The man demanded that his shoulder bag and three duffel bags be filled with money. Inside the bank, police were already mobilizing. Constable Don Millard of the local force volunteered for an extraordinary assignment: he would pose as a getaway truck driver to get the robber outside and away from the hostages. The two men carried the heavy bags of cash out of the bank together. As they emerged onto the street, a police sniper fired. The shot killed the robber -- but it also triggered the dead man's switch. The bomb detonated on the sidewalk. Constable Millard survived, partially shielded from the blast by the large duffel bag of money he had been carrying. He recovered from his injuries and went on to a career as a firefighter. The street was showered with over $100,000 in cash. Remarkably, virtually all of it was returned.

The bomber's wallet yielded a pair of handcuff keys, 176 dollars, and a receipt from the Kenricia Hotel. The name and address he had given at check-in -- Paul Higgins, with a Toronto street address -- led nowhere. The remains of Old Port, Dutch Prince, and Teuros-Havanas cigars were found in his hotel room, along with the steamer trunk bearing the name P. Higgins. Nineteen-year-old Joe Ralko, who had seen the man around town in the days before the robbery, described him as being in his forties, with brown hair and a reddish-colored beard. But the perpetrator wore a mask during the robbery, and the explosion destroyed his features. A full set of fingerprints was circulated worldwide with no match. DNA testing conducted decades later also failed to produce an identification. An initial suspect was ruled out when DNA samples from his brother did not match crime scene evidence; that suspect was later found alive and well in France.

The unidentified man was buried in an unmarked grave in Kenora Cemetery, where he remains. The case has drawn periodic attention over the decades. CTV News documentary program W5 profiled the robbery in 1983 and revisited it in 2023, digging for new clues. Joe Ralko, the teenager who witnessed events leading up to the robbery, spent years researching the case and published his findings in 2017 as The Devil's Gap: The Untold Story of Canada's First Suicide Bomber. The Doe Network, an organization dedicated to identifying unknown persons, maintains an active case file. Despite fingerprints, DNA, witness descriptions, hotel records, and cigar brands, the Kenora bomber's real name remains unknown. The Lake of the Woods Museum in Kenora has featured an exhibit on the robbery, preserving the story as a significant chapter in the town's history.

Kenora is a small city of roughly 15,000 people on the north shore of Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario. It is a place better known for fishing, cottage country, and the Canadian wilderness than for violent crime. The 1973 bank robbery shattered that quiet in spectacular fashion. Live radio coverage captured the event as it unfolded, and recordings survive to this day. The story has the elements of a thriller -- a masked stranger, a volunteer constable, a sniper's bullet, a bomb blast, money raining down on the street -- but what has kept it alive for over fifty years is the unanswered question at its center. Who was the man who called himself Paul Higgins? Where did he come from? What drove him to walk into a bank in a small Ontario town with dynamite strapped to his body? The answers, if they exist, have not yet surfaced.