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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Celebrating Confederation: Three Hangings in the First Year

  2 The Deadly Game of Hangman

  3 The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery

  4 Crowd Control

  5 The Hangman’s Job

  6 Treason: The Case Against Louis Riel

  7 The Petticoat and the Noose

  8 The Science and Art of Hanging

  9 Arthur Ellis: Canada’s Most Famous Hangman

  10Reasonable Doubt

  11The Troubling Case of Wilbert Coffin

  12Steven Murray Truscott: A Kid on Death Row

  13The Last Women to Hang

  14The Last Drop

  15Under Lock and Key

  16The End of the Rope

  17Beyond Death Row

  18Britain Heads Toward Abolition

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Bibliography

  Image Credits

  Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

  — W.H. Auden , from “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” published in Harper’s Magazine , May 1948

  Author’s Note

  F or the names of people and places in this book, I have generally followed the spelling found in Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867–1976: An Inventory of Case Files in the Fonds of the Department of Justice , Government Archives Division, National Archives of Canada, 1994. I do deviate from this rule, however, when other reputable sources point to a different option.

  Another word on spelling: John Robert Radclive was a prominent Canadian hangman in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some sources give his last name as Radcliffe or Ratcliff, but the name is spelled Radclive in this book.

  The terms “gaol” and “jail” are variants of the same word, signifying a prison for the detention of people awaiting trial or with sentences of less than two years. Whether a specific prison is named a gaol or a jail depends on generally accepted usage: for example, Ottawa has its Carleton County Gaol as opposed to Toronto’s Don Jail.

  I plowed through many statutes and other government documents in my search for materials for this book. Fortunately, I came across a medley of more exciting sources as well. Archival newspapers, for one. In earlier times, both before and after the advent of newer media such as radio and television, people depended on print media, particularly newspapers, for reports on local and world events. These papers, many of which are now available online, serve as a mine of information for modern researchers. Tucked into the reams of virtual newsprint, I found glittering nuggets of information, such as the description of a notorious hangman who snored like a “traction engine” the night before a hanging, or the fact that an axe killer was possibly insane but generally all right, except when he had been drinking, or the poignant details of a condemned person’s last meal. I am also hugely indebted to the wealth of secondary sources — books, articles, and visual and audio materials — I consulted in my efforts to provide a nuanced view of the people, places, and events that featured in the history of hanging in Canada.

  Introduction

  T he condemned man clutched the wooden handrail of the prisoner’s box, waiting for his sentence.

  The judge was wearing a black cap and black gloves when he swept back into the courtroom. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down at the bench and began to read: “Prisoner at the Bar, it becomes my painful duty to pass the final sentence of the law upon you. You have been found guilty of murder. You will be taken from here to the place whence you came and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  Death by hanging — a long-standing Canadian tradition.

  Capital punishment, the execution of someone found guilty of a crime, dates back to the arrival of European explorers on our shores. In those days, if you were condemned to death, quite a wide range of methods could be used to punish you. You could be hanged, or face a firing squad, or be burned at the stake. You might even be put to death by a multiplicity of methods. For example, just after the first proper settlement was established in Quebec City in 1608, explorer Samuel de Champlain learned that a locksmith named Jean Duval was conspiring to kill him. Duval was arrested, found guilty, hanged, and strangled. Then his head was cut off and stuck on a pike on the highest rooftop of the fort, as “food for birds,” according to the nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman — a stark warning to other settlers who might be considering similar schemes. The display was also meant to serve as a stern message to the local Indigenous peoples that the newcomers meant business.

  Samuel de Champlain, explorer, cartographer, and administrator of the colony of Quebec. Originally taken as authentic, this image was later found to be a false portrait, based on a 1654 engraving of Michel Particelli d’Emery.

  In 1763, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the first global conflict in history, saw Britain and her allies victorious and France defeated. Large swaths of previously French-owned mainland North America, including Quebec, fell under the sovereignty of Britain. Although Canada remained a collection of separate British colonies until Confederation in 1867, a Royal Proclamation in 1763 replaced the prevailing Canadian legal system with the laws of England.

  Within the criminal justice system, the British strongly favoured hanging for the punishment of capital crimes, preferably in a marketplace or similarly busy area to ensure a large audience. Why hanging? Historically, other methods were used, such as beheading for high-born folk or burning at the stake for heretics. But traditionally, the most common form of capital punishment since Saxon times was hanging. The thinking was that, even without optional extras like beheading, hanging was a pretty nasty sentence, well befitting felons found guilty of heinous crimes. By the end of the 1700s in Britain, however, the litany of crimes regarded as sufficiently horrible to warrant the death penalty had swelled to 220, including such nefarious acts as keeping company with gypsies or skulking in the dark with a blackened face.

  In Canada, too, public hangings based on the English model gradually became the only method of dealing with serious crimes. As in Britain, the list was long: in the early 1800s, people were sentenced to death by hanging for more than a hundred different offences. Fraud and burglary were on the list. Two men, N. Ganson and A. Jeffreys, were hanged in 1821 for passing forged bills. In 1828, Patrick Burgan of Saint John, New Brunswick, aged eighteen or nineteen, received the death penalty for the double offence of stealing a watch and some money from his former employer and clothing from a sailors’ boarding house. Given the power and pre-eminence of religion in Canada at that time, your very life would have been in jeopardy if you were caught scrawling slogans on the side of a church. You could also be hanged for stealing your neighbour’s cow, which was the fate of B. Clement of Montreal. And just in case you thought that the law protected the young as it does today, think again. Children were regarded as mini­ature adults and treated as such — Clement was only thirteen years old when executed.

  In 1859, the catalogue of crimes in the statutes of the United Province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec today) was reduced to a more manageable number. On the list were “murder, rape, treason, administering poison or wounding with intent to commit murder, unlawfully abusing a girl under ten, buggery with man or beast, robbery with wounding, burglary with assault, arson, casting away a ship, and exhibiting a false signal endangering a ship.”

  By 1865, the number of capital crimes had b
een pared down further. Out went buggery and burglary and arson; from then on, only murder, rape, and treason were punishable by death.

  July 1, 1867, marked the date of Confederation: precisely at noon, the two new provinces of Ontario and Quebec, together with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, joined to form the Dominion of Canada, with John A. Macdonald as its first prime minister.

  By 1905, a uniform criminal code had been rolled out to the Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island as they all folded into the Dominion. Newfoundland was a latecomer in 1949. Nunavut, the newest territory, was carved out of the existing Northwest Territories in 1999, more than twenty years after capital punishment was abolished.

  According to the official inventory of Department of Justice cap­ital case files, over the course of the 109 years from Confederation until 1976, when the death penalty for civil (as opposed to military) crimes was removed from Canadian law books, 704 people were hanged, 11 of them women, and all but one of them for murder. Louis Riel, the Métis leader from Manitoba who launched two rebellions against the Canadian government in the late 1800s, was the lone exception. He was executed for high treason.

  This horrible history of hanging in Canada will focus on the period between Confederation and the abolition of the death penalty. It is a story of murder (and one treason) and hanging. It begins with a double slaying in St-Zéphirin, Quebec, and effectively ends in 1962 with a double execution in Toronto, Ontario, although another fourteen years would elapse before capital punishment was finally abolished.

  You will meet men, women, and children, those who were hanged and those who escaped the noose. You will meet judges and jurors and police officers and farmers and hookers and gangsters and ghosts. Above all, you will encounter the hangman and find out how he was affected by his job. You will be introduced to the science and art of hanging, and you will see what can happen when things go terribly wrong.

  Hanging was a harsh reality during the first century after the Confederation of Canada. Does the topic still have relevance today, or is it a dark chapter best relegated to the faded annals of our past?

  Some crimes are so horrific that a life sentence doesn’t seem adequate. Consider Canadian serial killers Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, and Russell Williams. In each case, a call was made for the return of the death penalty. Canada’s last hangman, John Ellis, was a firm believer in capital punishment. And even though the death penalty was eliminated in Canada more than forty years ago, a 2013 poll found that 63 percent of Canadians still agreed with him.

  Could we — should we — reinstate the death penalty?

  At the end of this history, you be the judge.

  Chapter 1

  Celebrating Confederation: Three Hangings in the First Year

  M odiste Villebrun and Sophie Boisclair were desperately in love. The burly lumberjack and his paramour yearned to spend the rest of their lives together. There was just one problem. They were both married — to other people. What were they to do? They lived in the small, conservative French Catholic community of St-Zéphirin, Quebec. In 1867, divorce would have been inconceivable. The church saw to that. They just had to come up with another strategy.

  They chose murder.

  The first results seemed quite promising. Granted, there were some whispers in the community when Villebrun’s wife, who had reportedly been in excellent health just a few days earlier, died suddenly. The gossip came to nothing, and the lovers were emboldened to press on. Things changed radically, however, when Boisclair’s husband, François-Xavier Jutras, died soon after. To the plotters’ great misfortune, Jutras had fallen acutely ill on a few occasions prior to his death. Suffering from convulsions and abdominal and neck pains, he consulted a doctor. The physician became very, very suspicious when his patient died. An autopsy showed that Jutras’s demise had been caused by strychnine poisoning.

  The lovers were accused of murdering Jutras. They were tried sep­ar­ately, each of them by judge and twelve-man jury, in the nearby town of Sorel. By this time, people were paying a lot more attention to Villebrun and Boisclair’s goings-on. As the Crown attorney said in his opening address at Villebrun’s trial: “There is no doubt that the two accused committed the crime of adultery. It does not necessarily follow that a person who forgets God’s commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ will forget the one that says ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but when you are on the downward slope of vice, you do not know where you will end up.”

  The trial took ten days, but the jury needed only five minutes to find Villebrun guilty of murder. And the only possible sentence was death by hanging.

  Then it was Boisclair’s turn. She, too, was found guilty, but before the judge could pronounce her penalty, she dropped a bombshell.

  “Sir,” she told the clerk of the court, “I do not want the sentence of death to be delivered at the present time, because I am pregnant.” Sure enough, as was customary, a specially convened jury of married women and a court-appointed doctor examined her and confirmed her pregnancy.

  As Jeffrey Pfeifer and Kenneth Leyton-Brown point out in Death by Rope: An Anthology of Canadian Executions , the two murderers should have been executed together, which might have led to a reprieve for both of them until after the child was born. In the end, Villebrun’s execution went ahead as planned, and on May 3, 1867, he was led to the scaffold alone. Ten thousand people turned up at his public execution. In a weird twist, Boisclair also witnessed the event, albeit reluctantly. The window of her cell overlooked the square where the gallows had been set up.

  The British parliament passed the British North America Act creating the Dominion of Canada in March 1867. Even though this execution took place two months before actual Confederation, it is, somewhat confusingly, officially listed as the first hanging in the new nation.

  Boisclair escaped the noose. When her baby was born several months later, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the recommendation of the minister of justice. She was locked away for twenty years in the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario.

  Department of Justice handwritten memorandum about Sophie Boisclair’s status prior to her release from the Kingston Penitentiary in 1887. It describes her as having been of unsound mind for a number of years.

  Sophie Boisclair was described by a surgeon as “of unsound mind” when she was finally released into the care of her son in 1887. Time has fogged so many details of these early cases, but how tempting it is to speculate that this was the same child whose birth had rescued her from the gallows in 1867.

  Ethan “Saxey” Allen was an ex-convict originally from Detroit, Michigan. The Detroit Post described him as “a hard character … always found with bad associates” and “rather notorious as a rough and a gambler.” He became the leader of a four-man gang that robbed banks and plundered businesses along the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, always one step ahead of the frustrated police.

  The Allen Gang’s luck ran out in the early hours of September 22, 1867; so did that of Cornelius Driscoll. Driscoll, employed for twenty-four years at the Morton Brewery and Distillery in Kingston, Ontario, had started working as their night watchman just two weeks previously.

  The gang broke into Morton’s with sledgehammers and crowbars in search of $2,500, which they knew was locked away in the safe. When Driscoll came to investigate the noise, Allen killed him with a sledgehammer. Early the following morning, a local resident found the dead man lying in the distillery yard, and the hunt was on. The gang members fled with their loot, but they were tracked down and arrested in a hotel in Watertown, New York.

  The criminals were brought back to Kingston and tried at the Frontenac County Court House. Allen was convicted of murder, although the jury added a recommendation for mercy. The judge did not share the jurors’ merciful sentiments, informing Allen that he held out no hope for pardon. Two of Allen’s accomplices got nine-and ten-year sentences in the Kingston Penitentiary for
manslaughter.

  The Detroit Post said at the time that the murder “was one of the most cold blooded and brutal affairs of the kind on record,” but it does look as though Allen had a change of heart before he went to the gallows at the Frontenac County Gaol behind the courthouse on December 11. Asked by the sheriff if he had anything to say, he replied: “No, nothing at all. Only I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.” He refused to have the customary black hood (called a “cap”) pulled over his head and, as the hangman pulled the bolt, he said “Lord, have mercy on me,” before dropping to his death.

  Legend tells of a ghost that stalked the Morton Brewery and Distillery for many years thereafter. The spirit of Cornelius Driscoll, the watchman who was bludgeoned to death on that September night in 1867, continued to patrol the hallways, checking all the locks.

  On November 5, 1867, the citizens of Kingston submitted a petition requesting that Ethan Allen’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. The petition was denied. On December 11, Allen was hanged at the Frontenac County Gaol.

  Dominion Day, July 1, 1868 — a special holiday declared by Governor General Lord Monck to celebrate Canada’s first birthday. Just imagine everyone’s excitement when the day finally dawned. There were picnics and parades and speeches and twenty-one-gun salutes and splendid bonfires and even torchlight processions after dark.

  The city of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, came up with a very odd way to celebrate this momentous anniversary: to wit, Canada’s third public hanging. A crowd of about eight thousand men, women, and children gathered around a scaffold set up in front of the jail. Onlookers gasped with horror and pity and women fainted as the condemned man, Joseph Ruel, was half carried, half dragged to the scaffold.

  He took seventeen minutes to die.

  The Montreal Gazette said the next day that “the execution naturally threw all St-Hyacinthe into sadness, and was a damper to all enjoyment of the national holiday.”