Dead Ends

by Paul Willcocks

  He decided to join the Royal Canadian Navy and get out of Montreal. Mantha’s occasional, tentative sexual adventures with men became much more frequent in foreign ports, all with hidden gay bars and clubs.

  In San Francisco, during a shore leave that included a lot of drinking, Mantha misjudged his prospective partner. He woke up after a beating, with a raw head wound and lingering headaches, chills, and fevers. He decided to seek medical treatment in the navy hospital when his ship returned to Esquimalt.

  That was a mistake. During “neurological tests,” doctors discovered what they called his homosexual depression and feelings of “inferiority and inadequacy.” The military was “the last place in the world for a man with this sort of conflict,” the doctor’s report concluded.

  Mantha was honourably discharged, and quickly found work as an engineer on tugboats based in Victoria, living close to downtown in James Bay.

  He was strong, rough-featured, with a broad, battered nose and a shock of dark hair rising up like a crown. There was a touch of the thug about him, to be sure, but a striking energy.

  In the summer of 1958, a gay bartender at the Empress Hotel introduced Mantha to Aaron Jenkins, whom everyone called Bud.

  Jenkins was in the navy, but hardly happily. He was seven years younger than Mantha, and enlisted in 1956 mainly because nothing else had worked out back in Coles Valley, Nova Scotia. He couldn’t get into teachers’ college and didn’t like the low pay and long hours as a Royal Bank clerk. The navy was a way out.

  But not an entirely successful one. Jenkins was initially unhappy, and surprised he couldn’t just quit. An evaluation described him as “immature, highly effeminate and emotionally unstable.” Jenkins was intelligent, but “quite unsuitable for service.”

  The two men had an intense affair through the summer, according to Mantha. A photo shows them in bathing suits, Mantha looking away from the camera and Jenkins—square-jawed, tousled hair—looking appraisingly at the photographer.

  Then Jenkins tried to call it off and, according to Mantha, said he wasn’t gay and was simply hustling Mantha for money. He said he planned to marry a girlfriend.

  Mantha confronted Jenkins early on the morning of September 6, 1958, in his sleeping quarters in Nelles Block, a barracks building at CFB Esquimalt. Somehow Mantha made his way past sentries at the gate and on each floor of the barracks, and entered the room without waking Jenkins’s roommates.

  Minutes later, Jenkins lay bleeding, stabbed fatally in the throat. A bloody hunting knife with a five-inch blade was found in the barracks.

  Navy officials suggested the death was a suicide. They wanted the case to go away.

  But civilian police conducted a proper investigation, and a search of Jenkins’s locker, and found love letters signed “All My Love, Leo.”

  It did not take long to track down Mantha, who confessed to stabbing Jenkins, but said he didn’t intend to kill him.

  Mantha’s lawyer was George Gregory, an experienced counsel and a serving Liberal MLA.

  When the trial began, Gregory set out to show this was a crime of passion, and not premeditated murder. The difference for Mantha was enormous—a lengthy prison term, or death by hanging.

  When the trial ended, Justice John Ruttan gave the jury three options—not guilty, manslaughter, or murder.

  They chose murder.

  And in 1958, the automatic sentence was death.

  But there was still hope for Mantha. While the law mandated capital punishment, the federal cabinet routinely commuted death sentences to life imprisonment. That was especially true in crimes of passion, where the killing was out of character.

  Ruttan immediately wrote to the federal justice minister, Davie Fulton of Kamloops, saying that this was a crime of passion and strongly recommending clemency.

  All he got in response was a telegram from Fulton. Mantha would hang.

  Partly, Mantha was a victim of politics. The federal government had been routinely commuting death sentences, while continuing to proclaim its support for capital punishment. The issue was politically sensitive. Some executions had to be allowed to go ahead, or its support for the death penalty would look like empty posturing.

  John Diefenbaker, the Conservative prime minister elected the year before, opposed the death penalty. He was a former defence lawyer and believed it was too easy for the state to kill an innocent person. His government commuted fifty-five out of sixty-three death sentences over the next six years. But he was not willing to take the risk of abolishing capital punishment. (That did not happen until 1975, in a 130-124 vote in Parliament.)

  So someone had to die. Mantha spent 100 days awaiting execution in the same prison with Bob Chapman, a nineteen-year-old farm boy who had killed his older brother. The two were supposed to hang together.

  But on April 24, three days before the scheduled hangings, the federal cabinet commuted Chapman’s sentence to life imprisonment.

  His first words to his mother were about Mantha’s fate. “What about Leo. They won’t do it to Leo, will they?”

  Chapman and his family sent a telegram to Fulton, urging commutation. To no avail.

  The other problem—the bigger problem—was that Mantha was gay. That meant inevitable prejudice and scorn at the idea of a crime of passion.

  Lloyd McKenzie, who prosecuted Mantha, said twenty years later that Justice John Ruttan believed Mantha’s sexual orientation was a strong factor in the government’s decision to go ahead with the execution. “He had a very heavy load to carry in defending himself in this case because he was homosexual,” McKenzie said. “There’s no doubt about it, that was a very strong factor against him.”

  The case was even more sensitive because prejudice and Cold War paranoia had produced a campaign to identify and remove gays and lesbians in the military and intelligence services.

  On April 26, Mantha and prison officials began preparing for his death. As the midnight hour of execution neared, a special phone line was kept open, awaiting a last-minute reprieve from Ottawa.

  It never came.

  Mantha entered the converted elevator shaft used for hangings. He had refused the sedation offered to condemned prisoners. His wrists were bound behind his back and his legs at the knees. His last sight, before the hood was pulled over his head, was hangman Camille Branchaud, the priest, and seven guards standing in a semicircle around him.

  Witnesses—including Gregory, his defence lawyer, and two reporters—watched below.

  At 12:08 a.m. on April 27, the executioner pulled a long wooden lever, the trap door opened, and Mantha fell. He hung for twelve minutes before being pronounced dead, the forty-fourth person executed in Oakalla. And the last.

  Gregory, his lawyer, had been with him in his cell until fifteen minutes before the execution. Mantha died “a very brave man,” the defence lawyer said.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The last two executions in Canada took place in December 1962. Beginning in 1963, the law remained in place but governments commuted all death sentences until 1976, when capital punishment was abolished.

  McKenzie believed Gregory never fully recovered from the experience of unsuccessfully defending Mantha and witnessing the hanging. Gregory was appointed a British Columbia Supreme Court justice in 1964. He took his own life in 1973.

  SOURCES

  MILKSHAKE MURDERER—Vancouver Province; Vancouver Magazine; British Columbia Murders, Susan McNicoll (Heritage House, 2010); At Home With History, Eve Lazarus (Anvil Press, 2007); Irrefutable Evidence, Michael Kurland (Ivan R. Dee, 2009); RadioWest.ca; Gocampbellriver.com; Supreme Court of Canada.

  CRAZY EDDIE—Peachland View; Province; Victoria Times Colonist; Vancouver Sun; Ottawa Citizen; Toronto Star; Eighteen Bridges (December 2013); BC Supreme Court records; BC Legislature Hansard.

  THE INDIAN PROBLEM—Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; New York Times; Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson (University of Manitoba
Press, 2011); “Dan Cranmer’s Potlatch,” Canadian Historical Review (1992); Umista.ca; Royal BC Museum.

  THE BIG CON—Victoria Times Colonist; Vancouver Sun; National Post; BC Securities Commission; BC Supreme Court records.

  WOMEN WE KILLED—Campbell River Courier-Islander; Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Victoria Times Colonist; On the Farm, Stevie Cameron (Knopf, 2010); BC Superior Court documents; Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry.

  OFFICERS DOWN—Globe and Mail; Kamloops Daily News; Alberni Valley Times; Vancouver Sun; In the Line of Duty, Robert Knuckle (General Store Publishing House, 2005); Officer Down Memorial website (www.odmp.org); Royal Canadian Mounted Police (www.RCMP.GRC.gc.ca); RCMP Veterans’ Association.

  KIDNAPPED—North Shore News; Abbotsford Times; Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Victoria Times Colonist; BC Superior Court documents.

  HOCKEY ON TRIAL—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Bergen County Record; Sports Illustrated (February 22, 2000; November 20, 2000); Dropyourgloves.com; YouTube; BC Superior Court documents.

  SEX ON-CAMERA—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Victoria Times Colonist; The Tyee; BC Legislature Hansard; BC Civil Liberties Association archives; Bill Bennett, Bob Plecas (Douglas & McIntyre, 2006); Scandal!!, William Rayner (Heritage House, 2001).

  GENTLEMAN OUTLAW—British Colonist; Victoria Times Colonist; Vancouver Province; RCMP online archives (www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/hist/archiv-eng.htm); The Grey Fox, Mark Dugan and John Boessenecker (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); Interred With Their Bones, Peter Grauer (Tillicum Press, 2006); Old Bill Miner, Frank Anderson (Heritage House, 2001).

  WAITING DEMONS—Victoria Times Colonist; Guardian; Vancouver Sun; Ottawa Citizen; The Stopwatch Gang, Greg Weston (Macmillan, 1982); Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, Stephen Reid (Thistledown Press, 2012).

  THOSE MCLEAN BOYS—British Colonist; Winnipeg Free Press; Dictionary of Canadian Biography; The Bad and the Lonely, Martin Robin (Lorimer, 1976); B.C. Provincial Police Stories, Vol. 3, Cecil Clark (Heritage House, 1995); BC Metis Mapping Project (ubc.bcmetis.ca).

  VANISHED—Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; National Post; BC Superior Court documents.

  MURDER AT SEA—Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; Toronto Star; Associated Press; Fatal Cruise, William Deverell (McLelland and Stewart, 1991); BC Superior Court documents.

  THE BOOGEYMAN—Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; Calgary Herald; Globe and Mail; Macleans; BC Superior Court documents.

  DEADLY MASSACRE—The Chilcotin War, Rich Mole (Heritage House, 2009); The Spirit of Pestilence (online); BC Studies (Winter 1982/83); Colonial correspondence, Court documents, Inquests, Letters (From canadianmysteries.ca).

  THE ROCKEFELLER CON—National Post; Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Daily Telegraph; New York Times; Whistler Pique; Vanity Fair (January 2001).

  THE BEAST—Toronto Star; Toronto Sun; National Post; Globe and Mail; Vancouver Sun; Where Shadows Linger, William Holmes, with Bruce Northorp (Heritage House, 2000).

  FORGIVENESS—Squamish Chief; Whistler Pique; Abbotsford Times; Vancouver Sun; National Post; Victoria Times Colonist; Vancouver Courier; Walking After Midnight, Katy Hutchison (Raincoast Books, 2006); BC Superior Court documents.

  WHOSE BODY IS THIS?—Ottawa Citizen; Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; A Timely Death, Anne Mullens (Knopf, 1996); CBC; BC Superior Court documents; Supreme Court of Canada judgment.

  SMUGGLERS AND DEATH—British Colonist; Nanaimo Bulletin; Gunboat Frontier, Barry Gough (University of British Columbia Press, 1984); William Duncan of Metlakatla: A Victorian Missionary in British Columbia, Jean Usher (UBC doctoral thesis, 1969); Colonial Despatches: The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871, University of Victoria (bcgenesis.uvic.ca).

  STEALING THE WORLD—Vancouver Province; Victoria Times Colonist; Chicago Tribune; Outside (June 1997); The Island of Lost Maps, Miles Harvey (Random House, 2000).

  HOCKEY NIGHT—Vancouver Sun, Buffalo News, Sports Illustrated (May 11, 1987); Toronto Star; Leaving Dublin, Brian Brennan (Rocky Mountain Books, 2011); Gross Misconduct, Martin O’Malley (Penguin, 1989).

  MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY—Alaska Highway News; Toronto Star; Edmonton Journal; Winnipeg Free Press; Montreal Gazette; 100 Mile House News; The View From Seven (http://theviewfromseven.wordpress.com); GenDisasters (www3.gendisasters.com); Aviation Safety Network.

  GO HOME!—Vancouver Sun; Victoria Times Colonist; Globe and Mail; CBC; Migrant Smuggling: Canada’s Response to a Global Criminal Enterprise, Benjamin Perrin (McDonald-Laurier Institute: True North in Canadian Public Policy, October 2011); “Opinion Discourse and Canadian Newspapers: The Case of the Chinese ‘Boat People,’” Joshua Greenberg, Canadian Journal of Communication (2000).

  SUBURBAN TERRORISTS—Toronto Star; Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Victoria Times Colonist; Équipe de recherche sur le terrorisme et l’anterrorisme, “Direct Action (the “Squamish Five”),” Julie Vinet (www.erta-tcrg.org/groupes/directaction.htm); Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, Ann Hansen (Between the Lines Books, 2001); Fury’s Hour, Warren Kinsella (Random House, 2005); BC Superior Court documents; YouTube (Rosie Rowbotham/Brent Taylor interview).

  BOMB ON A TRAIN—Nelson Star; Nelson Daily News; Vancouver Province; Doukhobor Genealogy (www.doukhobor.org); Inquest and investigator reports; Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History (canadianmysteries.ca).

  ESCAPE TO THE WILD—British Colonist; Kamloops Standard; Toronto Star; Vancouver Sun; Trapline Outlaw, David Ricardo Williams (Sono Nis Press, 1982); The Bad and the Lonely, Martin Robin (Lorimer, 1976); Call in Pinkerton’s: American Detectives at Work for Canada, David Ricardo Williams (Dundurn Press, 1998).

  TERROR IN THE SKY—Vancouver Sun; Globe and Mail; Victoria Times Colonist; New York Times; Birmingham Mail; CBC; Loss of Faith, Kim Bolan (McLelland and Stewart, 2005); Air India Commission Final Report; BC Superior Court documents.

  GANGLAND EDEN—Globe and Mail; Toronto Star; Vancouver Sun; The Mulligan Affair, Betty O’Keefe and Ian Macdonald (Heritage House, 1997); The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, Chuck Davis (Harbour Publishing, 2011); Jailed for Possession, Catherine Carstairs (University of Toronto Press, 2006); Webster!, Jack Webster (Douglas& McIntyre, 1990); BC Government Liquor Policy Review (engage.gov.bc.ca/liquorpolicyreview/history); Past Tense Vancouver Histories (pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com); BC Radio History (bcradiohistory.radiowest.ca).

  THE FALLEN BISHOP—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Ottawa Citizen; Globe and Mail; They Called Me Number One, Bev Sellars (Talon Books, 2013); Four Worlds International Institute; BC Superior Court documents.

  SAVING THE CHILDREN—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Spokane Daily Chronicle; Ottawa Citizen; Lethbridge Herald; Montreal Gazette; Vancouver Postcard Club newsletter.

  VIGILANTE INJUSTICE—Daily Colonist; Vancouver Sun; Who Killed Janet Smith?, Edward Starkins (Macmillan, 1984); Vancouver Past: Essays in Social History, ed. Robert A. J. McDonald and Jean Barman (University of British Columbia Press, 1986); Dictionary of Canadian Biography; BC Studies (Spring 1999).

  WELCOME TO CANADA—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Globe and Mail; Toronto Star; Braidwood Inquiry Final Report.

  JUROR GANGSTER—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Globe and Mail; Toronto Star; BC Superior Court documents.

  THE GOOD BOY KILLERS—Victoria Times Colonist; Vancouver Sun; Toronto Star; BC Superior Court documents; Such a Good Boy, Lisa Hobbs Birnie (Macmillan, 1992); Canadianinjustice.com.

  MARTYR OR MYTH?—Globe and Mail; Vancouver Province; Daily Colonist; “Plots, Shots, and Liberal Thoughts: Conspiracy Theory and the Death of Ginger Goodwin,” Mark Leir, Labour/Le Travail (Spring 1997); Fighting For Dignity: The Ginger Goodwin Story, Roger Stonebanks (Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2004); Ginger, Susan Mayse (Harbour Publication, 1990).

  COLD CASE—Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; CBC; BC Superior Court documents.

  LAST MAN HANGED—Montrea
l Gazette; Vancouver Province; Victoria Daily Times; The Canadian War on Queers, Gary Kinsman (UBC Press, 2010); William R. McIntyre: Paladin of Common Law, W. McConnell (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Nathaniel Christopher: The Random Reflections of a Vancouver Journalist (www.nathaniel.ca).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PHOTO: COURTESY THE AUTHOR

  Paul Willcocks is a journalist with over 30 years of experience. He has won a Michener Award, been the recipient of a Jack Webster Award for being British Columbia’s best columnist, and has been a National Magazine Writing finalist many times.

  Also in this series:

  Sour Milk & Other Saskatchewan Crime Stories

  Paper Cows & More Saskatchewan Crime Stories

  Boiling Point and Cold Cases: More Saskatchewan Crime Stories

  Thugs Thieves and Outlaws: Alberta Crime Stories

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