Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  The requirement to organize hangings made the local sheriffs feel really uncomfortable. It could even make them sick. Beneath the headline “Sheriff Cannot Find a Hangman,” The Globe reported in March 1912 that E. Martin, sheriff of Fraserville, Quebec, was “seriously ill from worry over his inability to hire a hangman. With an execution only eight days off, he cannot locate anyone willing and able to take the position, and may have to undertake the task himself.”

  And sheriffs did not relish the idea of conducting hangings themselves, especially because the condemned person was very likely to be someone they knew. They were also not confident of their expertise to carry out the job without bungling it.

  There were individuals prepared to step in, though. The Globe published a letter in July 1910 that read in part: “I wish to ask you if there is any possible chance for securing the position of assistant executioner.… I am willing to carry out anything that the law requires in connection with the position. I am an Englishman, 34 years old, strong and possessing all kinds of nerve, all of which are absolutely necessary for the position.”

  So what would be the basic qualifications for anyone wanting to apply?

  The Globe letter writer fulfilled the very first requirement, which was that you had to be a man. No hangwomen or hangpersons were allowed.

  You would also have to be prepared to travel — a lot. Executions generally took place at a jail near where the crime had been committed and where the trial was held, and the hangman had to make his way there. So you could find yourself taking long, boring train journeys to dots on the map like Lytton, British Columbia, or L’Orignal, Ontario, or Battleford, Saskatchewan, or Dorchester, New Brunswick. And you might end up paying for your own rail tickets.

  Carrying your own tools with you — a black hood and leather straps to bind the arms and legs of the prisoner, for example — was essential. You might even have to buy and prepare the rope used for the hanging. New rope is very elastic, and you would need to stretch it out by suspending a heavy weight from it for a few days before the hanging. If you were travelling to those dots on the map — like Lytton or L’Orignal or Battleford or Dorchester — you might have to rely on a hastily and perhaps shoddily built scaffold provided on site, or bring along your own. As noted by Ken Leyton-Brown, this was the preferred solution of one of Canada’s best-known and busiest hangmen, Arthur Ellis. His portable kit was painted an eye-popping shade of red.

  To be avoided at all costs was the kind of situation that occurred in December 1879, when a Cree hunter and trapper named Ka-Ki-Si -Kutchin or Swift Runner was hanged at Fort Saskatchewan Gaol, Alberta, for the murder of eight members of his family. According to the Edmonton Journal , crisis followed crisis on the day of the execution: the sheriff was delayed by brutally cold weather; the inexperienced hangman forgot to bring straps for pinioning the condemned man’s arms and legs; and, unaccustomed as they were to public hangings, the crowd of onlookers burned the wooden trap from the gallows to provide some heat. As officials scurried around to get the scaffold ready again, the prisoner cheerfully offered to kill himself with a tomahawk and save the hangman further trouble.

  Another important requirement for a hangman was a solid understanding of the mathematics of hanging. You would have to calculate the drop or length of rope used for each hanging depending on the weight of the condemned person. If all went according to plan, the fall would dislocate the vertebrae when the trap was sprung, causing a quick death. This was not an exact science, however, and mistakes did happen. It took seven minutes for Patrick Whelan to die, remember? The drop was probably too short. And in Rimouski, Quebec, in 1882, the hanging of murderer François Moreau was badly bungled. Although his death was instantaneous, the drop was far too long, and his head, according to the Toronto Daily Mail , was nearly separated from his body.

  You would also have to deal with the often extreme hostility of the community. The locals were very unhappy when someone from the district went to the gallows, and they often took out their anger on the hangman. Look at what happened in 1872 after the hanging of Vildebon Bissonnette at the Montmagny Gaol, Quebec, for example. As they were leaving town by train, the two hangmen, a French Canadian and a Scot, started discussing the part they had played in the execution. Their fellow passengers went wild and beat both of them up. So, while on the job, you might want to disguise yourself with a mask and a false moustache, and you should be prepared to leave town in a hurry.

  As a hangman, you would certainly have to cope with unruly or uncooperative prisoners. In 1899, Benjamin Parrott, a carter from Hamilton, Ontario, was hanged for the brutal assault and murder of his mother. The Daily Mail and Empire reported that he was possibly insane and had attacked his family before, but that he was generally all right except when he had been drinking. He was clearly under the influence of the demon drink when he felled his mother with three axe blows to the head after a family altercation. On the day he was executed, Parrott asked for and was given some brandy just before leaving his cell, and he cursed the hangman all the way to the scaffold. In 1911, Francesco Grevola, convicted of the murder of a fellow Italian in Montreal, suffered a complete collapse and had to be half dragged, half carried to the gallows. A more active resistance was offered by Lawrence Vincent, a carnival worker hanged in 1955 at the Oakalla Prison in Burnaby, British Columbia, for strangling a young girl to death. He fought off hangman Camille Branchaud when the latter entered his cell to pinion his arms and followed up by phys­ically attacking and yelling insults at Branchaud on the scaffold.

  As for the bottom line — well, the pay could vary. Unfortunately, like most of the hangmen, you probably wouldn’t get a regular salary. As reported in The Globe in December 1912, hangman Arthur Ellis complained: “I don’t know how I drifted into the business, but I am tired of it and will quit unless I can get a living out of it.” At that time, sheriffs in larger cities were paying him $75 per hanging, and in smaller centres the pay was $50. As ropes were never reused, cash-strapped executioners sometimes considered supplementing their income by cutting them up and selling the lengths as souvenirs.

  With all these complicated requirements, sheriffs started to rely heavily on a small group of professionals who were sufficiently skilled to do the job quickly and efficiently. These men were sometimes called “Canada’s Executioners.” One of the first of these experts after Confederation was a man named John Robert Radclive.

  Growing up in Britain, John Radclive did not plan to be a hangman — he wanted to be a clergyman. “But I was no hypocrite and I gave it up.” In a 2007 article in the Toronto Star , Patrick Cain noted that Radclive joined the Royal Navy instead, where his duties included hanging pirates in the South China Sea. He also spent some years in the British army, fighting in India.

  After his arrival in Canada in 1887, Radclive went into a new line of work. But his salary as a steward at Toronto’s trendy Sunnyside Boating Club wasn’t enough to support his wife and four children. Fortunately, he had a useful skill to fall back on — after leaving the army, he had trained with William Marwood, Britain’s official executioner. So Radclive started working part-time as a hangman. Some members of the boating club merely laughed when the news trickled out that their steward was moonlighting as a hangman. But an influential member who was an inspector with the North-West Mounted Police complained to the club owners about having his drinks served by a “common hangman.” Radclive refused to keep his extracurricular activities a secret, and he was fired for “lack of discretion.”

  So again, Radclive found himself changing careers: in 1892, he became Canada’s first professional hangman. He hanged at least sixty-nine people, although the number could be as high as one hundred and fifty — in those days, record keeping was not very accurate.

  In the early years, Cain writes, Radclive did quite well financially — he seems to have been the only hangman to be paid a regular retainer of $750 a year, plus an additional fee and expenses for every hanging he performed. In 1893, he boug
ht a house on Sorauren Avenue in Parkdale, Toronto, and he later lived on Fern Avenue in the same area. Over time he seems to have been tolerated in the neighbourhood in spite of his grisly profession. According to a neighbour, “The little children who weren’t frightened of him just loved him.”

  But Radclive enjoyed his sinister reputation as a hangman, and his often offensive behaviour ensured that not everybody loved him.

  In 1890, a high-profile murder case kept the public glued to their newspapers. This was the so-called “Blenheim Swamp Murder.” John Reginald Birchall, a charming British con man masquerading as a member of the English aristocracy, lured a prospective business partner, also an Englishman, to a remote and swampy area near Woodstock, Ontario. There he shot him twice in the back of the head. Through a series of coincidences and some brilliant investigative work by John “Old Never-Let-Go ” Murray, chief detective for the province of Ontario, Birchall was arrested and tried for murder. After an eight-day trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on November 14, 1890, with John Radclive officiating.

  The day after the execution, the Toronto World , in a report stretching over four whole columns, recreated the drama of Birchall’s last night on earth. Tucked in among reams of information on the poignant last meeting between Birchall and his wife, the relationship of Birchall with his spiritual advisor, and Birchall’s personal preparations before the hanging was this unflattering snippet: “Meantime, in the corridor below, the hangman was peacefully reclining on a lounge, with the sound sleep of a babe but the snore of a traction engine.… The executioner was in an unusually cheerful mood, and during wakeful moments joked with the turnkey, the pencil pushers [newspaper reporters] and others.” The Huron Expositor was even more withering: “The hangman disgusted everyone by his noisy talking in the jail during the night.”

  Twelve years later, Radclive also infuriated the people of Hull, Quebec, the day before the execution of Stanislaus Lacroix in March 1902.

  Lacroix was a violently jealous man. He had pumped three bullets into his estranged wife, killing her, and he also murdered an elderly neighbour he suspected, wrongly, of having a relationship with her. During his trial, he gave the court the names of numerous other people on his hit list, including the parish priest. So Lacroix was not exactly the perfect citizen. However, when Radclive got drunk in the pub and boasted loudly that he was in town to hang Lacroix, the locals exploded with rage. They attacked Radclive; it took a wagonload of policemen to rescue him. For his own protection, he spent the night in the same jail as the man he was to hang the next day. The Ottawa Citizen reported that at the execution Radclive’s eyes “were black and badly swollen and his face was adorned with court plaster, giving evidence of the rough treatment he received yesterday.”

  By that time, Radclive was drinking so heavily that even seasoned reporters and prison officials were shocked. In 1910, a reporter from the Telegram sat with him in a Stratford, Ontario, hotel room on a Sunday afternoon, the day before a hanging, and watched him drink beer after beer “from the bottle, never using a glass.”

  It is said that Radclive started drinking excessively after the double hanging of a man and a woman in 1899. Samuel Parslow and Cordélia Viau were tried separately and both convicted of murdering Viau’s husband in Ste-Scholastique, Quebec. Before the execution, what a Montreal newspaper called a “howling mob” of two thousand swarmed the prison and tried to batter down the gate. The provincial police had to fire their revolvers in the air to break up the crowd. After the hanging, some of the six hundred spectators permitted to witness the execution from inside the prison yard charged the scaffold and ripped off the black cloth that shielded the bodies from public view. The behaviour of the frenzied crowd had unnerved Radclive so much that he drank an entire bottle of brandy that night.

  While he was initially cool and controlled at a hanging, the fear of bungling started preying on Radclive’s mind. As noted by Pfeifer and Leyton-Brown in Death by Rope , after something went wrong in 1902 at the execution of Walter Gordon in Brandon, Manitoba, Radclive, shaking like a leaf, exclaimed to the sheriff: “My God, it’s terrible, it’s terrible. Why did I ever start at this business?”

  Radclive retired in 1910 — his last hanging was in July of that year. In February 1911, he died in Toronto of cirrhosis, a liver disease no doubt caused by his excessive drinking. He was fifty-five years old and penniless. His wife had left him and gone back to Britain with two of their children, and he had lost contact with the two who remained in Canada. They were ashamed of their father’s profession.

  As quoted by Kenneth Saunders in The Rectory Murder: The Mysterious Crime that Shocked Turn-of-the -Century New Brunswick , Radclive described his nightmarish visions in an interview shortly before his death: “Now at night when I lie down, I start up with a roar as victim after victim comes up before me. I can see them on the trap, waiting a second before they meet their Maker. They haunt me and taunt me until I am nearly crazy with an unearthly fear.”

  John Robert Radclive died alone, despised for his job, rejected by his family, and haunted by his inner demons.

  The famous English author George Orwell once wrote: “Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.”

  Would you ?

  Chapter 6

  Treason: The Case Against Louis Riel

  L ouis Riel did not sleep as the clock ticked away his last few hours on earth. He spent most of the night on his knees, praying. At 11:00 p.m., he ate a small meal of bread, milk, and three raw eggs. At 7:00 a.m. the following morning, November 16, 1885, Catholic priests Father André and Father McWilliams administered the last rites to prepare the doomed man for death. Riel looked pale but calm. Wearing a short black coat, a woollen shirt and collar, dark grey tweed pants, and moccasins, he started the slow walk to the scaffold from his cell at the North-West Mounted Police barracks in Regina, Saskatchewan. The Mounties had thrown a cordon around the scaffold, which had been set up in a fenced enclosure adjacent to the loft. The only access was through a window. Riel and his spiritual advisors knelt and prayed at the opening, then they stepped outside.

  At 8:15, on a signal from the deputy sheriff, the hangman, Jack Henderson, came forward with straps to pinion Riel’s arms for the hanging.

  “Louis Riel,” he reportedly whispered, “do you know me? You had me once and I got away from you. I have you now and you’ll not get away from me!”

  Did Louis Riel hear those vicious words? Was he completely lost in prayer, or did his mind flash back through the years in a final attempt to make sense of what had brought him to that place?

  Louis Riel was the eldest of eleven children born to Louis Riel and Julie Lagimonière at the Red River Settlement in what is now Manitoba on October 22, 1844. He was one of six thousand French-speaking Catholic Métis (an Indigenous people with mixed white and First Nations ancestry). In his early teens, he was sent to school in Montreal; his vocation was to be a Catholic priest. But when his father died, he dropped out of religious studies and worked at a law firm in Montreal to support his family.

  Riel was catapulted into political life before he reached twenty-five. At that time, Rupert’s Land, which included what later became the three provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1868, the government of Canada started negotiations with the company to buy this huge expanse of territory. Eager to grab land on the prairies and not overly concerned about the people already living there, many English-speaking Ontarians started to push westward. Among them were members of the Orange Order, a Protestant social and political organization that was antagonistic toward French Canadians and Catholics.

  The Métis of the Red River Settlement in Rupert’s Land were afraid that they would lose their rights and traditional way of life when the sale went through. But who could help them hammer out an agreement with Canada? Louis Riel — energetic, educated, and bilingual — seemed like just the man for the job
. He agreed to become their leader.

  As noted by author and historian Lewis H. Thomas, Riel found a changed society on his return from the east. The population of the small, isolated settlement had swelled to nearly twelve thousand, most of them English-speaking Protestants hostile to the culture and values of the Métis. Like his people, Riel was concerned. He said the new settlers had come “to chase us from our homeland.”

  Riel acted promptly and forcefully, launching what was called the Red River Rebellion in 1869. He formed a provisional government for talks with the Canadian government, and his force of four hundred Métis took control of Upper Fort Garry (today’s Winnipeg) without meeting resistance.

  The prime minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, would probably have loved to dispatch troops to put down those pesky rebels. But with the national railroad still a distant dream, there was no way to send soldiers hurtling across the Canadian vastness in the depths of winter. Instead, Sir John A. negotiated with the Métis, and the province of Manitoba was created in 1870. The government of Canada guaranteed that land would not be taken from the Métis and that the French language would be recognized for the people of the prairies.

  This was a stunning victory for Riel and his followers. But they made a fatal error, one that would come back to haunt Riel for the rest of his life and ultimately factor into his death.

  During the rebellion, the Métis seized a number of prisoners. Among them was an aggressive Ontarian Orangeman named Thomas Scott, who took every possible opportunity to insult and disobey his guards. The Métis’ patience finally snapped, and they demanded that he be punished. A military tribunal tried and convicted Scott for defying the authority of the provincial government. He was to be executed by firing squad.

  Riel could have prevented the execution, but didn’t. Whatever his motives (vengeance? fear of losing the support of his followers? the need to show Canada that the Métis should be taken seriously?), even the newspapers of the period were highly critical of what they saw as a disastrous misstep. The Irish Canadian commented that Riel’s “first great mistake was the killing of Scott. That Scott brought his fate upon himself by foolhardy boasts and threats is generally conceded … but the act was nevertheless a criminal blunder of the first magnitude.” And when Riel himself was executed in 1885, the Quebec Daily Telegraph made reference to “the shooting of Scott, for which Riel was beyond question more hounded to death in reality than for the last [Northwest] rebellion.”