Ws thread for the other murdered couple referenced in link below..
CANADA - Florence, 63 & Harold 64,Fagan, Toronto, 6 March 1978
Dec 5 2021
Two midtown Toronto families killed at home, a year apart. What, if anything, connects their ‘overkill’ murders?
''Isaac (Ike) and Celia Airst, aged 55 and 43 respectively, lived in a midtown Toronto home on the southwest corner of Glencairn and Englemount Avenues with their son Avrom, 22.
A retired homicide investigator told the Star at the time that the Airst murder “looks too much like the Fagans’ to ignore the similarities.”
Both couples had long-standing marriages, and the Airsts were getting ready to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Again, there were no signs of forced entry.
Again, there were suspicions that the victims might have known their attacker or attackers.
How else could the killer get inside?
The Airsts were known for valuing their privacy, and it wasn’t unusual for all of their three second-storey windows to be covered by blinds and for the main floor windows to be blocked by curtains. And Celia Airst routinely used an intercom at the front double doors to screen visitors.
The order of the murders wasn’t immediately clear.
The men were bludgeoned to death upstairs in their bedrooms. Celia Airst was bludgeoned and stabbed in the back just inside the front door.
Were the men killed first in their bedrooms, with Celia walking in on the crime?
Or was Celia was killed first, the attacker or attackers moving quickly, so that the Airst men didn’t hear the noise and come downstairs.
There was a major difference between the Airst and Fagan murders.
There was something methodical about the Airst family killings, while the Fagan killer or killers seemed to have been in a major hurry.
Nothing appeared disturbed in the Airst residence, although their half-ton truck was missing from the driveway.
Investigators wondered if antisemitism was involved in the Airst murders. The family had been slain on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Celia was active for Jewish causes, and had worked for the Holocaust committee and for a couple of years with the Jewish Defense League.
“She was active in many charitable causes,” Rabbi David Monsson of Beth Sholom Synagogue told The Star. “She was always taking an interest in good causes.”
That explained how Celia made the news in October 1971 when she and another supporter disrupted a dinner for Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto.
They chanted “Freedom! Freedom!” and unveiled a red banner with the words, “Let My People Go,” in reference to Soviet curbs on emigration to Israel.
After Celia was ejected from the event, she told The Star that Kosygin had “got a good idea of democracy in action.”
“We got through security with ease,” she said. “We had no plans to do anything violent. We just wanted to hold up the sign.”
She was also involved in trying to persuade the Canadian government to act against Nazi war criminals from World War II.
Their son Avrom also had strong political views. At 13, he requested that funds for his bar mitzvah should be spent to plant trees in Israel rather than on gifts or donations to himself.
Isaac Airst had the reputation of being a kind, low-key man who didn’t flash his money. He dressed in baggy work pants and rubber boots, and he and Avrom routinely arrived for work in a half-ton truck.
Like Harry Fagan, he had worked his way up in the world.
Isaac Airst had left school at 14 so that he could help support his family, using his bicycle for jobs like delivering newspapers and prescriptions for a pharmacy.
“He had a strong sense of obligation to his father, who was not well,” his sister Sylvia told The Star. “He wanted to help — our father was a furrier, and furs were not selling well in those days.”
Isaac Airst repaired Corvette warships for the Navy in World War II. After the war, he worked in a family business retreading auto tires before getting into real estate and scrap metal.
He was a strapping man, but didn’t likely put up much resistance to any intruder who entered the family home on Sunday, Sept. 30, 1979 — he had a bad heart and had suffered a stroke.
Again, it was massive overkill.
Eventually, police grew to think the cases weren’t connected, despite any outward similarities.
“We do not consider the two cases linked,” acting Det. Sgt. Stephen Smith of the Toronto police cold case squad said in an email.
“As for possible motives, they are tenuous at best but it is believed the Fagan case was directly related to Mr. Fagan’s business dealing while the Airst case appears to be more of a robbery scenario,” Smith said.
The Fagan and Airst murders remain unsolved.''