Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  Riel’s future executioner, Jack Henderson, was one of the men imprisoned with Scott during the rebellion. He swore to avenge both his own treatment and the death of his friend, now a martyr to the Orange cause.

  Accused of Scott’s murder in Protestant Canada, and with a reward of $5,000 offered for his capture, Riel became a wanted man. He fled to the United States, although he did return to Canada several times over the next few difficult years. He was even elected to the House of Commons for the Manitoba riding of Provencher, although he never actually took his seat in parliament. The stress finally took its toll, and Riel suffered a mental breakdown. He spent two years in psychiatric hospitals in Quebec. From 1877 to 1884, he again lived in the United States, in both Keeseville, New York (close to Montreal), and Montana. He became an American citizen in 1883.

  Louis Riel in 1875. The Métis leader from Manitoba, who launched two rebellions against the Canadian government in the late 1800s, was executed for high treason in 1885.

  Riel returned to Canada for the last time in 1884. The Métis and First Nations people of Saskatchewan needed help to negotiate with the Canadian government for land rights and political power. At that time, Saskatchewan was part of the Northwest Territories, administered by the government of Canada; it became a province in 1905. The Métis called on Riel to work the same magic as he had in Manitoba in 1870. Although he responded to their call, Louis Riel was no longer the same man. He was fragile, both mentally and emotionally. He increasingly saw himself as the “Prophet of the Prairies,” sent by God to lead his people.

  Settlers in Saskatchewan, including whites and Métis, had a long list of objections regarding land claims and the collapse of land values in the area. Initially, they tried to petition Ottawa to redress these grievances. But when the government refused to act, merely saying that they would look into the problem, the protests were ramped up. In early 1885, Riel set up a provisional Métis government in Batoche on the South Saskatchewan River. In the spring of that year, the Métis launched an armed uprising called the Northwest Rebellion. It lasted just two months.

  This time, advanced technology helped the Canadian government forces to win the day. They were able to speed across the country on the newly opened Canadian Pacific Railway, and at the decisive Battle of Batoche in Saskatchewan, which lasted four days, the army’s superior manpower (eight hundred men against the rebels’ two hundred) and firepower turned the tide. Their secret weapon was the American Gatling gun: operated by a single gunner, the Gatling spat out a hail of bullets, and the Métis fighters’ rifles could offer little in response. The Canadians overran the rebels, and on May 12, 1885, the Northwest Rebellion was over. The rebels’ military leader, Gabriel Dumont, escaped to the United States, and Riel, described as “cold and forlorn,” surrendered to the North-West Mounted Police a few days later.

  Riel was accused of high treason under a 1351 British act called the Treason Act — an offence punishable with death. Selecting a British statute dating back five hundred years was clearly a political decision, made by a government looking for a law that carried a mandatory death sentence. For that purpose, our own made-in-Canada laws were not good enough.

  As a general rule in Canada, criminal trials were always held close to where the crime took place. Historically, there were solid reasons for this decision: it was easier to gather evidence locally; the judge and jury could visit the crime scene if necessary; and witnesses would not have to travel long distances to testify in court. Following this tradition, Riel should have been tried in or near Batoche. Instead, he was taken to Winnipeg for trial. This might have made some sense, as, in spite of his wanderings, Winnipeg was the place Riel called home. But, according to Thomas, when the authorities found out that, under Manitoba law, half the jury could be French speaking, he was quietly transferred to far-off Regina. There, he faced an all-white, English-speaking Protestant jury of six men.

  Riel flatly refused to plead insanity, as advised by his lawyers. He understood that if he were declared insane, it would delegitimize his people’s grievances against the Canadian government. His view was that he and his people had acted in self-defence. “I have a mission,” he said. “I cannot fulfill my mission as long as I am looked upon as an insane being.” As the trial progressed, relations between Riel and his lawyers broke down completely, and they asked the judge to deny Riel permission to speak.

  When Riel did eventually have the opportunity to express his opinions in his final trial statement, he spoke so lucidly and rationally that he convinced the jury he was indeed sane. Ironically, this sealed his fate.

  After the two-week trial, it took the jury less than an hour to come to a decision. The foreman, Francis Cosgrove, was reportedly “crying like a baby” when he announced the guilty verdict, with a recommendation for mercy. Judge Hugh Richardson, however, was not feeling particularly merciful that day. Finding Riel guilty of high treason, “a crime the most pernicious and greatest that man can commit,” the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.

  Decades later, one of the jurors, Edwin Brooks, said in a newspaper interview: “We tried Louis Riel for treason, but he was hanged for the murder of Thomas Scott.”

  Riel’s lawyers appealed his sentence to the Court of Queen’s Bench in Manitoba, but the court confirmed his conviction. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London denied leave to further appeals. In spite of the fact that he was a U.S. citizen, the Americans declined to interfere, saying that “every country has the right to determine for itself what constitutes treason.”

  In a bizarre twist, Riel’s secretary, William Henry Jackson, was captured after the Northwest Rebellion and committed to the Manitoba Asylum for the Insane in Selkirk. He escaped and sent a message through his sister to the prime minister of Canada: “If you hang Riel you will provoke a more dangerous and attrocious [sic ] outbreak. He is the sole mouthpiece of the aborigines and must be heard. Let him free and I am willing to be shot in his place.” This desperate plea, of course, came to nothing.

  An angry conflict flared up between English and French Canadians. Ontarians rejoiced that Riel was to be hanged. But according to the Quebec papers, every Frenchman wanted Riel to be pardoned.

  Nothing more could be done, said Sir John A. Macdonald. Because there were some doubts about Riel’s mental state, he added, three doctors had assessed Riel and all three insisted that he was sane. Riel was guilty of high treason, and there was no reason for delaying his execution a moment longer.

  As prime minister, Sir John A. had the last word: “He will hang, though every dog in Quebec barks in his favour.”

  And hang he did. According to the Quebec Daily Telegraph , after Riel’s arms were pinioned on the gallows on November 16, 1885, accompanied by Deputy Sheriff Gibson and fathers André and McWilliams, he “walked firmly and without assistance down the six steps to the scaffold, taking his stand on the drop, and constantly [repeating] in French: ‘In God I put my trust.’” Two minutes after the lever was pulled, he was dead.

  On the eve of his execution, Louis Riel said, “In a hundred years, they’ll still be talking about me.”

  And we still are.

  As the Quebec Daily Telegraph bleakly and presciently put it in the issue that appeared on the day Riel died:

  The wedge of discord has been, so to speak, driven deeply into the quivering flesh of the body politic, and Heaven only knows where the trouble will end. The execution of Riel marks the starting point on a very perilous path. With one portion of the Canadian population regarding the tragic event as the fit conclusion to a turbulent, murderous and rebellious career and the other portion viewing it as the martyrdom of a hero and a patriot, whose only crime was to have been of their blood and to have loved his poor downtrodden fellow-countrymen in the North West too well, it will be admitted, we think, that the outlook for the future is not encouraging. A wound has been sustained that will rankle and fester for years to come.

  Historians and political commentators ha
ve noted that the fault lines exposed by the rebellion and Riel’s trial have indeed continued to divide Canada to this day: east versus west, English versus French, Native people versus the rest.

  Sir John A. Macdonald would probably turn in his grave at the thought, but there are some eerie similarities between Louis Riel and Sir John A.’s good friend and fellow Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Many people see Riel, too, as a Father of Confederation. After all, he did bring Manitoba into the Dominion of Canada. Both Riel and McGee were passionate speakers and visionaries, committed to the land they called home. Both had powerful enemies who plotted their downfall. And both of them died in their early forties, violently.

  Chapter 7

  The Petticoat and the Noose

  S he was small and slim, with a long, narrow face and dark curly hair reaching to her shoulders. She was just twenty-two years old, married, and living in the village of Blairmore in the Crowsnest Pass area of the Rocky Mountains. Her name was Florence Lassandro. And at just after six o’clock on May 2, 1923, as dawn was breaking in what witnesses described as a “fretful morning sky,” she became the first, and last, woman to ever be hanged in Alberta. She died with the words “I forgive everybody” on her lips.

  From around 1916 to 1923, it was like the Wild West in Alberta. Those were the dark and desperate days of Prohibition. In the United States, the manufacture, transportation, importation, and sale of alcohol were completely banned. In less restrictive Canada, the provinces generally prohibited the sale, possession, and public consumption of alcohol, but there was no ban on the manufacture of liquor for export. This was a huge opportunity for entrepreneurial types wanting to make a quick buck. Heavily armed outlaws called bootleggers or rum-runners loaded their trucks and automobiles with crates of illegal booze and ran them across provincial and national borders to quench the public’s thirst for hard liquor.

  The most notorious bootlegger in the southwest corner of Alberta was a man called Emilio Picariello, also known as Pic, Emperor Pic, or the “King of the Crowsnest Pass.” Emperor Pic owned a hotel and garage in Blairmore and was a member of the town council. Folks saw him as a gallant Robin Hood figure who put on free movies for poor kids. But these generous deeds became a front for his much more profitable — and sinister — criminal activities. He owned a fleet of speedy McLaughlin Buick automobiles, known as “Whiskey Sixes,” which easily outran the sluggish Model T Fords of the Alberta Provincial Police. He demanded respect and loyalty from his employees, including Charles Lassandro, his chief mechanic, and Charles’s much younger wife, Florence. Like Picariello, both of them were Italian immigrants.

  Florence Lassandro loved the thrill of running booze across the British Columbia–Alberta border or over the foothills into Montana. And she came prepared, toting a .38 revolver in her purse. The guys liked having her on board. They felt the cops would be less likely to shoot if they saw a woman in the car.

  Florence often rode shotgun for Pic’s sixteen-year-old son, Steve. She was not in the car with him, though, on September 21, 1922. On that day, a constable with the Alberta Provincial Police, Steven Lawson, fired at Steve’s liquor-laden automobile as it tore through the Crowsnest Pass town of Coleman after an abortive attempt to deliver a shipment to Pic’s hotel in Blairmore.

  Steve ended up with an injury to his hand, either from a bullet or from jamming it in the car door in his haste to decamp. Confused reports of the incident sent Picariello into a fury. “If he has shot my boy, I will kill him tonight, by God!” Grabbing a gun and picking up Florence on the way out of town, he raced over to Coleman to deal with Constable Lawson. At the end of the confrontation, the officer lay dead, a bullet in his back.

  At first, as noted by anthropologist Ann Chandler in her article “The Lady & the Bootlegger,” Florence was quite casual about the whole affair. “He’s dead and I’m alive, and that’s all there is to it,” she reportedly said to the officers who arrested her. She also confessed to shooting Lawson.

  Bootlegger Florence Lassandro at the time of her arrest in 1922. She was executed in May 1923 for shooting a police officer and died with the words “I forgive everybody” on her lips.

  Lawson’s widow had been a horrified witness to her husband’s violent death, and she broke down completely while testifying at Picariello and Lassandro’s preliminary hearing. But it was the evidence of Pearl, Lawson’s nine-year-old daughter, at their joint trial that stamped their death warrant. This was part of the recorded conversation in court between Pearl and an examining lawyer:

  “Daddy was standing at the car … he just put his arms around Pick’s [sic ] neck and Pick fired and daddy let go.… He dropped down.”

  “Do you know why he dropped down. Do you, Pearlie?”

  “Because he was dead.”

  “Who killed him, do you know?”

  “Pick and the lady.”

  The trial lasted a week. The jury found both defendants guilty, and Judge William Walsh sentenced them to death.

  As the date of the execution approached, Florence had second thoughts about her confession. In a telegram to the minister of justice, she wrote: “I told Harris, my first solicitor, that I had agreed to take all blame.” She claimed that Picariello had instructed her to “tell anyone who asks you that you did it.”

  Maybe Florence did take the rap for the murder to save her boss, believing that they would both escape the death penalty. Wasn’t it true, after all, that women were never hanged in Canada? If that was the plan, it backfired. Badly. In spite of public objections and protests from the Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association, Picariello and Lassandro’s sentences were upheld.

  Florence Lassandro went to the gallows, but the truth is that when it came to hanging in Canada, you really were better off being a woman than a man. It’s all there in the numbers — 1,533 people were sentenced to death between 1867 and 1976, and just 58 of them were women. And of the 704 people actually hanged during that period, only 11 were women.

  One of the reasons for this difference, according to researchers F. Murray Greenwood and Beverley Boissery in Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment 1754 –1953 , is that women were less likely to use potentially lethal tools like guns or axes or hammers, and thus less likely to commit violent crimes. There were always exceptions, of course, as in the case of Phoebe Campbell of Thorndale, Ontario. Phoebe claimed that two men with blackened faces had burst into the family’s log cabin on July 15, 1871, demanding money. They attempted to shoot her husband, George, and when the gun misfired, they brutally hacked him to death with a knife and an axe. On the strength of her testimony, six local men were arrested, but questions soon arose as to the accuracy of Phoebe’s story. Police investigations revealed that Phoebe had killed her husband to cover up her affair with a local workman, Thomas Coyle. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder.

  Phoebe had three strikes against her: in addition to using deadly weapons to commit her crime, she was an adulterer and a husband killer. This type of offender often ended up on the gallows. As criminologist Sylvie Frigon points out, women were “punished for having stepped out of their social norms as women, wives, and mothers.” The London Free Press referred to Campbell in August 1871 as “the most atrocious criminal of our century.” Hanged in June 1872, she has gone down in history as the first woman to be executed in the Dominion of Canada.

  An undated handwritten sheriff and doctor’s report after the hanging of Phoebe Campbell in June 1872. She was the first woman to be executed in the Dominion of Canada.

  Just one year later, Elizabeth Workman was also hanged for murdering her husband. It was well known in Mooretown, Ontario, that James Workman was a drunk who beat up his wife and stole the pittance she earned doing laundry and cleaning house for neighbours and local businesses. None of these details came up at Elizabeth’s trial, where the judge, Adam Wilson, saw things differently. In his closing statement, he described Elizabeth to the jury as an unfaithful, sadistic woman
who had tied up her husband and battered him with a mop handle for hours, finally killing him. Her inexperienced lawyer, John A. Mackenzie, appointed the day before the case began, was no match for the hostile judge. The jury convicted Elizabeth of murder, although they did recommend mercy and asked for her sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.

  There was a huge public outcry against her sentence. All in vain. In spite of the jury’s recommendation, a flood of telegrams, five petitions (including one to the Governor General from 118 people in the Mooretown area), and two letters to the Department of Justice from Alexander Mackenzie, the future prime minister, Elizabeth Workman was hanged in June 1873.

  One factor that should have helped Elizabeth avoid the noose — but didn’t — was the unwillingness of officials in post-Confederation Canada to sentence women to death. Everyone in the criminal justice system was a man. Policemen, judges, lawyers, jurors, and politicians all firmly believed in the idea of chivalry: women in general should be respected and protected, and women offenders treated leniently.

  Those involved in the system struggled to find the balance between protecting what they perceived to be the weaker sex and punishing those few vicious individuals who strayed outside the norms. This tension was again illustrated when the case of Angelina Napolitano came to court in May 1911. On Easter Sunday of that year, Angelina, twenty-eight years old and heavily pregnant, took an axe to her husband, Pietro.