Murder memories still fresh
The murder of a little boy that shocked Red Deer citizens more than 40 years ago still remains vivid in some people’s minds.
Michael Clancy was six years old when he was strangled by a neighbour on the way home from a trip to the Dairy Queen. It was Sept. 17, 1965, and the boy was just a few blocks from his house, at 5051 43rd St. in Red Deer when he was killed by a neighbour.
His murderer, Robert Harold Billyard, 63, died in a Bath, Ont., prison on Thursday. His motive was never revealed.
“I choked him to death,” Billyard would tell police, after being taken into custody.
There was drizzle in the air the night of the murder, according to Advocate archives and Red Deer Historian Michael Dawe.
Shortly after supper, the Clancy boy dressed in a blue football helmet, a red parka, a pair of jeans and rubber boots and walked from his home, which rested where the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre parkade sits now, to the Dairy Queen in the same lot where it is today.
A neighbour saw Robert Harold Billyard and Michael Clancy talking.
James Walker Tiffin, was on his way to buy a pack of cigarettes from a store when he saw Billyard and the little boy talking. Tiffin was the witness who connected the dots for police, linking Billyard and the Clancy boy.
Harry Ford, now in his 60s and a Red Deer retiree, was a young constable, working with the Red Deer City RCMP at the time of the murder. He was just 22 years old and in his second RCMP post. He was stationed at the Peace River RCMP detachment before coming to Red Deer between 1964 to 1968.
Ford found the young boy’s body the morning after he went missing.
“We were doing a search in back of his residence, up in the bush behind the hospital,” he said. Officers first found a pair of rubber boots, a sock and a football helmet belonging to the boy in bush around 10-feet south of the lane behind the houses, not far from the boy’s home.
Minutes later Ford found the boy’s body at around 8 a.m. on Sept. 18, 1965, around 50 feet further south.
“I’m six foot five, so I was walking down a trail and I could look over the bush and I found him hidden,” Ford said. “He looked like he had been thrown into the bush because it didn’t look like there was any trail going in there.”
Ford protected the scene as officers waited for the RCMP’s Forensic Identification Section to collect evidence.
Once the little boy’s body was found his father Jacob Clancy wanted to go to the body, but he wasn’t able to because he couldn’t disturb the crime scene. “He was pretty distraught,” Ford said. Police had to hold the father back.
“It’s something you never forget about,” Ford said. “It’s just one of those things in your career you remember.”
Red Deer was a small community, with just over 25,000 people in the 1960s and only around 24 RCMP members.
Red Deer Historian Michael Dawe was just 10 years old. He remembers going on the occasional trip to the Dairy Queen, not far from where the boy’s body was found.
Dawe said as a child it really struck him because he and Clancy shared the same first name. He said it was shocking because the little boy had gone to buy an ice cream in a very safe neighbourhood, in a very safe community, and he didn’t come home.
“It was just a very sad story and a real shock in the community because that sort of thing just didn’t happen here,” Dawe said. “It’s every parents worst nightmare. Your kid is fine. You think they’re safe, especially when they’re in a stable neighbourhood, where everybody knows everybody, and then suddenly your child has vanished and then they find them dead.”
Billyard — known as Bill Sherwood in Red Deer at the time — was taken into custody by police. He was originally from Dunnville, Ont. — a community on the north shore of Lake Erie. He was unemployed and lived in a boarding house, near the Clancy boy’s home.
Officers asked Billyard why he did it and if the little boy had made him angry. “No, I don’t think so, I don’t know why I did it,” Billyard told police, when questioned shortly after the murder took place.
Billyard told police he met the boy on the street at around 7:50 p.m., the boy followed him to the car and “Then I choked him to death.” Billyard then returned home to 5063 43rd St. in Red Deer to watch TV.
Before the murder, Billyard had spent time at the Alberta Hospital in Edmonton and in Ponoka, with psychiatrists diagnosing him as having a “severe character disorder.” During the trial, his defence attorney argued that he may have choked the boy unintentionally while undergoing an epileptic seizure and experiencing “automatic behaviour patterns”, a condition where the person doesn’t have control over what they are doing.
Billyard was sentenced by Justice J.V.H. Milvain on Feb. 18, 1966, to life imprisonment for what at the time was called non-capital murder.
Billyard would make headlines again in 1973 when he escaped from a Saskatchewan prison while on an escorted temporary absence pass.
The Clancy boy had two siblings, a brother and a sister. Clancy’s mother Theodora died in 1986 and his father Jake or Jacob died in 1990. Both are buried in the Red Deer Cemetery, next to their son Michael.
sobrien@reddeeradvocate.com
