Practically Perfect

by Dale Brawn

  The day after Feener was taken into custody in Kirkland Lake, Timmins police chief Gordon Beacock read a newspaper report of his arrest, and instinctively knew that Feener was somehow involved in the disappearance of Chouinor. Within hours Beacock and two of his detectives were sitting down with the suspect. Feener admitted going out with Chouinor, but claimed he dropped the missing woman off at a bus stop. They got along fine, Feener said, and his date even gave him her picture. Although Feener had an answer for every question, he could not explain why Chouiner would ask to be dropped off at a stop where there had been no bus service for three months. “I didn’t know that,” he responded. “There used to be when I lived in Timmins. I guess she had to walk then. A long way.”[10]

  Feener also could not explain why a woman he barely knew would give him her watch and ring, or why he kept talking about her in the past tense, as if she were dead. As soon as Feener realized that no one believed his story, he asked Beacock if he thought that he, Feener, killed Chouinor. The police chief said yes, he guessed he did. Then just like that, Feener confessed. The detectives were back in Timmins by midnight, Feener firmly in hand, and at 2:30 a.m. they discovered Chouinor’s badly beaten body lying thirty feet off the road ten miles northwest of town. Her clothing was dishevelled, her underwear was missing, and lying near her coat and scarf was a man’s shirt. The murder weapon was found less than a kilometre away. An autopsy conducted the next day revealed that the young woman died fighting for her life. Not only was she slashed multiple times across the chest and back, her hands were badly cut, presumably as she tried to grab the knife with which Feener was stabbing her.

  The next day was a Saturday, but it was no day of rest for the RCMP sergeant who arrived in Timmins from Fredericton. He told the officers in charge of the Feener investigation that while the body of Cathy Essers was still not officially identified, there was no doubt it was her. The prisoner, set to be arraigned Sunday for Chouinor’s murder, refused to say anything about Essers. Nor would he tell Wright, who the day after Feener was arraigned made the trip from Kirkland Lake to Timmins, anything about the disappearance of Dolly Woods. All he admitted was that he once knew Woods, and that she gave him her picture, which he taped to the dashboard of his car. Asked about the other women whose pictures were alongside those of Essers, Chouinor, and Woods, he said nothing.

  At his arraignment on October 12, 1960, Feener was committed to the custody of the Timmins police, pending the outcome of a preliminary hearing to be held two weeks later. None of the fifteen members of the Porcupine Law Society were prepared to represent the accused killer. As a result, during his arraignment he sat alone, occasionally laughing quietly, one hand covering his head. Feener looked every bit the rebel. He walked into the courtroom with his grey pants tucked into his cowboy shoes, his striped shirt open nearly to his waist, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a gold cross hanging from his neck. When Feener’s preliminary hearing eventually got underway he was still unrepresented, and made no attempt to cross-examine Crown witnesses. The accused killer was quickly committed to stand trial for the murder of Kay Chouinor.

  Before the year was out Toronto lawyer Hugh Latimer agreed to defend Feener against a murder his client freely admitted committing. Latimer quickly launched a motion for a new preliminary hearing, arguing that because his client was not represented at his first hearing, he was effectively denied the right to cross-examine his accusers. A superior court judge agreed, and another preliminary was convened. For the second time Feener was committed to stand trial. It started on March 6, and lasted three days. Key for the defence was the testimony of two psychiatrists from the North Bay Mental Hospital, whose reports were actually prepared at the request of the Crown. The first of the two doctors said that in his opinion Feener “was in an epileptic twilight state at the time of his crime. An epileptic twilight state is a temporary insanity that clears up after some time but has a tendency to recur.… Mr. Feener has been an epileptic for many years.”[11] As evidence, the doctor pointed to his dreamlike state of mind, “the explosive outburst of blind destructive aggressiveness, the loss of consciousness, and the consequent well circumscribed amnesia for a considerable part of the event.”[12] The second psychiatrist said that after drinking a large quantity of alcohol, Feener had a seizure, and during it he killed Chouinor. There was, he said, no evidence of premeditation.

  Latimer did not call Feener as a witness, but in his summation spoke at length of his client’s troubled background.

  My one concern in this matter is that an injustice should not be done to a young man, who through an accident of birth was not equipped, mentally and emotionally, to properly look after himself. My client had no motive when he killed this girl of high moral standards. Not sex. Not money. I say the hand that struck the blow was not ruled by the brain.[13]

  The Crown Attorney prosecuting Feener acknowledged that the accused had a troubled background, but argued that he was still criminally responsible for his actions. Referring to Feener, he said. “He had a bad upbringing, an abnormal personality and undeveloped mentality, but he is not an imbecile and not an idiot.”[14] Members of the all male jury agreed with the prosecutor, and it took them just fifteen minutes to return with a verdict of guilty. The triple killer was sentenced to hang three months and one week later. Before that happened, however, Latimer asked the Ontario Court of Appeal to throw out his client’s conviction. They were not prepared to do that, and one month before he was to hang, Feener’s remaining hope was an application for clemency.

  The federal cabinet met on June 8, to discuss whether to grant a commutation. Some members pointed to evidence that Feener acted like an insane man during his assault on Chouinor, and they suggested that he should be kept in custody for the rest of his life. They felt the murder he was convicted of committing was neither planned nor deliberate, and the method used to kill Chouinor was far from rational.[15] These cabinet members might also have pointed to an amendment to the law dealing with capital murder, which was about to come into effect. It would change the definition of the crime, so that in the future capital murder had to be planned and deliberate, two things Feener’s was not.

  To ensure that condemned prisoners did not act up or become violent, the federal government refused to inform death row inmates if they were going to be executed, or have their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Telegrams like the one received by Mickey Feener typically arrived just hours before a prisoner was scheduled to be hanged.

  Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

  A majority in the cabinet of Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, however, believed that if Feener was clever enough to try and cover up his crime, and was able to attract women all over eastern Canada, he was sane enough to hang. The majority even rejected the arguments in favour of clemency advanced by Georges Vanier, the country’s governor-general. Vanier pointed out that under the Criminal Code amendments about to be passed in Parliament, Feener could not be hanged; and, he added, because Feener was by everyone’s admission a moron, he should not be hanged.[16] But hanged he was. No doubt members of the federal cabinet, like the jurors who found him guilty at trial, were influenced by a vision of the photos taped to the dash of the killer’s car. The three women identified were all murder victims; the fate of the other five remains unknown.

  Owen Maxwell Feener was hanged in the courtyard of the Haileybury Jail in northeastern Ontario. He died at 1:03 a.m. on June 13, 1961. Whatever concern he may have had for what was to come did not affect his appetite, and he ate with gusto a last meal of steak and French fries. The only thing that seemed to bother him was a sense of guilt over what he had done to Dolly Woods. Two hours before he was to be executed, Feener asked if the sheriff could be summoned to his cell. When the sheriff arrived Feener handed him a scrap of paper, on which he had scribbled a confession. “I’m going to roast in hell,” he said. “I’d just as soon do it with a clear conscience.”[17] Wherever Feener ended up, it was without his ey
es. Just before he began his death walk he decided to make a last gesture: he asked that his eyes be given to an eye bank. His hope, he told those standing around him, was that “the poor devil who gets them trains himself to look at something besides skirts.”[18]

  The sad and pathetic story of Mickey Feener did not end with his execution in 1961. When her father was put to death, Feener’s daughter was a little over two years old. Life was tough for her and her mother, and it got tougher. The daughter was eleven when her only parent gave her away, her mother more committed to a new husband and three new children than she was to the child of a killer. The young girl remembers standing in a phone booth, asking why she was being abandoned.

  I felt I was not meant to have any family. And so that is what happened. The mother, the husband and the three other children went on to live their lives and not even take a second to wonder if the little girl that was given away was even alive. It is amazing how the life of my mother [who died during surgery in 2010] and my father may have influenced the choices and the things that occurred in my life. Choosing a wrong partner, going the wrong way and making bad decisions. Having bad things thrust upon me.[19]

  Was this, she wondered, her destiny. “I would never understand why.”

  10

  Skeletons Resurface

  It is sometimes said that the secrets of our past are sooner or later bound to haunt us. That was certainly the case for the men whose stories are told in this chapter. All three murdered and escaped detection for a considerable time, until the bodies of their victims resurfaced. Strictly speaking, only in one case did a skeleton actually return to the surface; two of the killers simply left their victims where they were killed.

  John Munroe:

  Nobody Asked About Mother and Daughter

  The young architect was anything but subtle. He met his lover at a public event, he courted her in full view of the community, he showed up at her home every Sunday, she gave their baby girl his surname, and virtually everyone who knew him regularly saw the couple out and around Saint John, New Brunswick. When the married father of two (now three) decided to murder the mother of his illegitimate child, he hired a coach and coachman, and twice drove her to the spot where what remained of the mother and child eventually were found. And despite making absolutely no effort to hide his cruel deed, he very nearly got away with the murders.

  John Munroe was born in Ireland in 1839, one of three children of a well-to-do carpenter. When the family immigrated to Canada in the 1840s, they settled in Saint John. John worked in his father’s lumberyard after school, and it seemed almost inevitable that he would go into the building business. Munroe was ten when his future lover was born. Her father was also a carpenter, but unlike John, Sarah Margaret Vail had anything but an easy life. Her mother died a few months after she was born, and she and her sister made do with whatever was at hand.

  Munroe was twenty-three when he married Annie Potts, and before a year passed the couple became the parents of their first child. Three years later the young married man met Sarah at a community event in Caledon, on the outskirts of Saint John. By the time Munroe and his wife had their second boy, Munroe and Vail were lovers. On February 4, 1868, Sarah gave birth to Munroe’s baby, a girl she named Ella May Munroe. The affair was public knowledge, except perhaps to Annie.

  In 1867 Vail’s father died, leaving her the family home. Sarah sold it the following year for $500, a small fortune in nineteenth-century New Brunswick. It seemed only natural that she would turn to her lover for advice about how to invest the money. That was a mistake. Munroe later said he first thought of murdering Sarah and their daughter two days before he committed the crime. With the benefit of hindsight, it is almost certain that he had murder on his mind from the day she sold her home; which perhaps explains why it was then that he purchased a .22 calibre revolver. It was also about this time that he left a letter with a friend in Boston. The letter was addressed to Vail’s sister, and was ostensibly written by Sarah. In it Sarah wrote that she had run off with a man she was about to marry, and asked that no one worry about her. The letter was the first step in an ill-conceived plot to murder its alleged author.

  Once Vail sold her residence, her life-clock rapidly began winding down. Two weeks before she was murdered, Munroe told Vail that he and a few associates from Saint John were going on a junket to Boston, where they intended to mix a little pleasure with business. When Sarah insisted that she accompany her lover, Munroe obliged her. The pair returned on Friday, October 23, and Vail checked into the Brunswick Hotel as Mrs. Clarke. She informed the proprietor that her husband would soon be joining her and their young girl, and the following day her trunks arrived from the boat. On Monday Munroe showed up in a hired coach. He, Sarah, and Ella May then went for a drive into the countryside north of Saint John. When they returned, Vail checked into the Union Hotel, again as Mrs. Clarke, and Munroe made arrangements for her trunk to be brought from the Brunswick.

  Three days later Vail and her daughter were to have left Saint John for Boston, but the day was wet and stormy, and Munroe persuaded Sarah to postpone her trip for a few days. Munroe, on the other hand, did not change his own plans. He and his wife spent the next day and a half on a return trip to Fredericton, New Brunswick. He later said that it was on this trip that he began thinking about murdering Vail and his baby. He kept thinking about how desolate the road was when they drove into the countryside, and became convinced that it would be the perfect place to put an end to the complications his lover brought into his life. With murder in mind, Munroe hired the same coach and driver he retained earlier in the week, and on Saturday he picked up his lover. He also told a number of people that Mrs. Clarke would be leaving for Boston on the following Tuesday, and made arrangements for her trunk to be taken to the steamer New England.

  When the Munroe party of three reached that part of the road where they stopped the previous Monday, he told the coachman that Mrs. Clarke and her baby would walk from there to the home of friends. He was going to accompany them part way, and would catch up with the driver at a hotel they just passed. With that Munroe and his travelling companions got out and began walking down the deserted road. About an hour later a clearly excited Munroe hurried into the hotel where his driver was eating, and said they were to leave at once for Saint John. Once he got back to the city Munroe put Vail’s trunks on the steamer, and for the next year they sat unclaimed in a Boston warehouse.

  Despite conducting his affair in full view of almost everyone who knew him, no one seemed to notice that Munroe’s lover and her baby were missing. Vail’s sister certainly did not care. She and Sarah had a falling out over their father’s estate, and there was no one else who might have worried even if they knew the mother and daughter were missing. And indeed, for ten months and twelve days it appeared that John Munroe had committed the perfect murder. Then, on September 12, 1869, a group of berry pickers stumbled across two skeletons, one apparently that of an adult, the other of an infant.

  For the next two days dozens of local residents made their way through a hundred feet of bush to see the remains. One of them, William Douglas, was part of a group whose members picked and probed the skeletons to see what they could find. He later recalled that a woman standing near him “took a stick and pulled up a bunch of hair, all braided, then she stuck the stick down again in the same place and turned up a part of a bonnet. I turned over the skull, and out of it ran brains and stuff, making a great smell. There was a little shoe there too, and a stocking in it; there was some kind of corruption in it, which, when the shoe was turned over, ran out, making a bad smell.”[1] A considerable amount of braided hair was attached to the skull, a sizeable curl on one side, styled in what then was referred to as a waterfall. Lying near the skull were pieces of a child’s smock and a tiny shoe. To even the uneducated eye it was obvious that the remains had been eaten by animals.

  When the authorities arrived they were not quite sure what they were dealing with. So little remai
ned of the bodies that were it not for Vail’s skull, they might have thought they were looking at the bones of an animal. It did not take long, however, for suspicion to point in the direction of Munroe. Once it became public knowledge that the skeletons were those of a woman and infant, witness after witness recalled seeing Munroe with two such people, and when Vail’s trunks were returned from Boston unclaimed on September 29, Munroe’s luck ran out. The luggage was quickly indentified as belonging to Vail, and when the authorities opened the trunks, inside one they found a picture of Munroe. He was arrested, and despite several cautions not to say anything, began talking. With him following his arrest were Francis Jones, Chief of Police for the Parish of Portland, and Humphrey Gilbert, a local barrister who doubled as a Saint John police magistrate. Gilbert advised Munroe that because of all the talk about his relationship with a missing woman and child, it was thought appropriate to have him arrested. Gilbert told the prisoner that it was his duty to warn him to keep his own counsel. Gilbert then took Munroe to an office on the second floor of the courthouse, where John Marshall, the Chief of Police for Saint John, was waiting. As soon as Gilbert, Marshall, and Munroe sat down, Munroe started telling his story. Gilbert immediately stopped him: “I then said to the prisoner not to tell anything about it, as we might be brought on the stand. He said he did not care; if he was brought on the stand himself, he would tell the same as he would tell them.”[2]