vehicle near the same intersection, the victim of blunt-force trauma. Somewhere between those two moments lies the missing piece of Leslie’s story. Someone knew what happened after he left that hotel. Someone knew how he ended up inside that vehicle.
And someone knew why a 32-year-old man who went out on an August night in 1965 never came home. More than sixty years later, the person responsible has never been brought to justice.
The murder of Leslie Alexander Bichener remains unsolved.
Sources: Toronto Police Service, Toronto Journey 416, Lost Toronto, Toronto Online
Someone Saw Something 