CANADA Canada - Ambrose Small, 56, Toronto, 2 Dec 1919

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http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1891dmon.html

Ambrose Small
Missing since December 2, 1919 from Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Classification: Missing





Vital Statistics
  • Date Of Birth: 1863
  • Age at Time of Disappearance: 56 years old
  • Height & Weight: He was short.
  • Distinguishing Characteristics: His hair had started to gray and recede and he had a "walrus" mustache. His face was always reddened by broken blood vessels, the result of too much drinking. He was a daring gambler and a notorious womanizer who wore fancy clothes.




Circumstances of Disappearance
Ambrose Small, the Canadian entertainment figure, vanished on December 2, 1919 and his disappearance was sensational and mystifying that it made a permanent mark on North American history.
Small went to work at the age of 13 in his father’s modest establishment, Toronto’s Warden Hotel. As he grew older, he began managing the hotel bar and booking entertainment for the customers. In addition to working for his father, Small also took a part-time job as an usher at the Grand Theater. He slowly worked up the ranks to assistant manager and then booking manager, arranging for florid and spicy melodramas for the venue. These programs met with much success and Small began to prosper. He also began to buy interests in small theaters in and around Toronto.
Small also began to acquire a couple of different reputations. One of them was as a daring gambler. He was never afraid to bet huge sums on races and while he always paid off when he lost, he was not above being involved in fixed races either. He started to gain a number of enemies in racing circles and in his romantic life as well. He was also a notorious womanizer. He was often seen squiring young and beautiful women about town, especially the gorgeous showgirls who worked the local theaters. He left many a hopeful starlet feeling both used and disappointed when he moved on to another attractive lady.
This is why it must have come as a great surprise when the rakish Small, just before his 40th birthday, suddenly married Teresa Small, the wealthy heiress to a brewing fortune. What did not come as a surprise though was when Small began to use Teresa’s money to purchase scores of small theaters and to book the biggest-named talent that he could find into them. Small finally had his fortune and he finally realized his dream of owning the Grand Opera House. Within a few years, Small began to grow tired of his marriage and secure business life and he began gambling and seeing women again.
As his fortunes grew, Small continued to make enemies. He made his prejudices well known to anyone who would listen, even strangers. He disliked children, Catholics (which was interesting considering that hi wife was a devout Catholic) and the poor and felt that giving anything away to a charity was foolish. By the late 1910’s, the high life began to take its toll on Small.
In 1919, Small and Teresa began negotiating the sale of the Small chain of theaters to a British-owned firm, Trans-Canada Theaters Limited. The deal was concluded on December 2, 1919 and the Small’s received a check for $1 million, with an additional $700,000 to be paid to them in installments over the next five years. The husband and wife endorsed the check and deposited it in their account at the Dominion Bank at 11:45 in the morning.
That afternoon, Small told his lawyer, E.W.M. Flock that he planned to inform his secretary John Doughty that not only had Doughty been retained by the new firm as a secretary and booking manager, but he would see a substantial increase in salary. Attorney Flock saw Small again later that evening (around 5:30) at the Grand Opera House. Small was in a fine mood, laughing and smoking cigars to celebrate the sale of the chain. He spent a few minutes with Small but then left to catch a train. As he walked out of the front foyer of the opera house and into a driving snowstorm, he looked back and waved at the smiling Small. It was the last time that he would ever see his client.
A short time later, Small also left the opera house. Bundled up against the biting wind, cold and snow, he made with way to the corner of Adelaide and Yonge, ducking into the shelter of a newsstand operated by Ralph Savein. The newsstand owner knew Small well as he habitually checked the racing results in the paper each day. Small always picked up the paper around 5:30 when it arrived by train, however on this day, the papers had not been delivered because the train had been delayed by a terrible snowstorm in New York. Savein said that Small cursed bitterly over the lack of the paper, which was something that he had never heard him do before. Small then trudged off into the snow and as he made his way down the block, Savein saw his form fade away into the blowing storm. He was the last person to report speaking with Ambrose Small.
Several days passed before anyone realized that Small had disappeared. His wife and friends were so used to his dalliances and gambling that they guessed he had simply gone out of town for a few days. They wanted to ignore his shortcomings so badly that they never dreamed he could have met with foul play. Once his disappearance became official though, the authorities launched the biggest manhunt in Canadian history.
As the hunt for Ambrose Small continued, many began to fear that the theater magnate had been murdered. A man named George Soucy, a publishing house employee, reported that he had seen Small being forced into a car on the evening of December 2. Also, on that same night, a caretaker named Albert Elson insisted that he had seen four men burying something in a ravine just a short distance from Small’s home. A cleaning woman, Mary Quigley, swore to police that she had seen a notice pinned to the wall in the Convent of Precious Blood, located on St. Anthony Street, which requested “prayers for the repose of the soul of Ambrose J. Small” several days before the public or the press knew that he had vanished! These turned out to be some of the best leads that the police had but they were among the hundreds that actually came in. The authorities conducted a painstaking search for the missing man. Every business in Toronto was searched and all six cities where Small had theaters were scoured for clues. Toronto Bay was dredged several times and the basement of the Small mansion on Glen Road was excavated. The search continued for years and even as late as 1944, investigators were still digging up the basement of the Grand Opera House, hoping to find Small’s bones. They also tore up the floor boards and pried off wall panels in the search. Years later, a second-hand story emerged that a local fruit vendor had witnessed a man stuffing something down the theatre's coal chute. The story was partially backed up by a stage hand who claimed some particularly pungent fumes belched out of the theatre's chimney on the evening of December 3, 1919 -- the night after Small disappeared. Police reportedly sifted the Grand's huge furnace for human remains, but without success.
After 1919, Ambrose Small was “spotted” in hundreds of places from owning a hotel in South America to living it up in France with a girl on each arm and a champagne bottle gripped in each fist. A psychic envisioned him buried in the Toronto city dump. An old friend claimed to catch a glimpse of him on the street in London. The magician Harry Blackstone swore that he spotted Small gambling in a Mexican cantina. Regardless, the courts pronounced him officially dead in 1923.
The Case of Ambrose Small was officially closed in 1960. But even then, the police were still receiving and investigating letters purporting to disclose Small's burial location. As late 1965, Toronto Police detectives inspected a possible grave site in Rosedale Valley.
By 1970, the story was reaching mythical proportions: the ghost of Ambrose Small was reported haunting one of his former properties, the Grand Theater in London, Ontario and is credited to have saved the theatre's most prominent architectural feature from unintentional demolition. It's difficult to know how the Grand got its reputation for being haunted, but by the late 1940s part of its heritage included the legend that Small's spirit walked the stage after every opening night. Toronto-born comedian Beatrice Lillie supposedly saw the ghost beckon to her during a May 1927 performance.
What really happened to the theater mogul remains anybody’s guess and the mystery of Ambrose Small will undoubtedly live on for many years to come.
 
What an interesting case! I had never heard of it before.

Apparently police had evidence that Small's wife was implicated in the (alleged) murder of her husband but there was a cover-up, at least according to a police detective's report dating from the 1930's, due to the fact that Small's widow was from a very wealthy family and part of the social elite. More info here:

http://www.russianbooks.org/small.htm

Unfortunately the whole thing was tainted with sectarian disinformation and the main "evidence" against Theresa Small was the fact that she was Catholic and wealthy which was viewed as a suspicious combination in a city largely populated by descendants of Irish Protestants at the time. It was no different here btw, remember what happened with NY Governor Al Smith's presidential campaign in 1928.

I guess Theresa did have many reasons to want her less-than-exemplary husband dead but so did a few mobsters apparently, and by focusing the attention to her through titillating articles in the papers that went as far as publishing ridiculous claims that even the Prime Minister of Canada -who incidentally was Catholic- was implicated in a cover-up the local media derailed the investigation making it next-to-impossible to get to the bottom of the story. The fact is that all subsequent serious inquiries into the matter have cleared Small's wife.

small-posterW.jpg
 
Wonder if his gambling debts were bigger than anyone knew? It doesn't sound like he walked away with any money - the proceeds of the sale went into the bank. I wonder if the money was controlled by the wife - if she cut him off without a way to pay gambling debts? That certainly could have been fatal to her husband without getting involved in any kind of conspiracy.

Or, perhaps he froze in that snowstorm and was unrecognizable by the time his body was found. If he froze in the snowstorm, could he have been buried by a snow pile and stayed there until spring?
 
Wonder if his gambling debts were bigger than anyone knew? It doesn't sound like he walked away with any money - the proceeds of the sale went into the bank. I wonder if the money was controlled by the wife - if she cut him off without a way to pay gambling debts? That certainly could have been fatal to her husband without getting involved in any kind of conspiracy.

Small was already wealthy when he married, the sale appears to have concerned properties that he already owned, but perhaps it would have been useful to have accountants look things over after his vanishing.

Or, perhaps he froze in that snowstorm and was unrecognizable by the time his body was found. If he froze in the snowstorm, could he have been buried by a snow pile and stayed there until spring?

Toronto has the same climate as Chicago, there is snow but it often melts and doesn't pile up that much. Even then, with all the hype surrounding Small's disappearance any unknown body would have been scrutinized for identification purposes I guess. Unless he fell into the river or the lake. It's quite intriguing.
 
https://www.amazon.ca/Missing-Millionaire-Ambrose-Obsessed-Finding/dp/0771025173
51oSIR0tUmL._SX334_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

"In December 1919, Ambrose Small, the mercurial owner of the Grand Opera House in Toronto, closed a deal to sell his network of Ontario theatres, deposited a million-dollar cheque in his bank account, and was never seen again. As weeks turned to years, the disappearance became the most "extraordinary unsolved mystery" of its time. Everything about the sensational case would be called into question in the decades to come, including the motivations of his inner circle, his enemies, and the police who followed the trail across the continent, looking for answers in asylums, theatres, and the Pacific Northwest.

In The Missing Millionaire, Katie Daubs tells the story of the Small mystery, weaving together a gripping narrative with the social and cultural history of a city undergoing immense change. Daubs examines the characters who were connected to the case as the century carried on: Ambrose's religious wife, Theresa; his long-time secretary, Jack Doughty; his two unmarried sisters, Florence and Gertrude; Patrick Sullivan, a lawless ex-policeman; and Austin Mitchell, an overwhelmed detective. A series of trials exposed Small’s tumultuous business and personal relationships, while allegations and confessions swirled. But as the main players in the Small mystery died, they took their secrets to the grave, and Ambrose Small would be forever missing.

Drawing on extensive research, newly discovered archival material, and her own interviews with the descendants of key figures, Katie Daubs offers a rich portrait of life in an evolving city in the early twentieth century. Delving into a crime story about the power of the elite, she vividly recounts the page-turning tale of a cold case that is truly stranger than fiction."
 
Grand Opera House (Toronto) - Wikipedia
The Grand Opera House, circa 1885, by F.W. Micklethwaite
Book Available October 22, 2019

Hogtown Empire - The Disappearance of Ambrose Small


"Hogtown Empire is a true-crime adventure story. Ambrose Small and his wife, Theresa, were wealthy entertainment impresarios who owned a prominent chain of theatres in southern Ontario. On December 2, 1919, the Smalls banked a cheque for $1-million, a down-payment on the sale of their theatrical empire. That night, as dusk fell, Ambrose disappeared into the darkness and was never seen again. What happened? Was he murdered? Did he disappear of his own volition? No body was ever found and, as far as anyone can tell, he took none of his money with him.

Geordie Telfer is an Emmy-nominated, Canadian Screen Award-winning multi-media writer. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books for various imprints of Folklore Publishing in Edmonton, including: Real Canadian Pirates, How to Speak Pirate, A Dictionary of Canadianisms, My Canada, 1001 Awesome Things About Canada, and Mysterious Ontario.

Hogtown Empire brings together years of research and unearths old documents not seen in public for years. It includes interviews with handwriting experts, psychics, private detectives, writers, musicians, and descendants of key players in the real-life mystery."
 
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Wondering if AS is somewhere in the Rosedale ravine... imo, speculation.
Huge article (book excerpt) in Toronto Star.rbbm.
He was a scoundrel with a jealous wife and a troubled mistress. He made the deal of a lifetime — then vanished | The Star
By Katie Daubs Adapted from The Missing Millionaire Sept. 6, 2019
"Ambrose had made a few enemies over the years. When he was a boy, his father ran the hotel and saloon next to the theatre, and as a teenager, Ambrose worked behind the scenes of the Grand as an assistant treasurer. Ambrose was ambitious, and after a few decades he owned the Grand, and controlled a network of theatres across Ontario. Some said he’d backstabbed his way to the top, but he had plenty of admirers. He was a good friend if he liked you, a “very vindictive man” if he didn’t, and downright “nasty” if you went behind his back.

Back in 1902, Ambrose married Theresa Kormann, the daughter of a local brewing family. The newlyweds moved into a mansion in Rosedale, and travelled the world by steamship."
snip>>>>>>>>>>>

"It was a bright night, and a dusting of snow glittered on the ground. Downtown, Hamlet cast a spell over the crowd at the Royal Alex, Charlie Chaplin’s plasticine face was sending audiences into hysterics at the moving picture houses, and Follies of Pleasure was titillating the crowd that went in for that kind of thing at the Star Theatre. From the edge of Bloor St., where the city dipped abruptly into a forested ravine, Elson saw a car driving along the road below, on the way to the dump. The car stopped under a lamppost and four men dragged a rather cumbersome lump from the car. Elson was curious, but a fence blocked most of his view. When they returned to the car emptyhanded, he went back to flooding his rink."
 
Dec 3 2019
Lengthy article
Why the long-ago murders of two tycoons in Canada haunt us still - Macleans.ca
"Daubs also covers the nitty-gritty of the era well, with a sharp eye for details. As a flashy, younger rich man, Small was an early car enthusiast—he tended, in fact, to buy a new one twice a year—and one of his vehicles was among the first in the city, with Small’s chauffeur at the wheel, to strike and kill a pedestrian. And then there’s Daubs’ entertaining account of how Jack Doughty, Small’s private secretary and a chief suspect in whatever happened to the impresario, conducted the 1919 equivalent of those how-to-kill-your-spouse Internet searches that prove so damning in contemporary trials: he asked almost every acquaintance he encountered in the days before Small’s disappearance, “How would you kidnap an abusive employer?”

"In Small’s case, Daubs essentially opts for the conclusion reached by the Ontario Provincial Police’s 1936 examination of the record: in all probability, Small’s wife, Theresa, was the brains behind his disappearance (and death), Doughty was the muscle, and investigating police detective Austin Mitchell the useful idiot"
 
I dunno why but i'm trying to figure out if he looks like a man that was hit by a car 10 years later near Los Angeles... Is there a chance he left of his own accord?
CASE NUMBER - 2229UMCA
Interesting find!
"Date of Discovery: October 22, 1930
Location of Discovery: Verdamont San Bernardino County, California
Estimated Date of Death: Minutes before found
State of Remains: Recognizable face
Cause of Death: Auto/pedestrian accident

Physical Description
Estimated Age: 55-65years old
Race: White
Gender: Male
Height: 5'8", Estimated
Weight: 180 lbs, Estimated
Hair Color: Gray or Partially Gray
Eye Color: Hazel
Distinguishing Marks/Features: Beard"
 
Whilst it is unlikely we will ever know what happened, I am surprised at how little the issue of prohibition comes up in the various theories. Ontario had prohibition from 1916 to 1927, but with breweries and distilleries allowed to function for export. US prohibition came into effect in January 1919 (just after he went missing). Theresa Small's family owned a brewery. Ambrose Small had numerous criminal associates. And Ontario was a jumping off point for running alcohol into the States during prohibition, organised by mob figures like Rocco Perri based in Ontario. The timing of his disappearance (just when the mob would have been organising for prohibition) combined with his milieu makes me think that this would have been a strand worth looking into.

Pure speculation, but as good as anything else I have seen.
 

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