allowed in the jail courtyard.”
Things seemed so well organized that in 1928, after an incident in the United States where a newsman smuggled a camera into the death chamber at the notorious Sing Sing prison near New York City, the Southeast Missourian heaped praise on Canada. At a recent hanging in Canada, “not even a porter was permitted to see the hanging.… The raising of the black flag was all that was made public about the execution itself.… The Canadian method of executing criminals, so far as publicity is concerned, is better than ours.”
Then an incident in March 1935 brought the horrors of hanging squarely to the forefront again. “A Ghastly Hanging” trumpeted the Ottawa Citizen in 1935, when Tommasina Teolis was decapitated during her execution at the Bordeaux jail in Montreal. Enough of capital punishment. This “ghastly and barbarous episode should be made impossible in the future,” was the newspaper’s bitter lament. But hangings continued. All that ended in 1935, as a result of this event, was the practice of giving out tickets to the public to watch them.
One step forward, two steps back. Take the execution of Peter Balcombe in Cornwall, Ontario. In this high-profile case, Balcombe, a young married Canadian army lieutenant, was arrested and charged with murder after the nude body of Marie-Anne Carrier, a women’s reserve army sergeant, was found stabbed to death in a ditch near Iroquois, Ontario. Balcombe had promised to leave his wife for Marie-Anne, but chose a more chilling way of extricating himself from a tricky relationship.
According to the Toronto Star , when Balcombe met his end, “the canvas-covered top of the gallows was plainly visible from the street. The crowd, many of them teenagers, including many young girls, was in a holiday mood, shooting off firecrackers, joking and laughing for more than two hours before the execution took place. Several times, police details had to clear the streets so vehicles could pass as the onlookers pressed forward for better vantage points.”
This happened in 1954: eighty-five years after executions were supposedly removed from public spaces and just eight years before the very last executions in Canada. Nothing, it seemed, could effectively slam the door shut on the frenzied crowds who turned out in droves, clambered onto rooftops, or stormed prison gates to witness an execution.
Chapter 5
The Hangman’s Job
A ccording to the law, the federal government played no role in organizing executions in Canada. As the Montreal Gazette put it in 1936: “The sheriff of a judicial district is the man charged with the execution of the laws, civil or criminal, and consequently is engaged in either hanging people or seizing their furniture, or otherwise annoying them.”
The requirement to organize hangings made the local sheriffs feel really uncomfortable. It could even make them sick. Beneath the headline “Sheriff Cannot Find a Hangman,” The Globe reported in March 1912 that E. Martin, sheriff of Fraserville, Quebec, was “seriously ill from worry over his inability to hire a hangman. With an execution only eight days off, he cannot locate anyone willing and able to take the position, and may have to undertake the task himself.”
And sheriffs did not relish the idea of conducting hangings themselves, especially because the condemned person was very likely to be someone they knew. They were also not confident of their expertise to carry out the job without bungling it.
There were individuals prepared to step in, though. The Globe published a letter in July 1910 that read in part: “I wish to ask you if there is any possible chance for securing the position of assistant executioner.… I am willing to carry out anything that the law requires in connection with the position. I am an Englishman, 34 years old, strong and possessing all kinds of nerve, all of which are absolutely necessary for the position.”
So what would be the basic qualifications for anyone wanting to apply?
The Globe letter writer fulfilled the very first requirement, which was that you had to be a man. No hangwomen or hangpersons were allowed.
You would also have to be prepared to travel — a lot. Executions generally took place at a jail near where the crime had been committed and where the trial was held, and the hangman had to make his way there. So you could find yourself taking long, boring train journeys to dots on the map like Lytton, British Columbia, or L’Orignal, Ontario, or Battleford, Saskatchewan, or Dorchester, New Brunswick. And you might end up paying for your own rail tickets.
Carrying your own tools with you — a black hood and leather straps to bind the arms and legs of the prisoner, for example — was essential. You might even have to buy and prepare the rope used for the hanging. New rope is very elastic, and you would need to stretch it out by suspending a heavy weight from it for a few days before the hanging. If you were travelling to those dots on the map — like Lytton or L’Orignal or Battleford or Dorchester — you might have to rely on a hastily and perhaps shoddily built scaffold provided on site, or bring along your own. As noted by Ken Leyton-Brown, this was the preferred solution of one of Canada’s best-known and busiest hangmen, Arthur Ellis. His portable kit was painted an eye-popping shade of red.
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