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  As with Modiste Villebrun, love was the undoing of Joseph Ruel.

  He was having a passionate and rather public affair with Arzalie Messier, the wife of a farmer named Toussaint Boulet: witnesses at Ruel’s trial claimed to have seen the couple embracing and grappling on several occasions. Under the pretense of helping Boulet with his treatment for what seems to have been a sexually transmitted disease (probably syphilis), Ruel started to feed the farmer a cocktail of poisons. Ruel made the mistake of obtaining these substances (arsenic and strychnine) from local doctors, ostensibly to deal with pesky dogs and foxes. As Ruel had not professed any previous interest in trapping foxes, the authorities became suspicious when Boulet died. The police concluded that he had been poisoned and Ruel was charged with murder.

  Arzalie Messier was not charged. As noted by historian Ken Leyton-Brown in The Practice of Execution in Canada , this may have reflected the community’s sympathy toward a woman who had been wronged by her husband. Toussaint Boulet’s disease was seen as proof that he was a sinner who had destroyed his marriage. He had been unfaithful to his wife for a long period, and his risky sexual behaviour endangered her life as well as his own.

  But the courts would not tolerate murder. Ruel had poisoned Boulet. The jury found him guilty, with no recommendation of mercy. In sentencing Ruel, the judge criticized him sharply for robbing the victim of both his wife and his life. Ruel was hanged less than two months later.

  Remember Saxey Allen’s words as he went to the gallows? “I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.”

  That is exactly what the lawmakers and politicians and medical professionals and large numbers of the general public wanted to hear. They hoped — no, believed — that the fear and horror of a death by hanging would deter others from committing heinous crimes.

  This deterrent effect worked in two ways, they argued. First, if the punishment were severe enough, it would discourage criminals from perpetrating further monstrous acts. In legal terms, this is referred to as “specific deterrence” and is not really relevant to the capital punishment debate. After all, dead men commit no crimes. Second and more important is the idea of “general deterrence.” This view holds that potential murderers would think twice — or many times — before copying the behaviour of a hanged criminal. And if, after all that, you did go ahead and murder someone — well, then, it was all your own fault if you found yourself hanging by your neck from the gallows.

  But there were other lawmakers, politicians, medical professionals, and members of the public who questioned that view. Before Confederation, the prospect of being hanged hadn’t prevented people from committing even minor offences like stealing a cow or a horse, so how could the death penalty be regarded as effective at all?

  Once the deterrent effect of hanging came into doubt, other uncomfortable questions arose. Was the only principle underlying capital punishment that of retribution — punishment for wrongdoing — or, even more unsettling, simple biblical-style revenge: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Some claimed that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the execution of murderers was justified, especially when the victim was a policeman or a prison guard, the true protectors of our society. Others, like the late, great Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan, argued that “the real reason why this barbarous practice persists in a so-called civilized world is that people still hold the primitive belief that the taking of one human life can be atoned for by taking another.”

  The naysayers pointed to other problems, too. People might go to the gallows simply because they had a tough prosecutor or an inadequate defence lawyer — if they had one at all. This was very clearly illustrated in the case of Elizabeth Workman of Mooretown, Ontario, who was arrested for murdering her husband, James, in October 1872. Scott M. Gaffield notes in “Justice Not Done: The Hanging of Elizabeth Workman” that when Elizabeth’s trial opened on March 20, 1873, it became clear that she had neither a lawyer nor the means to hire one. As a result, the court asked a local barrister, thirty-three-year -old John A. Mackenzie, to handle her case. The trial started the next day, leaving Mackenzie mere hours to familiarize himself with the facts and formulate a defence in this life-and-death battle. All he could come up with was a statement of Elizabeth’s innocence. He neither questioned nor challenged witnesses during the two-day trial, nor did he make reference to the good character of his client or the fact that she was more than likely the victim of spousal brutality. As future prime minister Alexander Mackenzie (no relative of lawyer John A.) argued in a letter in May 1873, “there was no opportunity of bringing out evidence that might tilt in her favour. The unfortunate woman had no counsel engaged, and no one interested in assisting her.” And as for the counsel who was eventually appointed, “what could he do on a few hours’ notice?”

  There were yet more troubling questions that emerged in the pro-and anti-capital punishment debate. What if something went horribly wrong during the hanging; for example, if it took too long for someone to die, as had happened to Joseph Ruel?

  And, most disturbing of all, what if, by some dreadful mistake, the wrong person went to the gallows?

  Chapter 2

  The Deadly Game of Hangman

  I n March 1902, Stanislaus Lacroix was executed in Hull, Quebec, after murdering his wife and a neighbour. A rare photo shows the condemned man standing on the trap door beneath a gallows. His arms are pinioned with black straps, and a cap is draped over his head. The noose dangles down beside him. Gathered around are four men. Two priests in their cassocks and the sheriff with his cocked hat, gown, and sword stand to his right. And on the left, the same side as the noose, the hangman waits, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. Three other officials — doctors, perhaps? — are at the bottom of the scaffold. Two of them look up toward the doomed man. Within moments, the trap would be sprung and Lacroix, as described in the Ottawa Citizen , would be “dashed to eternity.”

  But many other individuals were involved in the game of Hangman in Canada before that final grim act took place. Unlike the vaguely grisly children’s guessing game, real Hangman truly was a matter of life and death. If you were convicted of murder, there was one, and only one, sentence available — hanging.

  The game began with a death, and 704 times in Canada’s first century, it ended with a death, too.

  So before we get too far ahead, let’s meet some of the principal players whose specialized roles made them stand out from the rest.

  The execution of Stanislaus Lacroix in Hull, Quebec, March 21, 1902.

  First, there had to be a body: spread-eagled on a city street, slumped over a desk, buried in a shallow grave in field or forest. Even in the one and only case where the convicted man, Louis Riel, was hanged for high treason and not for murder, there was a body. Thomas Scott, a troublesome adventurer from Ontario, was court-martialled and executed by a Métis firing squad during the Red River Rebellion in Manitoba in 1870. Blame for his death was laid squarely on Riel and played into Riel’s own trial and execution some fifteen years later.

  The ink was scarcely dry on the British North America Act that established the Dominion of Canada in 1867 when Official Murder Victim Number One, François-Xavier Jutras, a farmer in St-Zéphirin, Quebec, met his end by strychnine poison. The very last murder victim, killed in a hail of hammer blows just before capital punishment was abolished in 1976, was Georges Nadeau, a thirty-four-year -old paint-shop instructor at the Cowansville Penitentiary, Quebec.

  For every victim, there has to be an aggressor — a man, woman, or child who pulls the trigger or plunges the knife or slips arsenic into a cup of tea. Nadeau’s nemesis was French-Canadian Mario Gauthier, just nineteen years old. Gauthier became one of the last eleven men ever to spend time on death row in Canada. By that time, death sentences were routinely being commuted to less severe punishments, but in his case, it wasn’t necessary. The Court of Appeal granted him a new trial, and he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. He ended up being
sentenced to eleven years for his crime.

  When Mary Lane of Brandon, Manitoba, a pregnant mother of four children, was shot at close range on the afternoon of July 5, 1899, suspicion initially fell on a tramp with a foreign accent. The vagrant had come to the Lane residence and had shot Mary when his request for food was refused. Or so said Emily Hilda Blake, the Lanes’ twenty-one-year -old domestic servant, who had arrived in Canada from Britain as an orphan some ten years previously. The city was in an uproar over the news, but within four days, the real perpetrator was in custody. It was Blake herself. Police investigations revealed that she had purchased the gun used in the shooting. Once confronted with the evidence against her, she confessed.

  The youngest individual ever convicted of murder (and hanged) in post-Confederation Canada was sixteen-year-old Archibald McLean. Archie was the most junior member of the Kamloops Outlaws, a gang of four Métis youths who caused chaos in the Fort Kamloops area of British Columbia in the late 1870s. The desperadoes kicked off their life of crime with robbery. As quoted by Hamar Foster in his essay on the Kamloops bandits, one neighbour complained, “This is a fine state of things, to be terrorized by four brats who have threatened to burn the jail in order to destroy the records of their deeds.” The so-called brats moved on to horse rustling, then to murder. Archie shot at point-blank range the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Kamloops representative, John Ussher, who was generally in charge of law and order in the settlement. Ussher had led a poorly armed posse to the outlaws’ camp in search of a stolen stallion. The gang followed up that murder with the random killing of a sheep herder, on the unlikely pretext that the man had drawn a gun on them. A much larger, better armed, and very angry posse flushed them out of the cabin where they had taken refuge, threatening to burn them out if they didn’t surrender. The youths were locked up in the Kamloops jail pending their trial at New Westminster, British Columbia.

  With the accused in custody, the official tasked with organizing the trial was the local sheriff. But if you think of a sheriff as a dude in the Wild West walking down a dusty road with a shiny star on his chest, spurs clanking on his heels, and a pair of six-shooters on his hips, think again. That archetype did not live in Canada. Agreed, the Criminal Code defines sheriffs as “peace officers.” The official Service Canada website adds that “sheriffs execute and enforce court orders, warrants and writs, participate in seizure and sale of property and perform courtroom and other related duties.”

  While some Canadian sheriffs in earlier times and in smaller centres might have been rough-and-ready types, others were more like Ernest Charles Drury, farmer, writer, and premier of Ontario from 1919 to 1923. After his fall from power, Drury spent a few years dabbling in federal politics. In 1934, he was happy to be appointed sheriff, county court clerk, and local registrar of the Supreme Court for the County of Simcoe, Ontario — all for the “princely” salary of $3,750 a year.

  Farmer, writer, and premier of Ontario Ernest Charles Drury, 1920. One of his duties as sheriff of Simcoe County, between 1934 and 1959, was to organize three murder trials.

  As sheriff, Drury had a number of unpleasant “related duties” to contend with in the course of his twenty-five years on the job. Evicting tenants when they defaulted on their rent was one of them. Another was organizing three murder trials. He found the second of these particularly disturbing. In his memoirs, Farmer Premier , Drury described the prisoner as an “Indian boy” of about eighteen years. Without provocation, the youth had stabbed a friendly night watchman twenty-three times with a sharp piece of scrap metal snatched from a factory workbench.

  Once the case went to trial and the action moved into a court of law, writes Ken Leyton-Brown, counsel for the Crown and the defence conducted interviews to choose the six-to twelve-member jury. Jurors were supposed to represent the public, but this was generally not the case. Women, or First Nations people for that matter, could be victims or murderers. But never jurors.

  In court, the judge, invariably a man, became the most powerful player in the game. Inspiring fear and respect, he swept into the courtroom in his black robes at the beginning of a trial. Everyone rose, and he took his seat on a special raised platform, dominating the room.

  Guided by the judge, the jury would weigh the evidence, decide whether the accused was guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt (or of the less serious crime of manslaughter, or not guilty), and deliver a verdict. Jurors played a supporting role right up to the dying moments of the trial, when the jury foreman stepped forward on their behalf to deliver his one and only speaking line: “Your Honour, we find the accused guilty as charged,” or, for the lucky ones, “not guilty.”

  The jury’s decision was most often driven by the judge’s charge after all the evidence had been presented by the lawyers for the prosecution and the defence. This was an important step, notes Leyton-Brown, especially in difficult cases or where the law was complicated. The judge was generally very fair, but he sometimes made his opinions, positive or negative, crystal clear to the jury. In 1904, George William Gee of Woodstock, New Brunswick, was accused of murdering his young cousin and one-time girlfriend, Millie Gee, by shooting her twice in the side. In his review, a stern Chief Justice Tuck ordered the jury: “Don’t, gentlemen, allow any mock sympathy to hinder you in rendering your verdict. Now go and do your duty.” Are you surprised that the jury found Gee guilty?

  As they usually knew that the accused would be hanged if found guilty, juries often struggled with returning this grim verdict. They sometimes hesitated to convict youths or people with families. Complicating this might be uncertainty about the identity of the perpetrator and scanty or largely circumstantial evidence — these and other factors made the jury leery of accepting someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When they felt particularly unsure, they exercised the option of recommending mercy. In one remarkable case in 1923 in Montmagny, Quebec, farmer Gustave Dubé was found guilty of shooting his wife. The jurors were horrified when they realized this meant the death penalty. They recanted, protesting that they thought the charge was manslaughter. Perhaps subscribing to the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse, the judge refused to budge and Dubé went to the gallows.

  As with modern cases, the judge’s role was to decide whether evidence was admissible or inadmissible, interpret the law, and guide the jury’s decisions. In capital cases prior to 1976, however, there was one notable addition. With a guilty verdict, the judge’s final act was to deliver the death sentence. He would sweep out of the court, only to return immediately, to even more fear and respect, wearing a black cap upon his head and sometimes black gloves as well. As Leyton-Brown points out, these theatrics and rituals at the time of sentencing — cap, gloves, and the set wording of the death sentence itself — came to Canada, like most other court routines, courtesy of the mother country, Britain. They were all designed to underline the power and majesty of law and state.

  Often the judge would lash out in his final address to the prisoner. In 1878, Michael Farrell, a violent man much feared in Ste-Catherine, Quebec, shot and killed a neighbour who was using a right-of-way through Farrell’s property, in full view of the neighbour’s children. As reported in the Quebec Saturday Budget , Justice Monk had this to say: “I cannot immagine [sic ] how a man of your position and intelligence could possibly have conceived and carried out so terrible a crime. I will not recall to your recollection the horrible, sanguinary scene which took place, when you slew your victim in the presence of his little children and his friends, and slew him as you did, prisoner, without any provocation.” According to the paper, Monk was very much more distressed than the condemned man, who sat calm and stone-faced throughout the judge’s address.

  Who would live and who would be condemned to death by judge and jury? The answer was often unpredictable. Take the opinion of Simcoe County’s Sheriff Drury on two of the murder trials he oversaw. The first was the case of the eighteen-year-old Indigenous youth accused of stabbing a night watchman. T
he defence tried to prove that “he was mentally dull and perhaps retarded,” but the judge and jury were hostile. The youth was sentenced to death, with no recommendation for mercy. The second case was that of two young men, also eighteen or nineteen years old, who shot, threw into a swamp, then shot again — this time to death — an older man who had made sexual advances to them. They were soon arrested and tried in Barrie, Ontario. The jury found them guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and the judge gave them less than the maximum sentence.

  As Drury wrote of both cases in his memoirs:

  The savage nature of the young Indian’s crime, which might reasonably have been taken to indicate mental instability and thus serve as an argument for clemency, quite evidently predisposed both judge and jury against the prisoner. I wonder if they had read stories of Indian massacres? In the second case, clearly a deliberate and cold-blooded murder, the youth of the prisoners, the squalor of their environment, and above all the exist­ence of the death penalty, just as evidently predisposed judge and jury in their favour.

  Once the trial was over, prisoners were generally sent to the local prison to await execution. They were segregated in a special section called death row and kept under constant surveillance. Although phys­ically restricted, every condemned person was allowed unlimited access to a spiritual advisor, generally a Christian minister.

  The minister taking care of the spiritual needs of inmates at the Don Jail in Toronto, Ontario, in the early 1960s was Salvation Army chaplain Cyril Everitt. “I will see you in heaven,” Everitt said to Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas as the two men stood on the scaffold at the Don Jail just after midnight on December 11, 1962. Moments later, they dropped through the trap door together, the last ever to hang in Canada. In their final days on death row, as their appeals sputtered and died, Everitt visited them two or three times a day to cheer them up and pray with them. What was rare in this case, as Robert Hoshowsky points out in his book on Turpin and Lucas, The Last to Die , was Everitt’s deep affection for his charges: he visited their graves for many years after they died.