Blood in the Water

by Silver Donald Cameron

  Today they are mostly hooked on long, baited lines, but traditionally they were fished from modest-sized boats using harpoons. The man with the harpoon is called a “striker;” his station is in a steel pulpit at the tip of a long slim stainless-steel walkway called the “stand,” which runs out from the bow of the boat. It is no small feat to harpoon a moving swordfish from a plunging, soaring pulpit. Omer Boudreau was particularly good at it.

  Swordfish live in the open ocean, so fishermen pursue them far offshore, staying out for days at a time. On one occasion, Omer had stocked his boat with food, drink, and other supplies, like cigarettes. (“This was a long time ago,” he noted. “Everybody still smoked then.”) Then he sent his crew home to get some sleep before they sailed out in the evening.

  That night they went to sea. Six hours later, off the northeastern tip of Cape Breton, Omer—who was at the wheel—said to a crewman, “You should get me a pack of cigarettes out of that locker.”

  “There’s nothing in there.”

  “Sure there is,” Omer said. “I put the grub in there myself.”

  “Well, there’s nothing in there now.”

  Omer took a look. Sure enough, the locker was empty. So were the other lockers where their supplies had been stored. Without supplies, the trip was impossible. They turned around and headed home. Six hours later they were back in Petit de Grat. Phillip was selling their supplies on the wharf.

  What did Omer do?

  “What could you do?” said Omer. “He’s got no money. The police won’t do frig-all. We just loaded up again and went back out.

  “I’ll tell you another one he pulled on me. I had a nice four-wheeler parked out behind the house here. Usually I put it in the shed, but this night I didn’t. And mostly I sleep with the window open, but this night it was raining and windy and the curtains were blowing all around, so I closed the window. Phillip and another one came in the night and dragged it and put it up on a trailer, and gone. It’s all gravel back there, and you could see the scuffs where they turned the wheel and dragged it sideways. Right under my bedroom window!

  “Anyway, a day or so later I’m at the Corner Bridge, and Phillip is outside the store, sitting on a five-gallon bucket of poached lobsters, selling them right there in the open, and he waves me over. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘if you want to know who stole your bike, it was me. And if you want it back, I’ll tell you how you can get it. I sold it up in Troy, at the trailer park there. You can go there and buy it back.’

  “I said, ‘Listen, you little bastard’ ”—by now Omer, just telling the story, was trembling with rage and frustration—“ ‘listen, you little bastard, I’m seventy-five years old and you know I can’t put a beating on you like you deserve. If I was a little younger I’d give you a beating you wouldn’t forget.’ ”

  I had heard the story before, the bike that was sold in Troy, not far from the Canso Causeway. But I hadn’t heard who the victim was.

  “It was me,” said Omer. “Oh, that little bastard. I got the insurance for the bike, but it was only about $4000, and the bike cost me twelve. They said it was old, so they depreciated it—but it was hardly used. I don’t use a bike much, just running out to the cabin I had in Gros Nez.”

  Gros Nez—Big Nose—is an island that looks like the nose of a giant lying supine in the sea. The phrase also refers to the nearby eastern tip of Petit de Grat Island. There are no roads into that area. You get there by boat or ATV. A friend and I had cruised along that shore in a small motorboat a week or two before, and I’d noticed a couple of little shacks along the shore. Phillip slept in those cabins sometimes. I had heard that Omer’s brother Peter had a cabin out there too, and that Phillip had trashed and burned it.

  “That was my cabin,” said Omer. “Mine and Peter’s. I bought the materials and we built it together. And what a job they did on it, you. They picked up a small log and used it for a ram, and punched right through the walls. They wrecked everything, everything, everything. We didn’t know what to do, pull it down or fix it up, but then a couple of weeks later it was burned.”

  By Phillip?

  “Well, I don’t know who burned it, but I don’t think it was Phillip. I got a suspicion who it probably was. It could have been Phillip, though.

  “I damn near hit him with my car one time, head-on, without wanting to. A guy from Boudreauville was planting pot plants, and Phillip didn’t like him. Maybe he was short of marijuana himself, I don’t know. Anyway, he went to Boudreauville, wherever they were planted, somewheres in the woods, with his four-wheeler. Stole them all. Packed them on the front of his four-wheeler, tied them up. There were seven or eight of those plants, and they were maybe four or five feet high.

  “I go to see his brother once in a while, Gerard, he’s a good friend of mine. So this night I was coming home, and it was turning dark, about eight o’clock at night. There’s a big curve that goes right down along the water there. I had my park lights on—and all of a sudden this thing’s coming at me around the curve, partway on my side of the road. I didn’t know what the hell it was. You know, he had the plants in his rack there, all tied up together. He had no lights on, and he was comin’ about thirty, forty miles an hour, and I was comin’ the same speed the other way, fifty, sixty kilometres, and first thing, this is in front of me! I never had a clue what it was. I couldn’t see him or nothing; you could barely see the bike. He got by me all right, but I damn near hit him head-on.”

  Later in the evening, as Omer was sharing some reflections on how people should treat one another, he told me about an episode with his father. He was very young, possibly ten or twelve, so it must have been around 1950, a time of wrenching poverty in rural Cape Breton. Omer and his father were out on their woodlot one winter day cutting firewood. They’d loaded the wood on their sled and were heading home when they met a desperately poor neighbour who had no woodlot and had been gathering dry sticks and dead branches. The man had several children, and Omer knew that they didn’t even have blankets; the children huddled together in their coats to keep warm.

  “Along comes another fellow, he owned the next woodlot. He was pretty well off, but he was an asshole. ‘Where’d you get those sticks?’ he said. ‘Over there.’ ‘That’s my woodlot,’ said the asshole. ‘Those are my sticks. You put them back.’ My father said, ‘Aw, come on, it’s just a few sticks’—but this arsehole insisted. It got quite heated. Finally my father said, ‘All right, my friend, put the sticks back and then you come with me.’ We got him up on the sled and we drove to his house and we dumped our whole load of firewood. ‘There,’ said my father, ‘that’ll keep you going for a while.’

  “I don’t think I ever saw my father so mad,” said Omer, his eyes brimming. “But why would you do that? Just to hurt another man? He had lots. He was never going to use those sticks. They meant nothing to him. I can’t understand a thing like that. I still can’t understand it.”

  ISLAND VOICES

  “I had given him some gas for his four-wheeler, and he looked around my shop and he said, ‘What do you need here? What do you want? I’d like to give you a gift.’ I said, ‘Phillip, there’s nothing I need that I don’t have.’ If I’d of told him there was something I wanted, he’d of went and stole it, and I didn’t want that.”

  “One time there was a ship in here and half a dozen survival suits got stolen off of it. Them things are expensive, maybe $3000 each. The ship couldn’t sail without them, and it was going to take a while to get new ones. Phillip sent somebody to tell the skipper he could get them back for $300 each or something. Well, what would you do? Pay $18,000 and wait ten days—or pay $1800 and sail tonight? Didn’t take him too long to do the math.”

  “When James gets out he’ll be seventy-some years old, the fucker. I can probably kick his fucking cane and walk on him.”

  “If Phillip was my brother, I would have been up on a roof somewheres with a rifle,
outside the courthouse, and I would have picked them off, every one of the ones that killed him.”

  * * *

  —

  Some people claim that Phillip couldn’t have been poaching the morning he was killed, because he only poached at night. Not true, said Omer. He poached in the daytime, too, when it served his purposes.

  “There was a fellow he didn’t like. I won’t name the guy. Now, Phillip’s got a little speedboat that does twenty-five miles an hour, and the other guy’s in a fishing boat that does maybe eight knots. So Phillip would go out in the morning, and he’d stay one trap ahead of the guy, and he’d haul the guy’s second trap while the guy was hauling his first. And then whatever lobsters were into it, he’d hold them up and say, ‘Look! Look what nice lobsters I got from your trap!’ And then he’d put them in his boat and leave the trap open and go on to the next trap. And then of course the fisherman, when he was finished with his first trap, he’d have to come over and haul that trap again. It was empty, of course, but he’d have to bait it again and close it.

  “Phillip would do that all along the string of traps until his mind was satisfied. And then he was taking the lobsters in and selling them.

  “The guy hollered, ‘I should shoot you’—he’s allowed a gun to shoot seals if they’re on his nets, something like that, so he had a 12-gauge shotgun, and he held it up to his shoulder, and he said, ‘You little prick, I should fucking shoot you!’ Phillip laughs and he holds up his .22 rifle that he had in his boat all the time, and he says, ‘My gun can shoot farther than yours.’ So that’s pretty brazen, eh? He done that to three or four fellers.”

  “Are you serious?” I said. “He’d go down the string of traps cleaning out each one in turn, right in front of the fisherman that owned them?”

  “That’s just what he’d do.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “was he trying to get himself killed?”

  8

  COURTROOM 3: THE COCKAMAMIE STORY

  BACK IN COURTROOM 3, Luke Craggs is beginning what one reporter will describe as a “blistering” cross-examination of Craig Landry, who has just told Her Majesty’s Story again.

  “How was jail, Mr. Landry?” Craggs demands.

  Shane Russell immediately objects. What’s the relevance of the question to the matter before the court?

  “Well, I have some sense of where the defence is going,” says Justice Kennedy. “I’ll allow the question.”

  “Did you like it?” Craggs asks. “Did you want to get out of jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why did you want to get out of jail?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “Well,” Craggs continues, “if you didn’t like it, what specifically did you dislike? Was the food good? Were the clothes comfortable? Were there scary people there? Did you meet any of them? Did you sleep at night? How did you feel about not being with your three-year-old daughter? You were charged with murder: did you know what the potential sentence might be for murder? Were you concerned you might be in jail a long time? During the three or four weeks you were in jail, were you thinking of ways you might be able to get out of jail?”

  Under Craggs’s questioning, Craig says he hasn’t seen any of the Crown’s evidence that was provided to his defence lawyer—no video statements of the other accused, no photographs, nothing. Yes, he was taken in for questioning on June 2, shortly after midnight. He went voluntarily, and he voluntarily gave the police a statement that was not true. Craggs wants to know if the purpose of giving the statement was to mislead the police.

  “No,” says Craig. He gave the statement because “we were told to.”

  Craggs gives Craig a copy of the transcript of that interrogation, in which the police make it clear that Craig is not under arrest and is free not to speak or to leave at any time. Craggs starts to lead the witness through the tissue of falsehoods that make up his statement. For instance, Craig told the police that he didn’t see other boats, and that he didn’t see Phillip Boudreau—but both of those statements are false. Then Craggs puts up a flip sheet on an easel and asks the witness to start making a list of his own lies as they emerge from the transcript.

  Shane Russell objects. It’s possible for the defence to establish that Craig lied repeatedly on June 2 “without embarrassing the witness or engaging in theatrics.” Justice Kennedy excuses the jury and asks Craggs his intent. Craggs says he wants the witness to record his own lies. The Crown doesn’t think the witness should be asked to do that. Justice Kennedy agrees, but notes that it’s perfectly acceptable for Craggs himself to keep a running tally of the witness’s lies. As presiding judge, it’s his job to ensure that Craggs’s record is accurate, but the defence is certainly entitled to keep a visible record. Craggs moves the easel closer to himself. The jury files back in.

  Craggs painstakingly leads the witness through lie after lie, ticking them off on the flip chart. The lies occur on page after page of the transcript—this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page. On this page of the transcript, Constable Rob Daley, the interrogating officer, says, “All right, and you want me to believe that?” Craig responds, “What do you want me to tell you?” The officer replies, “The truth.” Craig responds, “I did.” Towards the end of the interrogation the officer tells Craig that the body will be found and that the remains will show the cause of death.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” Craig replies. “Don’t misunderstand, I’m not—I’m not—I’m just saying that he’s done this before.”

  And why had he said that? Craggs asks the witness.

  “It’s just what I was told to say.”

  Luke Craggs summarizes: he’s noted down fourteen lies, and he wants to know if these were all lies that Craig was instructed to tell: Did Craig himself really have no role in fabricating this detailed cover story? His meeting with Dwayne, James, and Carla late on June 1 had lasted only ten or fifteen minutes—and in that length of time he had heard and absorbed this whole story so that he was able to repeat all the details to the police?

  “Yes,” Craig responds. That’s what he’s saying.

  “You weren’t in fear yourself of possibly being charged?

  “No.”

  “The motivation behind your telling all of these lies was not to save your own skin?”

  “No.”

  “It was just doing as you’re told? Why? I mean, you’re not a trained seal or something—I need to understand why you went to the extent you did, just because you were told.” But Craig just keeps repeating that he did it because “that’s what we were told.”

  It’s 4:30 in the afternoon, and Craggs gives up. He’s done with this line of questioning. Justice Kennedy adjourns the session.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Craggs grills Craig Landry again. After Phillip Boudreau’s death, and after the crew of the Twin Maggies landed their lobsters and he helped Dwayne clean the rifle, what did he do? He got home about 1:30, after which he smoked and watched TV until Carla Samson called him late that afternoon. No, he didn’t reflect on the morning’s events, didn’t think about what he should do next, didn’t think of calling a friend, or the police, or the priest. Yes, he did think about the morning’s events, but he didn’t really think about what might come next.

  The events in Mackerel Cove happened fast, maybe ten or fifteen minutes from start to finish. Did he make any objection to what was happening other than to cry, just once, “Stop, no more shooting”? He did not. He says he just stood passively by and silently watched things happen—the attempt to tow Phillip’s boat, the three rammings, the whole process of gaffing and towing and sinking Phillip. He was arrested on June 6 and charged with murder on June 7, and he gave no detailed statement then because “I was told to keep quiet.” Then, on June 26, in the presence of his new lawyer, Joel Pink, he told—for the fi
rst time—the story he had just told the court again the previous day, the account that became Her Majesty’s Story. The next day he re-enacted the whole episode with the police because the police “wanted to see where things had happened.”

  Craggs establishes that Craig has lived in Petit de Grat, specifically in Alderney Point, almost all his life; he can actually see Mackerel Cove from his yard. Soon after the re-enactment, he was released from custody. How did he feel?

  “It was good to be home.”

  Craig had subsequently testified at the preliminary inquiries for both Dwayne Samson and James Landry. Craggs shows him the transcript of Dwayne’s preliminary on November 26, 2013, followed by the transcript from James’s preliminary on December 17, and then takes Craig back to the transcript of his interview with the RCMP on June 26, some months earlier. And then, finally, he gets back to the meeting of the four accused at Dwayne and Carla’s house the day of Phillip’s death. How long was the meeting? On June 26 Craig said it lasted “two or three minutes,” maybe “three or four minutes”—but today he said it lasted ten or fifteen minutes. So which of these assertions is accurate?

  “Without being sarcastic, I never had a chance to look at my watch,” Craig responds. “It was however long it took, I’m sorry.” But it was brief, because “I had a two-year-old to take care of.”