Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  In and out of court Mr. Justice Alexander Malcolm Manson was an outspoken, opinionated, abrasive individual, accused by contemporaries of making up his own law as he went along. In the quarter of a century he sat on the bench, more of his judgments were overturned on appeal than those of any other British Columbia judge. A few years after the Pavlukoff trial, Manson spoke as if he was proud of his less than sterling reputation. “As a judge I broke all the rules. Some think it is the sole duty of the court to protect the accused. But it is also its duty to see that society is protected.”[29] He seemed almost whimsical when he lamented that “The rock pile has gone and the preachers have done away with hell”[30]

  It did not take long for Pavlukoff to complain about Manson’s conduct on the bench. After one particularly heated exchange between his lawyer and the judge, Pavlukoff became infuriated. Perhaps sensing his fate, the bank robber jumped to his feet. “Your lordship, I found your behavior very disgusting and you seemed to have formed an opinion already as to my guilt. Not only is my life at stake, but my mother is at home sick, and before you kill her you will have to chain me to this box to keep me here.”[31] Justice Manson’s response gave some credence to Pavlukoff’s complaint about bias. “Fortunately for you, the matter is in the hands of the jury — in the hands of the jury and not in my hands.”[32]

  After a week-long trial, and a difference of opinion between several Crown witnesses over whether Pavlukoff was the bank robber, it took a jury just one hour to find the career criminal guilty of Petrie’s murder, and even less time for Manson to sentence him to be hanged. Until he was, Pavlukoff should have been confined in one of the Oakalla Prison Farm’s death row cells. But because his lawyers filed an appeal on his behalf, the bank robber was not regarded as a condemned prisoner. Until that proceeding was finished, he was kept in a section of the prison reserved for those awaiting trial. As a result, he had more privacy than he would have had on death row. He also had access to other prisoners, and contraband.

  The beginning of the end for the convicted killer started mid-afternoon on Wednesday, July 8, 1953. After a five-day hearing the provincial Court of Appeal refused his request for a new trial, and one of Pavlukoff’s lawyers drove from the courthouse directly to Oakalla. According to the lawyer, his client took the news that he was to be hanged three weeks later without emotion, but seemed pleased Hurley was going to try to take his appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

  Rules for those about to be executed at Oakalla were relatively relaxed, and Pavlukoff somehow managed to obtain a small knife. Within minutes of learning that the British Columbia Court of Appeal had denied his application for a new trial, the life-long criminal plunged the knife directly into his heart.

  Courtesy of Vancouver Sun.

  In an ironic twist of fate, the bank robber was the only person in the prison who knew that his appeal had been rejected. Because of that, instead of being taken directly from his meeting to death row, Pavlukoff was returned to his holding cell. In anticipation of his appeal failing, Pavlukoff somehow obtained a small knife, and removed its handle and sharpened its blade. Where he hid the dagger was never determined, but ten minutes after learning that he was to be executed, the killer placed the point of the knife directly over his heart, then plunged the blade into his chest. Twenty-nine minutes later he was dead.

  Hugh Christie, Oakalla’s warden, an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, was deeply distressed by the suicide. But as he said later, there was likely no way his officers could have prevented it.

  Manual searches of prisoners are conducted as frequently as once a day. But this was a weapon so small that it could be concealed easily. Pavlukoff may well have concealed it in his mattress. We should have found the knife, but unfortunately we didn’t. When a man makes up his mind to kill himself, it’s pretty hard to stop him. In any event, it is primarily our fault, because we are supposed to be on the lookout for such things.[33]

  Christie said he could not help but to feel that Pavlukoff pondered how to kill himself for a long time before he actually committed the deed. “The precision with which he plunged the blade between two ribs and directly into the heart would indicate that he had spent some time in study. Or else he is just lucky.”[34]

  9

  Pictures on the Dash

  Owen “Mickey” Feener

  Mickey Feener may have been a high-functioning moron in life, but in death he is the poster child of serial killers. Abandoned as a young man by parents who showed him neither love nor guidance, he married a fifteen-year-old from a similar background, murdered three women infatuated with his good looks and way with words, and did just about everything he could to be caught, short of actually turning himself in to the authorities. He killed on impulse, left his victims where they died, and in each murder was identified as the last person seen with the person he beat to death. Yet despite all this, it took police a year and a half to catch him, and even then they succeeded only because he was driving the flashy red sports car of one of his victims, his name prominently written across its hood with masking tape.

  Owen Maxwell Feener was born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, in 1937, and from the beginning to the end of the eight years he lived with his parents he was unloved and unwanted. His father was an alcoholic, and Feener was mentally challenged. Add epilepsy to that and you have a child with more than a few problems. Things got worse when Feener was shot in the head and spent three months in hospital. Handed off by his parents to social services, he took his problems with him into foster care. Over the next three years he proved too much to handle, and after being classified as “mentally retarded,” he was committed to the Nova Scotia Training School. Feener entered the Truro facility when he was eleven, and left five years later. He could have left earlier, but his mother advised the local Children’s Aid Society that she was not prepared to take him back. When he turned sixteen Feener left the school, lonesome, frightened, and absolutely on his own. Not surprisingly, he turned to crime. He was first sentenced to three months in jail for stealing a rifle and hunting knife, and then to a year in reformatory for a couple of auto thefts. As soon as he was released Feener bought himself a car, and for the next three years drove without a licence, worried he was not smart enough to pass a driving test.

  Feener was twenty when he married a girl five years his junior. She too came from a troubled background, and before meeting Feener was in and out of trouble with the law. Two years after they married the couple became parents to a daughter, and moved from Kirkland Lake, where Feener was working, back to Nova Scotia. There the relationship came to an abrupt end, in no small part because Feener started an affair with his wife’s sister.

  My wife accused me of shacking up with her sister. I tried to explain, but no good. That’s when our marriage broke up. I then accepted her sister…. Well, that didn’t last either — well, my wife wanted me back but from then on she got herself in one mess after another. Yes — other men. I then left her for good.[1]

  Mickey Feener may not look it in this photo, but in the 1950s he was quite the lady’s man. He was hanged for murdering two women, and confessed to killing a third. He taped photos of his victims to the dash of his car, along with the pictures of five other women. Although investigators were fairly certainly he killed the unidentified women, Feener kept his mouth shut right to the end.

  Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

  Feener later summed up the relationship he had with his wife as “just cats and dogs — one of us just as bad as the other.”[2]

  No one knows how Dolly Woods, a seventeen-year-old Kirkland Lake waitress, met Feener, or whether they dated more than once. What is known is that the last time they went out Feener’s wife had just given birth, and she was spending the night in the hospital. Woods no doubt found the tall, good-looking, hard rock miner fun to be with, but she kept her last rendezvous with the smooth-talking Feener a secret, at least from her sister, Gloria. The two were living together at a local rooming house, and a
ll her sister knew was that Dolly was there one day, and gone the next. According to Gloria, “she just vanished, leaving all her clothes in my room.”

  According to Feener, on his date with Woods the couple were driving towards the Ontario-Quebec border with no particular destination in mind. He said they “left Kirkland Lake at midnight and went down the highway to the Quebec border.… It happened at daybreak and I got mad and choked her. I covered the body with brush.”[3] He later told investigators that he could not remember where he murdered Woods, or even the exact date, but recalled that he could see the lights of a village fifteen minutes walk away.[4]

  In fact, Woods was murdered just after midnight on April 15, 1959, on a lonely stretch of Provincial Highway 48 between Notre-Dame-du-Nord and Rouyn, in the province of Quebec. Ontario investigators reached that conclusion after Feener confessed to beating Woods to death, and they decided to ask their Quebec counterparts if any unidentified bodies had been discovered near the border. Sure enough, berry pickers stumbled onto what was left of Dolly sometime in May or June 1960. A spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police said OPP officers had been searching for the body of the missing waitress since she disappeared in April 1959. That may have been true, but one call to Quebec would have saved them a lot of effort. Because the authorities on either side of the border were not talking to each other, Wood’s skeleton remained unidentified until Feener told the police where it could be found.

  When Feener’s second murder victim emigrated to Canada from Belgium she settled in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where the thirty-two-year-old opened a dress shop. Sometime over the next two years Cathy Essers met Feener at the Acadia Hotel, a Halifax drinking spot. The two hit it off, and when Essers moved to Toronto in mid-August 1960, she and Feener renewed their relationship. The precise nature of that relationship remains a mystery, at least to Esser’s fiancé, Conrad Walther. Walther farmed just north of Toronto, and as far he knew, when Essers disappeared she was on her way home to put her affairs in order before the two were married.

  If Essers was truly committed to marrying Walther she certainly had a funny way of showing it. Shortly after arriving in Toronto in her cherry red Austin Healey sports car she and Feener left for Cleveland, then Detroit, with frequent stops along the way for drinks and dancing. On the homeward part of their journey the two got as far as Windsor when they fought and Feener rented a car to return the rest of the way alone. But instead of stopping in Toronto, he drove to Montreal, where he abandoned the rental car on a city street, and took a train home. Within a month Essers and Feener resolved their differences, and when she headed for Nova Scotia in late September 1960, Essers took Feener along. In Fredericton they checked into a hotel as man and wife. According to Feener, at this point everything was fine. He said that when he got back from paying their bill Essers had a drink ready for him. After that one, and a few more, they made love. It was at that point, he recalled, that she started to act funny.

  The next day they began arguing about who should drive Esser’s car. Esser insisted she should, but Feener said no. She became angry, and hit him over the head with a bottle of beer. Although dazed by the blow, Feener managed to stop the car, then turned on his passenger. “I stopped the car and grabbed her by the throat and almost before I realized it, she was dead.”[5] Feener threw his victim’s body into the ditch, took her cash, and from her suitcase removed an electric iron. Then he continued on to Nova Scotia. On an impulse, Feener wrote “Mickey” on the hood of Esser’s car, in adhesive tape, before returning to Kirkland Lake.

  On October 1, Walther reported his fiancée missing, and on the same day someone, presumably Feener, attempted to cash a forged cheque drawn on her bank account. Four days later a badly decomposed body was found in a ditch near Fredericton. It could not be identified; investigators in Nova Scotia seemed not to have received a copy of the missing person’s report filed by Walther.

  Feener’s third victim grew up resentful. Kathleen Chouinor’s father died in 1945, leaving his wife to care for the couple’s six sons and three daughters. The widow could not cope with the pressure, and abandoned her children. The eldest daughter, eleven-year-old Kathleen, dropped out of school, and despite her best efforts to care for her siblings, witnessed one after another being placed in a foster home or being forced to take whatever work was available to young men barely in their teens. She never got over the experience, and despite a commitment to family that survived the separation, she grew to resent the life she had been given. By her twenties she was withdrawn, intensely religious, and perhaps out of a sense of failure, obsessed with her reputation. As far as anyone could remember, she rarely socialized. In fact, she went out with a man on only a handful of occasions. Sadly, her last date was with Mickey Feener.

  Feener murdered Cathy Essers sometime during the last week of September 1960. On October 4, he showed up unannounced at the residence of a Timmins doctor in whose home Chouinor worked as a domestic. Chouinor had her own room in the large house, and spent most of her evenings alone, listening to country and western or religious music, or reading magazines. On the day she went missing she left on her nightstand Your Horoscope, and on her dresser, Your Dreams. Chouinor was a complex and secretive person. The attractive twenty-six-year-old spent most of what she earned on her brothers and twin sisters, and was never known to party, yet her closet was full of cocktail dresses. Hanging prominent among them was a fur coat.

  When Feener showed up to see Chouinor the two talked in the hallway of Chouinor’s employer. The doctor’s wife listened to their conversation, just out of eyesight. She heard Feener ask if Chouinor would drive with him to Winnipeg. She refused, and he suggested they could at least go out later that evening. To this she agreed, and Feener left. That Chouinor would agree to the date surprised her employers. Years earlier she went out with Feener, and he made sexual advances, so she refused to see him again. In fact, according to her boss’s wife, “Kay grew up with an aversion to men. Apparently she distrusted them and their motives. She was sensitive about her reputation and never considered doing anything that would damage [it] even slightly.”[6]

  After Feener left, Chouinor told her employer that she thought she may have just made a mistake. Her employer agreed, and tried to talk the young woman out of keeping her appointment, but when Feener showed up at 8:30 p.m., she left in his bright red sports car. No one knows what the couple did for the next three hours, but just before midnight they drove into a service station, and Feener asked the attendant to adjust his car’s carburetor. The two then parked somewhere in or near Timmins, and Feener talked about Cathie Essers. At some point Chouinor realized that her companion was confessing to murder. She urged him to go to the police and turn himself in. He refused, she became frightened, and when she tried to get out of the car, Feener grabbed her. “I hit her three times on the back of the head with my flashlight and she passed out. We were still sitting in the car.”[7] When Chouinor regained consciousness, she told Feener that she was not afraid to die, and then almost plaintively asked him, “Why, Mickey?” Her attacker said he “then took a hunting knife and struck her on the back of the neck. I don’t know how many times.”[8]

  Although Feener thought Chouinor was dead, she was not, and after driving about twenty miles out of Timmins he realized she was very much alive. He hauled the terrified young woman from the car and carried her to the side of a step bank just off the road. There he threw her to the ground, over and over again, breaking her hip and causing a gush of blood to cover his suit. He ripped from Chouinor the young woman’s watch and ring, and killed her with a stab to the throat. Feener then got back in the car and tried to leave. He recalled it was an awful sight. In his panic to get away he got stuck, and his emotions began bubbling over with the realization of what he had just done. He eventually calmed himself, pushed the small car to the roadway, and drove to Kirkland Lake. There he undressed and burned his blood-soaked clothes.

  The day he was arrested Feener was later asked by th
e police to explain what motivated him to brutalize and murder Chouinor. His response was brief. “Not for her money, or sex, but because of the other thing. My nerves were shot. I didn’t plan it.”[9]

  If the failure of the police in Ontario and Quebec to communicate about Dolly Woods is an example of a less-than-stellar investigation, the arrest of Feener speaks volumes about good policing.

  When Chouinor failed to return from her date, her employer became concerned, and filed a missing person’s report with the Timmins police. While he was doing that, in Kirkland Lake, seventy-five miles south, Detective Ozzie Wright happened to notice Feener walking toward a cherry red sports car. The one-time resident was hard to miss. He stood more than six feet tall in his fancy cowboy boots, weighed every bit of two hundred pounds, and beneath his thick blond hair sprouted the beginnings of a beard. Wright remembered that when Feener left town a year earlier he failed to pay a $33 careless driving fine, and was curious how a deadbeat like Feener could be driving such an expensive-looking sports car. When the detective got closer he could see eight photographs taped to the dashboard, all of women. Wright took Feener and the sports car into custody.

  Feener was a smooth talker, but the more he talked, the less Wright believed him. Asked why he was driving a car registered to a woman living in Nova Scotia, Feener told the officer that he and the car’s owner met a year earlier in Halifax and renewed acquaintances when she moved to Toronto. She wanted to return to Nova Scotia for some reason, and asked Feener to come with her. Somewhere along the way she gave him her picture. Then she decided that she was not going to Nova Scotia after all. Instead, she was heading for California, and she asked him if he would look after her car. Wright did not believe a word of the story, and contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in New Glasgow. They told him the car belonged to Cathy Essers, a woman reported missing by her boyfriend a week earlier. Wright was also informed that the badly decomposed body of an unidentified woman recently found in a ditch outside Fredericton was almost certainly that of Essers. The RCMP officer had one request: could Wright keep Feener in custody until someone from his detachment arrived with a warrant charging Feener with offering an indignity to a body? That charge would be good enough to hold him until the body was officially identified.