Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  A subject of considerable interest to all of the participants in Cloutier’s trial was Brochu’s extended illness. The first doctor to treat the former cab driver said Brochu arrived at his office on July 16, 1937, complaining of a severe burning sensation in his stomach. The doctor testified that Brochu told him he had not eaten any bad food, nor had he been drinking. After examining the patient, the physician admitted that he “wasn’t able to determine the cause of his sickness. I decided his illness was inflammation of the stomach and not indigestion as I had first believed. It seemed as though he might have suffered some kind of poisoning through his food.”[13] After Brochu left, the doctor said he continued to think about his patient’s condition and decided to stop by the Brochu residence to see how the cabbie was feeling. “I didn’t stay long at the home because Mrs. Brochu did not receive me very well.”[14]

  The next medical practitioner to treat the murder victim was a doctor working at the hospital in Thetford Mines. He testified that Cloutier showed up with her husband on July 21. “Brochu was having considerable pain from his stomach. I was unable to find out what was the cause of his trouble and apparently he did not know himself. His illness might have been caused, I thought first, by contaminated water, improperly cooked food or even green vegetables.” But, he said, after five days of rest Brochu left, “apparently cured.”[15]

  Last to treat Brochu was a physician who examined him several times in the days before the patient died. He was convinced Brochu was suffering from some kind of indigestion. “I treated him with ordinary indigestion and the medicine I prescribed for him did not help. In most cases of that kind, which were common in the district at that time, it would have.”[16] When asked about the circumstances surrounding the making of Brochu’s death certificate, the practitioner said his patient’s widow told him that she needed a death certificate before she could collect on her husband’s life insurance, so he made one out, listing indigestion as the cause of death. What he did not know was that Cloutier made the same request to two other doctors. They both refused to provide her with the certificate.

  The pathologist who examined Brochu’s body following its exhumation felt very strongly that the dead man was not well served by his doctors. He told the court that after someone consumes arsenic they feel:

  violent pains and burning in the stomach, and vomiting follows. The hands and feet swell, the face becomes swollen and the eyes are affected. Later the victim feels pain in his limbs, which finally become paralyzed. There are eruptions on the skin. The victim becomes weaker. The pulse slows up, and then death comes.[17]

  The pathologist, who sat through the trial making notes, said every symptom he heard described was a symptom associated with arsenic poisoning.

  During his address to the jury Cloutier’s lawyer dismissed the testimony about witchcraft as “ridiculous and foolish talk,” and then bore down on the crux of the Crown’s case — the evidence that Brochu had been poisoned. That allegation was simply not something an honest and intelligent person could accept as true.

  Did Brochu die poisoned? Was it proved he was poisoned? Was poison really found? Medicine says yes. But medicine isn’t a certain science — it’s a theoretical science. Was medicine right before Pasteur? Doctors before him were sure of their ground just as we are sure of ours today. They were wrong though. Doctors giving testimony in courts before Pasteur came didn’t perjure themselves when they said what they thought was truth. They didn’t perjure themselves but they were still wrong. Dr. Roussel insisted the arsenic had been administered to Brochu in more than one dose. But three other doctors who had treated Brochu during his last illness in the summer of 1937 said his sickness was acute indigestion. Now all four doctors were trained in medicine. They should know what they are talking about. But they don’t agree. Brochu was a drinker and evidence during his trial was that liquor often made him sick. Three doctors who treated him said he was poisoning himself through his liver and kidneys. Perhaps he died a natural death. There was no evidence to show Mrs. Grondin ever had arsenic in her hands except for her gardening.[18]

  The defence lawyer concluded with his strongest argument. He caught the Crown’s medical expert in what he referred to as a monumental “error of analysis.” Holding up the container seized from Grondin’s home, he reminded jurors that the expert said it contained arsenic. But that was not true. It was not a mixture of paris green and carbonate of lime, as the Crown’s witness alleged. The supposed poison was nothing more than ordinary wood ashes. “If the doctor made a simple mistake like that, maybe he was wrong when he said there was arsenic in Brochu’s body.”[19] The lawyer may have been right, but the jury was not buying his argument. After sitting for a month and hearing testimony from more than one hundred witnesses, it took jurors one hour and fifteen minutes to find Cloutier guilty of murder. Perhaps they came to their decision so quickly because it was divinely inspired. When the jury was told it was to begin its deliberations, the foreman asked the judge for a “special favour.” Could they walk a few steps down the street to St. Joseph’s old Roman Catholic Church and pray for a bit. That is what they did. After spending twenty minutes on their knees, the jurors rose and returned to the courthouse. Ninety minutes later Cloutier was sentenced to hang.[20]

  The trial of his wife ended on October 8, 1938, and Grondin’s got underway before the same judge a month later. His hearing lasted almost as long as that of his co-accused, and much of the evidence was the same. One thing that became clear at the very beginning of the trial was that from the day he became Brochu’s hired man, Grondin was seldom apart from his lover. The murder victim’s fourteen-year-old niece and her brother lived with the Brochus the summer her uncle died. She testified that every day just after lunch Grondin showed up, and as soon as he did the siblings were banished to the second floor of the tiny home. “She [Cloutier] told us she would beat us if we did not leave.” Once they got to the second floor, she said, her aunt lowered a trapdoor at the top of the staircase. “We only came down again after Grondin had left.”[21]

  Although the trial continued for another three weeks, the result for Grondin was the same as it had been for his wife: guilty. His date with the hangman was set for the end of April 1939, by which time his wife should have been dead — except that was not the way things turned out. When Cloutier received permission to appeal her verdict, her death sentence was postponed. After the Quebec Court of Appeal denied her application for a new trial, her sentence was postponed a second time so that she could appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. That court reserved judgment after hearing arguments, and by the time the various appeals of Grondin and Cloutier were dealt with, the couple spent almost a year and a half on death row.

  In early February one last wrinkle had to be ironed out before they could be executed. According to law, condemned persons are to be hanged in the judicial district closest to where the crime was committed. In the case of Cloutier and Grondin, that meant their execution was to take place in the village of St. Joseph de Beauce. No one had ever been hanged there before, and its townspeople had no appetite for such a spectacle. By this time Cloutier did not care where she was put to death, she just wanted to get it over with. As usual, Grondin said nothing. When the provincial government was petitioned to change the location of the hanging, it agreed to do so: the couple was to hang in the courtyard of Montreal’s Bordeaux Jail.

  Grondin went first. A little over sixteen minutes later his widow began her death walk. She was dropped at 7:10 a.m., and as her body was cut down a black flag was raised to half mast. The tolling bells of the city’s Catholic Churches brought to an end the lives of two lovers who, with a little more patience, may have gotten away with murder.

  6

  The Two Rolands

  Love, booze, and one too many suicides are the themes of the two stories in this chapter. Both are set in the province of Quebec. Sadly, four people died, three of whom were women. In the first tale a killer got away with murder until his lover was o
vercome by guilt and committed suicide. The police thought it unlikely that a man and wife would each take their own lives, and it was their reopened investigation that sent her lover to the gallows. The second story is all about brutality involving a woman who would do anything for her man. That included killing his wife.

  Roland Asselin: Fifty-Five Weeks between Murders

  Ulric Gauthier was a big man in St. Telesphore, a small Quebec town located just west of Montreal. The large garage-man was one of the community’s most prosperous business persons, and drank with gusto. His stentorian voice, steeped in liquor, was often heard echoing down the town’s main street. But he died quietly, or at least as quietly as someone who shot himself can die. After Gauthier’s death was ruled a suicide, everyone seemed to forget about him — everyone, that is, except his widow. When she hanged herself three months after her husband died, the authorities thought it was one suicide too many, and reopened an investigation into the death of Ulric. That was bad news for Roland Asselin. One year and three weeks after he shot his lover’s husband in the side of the head, he was called to account.

  If Roland Asselin did not have a lot of close friends, he was at least well known. When not driving his cab he often stopped by local garages to kill time. Asselin was at the business operated by Joseph Babineau so often that no one noticed when he began wandering around the garage, opening drawers and poking about. In retrospect, as soon as it was discovered that a revolver was missing, Asselin should have been considered the likely thief. That was not the case, however, and although Babineau noticed the gun was gone sometime in mid-1946, he neither reported it missing nor made an issue of its disappearance. But Asselin knew where it was. In fact, the taxi man made little attempt to hide it. Perhaps that is why he had it in his jacket pocket on November 9, when he picked Gauthier up for a night of drinking.

  No one saw where the men went, but the next morning it was all too apparent where Gauthier ended up. His body was discovered lying on a dirt road a few miles out of town by an area farmer. The man slowed as he passed the corpse, but did not stop until he encountered some friends. The group returned to the remains, and despite the shock of finding the body of a man everyone knew, they could not help think that something was not right with the scene. Babineau’s missing revolver was lying on one side of Gauthier, and a bottle of beer on the other. Two things struck the men as odd: the fingers of the garage owner’s left hand were hooked into one of the pockets of his vest, as if he died in the middle of a casual conversation. And the men thought it unlikely someone could shoot himself in the left side of his head with his right hand. It was also strange that although it had poured rain the night before, the soles of the shoes of the dead man were dry, and there were no tracks in the mud leading up to or away from the spot where Gauthier lay.

  A few days later a coroner’s inquest was held in a local restaurant. Jurors were undecided about how Gauthier died. Some believed Asselin when he testified that the evening before Gauthier’s body was found the two were out drinking, and he dropped off his passenger near the spot where his body was found. Others were convinced the death was the result of some kind of accident, while a few felt Asselin was not telling the truth. As a result, the inquest was terminated, and a second one convened. This time jurors had no doubt — it was death by suicide. The police promptly closed their files, and life went back to normal.

  On the occasions when someone in town spoke of Gauthier, it was likely to relate a story about his drinking. The mayor, for instance, recalled the time he dropped by Gauthier’s house. As he walked up to the door, a bullet whizzed by his head. Gauthier quickly admitted to the shooting, but said he was not really trying to hit the mayor, just scare him a bit. The two men had a long relationship, albeit not a particularly pleasant one. The mayor frequently received complaints about Gauthier’s rowdiness, and once, when things had gone too far, he ordered local hotels to stop serving the garage-man. But that did not stop Gauthier from drinking and acting rowdy. Typical was an anecdote told by the town secretary, who remembered Gauthier breaking three window panes trying to get into his house one morning at 3:00 a.m. Gauthier said he wanted to pay his property taxes.

  If Gauthier’s widow had been better able to cope with her husband’s death, things would almost certainly not have ended as they did. Although Alice married Ulric in 1937, she was never really committed to making the marriage work. After Alice hanged herself, the police reopened their investigation into the death of Ulric, and most of the people they interviewed were asked the same question: “Did you ever hear that Gauthier’s wife ran around with other men?” Almost everyone agreed that he had. The exception was the local veterinarian, who, when asked the question, replied, “No, I never heard she ran around with other men.”[1] Well, then what did you hear? “I heard only that she had relations with other men.” According to most of those who testified, Roland Asselin was one of those with whom she was most intimate.

  These rumours could not be ignored, and for the next ten months Quebec Provincial Police officers looked for some concrete evidence that Asselin, or Asselin and Alice, murdered Ulric Gauthier. Persistence paid off. On December 29, 1947, a little over a year after Gauthier was killed, Asselin confessed, not to murdering the husband of his lover, but to accidently shooting him. According to Asselin, the two men drank beer at several bars just outside St. Telesphore. As they left the last one they got into a heated discussion over Gauthier’s insistence that he drive Asselin’s cab. The two argued, and Gauthier produced a revolver. They fought, and during the scuffle Asselin wrestled the gun away from Gauthier. He fired a single shot, to scare him, but the bullet struck Gauthier in the side of the head.

  After Asselin gave his statement to the police he was taken into custody. A third coroner’s inquest was quickly convened to look into the death of Ulric Gauthier. The hearing lasted just two hours, and it took juror’s only fifteen minutes to find Asselin criminally responsible for Gauthier’s death. A week later the cabbie was arraigned on a charge of murder. His trial got underway during the second week of June 1948, and after six days of testimony he was found guilty. The only real question was whether Gauthier’s death was the result of manslaughter or murder. The presiding judge had little doubt about which it was, and shared his conviction with jurors. He told them that they should not believe that Gauthier was shot with his own gun, since it was unthinkable that someone as demonstrative as the dead man could possess a revolver and not wave it around in front of others. On the other hand, they could accept as fact that Asselin had a gun on the evening in question.

  Jurors reached a verdict in a little over an hour. Once they made their decision known, court was adjourned for a few minutes to allow the presiding justice to prepare his sentencing remarks. Only one sentence was available to him. Although Asselin showed little emotion throughout his trial, as soon as he was returned to his cell to await the return of the judge, he collapsed. His guards quickly laid him on a bench, and summoned a doctor. After a lengthy delay, Mr. Justice Wilfrid Lazure formally postponed sentencing until the following morning, when Asselin was informed he was to hang on October 1. But he was not executed then, nor on January 14, 1949, March 25, or March 31. Asselin’s luck ran out when the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled there would be no more reprieves; the condemned man was to be executed on June 10. Just after midnight Asselin was hanged, and one half hour later he was declared dead.

  The deaths cells where condemned prisoners were held were small, utilitarian, and totally lacking in privacy. Twenty-four hours a day a member of the death watch sat outside the cell, keeping a written record of everything the prisoner said or did. The windows shown in this photo were covered when a death cell was occupied so that a prisoner would not know how quickly, or slowly, time passed.

  Author’s photo.

  Roland Genest:

  He Never Murdered a Woman He Didn’t Love

  They made quite a pair. Both were young, vivacious, and seemed to get fulfillment out a relati
onship that seemed equal parts love and violence. She was only twenty-one when she met the good looking twenty-five-year-old. By the time she realized he was married, the woman was deeply in love. So much so that when he suggested she kill his wife, she did not hesitate. For almost two years the pair got away with murder, and then he tired of her constant nagging. That’s when it all came to an end.

  Rita Genest was the first to die. She was just twenty-three, but in the opinion of her husband, she was no fun. A few months before Rita was beaten to death Roland Genest was on his own when he noticed a young woman riding by on a bicycle. They began to talk, and before long were dating. She was already in love when Genest told her that they would have to stop seeing each other — he was a married man. At his trial Genest said he forgot who brought up the subject, but he distinctly remembered that his lover volunteered to murder Rita. That way, she said, Roland would have an alibi, and he would be single again. In a matter of a few hours they decided to do it. Genest bought an iron bar, gave his co-conspirator a key to his apartment, and told her to set fire to the room when Rita was dead; which is exactly what she did.