Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  I had been drinking heavy on the 24th of September, 1945, and about 7 p.m. I was going to meet my girlfriend Marie Kayter (now McLaren’s wife) who worked in the Coffee Cabin on 2nd St. E. at 17th Avenue, and I was short of money and needed a few dollars to take my girlfriend out, and I walked down Fourth St. in Calgary and I was hungry, so I went into a Chinese fruit store to buy some peaches, and I bought the peaches and eat one in the store and I stayed in the store while eating the peaches, and during this time several customers came in and left. After a while the Chinaman and I were alone in the store, so I pulled out a gun, a revolver of Italian make, from my pocket it was not loaded because it was defective, and I told the Chinaman I wanted his money, and he started to holler and I told him to shut up and then I hit him several times on the head with the butt of the revolver, when the baker from the next store came in and struggled with me and I struck him with my fist and made the baker take the money from the till and give it to me. There was only $13. I run down, through the store and down the lane and through several backyards and two men were chasing me but I got away. I went to my girlfriend’s room and she helped clean the blood from my clothing. The next day I read in the paper that the Chinaman had died.[14]

  The problem with the statement was that the information it contained was for the most part simply not accurate. For example, in his statement McLaren is alleged to have said that he was on 4th Street when he went into Lum’s store. The fruit vendor’s shop was actually on 3rd Street. The statement also says that the baker who tried to help Lum came in to the fruit store of his own volition. In fact, he was forced into the store by the man who had been assaulting Lum. An even more glaring error was the assertion that the baker struggled with McLaren, who hit him with his fist. That never happened; there was no struggle, and the baker was not struck by anything. Another mistake of fact was the suggestion that Lum’s assailant ran through several backyards. The sailor chasing the man who assaulted Lum denied that the person he was pursuing ran through any backyards, nor were two men in pursuit. Furthermore, the gun that McLaren allegedly confessed to taking out of his pocket was not a revolver, it was an automatic, a distinction with which someone like McLaren would be familiar. Even the language used in the statement is inconsistent with what was normally used by McLaren. The poorly educated labourer, who referred to his victim as a “Chinaman,” was unlikely to describe his automatic pistol as a “revolver of Italian make.” More likely, he would have said it was “a wop gun.”

  Ironically, since McLaren’s wife could not by law testify against her husband, the alleged killer’s statement was the single piece of evidence that implicated him in Lum’s murder. The only other comment McLaren is alleged to have made about the crime was something he was supposed to have said to the detective who took his statement when the two men were alone. “I’ve made three mistakes in my life … First killing the Chinaman. Second, getting married. And third talking to you fellows.”[15] When a Calgary trial judge allowed both statements to be admitted into evidence, their prejudicial effect on jurors was incalculable, and McLaren’s trip to death row was assured.

  Following his return to Calgary, McLaren was held in custody pending the result of a preliminary hearing. When it ended on October 13, 1948, he was committed to stand trial for murder. Before it got underway, however, the Criminal Code was amended to give those convicted of a criminal offense an automatic right to appeal their convictions to the Supreme Court of Canada, provided their appeal was based on a question of law. That amendment came into effect fourteen days before McLaren went on trial.

  Among the first witnesses called by the Crown were the customers who were in Lum’s store between the time McLaren is alleged to have entered, and when Lum was assaulted. They remembered seeing the grocer’s killer, but none recognized McLaren as that man. Their failure to identify McLaren was a serious setback to the prosecution’s case, and the trial judge seemed determined to set things straight. After one of the customers testified that the man he saw was not one of the men in a police lineup, the Crown Attorney was permitted to ask a follow-up question: was there anyone in the lineup who stood out from the others, for any reason whatsoever? McLaren’s lawyer immediately objected to the question. The witness, he said, stated clearly that he did not recognize anyone in the lineup. “If the crown proceeds further it will be cross-examination.”[16] The trial judge disagreed and allowed the question. The witness then testified that there was only one person in the lineup with the build of Lum’s killer, but he had never seen that person before.

  The Crown persisted. “You say there was but one man in the lineup who resembled the man you saw in the store. Can you see him in the courtroom anywhere?”[17] Once again, McLaren’s lawyer was on his feet. Addressing the judge, he said “The witness has said he did not recognize anyone. The crown should not have asked the witness that question when there is only one man here [from the lineup] and that man is in the prisoner’s box. It is practically coaxing him to say it is the man in the box.”[18] The judge allowed the question. He promised that later, presumably after jurors had made their minds up about the guilt of the accused, he would direct the jury as to how much weight they should place on the evidence. When allowed to answer the question, the witness gave the answer the Crown Attorney was looking for: “Yes, he is the man in the prisoner’s box.”[19]

  One question the lawyer for McLaren posed, which was not answered during the trial, was why the police, who had his client’s fingerprints on file, did not attempt to match them with fingerprints taken from the rear door through which Lum’s killer escaped. He also wondered why investigators did not photograph the bloodstains left on the floor after Lum was beaten. The killer walked through the blood to make his exit — surely from the prints left at the scene the police could make an estimate of the size of the shoe that made the print, and from that the size of the killer’s foot.

  Is it possible that there were fingerprints taken that were not produced? It is not my duty to explain that. What are you as a jury to infer from that kind of evidence? It is the right of jury to demand the best type of evidence. They took McLaren’s fingerprints in Toronto, but the Calgary police did not hold up its end and take prints from the doorknob so that they could be compared.[20]

  The trial judge appeared to be singularly unimpressed with McLaren’s lawyer, a leading member of Calgary’s defence bar. On one occasion he asked the lawyer to stop yapping at the Crown,[21] and on another told the lawyer that “We are never going to get through this trial if it is going to be a Sunday school debating society.”[22] The animosity between the judge and the defendant’s counsel spilled over into closing arguments. During his more than two hour charge to the jury, the judge read McLaren’s alleged statement, sentence by sentence, ending each with the question: Did the detectives who interviewed the accused make this up? Inconsistencies between what was said in the statement and the facts presented at trial were ignored.[23] The judge concluded with: “A man who makes a confession which a jury accepts as being true, if that confession is in fact a confession of guilt, such a man can be convicted on that confession alone, even though there is no corroboration.”[24] When McLaren’s lawyer objected to the charge, arguing that the judge failed to advise jurors that they were free to interpret the facts in a way different from what was suggested by the Crown, the judge replied that if counsel did not agree with his charge, he was free to take his objection to the court of appeal.[25] Less than two hours later the jury returned a guilty verdict, with no recommendation for mercy.

  McLaren’s trial ended late in the afternoon on Saturday, November 20. The next morning he was transferred from Calgary to Lethbridge, where he was to be hanged on the last day of the following March. The case was back in the headlines three weeks before his scheduled date with the hangman, when the Alberta Court of Appeal turned down his request for a new trial. Two and a half weeks later McLaren’s lawyer appeared before Mr. Justice Patrick Kerwin of the Supreme Court of Canada to ask that
the court hear an appeal from his client’s conviction. Technically, the request should have been unnecessary. The amendment to the Criminal Code, which gave convicted killers like McLaren an automatic right of appeal, came into effect two weeks before his trial started. That meant that the court had no legal basis for refusing to hear his request for a new trial. Kerwin, however, did not see it that way. He ruled, for a reason he never stated, that McLaren’s appeal would not be heard by the Supreme Court.

  When Kerwin turned down McLaren’s application the condemned man’s only remaining hope was that the Governor General, on the advice of the federal cabinet, would commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. That hope was lost on March 29, 1949, less than twenty-four hours before McLaren was to hang. The condemned killer spent his last hours talking to his guards and playing checkers, occasionally standing up and asking “who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”[26] But when the clock struck midnight, McLaren was on his own. He walked to the gallows without assistance, showing no visible sign of emotion. That may have been because he took advantage of the offer made to those about to be put to death — would he like a drug, or brandy? Either one made a killer’s last walk a little more bearable.

  The trap doors separating Stanley Donald McLaren from eternity were opened at 12:11 a.m. on March 30. He was pronounced dead fifteen minutes later. In a sad, almost pathetic postscript to this tragedy, McLaren was buried in the yard of the Lethbridge jail at almost the same time as his victim was buried in Calgary. Lum’s relatives wanted to bring his body back to China, and until they could raise the money to do so, the grocer’s remains were kept in a vault at Union Cemetery. The day McLaren was executed, cemetery officials were told that there was to be no trip home.

  Arthur Kendall: Killing in Front of Family

  The people and the crimes described in this book share a number of common characteristics. One is that murderers are bullies; a second is that their crimes are seldom well planned. Arthur Kendall and the murder of his wife are examples of both.

  In the 1940s and 1950s the labourer and part-time farmer lived in the Walkerton district of southwestern Ontario and was the father of five children. The eldest was a thirteen-year-old son; the rest were daughters, aged eleven, nine, seven, and eighteen months. Kendall ruled his brood, and his wife, with an iron fist. When he spoke of his wife it was always to tear her down. Once he described her to a neighbour as “just a cow.” When he married her he said, “she was supposed to be a virgin, but [she was] no more a virgin than a 12 year-old cow.”[27] Despite his lack of respect for his spouse, Kendall enjoyed the company of women. Shortly before Helen Kendall disappeared her husband and three friends went into the bush near Wiarton, Ontario, to work at a saw mill. All four lived in the same cabin, and they soon began dating local women. One of the men knew the Kendalls well, and had a great deal of respect for Helen. He was a little surprised, and perhaps disappointed, when Arthur began bragging about the woman he was seeing. It did not come as total surprise when he later found out that Kendall’s new relationship was not new at all. In July 1952, he moved his family from their farm into a one-room cabin at Johnson Harbour, near Tobermory. A few days later Kendall left them on their own to take his other woman, and her five children, for a weekend trip to the farm that he had just left.

  Shortly after this Kendall and his family were alone in their cabin, when his two oldest daughters were wakened. They slept on a bunk directly above the bed of their parents, and had long before learned to follow instructions never to make a noise, or get up before being called. On August 2, 1952, the fight they listened to was worse than normal. Nine-year-old Anne and her older sister Margaret huddled together in absolute silence, not really understanding what was happening. Then they heard the last words their mother was to speak: “Arthur, please don’t.” As the two girls peeked over the edge of the bed, they saw their father place a knife on the table, and then drag the body of their mother out of the cabin. About thirty minutes later Kendall returned. While Anne and Margaret pretended to be asleep, he began wiping blood off the table and floor with a sheet. When he finished he stuffed the blood-soaked items, together with the knife, into a shopping bag and for a second time left the cabin. When he came back he washed the floor again.[28]

  The next morning their father instructed each of his children not to talk about their mother. If anyone asked, they were to tell them that she left home a couple of days earlier. That evening their father told the kids they were coming with him to visit a sick friend, Beatrice Hogue. The children stayed with Hogue and her five children for most of the next week, then everyone, all twelve of them, moved to Kendall’s farm seventy-five miles south, in Perth County. This activity did not go unnoticed, and rumours began to spread that something was amiss. When an acquaintance of Kendall’s dropped by for a visit, he could not help but notice that things were different. All his friend would say was “My wife has skinned out with another man.”[29] Kendall told someone else that his wife had run off to Brantford with her lover. The man suggested he go and bring her back, but Kendall rejected the notion: “let her go to hell.”[30]

  There was so much whispering about the missing Mrs. Kendall that word eventually reached the authorities. A month after their mother disappeared, the two oldest children were interviewed by an inspector with the Ontario Provincial Police. The children were well rehearsed. Asked where her mother was, Margaret said she left after a fight with her father, during which her mother threw a cup of tea into his face. In fact, the daughter recalled, they were having supper when her mother announced she was leaving: “she said I’ll never be back — never — she wasn’t crying…. I want her to be found, but I don’t care if she comes to live with us. I like my daddy best.”[31] The children even remembered the clothing their mother wore when she left the house, and the things she put into the shopping bag she took with her.

  Probably the most suspicious evidence that came to the attention of the inspector was a cardboard box found by a neighbour in the woods near the Kendall farm. Inside the box were articles of women’s clothing, including two slips and a July edition of the Farmer’s Advocate with Kendall’s mailing address visible on the front cover. When the items were examined in the police lab, two bloodstains were discovered on the front page of the magazine. The problem for investigators was that there was no proof the stains were human; and even though Kendall was seen walking through a freshly worked field in the area where the box was discovered, there was nothing concrete to connect him to it. The police eventually dug up the local garbage dump and the fields around the Kendall home, but nothing was found.

  So it was that with little to go on, the investigation into the disappearance of Helen Kendall ground to halt. While life for the missing woman’s children went on, times were much tougher than they once had been. For two years the youngsters lived in foster homes, then were returned to the crowded residence of their father and the Hogues. After that Kendall talked openly about what might or might not have happened to their mother. James later recalled that his father seemed almost proud of what everyone suspected he had done. He “always said there was no jail that would hold him. He liked to boast a bit — he discussed it openly in front of us.”[32] Anne remembered that when she or one of her siblings accused their father of murdering their mother, he would always reply: “Prove it.”[33]

  After brooding for nine years, Anne could no longer keep the family secret, and in January 1961, she went to the police. So too did Margaret. Before the month was out Kendall was arrested at the Royal Air Force base at Clinton, Ontario, where he worked as a carpenter. By the time his murder trial got underway on October 24, Anne’s brother also gave investigators a statement implicating his father in the disappearance of his mother. With nothing physical connecting Kendall to the crime, the Crown built its case on circumstantial evidence. It was enough. The trial ended after four days of testimony. The presiding judge stressed to jurors that there was nothing in the law that prevented them from bringing
in a verdict of guilty in the absence of a body. There was ample evidence, he suggested, for the jury to reach two conclusions: Helen Kendall was dead; and her death was brought about by her husband. In less than three hours the jurors rendered their verdict — guilty.

  When Charles Dubin’s appeal of Kendall’s conviction was heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal on January 23, 1962, his petition made reference to a number of legal points, but apart from arguing that the trial judge misdirected the jury, he really had only one thing to ask the court: if Kendall really did murder his wife, why did the couple’s children remain silent for nine years? He argued that when they were out of the control and influence of their father, the children had many opportunities to tell someone — members of the Children’s Aid Society, or the people in foster homes, for instance — about what happened. The appellate court deliberated for just eight minutes before dismissing the appeal. Two weeks later the same court granted the killer a stay of execution so that Dubin could try his luck with the Supreme Court of Canada. There he advanced the same argument, suggesting that the trial judge improperly instructed the jury when he failed to warn jurors against convicting Kendall solely on the strength of the distant memories of three of his five children. The Supreme Court, like the Court of Appeal, disagreed, and unanimously dismissed the appeal. Now all that was left for the killer was to ask the federal cabinet for clemency. This time he was more successful.

  Kendall made legal history when he was convicted of murdering his wife. A month earlier the Criminal Code was amended to divide murder into capital and non-capital charges. Capital murder involved either a pre-meditated killing, or a murder committed during a burglary, indecent assault, rape, escape from custody, piracy, sabotage, arson, treason, or the killing of a police officer. The sentence for a conviction under either category was mandatory. In the case of capital murder, it was death; in the case of non-capital murder, the sentence was life imprisonment. Kendall was the first person convicted of capital murder after the amendments came into effect. On April 10, 1962, the government of John George Diefenbaker commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. It added to the commutation a condition that he was not to be released without the approval of the federal cabinet. When Walkerton’s sheriff advised Kendall that he was not going to hang, the killer did not say a word.