“Cherchez la femme,” the old saying goes, and there certainly was a woman in this case: Jenny Smith (real name Janet Cooke), a beautiful, young police informer planted in the prison where Melady Jr. was being held. In cahoots with veteran police detective William Smith, Jenny posed as a prisoner with the aim of insinuating herself into Melady’s affections and possibly wresting a confession from him. She communicated with Melady through his cell window, which overlooked the women’s exercise yard. He fell in love with her and was shattered when she gave evidence against him at his trial. He was found “guilty as charged” and sentenced to death.
As described by author John Melady (yes, he is family — he claims Nicholas Jr. as his cousin), the scaffold was built atop the east wall of the jail, with the stairs inside the wall and the trap on the outside. So Melady dropped to his death on the same side of the wall as the curious onlookers gathered below.
That made it, technically, the last hanging in a public place in Canada. In 1869, An Act respecting Procedure in Criminal Cases, and other matters relating to Criminal Law, 1869, introduced some important changes. Section 109 of this piece of legislation, which was based almost word for word on a similar British law passed in 1868, provided that “judgment of death to be executed on any prisoner after the coming into force of this Act, shall be carried into effect within the walls of the prison in which the offender is confined at the time of execution.” Additionally, at the beginning of 1870, an Order-in-Council containing a series of rules and regulations written by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, in his capacity as minister of justice, attempted to impose uniformity in how executions were carried out across Canada.
An Order-in-Council was issued on November 25, 1869, refusing a request to commute Nicholas Melady’s death sentence. Melady’s hanging on December 7 was the last one in a public place in Canada.
So public executions went private, hidden behind prison walls. The official act reflected the extreme discomfort felt by polite nineteenth-century Victorian society in the face of the violence, obscenity, callousness, and contempt shown by mobs at a hanging. But an uneasy tension remained: if you prevented the public from attending hangings because they behaved so badly, how could you make sure that executions would remain a powerful deterrent and that their retributive message — if you commit a crime, you will be punished — would endure in the public consciousness?
As Ken Leyton-Brown observes: “Means had to be found to enable the continuation of public involvement, in what was to be considered private execution.” The authorities tried to deal with this thorny problem by allowing representatives of the public to be present at executions — the sheriff who was handling the execution, the gaoler, doctors or surgeons, justices of the peace, prisoners’ relatives “or other persons as it seems to the Sheriff proper to admit within the prison for the purpose,” and, of course, ministers of religion. Also, the 1869 act provided for certain procedures to be followed after an execution: a doctor was to examine the body of the hanged person and sign a death certificate; the sheriff was to sign a declaration that the person had been executed; and a coroner’s inquest was to be held.
Other measures to advertise that an execution was taking place were specified in the rules and regulations. Rule 3, for example, provided for “a black flag to be hoisted at the moment of execution, upon a staff placed upon an elevated and conspicuous part of the prison, and to remain displayed for one hour.” So, on December 13, 1901, after Joseph Ernest Laplaine was executed in Montreal, Quebec, for the murder of his landlady Valérie Charbonneau, the Montreal Gazette reported that “with the carrying out of the law’s decree the black flag was hoisted on the jail, proclaiming to the six hundred or so persons who had gathered outside that Laplaine had paid the penalty of his crime.”
According to Rule 4 of the rules and regs, the bell of the prison or of a neighbouring church was to be “tolled for fifteen minutes before, and fifteen minutes after the execution.” As a variant of this requirement, when Wilbert Coffin was hanged at Montreal’s infamous Bordeaux jail on February 10, 1956, a black flag flew and a bell rang out seven solemn times to announce his death.
So now that executions had moved inside prison walls, you might assume that the days of the inappropriate carnival-like antics of huge crowds at a hanging would be over.
You would be wrong.
Remember that the sheriff was allowed by the Procedure in Criminal Cases act to invite members of the public to attend hangings if he thought it appropriate to do so? Well, he often did. It was not uncommon for as many as two hundred people, among them newspaper reporters, to be given permits to witness a hanging. Sometimes these permissions were used to ram home a message. In 1885, a group of Indigenous men, the so-called “Cree Eight,” were tried for murder and sentenced to hang for their involvement in the North-West Rebellion, the same uprising that saw Louis Riel go to the gallows. The men were hanged together in Battleford, Saskatchewan, on a twenty-foot-high scaffold specially built for the purpose. As a chilling reminder of the power and authority of the state, hundreds of local Indigenous people were rounded up to watch the execution, among them all the students of the Battleford Industrial School.
Gatecrashing was common. Witness the scene when Joseph N. Thibeau of Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, was hanged in February 1881. Thibeau had been convicted for the murder by fire of Charlotte Hill, a resident of the poorhouse that he ran. The New York Times described the “wild disorder” of a horde of around a thousand spectators, among them women and children:
Toward daylight teams of every description began to pour into the town, and soon after 6 o’clock the crowd began to gather in front of the jail inclosure [sic ]. Several crowds, principally from the country, were inflamed with liquor.… With shouts and yells, the mob rushed toward the fence. Clergymen, constables, and citizens tried in every way to restrain the throng, but all to no purpose. Huge beams were used as battering rams, and once an opening was made, poles and hands were used, and the whole front of the high, strong fence was in a few minutes torn down. The scene was one of the most disgraceful ever seen.
Even if you did manage to keep the public out, it was not always easy to shield the gallows from view. Spectators would clamber onto walls and rooftops to watch a hanging. Take the sensational case of Thomas Nulty, age twenty-one, of Rawdon, Quebec, who butchered his four younger siblings with an axe. There were grave doubts as to whether he was responsible for his actions, but the jury found him guilty with no recommendation for mercy. He was hanged in May 1898 at the Joliette Gaol, Quebec. According to the Ottawa Journal , Nulty died “stolid and apparently unconcerned.” By contrast, “fully a thousand laughing, jeering men were present.… So badly had matters been arranged that anyone who possessed a ladder sufficiently long, made up a party of himself and friends, selected a nice sunny spot on either the roof of the gaol or the gaol shed, and stayed there.… The whole thing seemed like a circus, so much so that even Radcliffe, the executioner, lodged a formal complaint.”
It was especially difficult to ensure privacy in smaller centres. As quoted in Terry Boyle’s Fit to Be Tied , Blanche Grant, a young girl living in Parry Sound, Ontario, described the hanging of train robber John Burowski in December 1928 for the murder of Thomas Jackson, a farmer from Waubamik. She wrote that the top beam of the scaffold was clearly visible above the Parry Sound Gaol wall. To mask this, “the wall height was increased by a solid paper fence on the day of the execution.… At midnight of that crucial day the courtyard was ablaze with lights and the shadows of the action could be seen on the paper fence.”
On occasion, it did seem as though the situation actually was improving. Unlike the chaotic scenes at Thibeau’s and Nulty’s executions, all was calm and orderly when Raoul Brodeur was hanged in Sweetsburg, Quebec, in December 1923. Hangman
