What Happened to Mickey? The Life and Death of Donald “Mickey” McDonald, Public Enemy No. 1
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by Peter McSherry
Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2013 352 pp., illus., $24.99 paperback
Donald John McDonald was born in Toronto in 1907 and would become better-known as Mickey. Peter McSherry’s book What Happened to Mickey? traces McDonald’s life and his criminal career.
By February 23, 1939, McDonald had spent seven of the previous fifteen years behind bars. “His known associates are practically all criminals and prostitutes, and to my knowledge he has never been engaged in any legitimate employment,” reported Chief Inspector John Chisholm of the Toronto Police Department. After he was charged with the cold-blooded murder of bookmaker Jimmy Windsor, McDonald became public enemy No. 1.
McDonald was subsequently kept busy with two murder trials, a liquor truck hijacking, and a $50,000 bank roberry. In August 1947, he made a daring escape from Ontario’s Kingston Penitentiary along with two other prisoners. He was the only one not to be caught.
McSherry’s book is divided into two sections: The first chronicles McDonald’s life up to 1939 and his marriage to Kitty Cat McDonald, while the second deals with his life after the Windsor murder. The book ends by offering different versions of what might have happened to Mickey McDonald — one of which, McSherry believes, answers the question of the criminal’s disappearance and purported demise.
Lovers of gangster movies, crime books, or Canadian history will all find What Happened to Mickey? an entertaining and absorbing read.
— Beverley Tallon (Read bio)
Beverley Tallon is a freelance writer and the former Assistant Editor for Canada's History.