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 been 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.
