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.
