Case #1: The triple-slaying of the Airst family

In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 30th, 1979, upper-middle-class couple Ike and Celia Airst, aged 55 and 43 respectively, and their son Avrom, 22, were viciously bludgeoned to death in their mid-Toronto home on the southwest corner of Glencairn and Englemount Aves (at the time the area was part of a separate city called North York). The Airst’s married daughter, Simmie, found the three bodies at 1 p.m. on Sunday when she came to visit. She ran across the street to tell neighbours.

The Airsts had somewhat controversial histories. Ike owned 31 commercial buildings in the city, including one that housed a gay bathhouse, which brought him some unwanted attention in 1977 after a boy was murdered by pedophiles in a seedy downtown body rub parlour. Additionally, in 1965, he and his brother had been publicly accused of being slum landlords. However, friends and people who knew him from his work doing repairs on his various properties said he was a hardworking, kind man. Celia was an ardent member of the Jewish Defence League, and had gained some notoriety in 1971 for heckling visiting Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in the name of her cause. Avrom lived at home with his parents and assisted his father with his maintenance work. A neighbour said the family was very private and “kept early hours”. Ike had suffered several strokes and a heart attack in recent years and was thus not in fulsome health.

Based on the daughter’s statements and the layout of the crime scene, police believe the crime transpired as follows: On Sunday evening, Celia and Avrom went out for dinner and drinks with Simmie and her husband. Ike decided to stay home and watch a baseball game. After enjoying dinner at Inn on the Park in the city’s east end, Avrom wanted to go home to tend to his father, who had a pacemaker. He was driven home, and then his mother left again with her daughter and son-in-law for drinks and a stroll in the Yorkville district. At almost 1:30 a.m., Celia was dropped off at her house. It was a foggy night. Police speculate she entered the house and locked the door, but opened it again when she heard a knock, perhaps thinking it was her daughter. She was immediately fatally attacked with a blunt instrument, and then the killer(s) went upstairs and killed Ike and Avrom in their bedrooms in the same manner. Celia’s body was found in the front hall, the men’s upstairs. The crime scene was saturated with blood.

There was no evidence of forced entry, and police determined it was unlikely that Celia would have opened the door to a stranger. Robbery was ruled out as a motive since nothing was taken. Although police probed possible political grievances or anti-Semitism as motives for the murders, no connections were ever established, nor was a link found to Ike’s business dealings. And police could apparently neither confirm nor dispel theories that this crime is related to the nearby murder of an elderly couple, Harold and Florence Fagan, in 1978 (I will consider posting this case in the future). Almost thirty years later, the Airst family murder remains unsolved.

Comments: The most informative article about this crime was published in the Toronto Star on September 30th, 1981. From what is publicly known, police didn’t make much headway in searching for suspects, but this is almost assuredly not a “random” crime. A question I have is why the bludgeoning of Celia in the front hall didn’t rouse the men upstairs from their sleep. It would probably have made quite a racket. Maybe the killer(s) was/were in the house already, and had killed Ike and Avrom, when Celia arrived home.

Below are aerial images of the location: