The Hangman’s graveyard 15 men hanged at Toronto’s Don Jail and unclaimed

Forgotten Souls Beneath a Parking Lot: The Unmarked Graves Behind Don Jail

On a recent walk through St. James-the-Less Cemetery in Toronto’s Rosedale Valley ravine area, I came across a somber and largely forgotten chapter of Canadian history: the graves of 15 men who were hanged, unclaimed, and buried behind the Don Jail for committing heinous crimes prior to the abolition of the death penalty in Canada in 1976.

The existence of this graveyard was rediscovered in 2007 during an expansion of Bridgepoint Hospital. A survey from 1953 had noted the burial site, but over time it was all but forgotten, now lying beneath a parking lot on the hospital’s east grounds (see my photo of the current east section).

When archaeologists finally located the graves, they found that the coffins had eroded over decades, revealing 15 sets of human remains. All of the men were buried with their feet facing east, and each showed evidence of the “hangman’s kiss”—a clean break of the third vertebra, the hallmark of judicial hanging. Fourteen of the remains bore cranial autopsies, conducted at the time to study what pathologists called the “criminal mind.”

Among those identified was Jan Zlolko, an immigrant who arrived in Canada in 1914, hoping to build a better life and support his wife and child left behind in Poland. In a desperate act, Jan lured a man named Trendo, whom he befriended at a bar, with a promise of work in the developing Toronto suburb of Moore Park. An argument erupted as they walked along the Belt Line, ending with Trendo’s brutal murder—his head smashed with a hammer and $34 stolen. Jan Zlolko was hanged for this senseless crime four months later, leaving behind a grieving widow and child.

A hangman noose purportedly used in the Don Jail to hang Jan Zlolko in April 1915.

In 2008, all 15 men—including Jan Zlolko—were respectfully reinterred at St. James-the-Less Cemetery in a ceremony led by Dean Douglas Stoute of the Cathedral.