BUXBAUM o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2007-11-03 published
Convicted wife-killer
BUXBAUM dies in jail
By Joe BELANGER, Sun Media, Sat., November 3, 2007
Helmuth BUXBAUM, a church-going, millionaire nursing home operator
whose double life of sex and drugs imploded with the contract
killing of his wife, has died.
Focus of one of Canada's most sensational murder trials in the
mid-1980s, he died in prison at age 67.
An official at Warkworth Institution near Peterborough said
BUXBAUM
died Thursday after being transferred to Kingston Penitentiary
Regional hospital because of unspecified health concerns.
Free
Press reporter Chip
MARTIN, who covered
BUXBAUM's trial
that ended with a life sentence for the murder of his wife, Hanna,
said he was struck by
BUXBAUM's double life. "On the one hand,
he was a very good family man, a very good businessman and, on
the surface, a very religious man and a leader in his faith community,"
said MARTIN.
"That he had a dark side to his personality -- that he could
hang around a bunch of low-lifes and let them exploit him for
money in exchange for drugs and sex -- was a real revelation,"
said MARTIN, author of Buxbaum: A Murderous Affair.
During the trial,
BUXBAUM, who had built a Komoka-based nursing
home empire from scratch, was described as a cocaine addict who
preferred the company of young prostitutes and was desperate
to do away with his wife, whom he found dull and unattractive.
MARTIN offered another description of Hanna.
"His wife was a wonderful woman and mother who stood up to him
and paid the price with her life."
BUXBAUM reportedly sold the business before his conviction for
$23 million.
The Crown's case centred on money, saying nearly $2 million had
disappeared from
BUXBAUM's bank account and that he had recently
taken out a $1-million life insurance policy on his wife.
Hanna BUXBAUM, 48, was shot in the head by a gunman at the side
of a highway in July 1984 while a nephew, Roy
BUXBAUM, sat in
the car.
They had stopped, supposedly to help people having car troubles.
It was later learned
BUXBAUM planned the killing earlier in the
day, but it was foiled when a police cruiser pulled up after
the cars had stopped on Highway 402.
They left and drove to Pearson International Airport to pick
up a nephew. The shooting was staged when they returned later
that day.
BUXBAUM denied he hired a drug dealer as the hit man.
But at trial, drug dealer Rob
BARRETT testified
BUXBAUM offered
$25,000 plus expenses and a house for someone to kill his wife.
BARRETT said he offered the contract to Pat
ALLEN, another London-area
drug dealer.
ALLEN, sentenced to eight years, testified he agreed
to perform the killing, but backed out and let Gary
FOSHAY take
over.
FOSHAY was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to
life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
In a later appeal, rejected by the Ontario Court of Appeal, the
defence argued
BUXBAUM was insane at the time of the killing
because of a stroke suffered two years earlier.
The▼ nephew, Roy, who later sued
BUXBAUM, could not be reached
for comment.
Despite being behind prison walls,
BUXBAUM never quite faded
from the limelight, his name regularly resurfacing in the media
as recently as January 2005 in a documentary about his lawyer,
Eddie GREENSPAN, and
in June 2000, when a reporter wrote about
BUXBAUM advocating for the rights of seniors in prison.
In that story,
BUXBAUM said he still dreamt about reconciliation
with his six children and his grandchildren, but knew it wouldn't
be easy.
"After so many years, it's like I don't exist," he said. "I'm
an inconvenience. They've built their own lives and their own
careers. They don't need me."
In the article,
BUXBAUM complained about life in prison, especially
for seniors.
"There▼ is no mercy in Canada,"
BUXBAUM said.
"We've lost our mercy, and these old people must die a lonely
death in prison."
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BUXBAUM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-03 published
Hired wife's killer, jailed millionaire dies
By The Canadian Press, Page A12
Kingston, Ontario -- Helmuth
BUXBAUM, a millionaire Ontario nursing
home operator convicted in 1986 of the contract killing of his
wife, has died.
Warkworth Institution, southeast of Peterborough, Ontario, said
in a release yesterday that Mr.
BUXBAUM, 68, died Thursday after
being transferred to Kingston Penitentiary Regional hospital.
Cause of death was not given.
Mr. BUXBAUM was sentenced February 13, 1986 to life imprisonment
for the murder of his 48-year-old wife and business partner,
Hanna, after a 68-day trial filled with lurid testimony from
a rogues gallery of hookers and drug dealers.
Mr. BUXBAUM, an outwardly respectable churchgoer, was an acknowledged
cocaine addict with an appetite for young prostitutes. Testimony
indicated he also had a bank account from which $2-million had
vanished, and he had recently taken out a $1-million life-insurance
policy on his wife.
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BUXBAUM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-13 published
He was a pillar of society who put a contract on his wife
In 1984, he arranged the attack, delivered his wife to the scene
of the crime and watched her plead for her life before being
shot in the head in front of their 14-year-old nephew
By Noreen RASBACH,
Page S8
His 68-day trial was nothing less than a Canadian sensation,
with newspapers detailing the unlikely ways he used cocaine and
the lurid testimony about his unseemly trysts with prostitutes.
In the end, the verdict was quick and damning: The jury took
only 12½ hours to find Helmuth
BUXBAUM, then 46, guilty of first-degree
murder for arranging the 1984 contract killing of his wife and
business partner, Hanna.
He didn't just arrange the attack, but drove her to the scene
of the crime and watched her plead for her life before being
shot in the head. The murder took place at the side of a highway
near their home in Komoka, a small town outside London, Ontario
The couple and their 14-year-old nephew, Roy, stopped to help
the occupants of a car that appeared to have broken down. They
were immediately ambushed. When a gunman pulled Hanna out of
the car, the long-suffering wife of Helmuth
BUXBAUM looked at
him and said: "Please honey, no, not this way." She was 48.
"It was a big deal at the time; it was a huge story," said Heather
BIRD, who covered the trial for the Toronto Star and wrote a
book about the case, Conspiracy to Murder: The Helmuth Buxbaum
Trail. "It was also a really, really sad story and a very seedy
story."
Prominent Baptist
The▲ tawdry details that came out in Mr.
BUXBAUM's trial were
in stark contrast to his reputation: Successful businessman,
prominent Baptist, devoted family man. He and his wife had built
a business operating nursing homes that had made them millionaires,
while also raising six children, one of whom was an adopted daughter
from Costa Rica. "He was well-known in the community," recalled
Greg CALCOTT, the investigating officer in the case who recently
retired from the Ontario Provincial Police. "He was wealthy and
an absolute pillar in the church."
For her part, Mrs.
BUXBAUM was known for her extensive charity
work. "She was legitimately loved and respected in the community
as being the exemplar Christian woman," Mr.
CALCOTT said. "She
used to stop street people and buy them clothing.
"That, in contrast to his hypocrisy, brought a lot of interest"
to the case, he added.
The case may have been irresistible, with its sex, drugs, money
and religion, but Mr.
BUXBAUM wasn't. The man who was repeatedly
unfaithful to his wife almost from the start of their marriage
was anything but charming.
"There▲ was nothing charismatic about Mr.
BUXBAUM that I saw,"
Ms. BIRD said.
Mr. CALCOTT agreed. "He came across as arrogant, but he also
came across as very childlike - and I don't mean that in terms
of innocence. [He had] a kind of naive understanding of what
was happening."
That led to his being taken advantage of by the drug dealers
and prostitutes with whom he associated. "He liked the idea of
being a big-time operator," Mr.
CALCOTT said. "I know that Robert
BARRETT [who was convicted of conspiring to kill Mrs.
BUXBAUM
after testifying he hired the killers] used to get him $1,000
of cocaine and Mr.
BUXBAUM would pay him cash.
BARRETT would
get the cocaine and keep three-quarters of it and give the rest
to Helmuth, saying that's what $1,000 of cocaine would look like.
Of course, he had nothing to compare it to, so he took it on
faith.
"I think that everyone in that group who was dealing with him
was ripping him off one way or another," Mr.
CALCOTT said.
In 1982, after suffering a stroke, Mr.
BUXBAUM's behaviour spun
out of control.
By the end of the trial, the entire country knew all the sordid
details - that he had sexual relations with more than 100 prostitutes
(sometimes two or three at a time), that he wanted to have sex
with young girls and boys, and that he was a regular user of
cocaine which he injected into his ankle and even his penis.
The court heard, too, that he disparaged his wife to the prostitutes.
"Even though he did have all that money, there was nothing glamorous
about him or his story," Ms.
BIRD said.
Helmuth BUXBAUM grew up in Germany as the youngest in a family
of 10 children. At his trial, he recounted how his family spent
some time in refugee camps; when he came to Canada at 19, he
arrived with no money and only one pair of shoes.
He went to work and studied, part-time, for his Grade 13 diploma.
In 1960, he met Hanna
SCHMIDT, after being introduced by his
parents. They had a lot in common, especially their Baptist faith
and hard childhoods. Hanna, who was born in Poland, stopped her
formal education at 8, when she was sent to a Russian concentration
camp with her mother and brother. She was to spend five years
in camps, before being released and eventually reaching West
Germany, and later Canada. When Helmuth met her, she had already
spent seven years working at a meat-packing plant in Kitchener,
Ontario
They married in June, 1961, with dreams of becoming medical missionaries.
Two years later their son Paul was born, and not long after that
Mr. BUXBAUM finished his diploma and decided it was time to go
to medical school. The family moved to London, where he enrolled
at the University of Western Ontario as a pre-med student. By
Christmas he had dropped out of the program, saying it was too
difficult. Instead, he pursued a bachelor of science degree,
which he received in 1967.
All that time he was supported by Hanna, who scrimped and saved
and managed to purchase a house, then a three-suite apartment
building and a farm. Eventually, the couple went into the nursing-home
business, where they made their millions.
They▲ raised six children, with Mrs.
BUXBAUM fighting to keep
the family together despite her husband's repeated romantic dalliances.
In June, 1984, he packed his bags but she persuaded him to stay.
A month later, on July 5, 1984, she was shot by the side of the
road.
A little more than two weeks later, on July 23, the police charged
Mr. BUXBAUM with murder.
Children Devastated
The shooting devastated his children. The older ones appeared
frequently at his trial, but weren't in court to hear the guilty
verdict. Their family friend and pastor, Rev. Douglas
DAKIN,
who was looking after the children during the trial, said at
the time that the children "didn't know what to say" about the
verdict. "They didn't know what to do if he got out, and they
didn't know what to do if he stays in." Reached this week at
his home in Komoka, Mr.
DAKIN refused comment on both his and
the children's behalf. "They all decided not to say anything."
After Mr. BUXBAUM's conviction on February 13, 1986, the case
became even more provocative. During the trial, he had not allowed
his first lawyer, Edward
GREENSPAN, to play up the fact that
he had suffered a stroke and how it had affected his ability
to reason. Later, he hired another legal heavyweight, Clayton
RUBY, who persuaded him to base his appeal on it. Mr.
RUBY argued
that Mr. BUXBAUM's stroke had rendered him mentally disabled,
and that he was insane when the murder occurred. The proof? Mr.
BUXBAUM's
refusal to allow an insanity defence to show that he was, in
fact, insane. The Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the
case, which effectively ended Mr.
BUXBAUM's appeal options. Requests
to various justice ministers to review the conviction were denied.
Back In Court
There were other legal battles, too: He took on Mr.
GREENSPAN
to get back some of the $1-million-plus he had paid in legal
fees (which his lawyer James
CARTHY suggested were the highest
ever in Canada.) Mr.
BUXBAUM lost.
He was sued by his brother for involving his nephew in the shooting
scheme - and for the teen's "severe and traumatic mental and
emotional upset and nervous shock" after witnessing his aunt's
murder. The nephew won $400,000, which was reduced by $65,000
upon appeal.
Mr. BUXBAUM also fought for control of his wife's $2.8-million
estate, objecting to his children's plan to invest the money
in Florida real estate.
In the early 1990s, he gave a number of interviews from prison.
He complained he had not had a fair trial. He was pursuing yet
another attempt to get a justice minister to review his case.
He believed he should be the subject of a royal commission.
At Kingston Penitentiary, his prison job was to wash convicts'
underwear; when he moved to the medium-security Warkworth Institution,
he learned to use a computer and tutored illiterate prisoners.
He married again while in prison, but the marriage didn't last.
Not a lot was heard from Mr.
BUXBAUM until 1993, when papers
around the country ran a story about a personal ad in placed
in the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper. The man who arranged
a hit on his wife, watched her get shot in the head, and shattered
his family of six kids in the process, was seeking a new companion.
Describing himself as "a Christian, generous, caring, loving
man," he was seeking someone who was pregnant or had a baby recently
but had no man in her life. He was willing to be "a supporting
father for your child and a husband-father for yourself."
It's not known whether there were any takers.
Helmuth BUXBAUM was born on March 19, 1939 in East Prussia, Germany.
He died of undisclosed causes on November 1, 2007, at Kingston
Penitentiary regional hospital, in Kingston, after being transferred
there from Warkworth Institution, near Peterborough, Ontario
He was 68. He leaves six children, sons Paul, Mark, Phillip and
Daniel, and daughters Esther and Ruth.
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BUXTON o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-12-28 published
MAITLAND,
Donald "
Don" McFaul
At the Collingwood General and Marine Hospital on Wednesday December 26,
2007. Donald McFaul
MAITLAND of Clarksburg, in his 79th year.
Beloved husband of the former Nan
MUSGRAVE, of Clarksburg. Father
of Marsha WATTS
(Tony) of Sunderland; Christopher (Penny) of
Collingwood and Charles of Ravenna. Grandfather of Trevor, Virginia,
Meghan, Claire, Laura, Tyler and Eric. Predeceased by a sister
Frances. The family will receive Friends at the Ferguson Funeral
Home, The Valley Chapel, Thornbury on Sunday from 2-4 p.m. Members
of Royal Canadian Legion, Branch #281 Beaver Valley will conduct
a memorial service at the funeral home on Sunday at 1 p.m. followed
by a Masonic service, Beaver Lodge, Thornbury #234 at 1: 30 p.m.
A funeral service will be conducted at St. George's Anglican
Church in Clarksburg on Monday December 31st at 1: 30 p.m. with
Canon William
BUXTON officiating. Interment of cremated remains
will take place at Thornbury-Clarksburg Union Cemetery at a later
date. As your expression of sympathy, donations to the Canadian
Diabetes Association would be appreciated and may be made through
the funeral home.
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BUXTON o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-27 published
SKELLY,
Vlasta
Beloved mother of Andrei
SULZENKO, generous and loving grandmother
of Alexa and Ben
SULZENKO, glorious mother-in-law of JoAnne
SULZENKO,
Tracy PATTERSON and Joseph
SKELLY, Michael
SKELLY, Sylvia
BUXTON
and their children, Sebastian and Jocelyn, and sister of Boris
KERSTING.
Died peacefully in Toronto at Perram House early on
Sunday, November 25, 2007 after a struggle with cancer.
Vlasta was an astute consumer credit manager, an award-winning
bridge player, a fine cook and baker, an avid reader of fiction
and "The Economist", and a tennis aficionado. She was predeceased
by her husband, Joseph (Zefi)
SKELLY, and by his sister, Zina
PRISTER.
The family thanks Elizabeth
TANASKOVIC,
Tracy
PATTERSON and Felix
KREICHMAN for their Friendship and support. The family is grateful
to Perram House and Toronto Western Hospital for their compassionate
care. Donations in Vlasta's name to Perram House, 4 Wellesley
Place, Toronto, M4Y 2K4, are welcome. At her request, there will
be no service, and cremation will take place. A celebration of
Vlasta's life will be held at a later date.
Vlasta was a beautiful, sweet woman, who made few demands on
life, and whose petite shoes will be impossible to fill.
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