Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  Investigators were never able to determine the precise sequence of events that led to the murder of Fred and Jean Labrie, but they suspect that something happened to make Séguin fear that his past was about to catch up with him. To prevent that from happening he shot Fred twice in the head, and then stabbed Jean to death before dumping their bodies in a streambed sixteen kilometres southwest of Kamloops.

  Twenty-four hours after disposing of the Labries, their killer began selling the couple’s household effects. A few days later Séguin used Fred’s truck as part payment on a used mobile home. Although he moved his purchase into a local trailer park, for the next month he continued to reside in the duplex. The fugitive had enough of Kamloops, and in mid-December caught a westbound bus for Williams Lake. On the fifteenth he was noticed hanging around the Canadian Bank of Commerce, apparently indifferent to the falling snow.

  At 11:00 p.m. the manager of the bank finally finished work, and no sooner started his car when Séguin opened the passenger door and slipped in beside him. The Maxville murderer stuck a .32 calibre handgun into the banker’s side, and told him to drive out of town. They no sooner reached the countryside when the fugitive said to stop the car. The two sat in silence for a few moments, and then Séguin told the manager to drive back. As they neared the bank they saw two men standing on the sidewalk and Séguin instructed the banker to keep going. Seconds later he told the manager to make a U-turn. The men on the sidewalk were still chatting, and the killer again forced his hostage to head out of town. This time they stopped for a few moments near the town’s garbage dump before returning.

  At last the sidewalk was empty. Séguin ordered the banker to pull over, park the car, and let him into the bank. The men walked directly to the vault, leaving the front door slightly ajar. One of the individuals who had been visiting on the sidewalk happened to be an employee of the Bank of Commerce, and when he and his friend finished their coffee and started for their respective homes he noticed the open door. Almost as soon as the pair stepped into the bank to see what was wrong they were told to put their hands up, and to stay where they were. With the manager in front of him and the two newcomers behind, Séguin was outflanked. The killer ordered the banker to step away from the vault and join the men by the door, but instead of walking around the counter the hostage started towards Séguin. He no sooner took his first step when a shot rang out and Séguin bolted.

  Within minutes all five members of the Williams Lake detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived on the scene, greeted by two badly shaken bystanders and a bank manager with a wound to his leg. Figuring out where the bad guy went was not difficult. Séguin’s footsteps were clearly visible in the fresh snow, and officers easily followed them to the highway leading out of town. For a while the robber walked in a relatively straight line down the road, but over the next two miles Séguin periodically left the highway to walk through the ditch on one or the other side of the roadway, as if he were trying to avoid being detected by drivers of passing vehicles. When the fugitive’s trail turned down a densely wooded back road, pursuing officers opted for caution and returned to Williams Lake to organize a search party.

  Early the next morning trackers followed the footprints of the bank robber to a creek bed just inside the Sugar Cane Indian reserve, and their pursuit slowed to a crawl. Around 9:00 a.m. a constable suddenly shouted that he saw the fugitive. As soon as he did Séguin stepped from behind a tree, gun in hand, and demanded that his pursuers put down their weapons. Instead, all but one of the officers dropped to the ground. As Séguin began shooting at the downed posse members the only policeman with a clear view of him fired, hitting the escaped killer in the chest.

  Someone was immediately dispatched to arrange for a doctor to be brought to the scene, and when he arrived the badly wounded criminal was stabilized, and then transported to the Williams Lake hospital. From that point onwards things quickly began to unravel for the Cornwall killer. Six days after he was shot, while still recuperating in hospital from his chest wound, Séguin’s fingerprints identified him as the man wanted for the murder of Leonard Hurd. On January 13, 1953, the killer was committed to stand trial, and five days later pled guilty to wounding with intent to kill, shooting with intent to do bodily harm, and robbery while armed. The result was a five year term of imprisonment on each count, the sentences to run concurrently.

  In March the provincial Court of Appeal increased Séguin’s sentence to twenty years, and dismissed his application for a new trial. With that, British Columbia washed its hands of the killer, and a month and a half later he was returned to Ontario to stand trial for killing Hurd. It’s around this time that Séguin began preparing for the worst. Somehow, presumably while he was waiting to be transferred to Ontario, he obtained a small aluminum tube containing enough potassium cyanide to kill four adults. Where he kept the vial for the next nine months is not known, but the fact that he insisted on using a night pail during his imprisonment, rather than a jail washroom, is suggestive.

  When Séguin’s murder trial got underway in Cornwall on October 26, there was no doubt about its outcome. After a four-day hearing the twenty-eight-year-old was sentenced to be hanged. Between his sentencing and his January date with the executioner Séguin was kept in solitary confinement. Visits were strictly monitored, and guards checked his food to ensure that it did not contain contraband.

  Séguin was scheduled to be hanged just after midnight on January 19, 1954. Although he professed to be an atheist, shortly before his execution he asked to see a priest. When his spiritual adviser arrived, Séguin told him to wait for a few minutes, during which time the priest heard an unusual noise coming from the cell. The sound was later identified. While his priest, a guard, and the jail warden stood in the corridor, the condemned prisoner retrieved the aluminum tube from where it had been inserted, took out its glass vial of poison, and shoved the vial inside an orange. Séguin then bit down on the fruit several times, breaking the glass and releasing its contents. As his spiritual adviser entered his cell, the condemned prisoner finished consuming the poison.

  The Catholic father vividly remembered what happened next.

  When I went in, the guards pulled up a chair in front of the cell door. Séguin was pale and upset, a different man than he was the day before. He was sitting down puffing a cigaret. I had a letter from his brother-in-law. He started to read it. I gave him a little Christmas card from his niece. It told him to have a happy death. He began to cry. He said he wanted to make his peace with God. He said he was sorry for his sins. He seemed to get more and more upset. He threw himself on the cot. He pulled a towel over his face. He seemed to get into a convulsion. His hands were shaking, he was turned on his side, breathing heavily. The guards called the governor. The governor went in and took the towel away. He was trying to go to confession when he fell. That is why I gave him conditional absolution from his sins. He had sorrow for his sins, but did not have time to tell them to me before he took his convulsions. He was very concerned about his sins and said he was sorry if he had done anything wrong in his life. He wanted to die a happy death. That was the only thing he could tell me. The he started to sob and cry and threw himself on the cot.[1]

  According to the priest, Séguin’s last words were: “I am sorry for what I have done. I have paid my debts to society for all the sins I have committed.”[2]

  By the time the jail doctor arrived, Séguin was dead. An examination of the poison found in his stomach determined that the potassium cyanide was substantially degraded, and had the vial not contained four times the dosage normally considered lethal, the killer would not have died.

  In their quest to determine how Séguin acquired the poison, jail officials seized a thirty-two page letter which the condemned man asked to be delivered to his sister following his death. In it Séguin said nothing of the poison, but made clear that even after killing three people he viewed himself as a victim of injustice. “Justice has condemned me as a dog. They will try and han
g me like one, but I will try my best not to. I will cheat them to the very last and, if I do succeed to cheat them in the end, I will only be too glad to do so. If I don’t cheat them, it will not be because I did not try to do so.”[3]

  A sad postscript to the saga of Henry Séguin began on September 18, 1955, when a hunter stumbled onto the remains of the Labries. In the three years the bodies of the couple lay exposed to the elements their bones were scattered over an area one hundred metres wide. Near them were the remains of their dog, shot once through the head. In the middle of February 1956, a coroner’s jury ruled that the bodies were indeed those of Jean and Frederick Labrie, and that evidence “points to a motive for the killing as being to obtain the victims’ personal belongings and furniture.”[4]

  Walter Pavlukoff:

  From British Columbia to Ontario

  Vera and Jack Pavlukoff emigrated from Russia in 1913, settling almost immediately in Vancouver. Jack got a job with the city as a labourer, and the security of his employment encouraged the Russian Orthodox couple to begin raising a family. Walter was the second oldest of five children. Following Jack’s death in 1929 the family’s fortunes, and Walter’s life, began a precipitous decline. With their meal ticket gone, the Pavlukoffs moved from home-to-home in east end Vancouver, and Walter was in jail when his two youngest siblings died of tuberculosis.

  Pavlukoff was nineteen when he turned to crime. He was caught after committing a series of robberies in Chicago, and spent almost five years in an American prison before being deported to Canada. Three weeks after his return he was arrested for armed assault and sent to the British Columbia Penitentiary. After serving two years he was released, but within months was sentenced to three years in the same institution for committing a robbery with violence. When Pavlukoff was apprehended he was wearing a homemade gun holster and mask around his neck, and in his pocket carried what he referred to as “a sucker list.” The names on it included two former provincial lieutenant-governors, the chief justice of British Columbia, and a number of prominent lawyers and businessmen. Pavlukoff told the officers who arrested him that the group was his wish list for the future. “They all have good jobs, nice homes, big cars and smoke good cigars.”[5]

  Two minutes before closing time on August 25, 1947, a man with a sallow complexion and a .9 millimetre Luger automatic pistol in his pocket walked past a police constable sitting in a parked cruiser and into a fruit shop next door to a west end Vancouver branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. He bought a shopping bag, and as he left the store he took the pistol from his pocket and slipped the bag over his hand and gun.

  Six customers were standing in line waiting to be served when Pavlukoff stepped into the bank. He quickly raised a newspaper, shielding one side of his face, and dropped the shopping bag. Pavlukoff walked up behind a man standing in front of one of the tellers, and told him to move to the wall, warning “no funny work or I’ll let you have it.” As terrified customers cringed in fear, Pavlukoff walked to the rear of the bank, pushing past two people. When he stopped, only the bank’s accountant and manager remained in front of him. After warning the accountant not to move, he walked towards fifty-five-year-old Sydney Petrie.[6]

  The manager was sitting behind an oak desk, typing. Ordered to get up, he exploded from his chair, put his shoulder under the front of the desk, and pushed it over onto Pavlukoff. The startled robber instinctively stepped back, pulling the trigger of the Luger as he did. A copper-jacketed bullet hit the banker under his left arm, travelled through his body before exiting near his hip, then ricocheted off an office chair, over the heads of the cowering customers, and through a plate glass window.

  As the mortally wounded Petrie staggered towards the vault, Pavlukoff turned and, without stopping to pick up any money, tore out of the building. A woman pushing a baby carriage was passing in front of the bank as he emerged, and as Pavlukoff stuffed the gun into his coat pocket he stumbled against her buggy. Sitting in his patrol car a few feet away was the police officer the robber had walked by on his way into the bank. Despite the sound of the gunshot, which attracted the attention of everyone else on the street, the officer remained oblivious to what was going on.

  Pavlukoff ran through an alley near the bank and reached an adjoining street before pursuers could see in which direction he turned. The bank robber then walked unnoticed out of the commercial district into a nearby residential area. For the next hour he worked his way north towards Kitsilano Beach, walking through backyards and vaulted fences. Once he almost collided with a woman relaxing in her yard. Six years later she still vividly remembered what happened. “I was next door talking to Betty Hopkins when I heard the gate open. I looked up and saw this fellow coming through. His face was dead white. He unlocked the back gate and side gate. I came around and stood at the side of the house but he never looked back.”[7]

  Pavlukoff twice more encountered area residents before he finally disappeared from sight. On the first occasion he walked past the window of a basement suite in which a woman was preserving peaches. She watched as he jumped over a railing beside her house, and noticed an ammunition clip slip from his pocket. Her dog was in the back yard and it also saw the intruder. The animal immediately gave chase, almost but not quite catching up to the fleeing bandit.

  The killer had a second close call when an eighteen-year-old saw him climb over a fence into the yard of the young man’s home. The youth immediately ran out of the house and approached the stranger. The curious teenager said hello, and when Pavlukoff ignored him and kept walking, the teenager followed. “He was dog-trotting and seemed to be forcing himself to keep going. I followed him across the street into the park and he ducked me.”[8]

  The young man no sooner returned home when he received a telephone call from a friend, who told him of the bank robbery. He immediately realized that the man he met passing through his yard was likely Pavlukoff, and the two friends met to take up the chase. Despite their best efforts, the trail was cold. We “couldn’t see him anywhere. We kept searching until the cops picked us up. I think he hid in the park until I’d gone to the beach and then followed me down.”[9]

  As it later turned out, that is precisely what happened. Pavlukoff waited in the park until he could no longer see any of his pursuers, then took off his suit coat and vest. With them in hand he walked across the road bordering the park and along the side of an apartment building. He quickly made his way to a staircase at the rear of the property, which provided access to the beach. There he almost ran into one of the building’s tenants. Before the day was out the startled woman learned just how close she had come to meeting a killer. She said he arrived at the gate leading to the beach slightly before she did. “He said ‘pardon me, madam’ and opened the gate. He was wearing a shirt and carrying an air force jacket. He was going very quickly, and turned east on the beach.”[10]

  A few yards from where the tenant and the bank robber met the police recovered the suit jacket and vest Pavlukoff took off in the park. Now coatless, the killer walked parallel to the beach along a clay cliff. Ten feet above him, a stonemason was building a retaining wall, and he noticed Pavlukoff. “He wasn’t running but he was going real fast. His black hair was mussed and he didn’t look like he was going to the beach. He looked like he had somewhere to go.”[11] Within minutes of the two sightings more than fifty police officers descended on the beach, but the quarry apparently left the area.

  A day after the attempted robbery the tailor who made the coat Pavlukoff abandoned identified his workmanship, and the police issued a warrant charging Pavlukoff with murder. The search grew in intensity over the next forty-eight hours, when two quite dramatic, and very different, events occurred. The first involved the escaped killer and an elderly hermit.

  Adam Tootell was sitting down for supper when Pavlukoff appeared at the door of his shack, offering to split wood in exchange for a meal. The stout, seventy-three-year-old Englishman lived alone near an isolated Canadian Pacific Railway right-of-way a
nd welcomed the company. “I am isolated out there. And I had just got my food in. He looked kind of decent to me so I gave him a meal. He had lots of cigarettes so we sat around and smoked. He seemed like a nice fellow to me.”[12]

  While the two talked, Tootell noticed the heel of one of Pavlukoff’s shoes was missing, and the other was loose. “Well, I had a pair of rubbers in there with a nail that I had stepped on and hurt my foot. They was only size eights though. So I gave him these rubbers and I knocked the nail down a little bit.”[13]

  Pavlukoff’s visit with Tootell ended shortly after Pavlukoff traded his new shirt for one of his host’s old ones. The exchange was no sooner completed when an oil delivery truck drove up. Tootell greeted the driver before returning to his shack to find his guest gone. Two days later the British immigrant saw a picture of his guest in a Vancouver newspaper, and notified the city police. Soon after, officers seized the shirt and shoes left in Tootell’s shack.

  While Tootell and Pavlukoff were getting acquainted west of Vancouver, a former prison guard, who claimed to have once guarded the killer, contacted the authorities to advise that the convict raided a chicken coop outside his acreage just south of the city. The toll collector said he was awakened mid-morning when his dog began barking. Looking out, he noticed Pavlukoff running from his property into an adjoining tract of timber.