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Man Blown Up While Attempting to Rob Bank Unidentified 52 Years Later

Cat Leigh
True Crime by Cat Leigh
4 min readJan 7, 2025

“Paul Higgins” had six sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest when he tried to rob Kenora’s Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in 1973.

The masked robber holding a dead man’s switch between his teeth / CTV News

On May 10, 1973, a masked man carrying a pistol and a rifle entered the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Kenora, Ontario. He had a homemade bomb strapped around his chest, which consisted of six sticks of dynamite, and was holding a dead man’s switch between his teeth to detonate it.

The man ordered a dozen staff members to leave the bank and asked the manager, Al Reid, to call the Kenora Police Department. Al was put on the line with the Chief of Police, Webb Engstrom, and told him the robber wanted a 1/2-ton truck parked outside and a driver to come into the bank to help. The manager recalled,

“He didn’t seem hopped up or anything. I just tried to keep it cool. My main concern was that he kept those sticks tightly in his mouth, or in his fingers when he too[k] the thing out to give us orders.

I tried to talk to him, about where he came from and so on, b[u]t I didn’t get any answers. He seemed rational, but he didn’t seem to have any real plan.”

As police arrived at the scene and closed off the road, Constable Don Millard volunteered to go undercover as a driver. He changed into…

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