Also known as William Barilko, “Bashin’ Bill” Barilko

Bill Barilko scored the overtime goal in game 5 of the 1950-51 Stanley Cup playoffs to win the Stanley Cup.

Bill Barilko disappeared on a fishing trip that summer. Immortalized in a Tragically Hip song, the Toronto Maple Leafs did not win another Stanley Cup until his body was discovered in 1962.

The Leafs did not win a single Stanley Cup the entire time period in which Barilko was missing. Barilko’s mysterious disappearance was solved in the Spring of 1962, the same Spring that the Leafs finally won their eighth Stanley Cup. No one has worn the number five for the Leafs ever since.

Timmins Memorial Cemetery

On August 26, 1951, Barilko joined his dentist, Henry Hudson, on a flight aboard Hudson’s Fairchild 24 floatplane to Rupert House in northern Quebec for a weekend fishing trip. On the return trip to Porcupine Lake, the single-engine plane disappeared and its passengers remained missing. Eleven years later, in June 1962, helicopter pilot Gary Fields discovered the wreckage of the plane about 100 kilometres north of Cochrane, Ontario, about 56 kilometres off course. The cause of the crash was deemed to have been a combination of pilot inexperience, poor weather, and overloaded cargo.

Barilko is buried in Timmins, Ontario, Canada, at the Timmins Memorial Cemetery.