Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  John Pawluk was hanged on August 21, 1936, and buried near the Assiniboine River on the grounds of the Headingley jail. Thirty-eight years later his and fifteen other bodies were disinterred and reburied in a small enclosure a mile west.

  James Alfred Kelsey: A Tendency to Talk Too Much

  James Kelsey was a good person who did a terrible thing, but were it not for his tendency to talk too much, he would almost certainly have gotten away with the perfect murder, despite the fact that the person he and his brother beat to death was a close family friend.

  In December 1959, Kelsey and his brother Lloyd Cross lived in Welland, Ontario. Although he had no record and was never involved in crime, Kelsey listened when his sibling talked of a way the pair could make some easy money. They were drinking at the Reeta Hotel when Lloyd said all they had to do was hire Sam Delibasich, a family friend and local cabbie, to drive them out of town. Then they would knock him out, take his cab to Toronto, and sell it to a used car dealer. On December 9, that is what they did. They asked Delibasich to drive them to St. Catharines. When they were only a few miles out of Welland the brothers asked the taxi driver to turn down a deserted side road, and then told him to stop. The three men smoked cigarettes for a bit before Kelsey quietly drew from his clothes a hammer and hit Dalibasich over the head. Cross then grabbed the weapon and hit their friend a second time. The badly injured driver managed to get out of the taxi and he started running across a field, closely pursued by Cross. When the elder brother caught up, he knocked Dalibasich to the ground. The winded and frightened cabbie held up his wallet, and as Cross took it Kelsey arrived on the scene. He told his brother that they had to kill Dalibasich, because if they did not, he would go straight to the authorities. “To make sure, I stuck an ice pick into Sam’s back.”[11] In fact, it turned out that Kelsey stuck it in three times while Dalibasich was alive, and another three after he died.

  The brothers left their victim lying in the field and drove to Toronto, stopping once to throw into Lake Ontario some of his belongings, together with the hammer and the ice-pick. When they reached Toronto, the killers made several attempts to sell the cab, but there were no buyers, so they abandoned it on a downtown street. Kelsey and Cross then checked into a hotel, and the next day made their way back to Welland. A resident of the apartment building in front of which Dalibasich’s vehicle was left noticed it, and after three or four days contacted the police. They promptly had the cab towed away. The body of Dalibasich, meanwhile, lay unnoticed until December 17, when it was discovered by a rabbit hunter. Although the police quickly connected the body with the cab abandoned in Toronto, they had nothing else to work on, and their investigation ground to a halt. That is the way things would likely have remained were it not for a radio program.

  Sometime in the two years following the murder Kelsey moved to Niagara Falls, New York, and a group of his childhood buddies began driving across the border for regular visits. In September 1951, the guys decided to take a trip to Buffalo, and on the way they listened to the radio program Gang Busters. When it ended Kelsey asked if anyone remembered the Dalibasich murder. Without waiting for a response, he started to talk. Aubrey Merritt was likely Kelsey’s best friend, and for the next several months brooded over what he heard. In January 1952, he got in touch with the Welland police. When they interviewed Kelsey’s girlfriend, she said she too was told about his involvement in the murder. With that investigators decided they had enough to lay charges against the brothers, and they were charged with murder. Kelsey made it easy for investigators — he confessed to everything. He even agreed to accompany the police to Toronto. Along the way he pointed out the various stops he and his brother made more than two years earlier. Kelsey showed investigators the road leading to the field where the murder occurred, and where he and his brother threw the murder weapons into Toronto Bay. In Toronto Kelsey took officers to one of the used car lots where they tried to sell the cab, and to the spot on Bloor Street where it was abandoned.

  The Crown decided to proceed against Kelsey first, and on March 10, 1952, his preliminary hearing got underway in Welland. Even at this stage if the young killer kept his mouth shut, he may have gotten off. But when he was asked if he had anything to say, he held nothing back. Kelsey’s two confessions were the only direct evidence the police had linking him to the murder of Dalibasich, so it did not come as much of a surprise when during his September trial he repudiated everything. He also refused to testify on his own behalf. That meant that all his lawyer could do was to introduce evidence of his previously good character, and argue that there was nothing in his past to suggest he would have allowed himself to become involved in such a brutal murder. His former girlfriend said the same thing. Asked if she believed what her boyfriend told her about his involvement with the Dalibasich murder, she said no, she did not. “I didn’t believe him because he was always a good guy.”[12]

  But by then it was too late. Since Kelsey did not challenge the evidence heard by jurors, and no evidence was led to suggest he had a reason to incriminate himself in a murder, the jury was free to accept as truthful everything they heard. On September 18, it returned a verdict of guilty. To make matters even worse for Kelsey, jurors refused to append to their decision a recommendation for mercy. The convicted killer was sentenced to hang early in the new year. Before then, however, his lawyer appealed the verdict to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Although it dismissed the request, it did grant a stay of execution until March 10, 1953, so Kelsey could take his request for a new trial to the Supreme Court of Canada. That meant he would be alive to give evidence at the trial of his brother, which got underway in mid-January. Kelsey again refused to testify. Since he was already on death row, there was nothing the Crown could do to force him to change his mind. For his part, Cross denied any involvement in the murder. According to his legal counsel, Kelsey acted alone when he murdered Dalibasich, and the lawyer told jury members they should not believe anything Cross’s brother told the police. After all, Kelsey was not only a deserter from the Canadian army; he was “a low character.”[13] The jury seemed to agree, and on January 13, 1953, it found the accused not guilty.

  A month and a week later the Supreme Court heard Kelsey’s appeal, and reserved judgment. Kelsey’s death sentence was postponed pending their decision. On March 16, Kelsey was once again advised that he was to hang. Before that could happen, however, the federal cabinet commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. With that, the man who talked too much was transferred from his death cell to Kingston Penitentiary.

  8

  Killers on the Run

  Walter Pavlukoff and Henry Séguin had a lot in common. Both were carpenters, both spent much of their adult life in prison, and both escaped after committing murder. Pavlukoff was a native of British Columbia and fled a massive manhunt to live for years in Ontario. Séguin did the opposite: he murdered in Ontario and hid out on Canada’s west coast. They had more than one thing in common, but the most memorable is that just before they were to be hanged, each committed suicide virtually in front of their death watch.

  Henry Séguin: From Ontario to British Columbia

  The execution was to have taken place at midnight. Everything was ready.

  A grave was dug the day before, hacked out of the frozen ground in a section of the jail courtyard near the outdoor scaffold. The executioner arrived from Montreal about forty-eight hours earlier, and after supervising construction of the gallows was killing time in the office of the prison warden. Nearby, police officials from Ontario and British Columbia were chatting in small groups. Just before the condemned prisoner was to begin his death walk he asked for privacy while he used his night pail. When his priest entered his cell a few minutes later, everything started to go sideways. Within minutes the killer lay dead. How it came to this is the stuff of fiction.

  The story started in either Cornwall or Maxville, depending on whether you begin with the killer or his victim. Henry Séguin was born in Cornwall, a city in eastern On
tario approximately four hundred kilometres east of Toronto. Maxville, the hometown of his victim, is thirty-two kilometres north. To suggest that Séguin had a troubled childhood is a gross understatement. He was only nine when he was convicted of break, enter, and theft and sentenced to an indefinite term in an industrial school run by a Roman Catholic order known as the Christian Brothers. He was released four years later.

  Six months after leaving St. Joseph’s Industrial School Séguin was back, again convicted of theft. Within days of re-entering the facility he escaped, albeit for only a day. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday he was sent home, where his criminal career began in earnest. With only a grade two education and no occupational skills, he took to crime as naturally as a Labrador retriever to water. Less than a year after being paroled from St. Joseph’s he was sentenced to a seven month term in a provincial jail, and no sooner had he been released than he received a suspended sentence for another theft. Within weeks he was arrested yet again, re-entering the Guelph jail as a seasoned criminal. It could have been worse. A more serious charge of robbery with violence was dismissed on a technicality.

  Henry Séguin killed three people, two for no other reason than they might sometime in the future be able to identify him. With the official death party waiting outside his cell to escort him to the gallows, he somehow managed to kill himself. In his suicide note he wrote that he was the real victim, not those whom he wronged during a life of crime.

  Courtesy of Vancouver Sun.

  Shortly after beginning to serve his sentence Séguin escaped. He immediately went on a crime spree, earning himself a term of two years less a day in the institution from which he had just broken out. A year into that term he escaped again. After committing a series of break-ins, he sought refuge in the Canadian army. A routine background check quickly determined that he was an escapee, and he was promptly discharged by the armed forces and arrested by the police. Séguin had finally reached the big leagues — he was about to do his time in a federal penitentiary.

  If there was any doubt about Séguin’s career path it was put to rest when shortly after being released he returned to Kingston Penitentiary, again convicted of break, enter, and theft. It was following this sentence that the connection between Séguin and Maxville was established. In late February 1952, Séguin left Kingston for the last time, and the now twenty-six-year-old moved home to live with his parents in the dance hall they operated in Cornwall. In a lot adjacent to their business an acquaintance of the Séguins stored a small house trailer. A few weeks after returning to reside with his parents, Henry broke into the unit and stole a Leatherneck Model 150 .22 calibre rifle and a small, three-compartment change purse.

  In June, Séguin left Cornwall following a fight with his parents, and he and a man he identified as his uncle rented a cabin a few miles outside his hometown. Weeks later, and now alone, he began sleeping in his car near an unused church on the outskirts of Maxville.

  Early in August Séguin was walking down the town’s main street when he ran into Douglas McKibben, whom he met while both men were imprisoned in Kingston. Over coffee the two reminisced about their days in prison, then McKibben made the mistake of telling Séguin that he was working as a bookkeeper in a garage owned by one of the town’s wealthiest citizens. He compounded his mistake by admitting that when he took the job he did not disclose that he was an ex-con. Séguin immediately realized what that meant, and told McKibben that if he did not supply him with money and food, he would share the bookkeeper’s secret with Leonard Hurd, McKibben’s boss.

  With the cash he was extorting Séguin rented a cabin on a farm near Maxville and began planning his next crime. On August 16, 1952, he carried it out. His target was Hurd, a man widely known to carry on his person large sums of money, often well in excess of $1000. The plan was simple — Séguin would park his beat-up 1934 Chevrolet coup on the side of a road just outside Maxville, then when it got dark walk into town and ask the garage-man for gas and a ride back to his car. Once the two were beyond prying eyes, Séguin would take Hurd’s money.

  It worked, sort of. Séguin did indeed leave his car outside Maxville, and he had no difficulty locating Hurd. The problem was the wealthy businessman was busy for most of the evening, and did not stop by his garage until 11:30 p.m., by which time several area residents had driven past Séguin’s Chevrolet and remembered both it and the stranger walking to town. Nonetheless, Séguin persuaded Hurd to give him a ride back to his car. When they arrived at their destination Séguin exited the rear passenger seat, pulled out his stolen rifle, opened the front passenger door of the vehicle, and shot Hurd five times, three times in the head. He then took the mortally wounded man’s wallet and cash, pushed Hurd’s car into the ditch, and took off in his coup.

  Séguin had no sooner driven away than a car passed the disabled vehicle. It was followed shortly thereafter by several more. The driver of one recognized the car angled into the ditch, and drove into Maxville to report the accident to Hurd. The Good Samaritan happened onto one of Hurd’s employees almost as soon as he reached town and the two immediately drove back to what they thought was the scene of an accident. As soon as they looked more closely, however, they realized they were wrong.

  Hurd was sprawled across the front seat, his legs on the passenger side of the car, his head under the steering wheel. Even without opening the driver-side door it was obvious Hurd had been shot. The men headed back to town, one to locate the local doctor, the other to report the crime to Maxville’s single-member police force.

  News of the incident spread like wildfire, and within an hour the murder scene was crowded with spectators. As soon as he realized there was nothing that could be done for Hurd, the town doctor returned home to contact the coroner, and report the robbery-murder to the nearest detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police force. By 2:00 a.m. the first O.P.P. officer arrived, and he noticed a brown leather bag lying on the floor in the rear of the Hurd vehicle. It was removed when the car, its owner still lying across the front seat, was towed to a Cornwall funeral home, where a post mortem was to be carried out the following day.

  On Sunday a senior inspector from the Toronto headquarters of the O.P.P. arrived to take over the investigation. One of his first actions was to inspect the brown satchel. Under a wash cloth and bath towel he found a number of comic books, a shaving kit, clothing, and three articles that tied Séguin directly to the murder. The first was a pay book issued by the Canadian army to Joseph Henry Laurier Séguin. Inside it the inspector discovered a certificate indicating that Séguin had been dishonourably discharged from the armed forces in January 1945. The last item was an Unemployment Insurance Card, also in Séguin’s name.

  Now that they knew who they were looking for, the police began a very public search for the killer and his unusual looking car. The coup had been modified by a previous owner, and a large wooden box was built into the space normally occupied by the trunk. For the next week the authorities found no trace of either Séguin or his car. But that did not mean that the investigation had not been fruitful. A key piece of evidence tying Séguin to the murder was turned up at the cabin rented by the fugitive. The killer befriended a teenage nephew of the cabin’s owner, and the two discussed guns at length. Séguin bragged about how good a shot he was, and told the young man he made it a habit to print his name under the metal butt plate of his guns, ensuring that there was never any doubt about to whom they belonged. In addition, Séguin gave the youth a handful of what he said were unique bullets; bullets which, it turned out, were identical to those that killed Leonard Hurd.

  Six days after the murder of the Maxville businessman a member of a highway maintenance crew cutting grass near the scene of the murder discovered the stock of a .22 calibre Leatherneck Model 150 rifle. As soon as the find was reported to the police an organized search of both sides of the road was begun, and it quickly turned up the barrel and trigger mechanism that fit the butt, together with a pouch containing ammunition similar to the bul
lets used in the murder. Printed in ink under the metal butt plate of the gun was “H. Beaudy,” the name used by Séguin when he checked into the cabin he rented shortly before the murder. Ballistic tests later revealed that the bullet recovered from Hurd’s body was fired from the rifle discovered by the maintenance crew.

  By day’s end the O.P.P. were satisfied they had sufficient evidence, and a warrant for the arrest of Séguin was issued. For the next two months the search for Séguin and his car produced no leads, but on October 25, 1952, a hunter walking along the bank of the Ottawa River near the Ontario-Quebec border discovered an unusual looking vehicle at the bottom of a steep embankment. By the next day there was no doubt it was the car seen parked on the side of the road near the spot where Hurd was murdered. The coup’s owner, however, was long gone.

  In fact, a week and a half after he robbed and murdered Hurd, Séguin began working for a lumber company ten kilometres north of Williams Lake, in the interior of British Columbia. The fugitive gave his name as Henry Godin, and for a month kept much to himself. That changed in early October, with the arrival of Frederick and Jean Labrie. Shortly after Fred began working with the same company as Séguin, the Labries struck up a friendship with the fugitive. Over the course of the next few weeks it grew sufficiently intimate that when Séguin quit his lumber job, he was able to persuade Fred to join him three hundred kilometres away in Kamloops. Jean was already in the city, working as a waitress at the Royal Cafe. The three rented one half of a duplex, and furnished their new home with items the Labries left in storage when they moved to Williams Lake. On November 14, the furniture, the three friends, and the Labries’ brown and white dog became a household. Three days later the young couple were dead.