Coach

by Rosie DiManno

  It was around this time that a “gorgeous” young woman, Suzanne Francoeur, entered the picture. All his life, Burns would draw some of the prettiest ladies in the room, enticed by his sexy manliness, charmed by his personality, then inevitably crazed by his inability to stay put on the porch. Not long after they met, Suzanne discovered she was pregnant. That floored Burns. He was nineteen.

  “I remember him coming home and telling my mother that Suzanne was pregnant, and Mom telling him that he had to marry her,” says Diane. “It was a shotgun wedding. Suzanne wanted to marry him, but Pat was forced into it. He’d just started on the Gatineau police force at the time and he didn’t want to cause a scandal. So he just gave in and got married. But he always knew this would be a short-term marriage.”

  Eleven months was all it lasted, just long enough to see Suzanne through the birth of their daughter, Maureen. The couple was not compatible and had issues thornier than their youthfulness, their palpable unpreparedness for matrimony. Suzanne, whisper relatives, was “a drinker,” alcohol perhaps consolation for a rapidly disintegrating marriage. In one mortifying incident just before the couple separated, Burns responded to a police call about a drunken woman who needed assistance.

  “Pat and I are in the squad car, he’s driving,” recalls a fellow Gatineau officer. “So, we show up at this address, and guess who it is on the street? Yup, Suzanne. They were going through stressful times as a couple. When she saw Pat, she took a fit. She was screaming, ‘Get away from me! Get away from me!’ I tried to calm her down, then she started giving it to me, too. Finally, I managed to cool her down and an ambulance showed up, took her away. That was tough for Pat. He was upset and embarrassed.”

  More frequently, it was his inebriated stepfather that Burns was called upon to scoop off the street. The army vet Harvey Barbeau was a habitué of the Legion hall. “Other cops would call Pat and say, ‘Go get your stepfather and take him home,’ ” says Diane. “That would embarrass him no end, but he’d do it. And he’d give Harvey shit, but nothing changed.”

  Separated and then divorced from Suzanne, Burns became a fading presence in his young daughter’s life, though he did try, clumsily, to fulfill his responsibilities as a daddy. “He’d go by once in a while and bring Suzanne back to my mother’s place,” says Diane, who was godmother to the child. “Of course, Mom would end up babysitting Maureen more than anything else. Pat did and paid what he could, but there was no formal child-support arrangement.” It was a parental abandonment for which Burns would attempt to atone many years later.

  There would be other women in Gatineau, a slew of them. And why not? Burns was young, handsome, beguiling. “A ladies’ man, definitely,” says John Janusz, who had two lengthy stints as his detective partner. “But it’s not like he did the chasing. The women were more often chasing him. And maybe the uniform. The ladies have something for the uniform. Not only did Pat have the uniform, he had the looks and everything else to go with it. He was cool, man. I always wanted to me like him.” Janusz laughs. “Actually, I wanted to be him.”

  His next serious relationship was with another beauty, Danielle Sauvé, who worked in the Gatineau library. Living together for five mostly happy years, though never wed, the couple had one child, a son, Jason. Burns would be a somewhat more attentive dad with Jason, even after departing Gatineau. The relationship with Danielle ended crushingly, each accusing the other of infidelity. Betrayal wounded Burns deeply. They tried to work it out, partly for Jason’s sake but also because they did love one another, despite everything, but the relationship never recovered.

  Single again, with two young children and absolutely no desire to procreate further, distrustful now of women who might manoeuvre him into marriage or a parallel commitment, Burns, still in his twenties, got a vasectomy. There would be no more pregnancies, planned or otherwise. “I like families,” Burns told a girlfriend a decade later. “I like watching parents with their kids. I just don’t want to be that family.”

  Given his domestic history, a family mutilated by the loss of its patriarch and repeatedly shifting domiciles thereafter, it’s understandable that Burns, rather than seeking out constancy and hard covenants of mutual faith in his relationships, would have gone in the opposite direction, resisting deep attachments. What’s more surprising is that, for someone raised almost entirely by females—a mother and four older sisters—Burns had precious little insight into women. He was the overweening, cosseted son of a domineering mother, and maybe that relationship influenced every adult liaison upon which he ventured.

  “He didn’t have the knowledge of what a man could be or do for a woman,” suggests Diane. “I don’t think he had that, because he never saw that. My mother was a very dominating person. Whether he was afraid of that or not, I don’t know. Perhaps it affected him, thinking, ‘If I get involved with these women, they’re going to start ruling me too, and I don’t want that.’ I think it made him more standoffish. He certainly was attractive to beautiful women, and they were attracted to him. There was never a time when he wasn’t with a woman, but it’s like he wasn’t looking for a genuine partner in life. He liked being taken care of. He always needed someone there and looked to women to fulfill a traditional role, doing things for him, which was strange, because our mother was definitely not a submissive person.”

  When Burns did remarry, at age forty-nine, taking the plunge was largely dictated by the logistics of immigration. His girlfriend was Canadian and he was by then coaching in Boston. She could not reside with him permanently unless they married, though Burns had first proposed before the Bruins job was offered.

  Louise Burns lived to an indomitable ninety-two, continuing to dye her hair blond throughout her eighties, always impeccably groomed, stylishly dressed and with complete make-up, even when resettled in a senior citizens’ home in Aylmer that had once been a monastery, threatening at one point to marry a fellow octogenarian resident, which sent her son into conniptions. Burns remained devoted to Louise, no matter how outrageous her behaviour, showering the woman with anything she coveted, including “the Cadillac of walkers.” When there was an item Louise fancied, she’d call Diane and say, “If Pat wants to buy me something, here’s what I want.”

  Endlessly, over the years, Louise would phone her son to correct anything he’d done or said that provoked her disapproval. “Pat was a dandy. He got that from Mom,” says Diane. “But if she didn’t like what he was wearing when she saw him on TV, she’d let him know. Or when she spotted him smoking a cigar during an interview, she told him to stop that. Then he started chewing tobacco, and she phoned, said, ‘Stop that. It doesn’t look good.’ And he listened to her.”

  To the end, Louise basked in the reflected glory of her youngest child’s extraordinary success, as chuffed with his celebrity as any of the arm-candy dames he squired. “From the time he first became an NHL coach, anytime we went anywhere—shopping, things like that—she would say who she was,” Diane remembers fondly. “She’d say, ‘You know who I am? I’m the mother of Pat Burns.’ ”

  Chapter Two

  Detective Story

  “Once a cop, always a cop.”

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN a scene from a James Cagney gangster movie, with boilerplate dialogue. In the defendant’s box, a young man committed to stand trial for murdering a priest turns to the detective who arrested him and snarls, “You’re going to die, you dirty dog.”

  Pat Burns was that detective. He and his partner had solved one of the most sensational murder cases in Hull’s history—the ghastly slaying of a Catholic priest who’d sadly gone trolling for a male prostitute. Father Roger Rinfret was found by a maid, lying in a pool of blood in his room at the Ritz Motel in Gatineau. He’d been stabbed nine times in the chest, twice in the back and twice in the throat. There were also cuts on the inside of his left hand and on his arms, suggesting the victim had struggled with his assailant.

  Gay sex, murder, a priest—it had all the elements of lewd scandal. Burns told repo
rters early in the investigation that the police had no suspects and no motive, but he actually did have a clue for both in what had transpired the night of March 30, 1980. The detectives at first followed a lead emanating from another suspect—a vicious and violent local felon and Millhaven Penitentiary prisoner who’d escaped from custody in midtown Ottawa while being transported by two officers, after holding a knife to their throats. Burns thought that knife might have been used to kill Rinfret. But that trail fizzled out, so Burns and his partner turned their attention elsewhere, learning early from interviews conducted with lowbrow characters that Rinfret was a closeted homosexual—what other kind could there be in the Catholic clergy?—who occasionally sought to satisfy his compulsions on the seamy side of the street. Burns, then twenty-eight and assigned to his first homicide, had spent weeks undercover with his partner at Major’s Hill Park, then a notorious gay haunt—a stakeout that led them to Alain McMurtie and another man, identified in court records only as Mr. X.

  The forty-nine-year-old Rinfret had been a priest for twenty-four years, seven of them spent as pastor at St. Matthieu’s Church in Gatineau before moving on to L’Ange Gardien Church in Masson, a Hull suburb. On the Sunday evening he was so brutally butchered, Rinfret had dinner with friends in Aylmer, then left alone to check into a motel, ostensibly so he could catch up on his sleep—overnight retreats away from the pressures of the parish were not uncommon. As would become known at the preliminary inquiry, Rinfret had encountered his killer while sitting in a car outside the posh Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa.

  McMurtie and a friend had spent that evening smoking hash, gulping Valium and drinking beer. He suggested, “Let’s go and roll one,” meaning mug somebody. McMurtie, twenty years old, had been a prostitute at Major’s Hill Park since the age of thirteen. Rinfret, as fate would have it, was the priest who’d buried his father. Outside the Château, around 10 p.m., McMurtie and his friend propositioned the target, wondered if he was interested in “a party for three.” The man agreed and drove them to the Ritz Motel. Once inside the room, the client asked for a kiss. And McMurtie stabbed him, over and over again, knifing Rinfret with such ferocity that he severed an artery in the priest’s left forearm.

  The previous evening, McMurtie had picked up another client with a secret sex life. This was Mr. X, a prominent citizen who was desperate to keep his homosexuality hidden from family and his trolling expeditions hidden from the public. Mr. X brought McMurtie home. There, unprovoked, McMurtie began slicing at Mr. X with the butcher knife he would later use on Rinfret. But this victim fended off the onslaught, saving his life by promising to keep quiet about the attack.

  At the preliminary hearing, Burns took the stand, providing investigative evidence against the accused deemed sufficient to send the case to trial. But it was the threatened testimony of Mr. X that convinced McMurtie to plead guilty—even as a mistrial seemed to be within his grasp—to second-degree murder in the killing of Rinfret, a crime described by the judge as committed “with savagery and sadistic fury.” McMurtie was sentenced to life in prison at Laval Penitentiary, with the possibility of parole after ten years served.

  In yet another twist of fate, Burns had known McMurtie well before the young man murdered the priest—he’d been his minor hockey coach. “He was a little brat, but he didn’t show any violent streaks,” Burns told Ottawa Citizen reporter Bob Marleau. “I remember warning him that he was going to get into a lot of trouble if he didn’t smarten up.”

  Burns toiled sixteen years as a full-time cop, half his adult life, and that profession shaped his persona, his view of the world and the world’s view of him, just as much as the other half spent coaching in the NHL. “Pat worked morality, alcohol, drugs, undercover,” recalls John Janusz, who had two long hitches as Burns’s detective partner in Gatineau, including their co-investigation of the stunning Rinfret murder. “You can imagine—priest in a motel room, gay sex. A good six months we worked on that case, got introduced to some of the people in the gay community through the Ottawa police, managed to resolve it. But it was intense … intense. And then, in the witness box, that guy threatens to eliminate him. You couldn’t intimidate Pat, though, not with his Irish character.”

  The priest murder would be the highlight of Burns’s policing career. Most cases were nowhere as dramatic, though oftentimes equally colourful or just plain goofy, as if plucked from old Barney Miller scripts. There was the Gatineau alderman who had his house broken into, three masked men aiming a shotgun in his face, robbing him of $14,700 in cash and jewellery. Though the culprits wore stocking masks, the alderman, Claude Bérard, would later recognize one of them in a Masson bar. Bérard pretended to befriend the man, invited him home, then forced the guy to apologize to his wife for the horror the gang had put them through, before calling police. Burns took that call-out, recounting at a bail hearing his bemusement when he arrived at the scene and was handed a contrite suspect. He elicited enough information from the fellow to fly to Edmonton and arrest two others in connection with the robbery, catching a couple of Oilers games while he was at it.

  Another memorable investigation had Burns undercover at a massage parlour operating as a bordello. A team of four cops put the Minou Noir under surveillance, scooping up a dozen of its clients for interrogation. One of them, apparently miffed about the “unsatisfactory” rub-a-dub he’d received, told investigators the masseuse had offered to take off her top for a further five dollars or masturbate him for twenty. Burns and his colleagues moved in for the raid, charging the owner and his wife with keeping a common bawdy house. At trial, Burns denied having threatened to charge the customers as found-ins if they didn’t cooperate. But it was a touchy case that made enemies for Burns in high places: the parlour owner was an ex–Ottawa police sergeant.

  Then there was the time he got clobbered by a woman wielding a frozen turkey when he tried to break up a domestic scuffle. Knocked Burns out cold, that wallop, though the story clearly got embellished over the many years of retelling. “Knocked out by a turkey. I had the cranberry sauce running down my neck. I had the stuffing in my ears. I was out. My partner had to subdue the woman and the man.”

  And the drunk driver he’d arrested, who later returned to the station brandishing a gun, which sent everybody ducking for cover, though Burns was out having lunch and missed the excitement. A sardonic sense of humour helped him cope with the crazies and the more common boring stretches of law enforcement. Once, the squad took into custody a strong suspect in a string of assaults who was refusing to cooperate. As it happened, their property room was full of costumes recovered from a truck robbery. Burns proposed getting into a full Easter Bunny suit, his face covered by the floppy-eared mask, then entering the suspect’s cell and beating the guy with his big felt-padded paws “until he talked.” That suggestion was declined.

  Hull’s police force would become amalgamated with Gatineau’s while Burns wore the uniform. For a long time previously, the two towns had spun in different orbits, though both were a late-night booze option for Ottawa tipplers. “Gatineau bars closed at 3,” Burns remembered. “We’d sit in the cruiser and watch the cars come over the bridge. It was like watching an invasion of drunks.”

  Oh, how Burns loved to tell those cop stories after it was all safely behind him, feet up on the desk in his office, surrounded by an appreciative audience of reporters. When in the mood for gabbing, no one in the game was more entertaining a raconteur. Whether the tales were always true was irrelevant, though they had the ring of authenticity. After a reporter in Montreal published some of those accounts, Burns feigned indignation: “Listen, I put away a lot of bad guys. Some of them can even read.”

  When Pat joined the force in Gatineau, new recruits pulled the swing shift, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., then worked their way to a squad car and eventually an investigative team. He and Janusz, who arrived a couple of years later, were the only English speakers in the department in the mid-’70s, so were drawn to each other even before being partner
ed as patrolmen and, afterwards, detectives. “His name was Burns and mine was Janusz,” notes Janusz of their non-francophone commonality. “We both spoke English, we both came from Montreal.” Both had also lost their fathers young. “We clicked.”

  Burns drew approval from the senior management ranks by his willingness to learn French after someone pointed out the fleur-de-lis on his uniform shoulder. It was a language he’d always understood growing up but had never learned to speak properly, mastering only snatches of the slangy joual version—eloquent Québécois street French. The issue would take on political significance when Burns got the coaching job in Montreal and had to deal daily with an aggressive francophone media that sneered at his pronunciation and accent. But as a newbie cop, he strove to improve his communication skills by taking French courses and submitting reports in both languages. “He didn’t speak the best French, but it was colourful,” smiles Janusz.

  Burns went from traffic patrolman with a radar gun—though Gatineau did finally get those falsely advertised motorcycles—to walking a beat, to his own scout car, to unmarked vehicles, huge black Chevrolets immediately clocked by the bad guys. With the amalgamation of five regional police forces, management broke the Gatineau detachment down into three investigative teams. “We wore civilian clothes, drove unmarked vehicles,” says Janusz. “We’d patrol and do surveillance, try to get information or find people for the sergeants that were in that criminal investigation branch. Pat and I were constables, but we ended up in criminal investigations together. They gave us the title agent enquêteur, which was basically a fancy way of saying an investigator or detective.”

  From the start, Burns had a knack for eliciting dope from contacts and snitches, slipping smoothly into the riffraff strata, the underbelly of urban crime. It was a peculiar talent, an intuitive instinct, but tailor-made for an ambitious cop. “He could talk to anybody,” says Janusz. “To get information, you’ve got to have an approach, be able to speak to people in their milieu. He worked that. He could adapt. If he needed to be hard-nosed, he would be hard-nosed. And if he needed to be cool, he was cool.”