by Dale Brawn
The jurors empanelled to decide the fate of Fred Stawycznyk sat through four days of testimony, including that given by the accused. He denied murdering the babies and said the only crime he committed was burying the last of Yatchuk’s five illegitimate infants. Under cross-examination, however, he did admit to not wanting any more children, and testified that if his daughter and twin boys found out there was to be a new member of the family, they would leave him. Ninety minutes after it started deliberating, the jury returned with its verdict — Stawycznyk was to be hanged on July 12, in Manitoba’s new indoor death chamber. It took a few moments before the convicted killer realized what he heard, and when he did, tears began streaming down his face. His voice shaking with emotion, he repeated that he did nothing wrong, that the court was ordering an innocent man to be hanged.
By a vote of two-to-one the Manitoba Court of Appeal turned down Stawycznyk’s request for a new trial. The dissenting judge said that in his opinion an injustice had been done to the accused and he urged his colleagues to join him in ordering a new trial. That was not to be, nor was the condemned killer granted clemency, but by then the Angusville farmer seemed to have accepted his fate.
Fred Stawycznyk was a rarity in the annals of Canadian executions; he helped his lover murder at least four of the children born to the couple. Because of the crime for which he died, Stawycznyk was not buried on consecrated grounds. Instead, he was interred in an area a few feet north of the cemetery.
Author’s photo.
The death cell in the Headingley jail, where Stawycznyk spent his last months, is separated from the gallows by a single door. The distance from the cell to the traps is no more than three metres, and Stawycznyk walked it unaided. He stood without moving while his executioner pinioned his legs, calmly looking around the small chamber. Just before the hood was pulled over his head, Stawycznyk was asked if he had any last words. He did, although not many. In Ukrainian he said, “I thank everybody here for the way they treated me, because I am innocent and prepared to meet my Maker.”[1] His statement was translated into English by a prison guard, and seconds later the trapdoors on which Stawycznyk stood were opened. For the next twenty minutes his body was suspended over a shallow pit dug into the floor of the room below, to ensure that his feet did not make contact with the ground.
Fred Stawycznyk’s body was claimed by his sons a few hours after he was executed, and it was returned to Augusville. There it was interred close to (but not quite in) a cemetery near the family farm.
William Bahrey: The Brothers in the Haystacks
William Bahrey had a confused sense of propriety when it came to women. On the one hand, he was fiercely protective of his two sisters, particularly Annie. When it turned out that the man she married in the summer of 1931 already had a wife, William killed him to preserve his wife’s honour. Yet shortly after his older brother Alexander married Dora, he began an affair with his sister-in-law. After Alex began abusing her, William killed him too. Despite having the intelligence of a ten-year-old, and the subtlety of a hammer, he got completely away with the first murder; and if he had kept his mouth shut, he would never have been linked to his brother’s death, either.
When the whole business started, Alexander and Dora Bahrey were no longer newlyweds. Although they were still in their twenties, they had a number of things going for them. Alexander was short, very heavy, and not much of a farmer, but he owned his own land, and in the Whitlow district of south-central Saskatchewan he was the go-to guy when it came to bootleg liquor or stolen wheat. William had a homestead next to his brother’s, and helped Alex in his illegal endeavours whenever he could. Above all else, however, William was devoted to his sister-in-law. Alexander knew of the affair, and while it bothered him, he did nothing to bring it to an end. In the fall of 1931 circumstances dictated that the brothers temporarily put aside their squabbling over Dora. Annie Bahrey had been married only a few months when someone found out that her husband, Nestor Tereschuk, already had a wife in Poland. That did not sit well with the Bahreys, yet had Tereschuk not started abusing Annie, it was likely something the family was prepared to overlook. But after the couple separated, and Annie moved in with Alex and Dora, the wound festered.
For a while it looked like the federal government was going to preserve the honour of the Bahrey family for them. It started proceedings to deport Tereschuk to his native Poland, removing the problem without resorting to violence. But the government allowed the bigamist to remain in Canada until everything was concluded, provided Tereschuk reported in every month to the North Battleford detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The wheels of government grind slowly, however, and in the fall of 1932 William decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. On October 31, Tereschuk showed up at Alexander’s farm, where William was visiting, and during the ensuing conversation William learned that Alexander, Dora, and Annie were going to spend the night at his father’s home, six miles away. Tereschuk was not invited. On his way home, William decided this was the perfect time to exact revenge for the dishonour Tereschuk brought on the Bahreys. With his .22 calibre rifle in hand, he walked to a nearby hill, and looked down at his brother’s house. When he saw three people come out, he put his plan in action. William ran to Alex’s barn, and waited. From his vantage point he was ideally positioned to shoot Tereschuk when he left Alexander’s house; but instead of walking past the barn, as William thought he was going to do, Tereschuk went around it.
When he saw his brother-in-law holding a rifle, Nestor knew immediately what he was intending to do, and begged him not to shoot. William ignored him and hit the startled man with the butt of the gun, stunning him. He then picked up the hub of a buggy wheel, which was lying nearby, and beat him to death. Bahrey dragged Tereschuk’s body to a flat area below the house, and as soon as it was dark, came back with his horse. Out of an abundance of caution he shot his brother-in-law in the head, from point-blank range. After that he looped a rope around the feet of the dead man and dragged Tereschuk’s corpse four kilometres to the haystack of a neighbour. The homestead was vacant, and Bahrey had all the time he needed to bury the body in the hay and then set the stack on fire. On the way home he threw the rifle into a creek. At his brother’s farm he found a cap, which apparently fell off the head of his victim when he dragged the man’s body to the haystack. He shoved it down a gopher hole, and covered it with a rock.
In retrospect, it is unlikely that William murdered his brother-in-law without the consent of his father, or at least the knowledge of his family. Immediately after the murder he told his sister he killed her husband, and within days everyone in the district was aware of what happened. Everyone, that is, except Dora.
All the Bahreys knew of the killing of Nestor Tereschuk … the whole bunch knew before I did because they were talking between themselves. When someone said they were afraid that Nestor might come back, the Bahreys said he will never come back. If I would spread this [to the authorities], they would punish me. I am only one, they are a whole bunch. I was a stranger and they were no good to me.[2]
Until Bahrey confessed to the killing nearly a year later, no one in authority had a clue that Tereschuk was dead.
It is a little ironic that when William talked to Dora of murdering Nestor, he told her that “if Tereschuk don’t know how to live properly with a wife here, we don’t want him.”[3] Five months after murdering his brother-in-law, William grew tired of the way his brother was treating Dora. Alex was a brutal man, with little affection and no respect for his wife. So William decided that he too must die.
Within months of their wedding, Alex started beating his new wife, causing her to complain in front of his family that she would rather hit herself with stones than have her husband continue striking her.[4] Over time Alexander’s ill treatment progressed from cruelty to brutality. The day after Dora gave birth to the couple’s first child Alex left for a day or two. Before he did, he barricaded the pathway from the couple’s house to the woodpil
e, forcing Dora to walk through waist-high snow to gather kindling for a fire. When her husband returned she complained. “Don’t you know that a woman will die if she goes out in the snow to get wood the day after a child is born?” He told her that was exactly what he had in mind. “I want it that way for you to die.”[5] Despite the fact that most of their fights took place in front of family members, no one aside from William expressed any sympathy for what Dora was going through. After one particularly heated exchange, Alexander asked Nestor what he thought should be done with his wife. The men debated, in her presence, whether it would be better to put a stone around her neck and throw her into a well, or just kill her.[6]
William found this mistreatment profoundly upsetting, and he talked to his sister-in-law about what he should do. He later said that he “told Dora I would do something to him.” He left her with no doubt about what that would be. “Dora knew I was going to kill him.”[7] Which is precisely what William did.
On April 10, 1933, Dora and Annie decided to spend a couple of days visiting at the home of Annie’s father. After they left, siblings John, William, and Alexander Bahrey played cards with a neighbour. Eventually everyone went home, except William and his older brother. Before they parted, Alec told William that he needed beer bottles for the moonshine he was making, and he was going over to their bother-in-law’s farm to get some. It was about two kilometres away, and when Alexander headed out, William followed. As the elder brother entered a granary, William crept up to a nearby snow bank. When Alex stepped out with the bottles, William shot him with a .32-20 Winchester, a centre fire rifle used to kill small game. To be sure his brother was dead he climbed onto a haystack and shot him three more times. William left the body where it lay and went home. The next morning he returned, tied a piece of barbed wire to Alexander’s arm, and dragged his body to the top of the same stack he stood on a few hours earlier. Then, just as he had done five months before, he started a fire.
The owner of the haystack noticed it go up in flames, but he lived some distance away, and it was not until April 16 that he went out to the field to investigate. Before he got there his dog was already nosing around what remained of the stack. Lying in the middle of the huge mound were bones of what clearly was once a human being. Because he did not have a telephone of his own, it was the next morning before the farmer contacted the local justice of the peace, who in turn telephoned the police.
On their way to the scene a contingent of officers from the North Battleford detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police got stuck in a mud hole, and by the time they showed up news of the gruesome discovery had spread. What little remained of the body was considerably disturbed. Scattered around the field were parts of a man’s overalls, braces, buttons, and bones. Included among the latter were parts of a skull, a human torso extending from the waist to the thighs, pelvic bones, some teeth, and numerous small bones. At the bottom of a half-metre pile of ashes investigators also found a short piece of barbed wire with a loop at one end. Lying near it were two shell casings.
William Bahrey brutally murdered both his brother and his brother-in-law. He was mentally challenged, although not sufficiently so to escape the noose. His lack of understanding of his circumstances can be seen in the letter he wrote seeking commutation of his death sentence. He wanted to be paroled from jail, he said, because he was “anxious to return to take care of my farm duties.”
Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.
After the remains were removed to a nearby church, the police encouraged people to view the body, in the hope that someone would see something that might help identify the person to whom the bones once belonged. Over the few days dozens of residents of the Whitlow district filed by, but many stayed away. John Bahrey was among the latter. He recalled being at home when his brother Harry stopped by. “We were talking about who it might be. It was said that it might be a tramp who had walked in there and slept in the straw pile.”[8] William listened to the conversation, but said nothing. After four days Ambrose could no longer put off what he must have suspected from the beginning: the body was almost certainly that of his son Alex, who had been missing for nearly a week.
Once the patriarch of the Bahrey clan identified the remains, the police quickly began questioning other family members. On April 19, they got around to William. He told them that the last time he saw Alexander, his brother was riding away from home on a bay saddle horse. A week later the horse was located, tied to a tree two kilometres from its owner’s homestead. It was obvious to investigators that in the preceding two weeks the animal had been well cared for.
The same day the police made their discovery, a coroner’s inquest was convened to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of Alexander Bahrey. After jurors finished examining the remains, the bones were sent to Regina to be examined by the province’s chief pathologist. She concluded that they belonged to “a fat, thick-set man of about 30 years of age and medium height.”[9] The short, chubby Alexander fit the description to a T. Even before investigators received the pathologist’s report, they concluded that if Alexander was murdered, his brother was the likely killer. In fact, from the time the police heard that Alexander was missing, officers kept William under surveillance. On April 25, they decided to increase the pressure on the Bahreys, and William was taken into custody on a coroner’s warrant. Even at this late stage had he said nothing, there was little chance William would have been charged with murder, and even less that he would be convicted. But a little over two weeks after being picked up, he told his jailors that he was ready to confess. What surprised the police was not that he was prepared to talk about his brother, but that he wanted to tell them about a second murder as well.
May 9, the day after he confessed to the killings, Bahrey led officers to the scene of both crimes. First he directed them to the haystack where he burned the body of his brother-in-law. There was not much left, although investigators found a quantity of small bones, a pair of cufflinks, and articles of clothing. It was not until more than four months later that the dead man’s skull was discovered a half kilometre away, and the remains were positively identified as those of Nestor Tereschuk.
From the haystack containing the bones of Nestor, William took his minders to the stream into which he threw the rifle he used to shoot his brother. Handed a rake, William went to the exact spot, and in no time pulled out the gun. After that he led the group to the gopher hole in which he stuffed Nestor’s cap. Next he walked to his brother’s farm. On the roof of a hen house officers found the dead man’s watch and razor, hidden there after he was murdered. Then William showed investigators where he was standing when he shot Nestor.
On May 11, Bahrey appeared at a preliminary hearing, called to determine if there was enough evidence to bind him over for trial. The result was a foregone conclusion, but Dora made the proceedings memorable. She had to be carried into the room, and as soon as she was sworn in, she became unresponsive to questioning, almost comatose. Then she suddenly she sat up, and in a loud, hoarse voice called out “Give me the Bible, swear me in a second time, and I will tell you all I know.”[10] With that she relapsed into her former state, and even questions posed by an obviously irate coroner did nothing to rouse her. Dora, however, was not to get off that easily. The police were aware that almost from the moment she learned that Alexander was murdered the grieving widow began living with her husband’s killer. The next day Dora was recalled to the stand, and this time she was ready to talk. In the opinion of many onlookers, her story could have come from a Tolstoy novel, delivered in broken English, and punctuated with a plethora of eastern-European idioms. The essence of what she had to say was crystal clear: William murdered both her husband and his brother-in-law.
Bahrey’s trial was scheduled to get underway the first week of October 1933, but before it did a specially empanelled jury was asked to determine whether the accused was mentally fit to stand trial. It was convened on October 2, and after deliberating for four h
ours, determined that William was sane enough to instruct counsel, and to appreciate the seriousness of what he was accused of doing. Bahrey’s trial started the next day. One Bahrey after another took the stand. None made any attempt to deny, or even minimize, what William did. On the seventh, Chief Justice James Thomas Brown imposed the only sentence he could: William Bahrey was to hang. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal heard arguments about whether the condemned prisoner was sane enough to stand trial. The three-member panel reserved its decision, but when the judgment came down it confirmed that William must hang. On February 13, the Governor General, on the advice of the federal cabinet, turned down his request for clemency. The man who could not keep a secret was to be hanged ten days later.
Two days before that was to happen, Arthur Ellis, Canada’s busiest executioner, arrived in Prince Albert. He spent the next day making sure everything was in order, and just before 6:00 a.m. on February 23, 1934, Bahrey started on his last journey. Beside him, but ignored by the condemned killer, walked his spiritual adviser. William was hanged exactly as scheduled, and ten minutes later joined his two victims in the hereafter.
William Larocque and Emmanuel Lavictoire: Murders for Insurance
Fifty-seven-year-old William Larocque and his best friend and neighbour, fifty-one-year-old Emmanuel Lavictoire, were not subtle men. After they insured and murdered a young man who lived near them in southeastern Ontario, they realized they had a money-making scheme that worked. Their story is a saga of limitless greed, and illustrates how easy it was in the 1930s to get away with murder, at least for a while.
It all started with Athanase Lamarche. In October 1930, he drowned in a car accident while driving with Larocque and Lavictoire near Masson, Quebec. Shortly before his death, Larocque persuaded the dead man to take out a policy of life insurance, which paid double its face value if Lamarche were to die in an accident. Larocque and Lavictoire were the only witnesses to testify at the coroner’s inquest convened following the drowning, and the jury quickly concluded that Lamarche died as a result of an accident. Shortly after the father of Lamarche was paid by his son’s insurance company, Larocque and Lavictoire swindled him out of a large portion of the proceeds. The ease with which they were able to persuade their victim to insure himself, and then get away with killing him, seemed to inspire the two men.