Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  Faced with this hideous dilemma, the lawmen in charge decided to follow the letter of the law: to hang Swim by the neck until he was dead. So the unconscious man was carried back to the gallows and hanged again, this time by Gill. And this time, there was no mistake. But more than three-quarters of an hour had elapsed between the first and second hanging.

  A commission of inquiry was launched to address the rumours swirling around the case: that hangman Doyle was disrespectful and drunk and gave the order to cut Swim down prematurely.

  The commissioner, J. Dickson, was very critical of Doyle’s performance. And he ended his report with a withering condemnation of Canada’s system of capital punishment and the dreadful burden it placed on the sheriff: “The sentence of the court is that the prisoner be hanged by the neck until he is dead. The duty of carrying out this sentence is placed on the sheriff. He receives no instructions from any official source as to how the details of this gruesome task are to be carried out.… The wonder is that there are not more affairs of this nature.”

  The reality is that probably many more bungles of this nature occurred than were reported. Leyton-Brown estimates that between one-third and two-thirds of Canadian hangings were botched. And over time, the public began to view strangulation itself as a type of failure. Observers and reporters reacted with shock and horror (“Revolting Scene at Execution” was a typical headline), but the authorities were not always keen to acknow­ledge errors or inadequacies. Not only did they start trying to keep details of substandard hangings out of the public eye, but they also became reluctant to report problems to their superiors. For example, Sheriff Robertson, the man in charge of the horribly mismanaged hanging of warden-killer Barrett in Edmonton, calmly telegraphed the Canadian undersecretary of state in Ottawa to let him know that “the execution of Garry R. Barrett [has] taken place without a hitch at 6.48 this morning.”

  Albert Pierrepoint, arguably the most proficient of British executioners, described hanging in his memoirs as “quick, certain, and humane.” He claimed that he had never bungled an execution and that the longest time he had ever taken to do the job was between twenty and twenty-five seconds. Arthur Ellis, arguably the most prolific and capable of Canadian executioners, was also proud of his achievements and enjoyed trumpeting them to the world. As he told The Globe in 1912: “I have never had a bungle, and consider I am rendering a service to society by despatching those unfortunates in the most humane way possible.” He spoke too soon. After what a newspaper referred to as “one or two ‘accidents’ out west,” a dreadful miscalculation in 1935 would make a mockery of his words.

  Chapter 9

  Arthur Ellis: Canada’s Most Famous Hangman

  A lexander Armstrong English, also known as Arthur Bartholomew Alexander English, but best known as Arthur Ellis, had a violent job. He was also a violent man.

  By the time executioner John Radclive retired in 1910, the Canadian government had already found a “pro” to take his place. According to one source, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier had penned a letter to the Home Office in Britain, asking for recommendations, and the name of ex-army officer Alexander English floated to the top. English moved to Montreal, Quebec, and became the busiest executioner in Canadian history. He used the professional name of Arthur Ellis after a famous English hangman named John Ellis, who he claimed was an uncle.

  Ellis quickly settled into his new life in Canada. One of his first jobs was the hanging of Pasquale Ventricini in Toronto, Ontario, in June 1910. Ventricini had come to Canada from Italy to build a better life for his wife and children. Those dreams came crashing down during a drunken brawl in March 1910, when he stabbed his friend Raffael Fabbio to death. A jury found Ventricini guilty of murder, although they did make a recommendation for mercy. But their argument that “the man was a foreigner and not used to Canadian ways” did not make much of an impression on Judge Riddell, and Ventricini went to the gallows. Arthur Ellis carried out the hanging at Toronto’s notorious Don Jail.

  For the next twenty-five years, Ellis’s duties took him all over Canada, from Halifax to Vancouver. In 1920, he hanged John Wilson, an ex–Royal North-West Mounted Police officer convicted of killing his wife, at the Prince Albert Jail in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. This was an unusual case in that it was the only time in Canadian history that a police officer was hanged for his crime.

  One of Ellis’s most important assignments was the quadruple hanging of members of the eight-man Hochelaga Gang in 1924.

  On April 1 of that year, a Hochelaga Bank payroll car was held up in Montreal, and the driver was murdered. The criminals made off with around $140,000, but they were soon apprehended and brought to trial. The case sparked a huge amount of public interest, as among the accused were gang leader Tony Frank, known as “King of the Underworld,” and Louis Morel, a former detective with the city of Montreal. The gangsters received the death penalty. The night before they were hanged, the police were out in force inside and around the Bordeaux jail, on the alert for any escape attempts. Crowds turned up before dawn and lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the sensational and very rare execution of four men simultaneously.

  Another high-profile hanging that came Ellis’s way was that of Earle Leonard Nelson in 1927. Ellis reportedly told the press that he was “delighted to perform” the execution. Nelson was an American serial killer also known as the Dark Strangler (because of his swarthy skin) or the Gorilla Killer (because of his huge hands and bestial attacks). He began committing sex crimes in 1918, when he was twenty-one years old, but he hit his stride in 1926, murdering and then sexually molesting more than twenty women and girls in the United States and, later, two in Canada. His killing frenzy finally ended in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he met his demise at the end of a rope.

  Although hangman Ellis complained bitterly in 1912 about not receiving any stipend from the government, by 1935, as reported in the Sunday Spartanburg Herald-Journal , he was being paid a yearly salary in Quebec for taking care of all hangings in the province. Throughout the rest of Canada, each job would earn him between $150 and $200 plus expenses. He travelled with his ropes, straps, and a black cap packed into a black bag. When he journeyed to smaller centres where there were no permanent gallows, he would take along his own portable kit, painted a dazzling red.

  Before his death in 1938, Ellis claimed to have carried out more than six hundred hangings in England, the Middle East, and Canada. It’s impossible to verify whether his tally was quite this high, as record-keeping was not entirely reliable in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and the pseudonym of Arthur Ellis was commonly used by other Canadian executioners.

  An old photo of Ellis, dated 1925, shows a man with deeply furrowed cheeks and small, pebble-shaped glasses. His working outfit was a frock coat and striped trousers, and he would often pin a flower to his lapel. He did not hide his identity; in fact, he enjoyed telling people who he was and what he did for a living — especially if they offered him a drink.

  Ellis knew that the relationship between the executioner and the public was a very complicated one. “Who put me where I am?” he once asked an interviewer. “Surely it was yourself and the other citizens of this country!”

  Some newspapers of the day tried to accentuate Ellis’s human side. “Hangman Ellis Keen Soccer Fan When He Isn’t Handling Noose” gushed a 1933 report in the Drummondville Spokesman , painting a rosy picture of a concerned citizen buying uniforms and organizing football clubs for Montreal youth. He was kindly “Uncle Arthur” to a ten-year-old girl, advising her on how to save up to buy a buffalo ranch out west.

  Ellis, too, liked to emphasize his humanity. “I always smile at a hanging,” he told reporters. “Do you realize that my face is the last living thing the murderer sees before he dies? I try to make his last moments as pleasant as possible.”

  But Ellis’s self-destructiveness and violence always bubbled close to the surface. He was armed and dangerous, often carrying a .38 revolver stuck into his belt. L
ike John Radclive before him, he was said to be a heavy drinker. The Montreal Daily Mail reported in January 1914 that hangman Ellis had been convicted of carrying a loaded revolver and of being drunk. He was fined $5 for the first charge and given a suspended sentence for the second.

  Ellis was well known to the police in Montreal, who once arrested him for beating and attempting to strangle his wife, Edith Grimsdale. It is said that he avoided a trial simply because there were three convicted men awaiting execution in Vancouver.

  Whether this particular story is true or not, what is completely without doubt is that Ellis had a hectic schedule. “Canada Noose Adjuster Busy,” explained the Milwaukee Sentinel in January 1926. “Executions throughout the dominion are keeping Hangman Arthur Ellis on the jump. He has seven engagements from Halifax to Vancouver up to Feb. 5, and four sheriffs have asked him to keep open four dates in February.”

  Ellis was proud of his speed and skill on the job. Sometimes he would hand a stopwatch to a newsman at a hanging and ask him to check out his efficiency.

  “But how do you know what the condemned man will weigh?” a lawyer once asked him in a conversation recorded by B.C. reporter Bruce Alistair “Pinkie” McKelvie.

  “I take a look at him in his cell. I can tell to within a fraction of a pound his weight after one glance. You see, the length of the drop depends upon the weight of the subject.”

  And calculating the length of rope correctly was crucial to the success of the hanging — too short a drop and the individual might be strangled; too long, decapitated.

  Of course, mistakes did sometimes happen.

  Take the case of Antonio Sprecarce in 1919, for example. Sprecarce was, by all accounts, a nasty piece of work who had been involved in several shooting incidents and run-ins with the police. After being fired from his job at the Grand Trunk Railway in Montreal, he returned to the railroad yards to demand his job back, as well as some pay he claimed was owed to him. In a subsequent clash with his ex-foreman, Sprecarce pulled out a gun and, as multiple witnesses testified at his trial, pumped several bullets into the man. It was an open-and-shut case; the jury took just five minutes to find him guilty.

  It took Sprecarce a lot longer to die.

  Always a lightweight, he lost around twelve pounds while in prison. This does not seem to have been factored into Ellis’s mathematical calculations when he officiated at Sprecarce’s hanging. The drop was much too short, and Sprecarce’s neck was not broken when the trap was sprung. He was cut down and lay there in full view of onlookers, taking more than an hour to die.

  Quite the reverse was the hanging of Daniel Prockiw of Winnipeg in 1926. Prockiw weighed in at 240 pounds. He was sentenced to hang for the murder of Annie Cardno, his common-law wife. Prockiw was every hangman’s nightmare — a big man with a thin neck. Ellis was worried as he prepared for the hanging, and rightly so. It ended up being horribly bungled. The drop was too long, and Prockiw’s head was literally torn from his body.

  Were these bungled jobs the result of gross incompetence, or were some hangings simply impossible to carry out effectively? Hard to tell, although Ellis never hesitated to make his own viewpoint known. As he wrote in a letter to Sheriff Lawreason of Hamilton, Ontario: “No one has suffered more than I have when I have had to use antiquated conditions and expected to give something that was impossible under the conditions that exist.”

  Never was this more chillingly illustrated than with the 1935 hanging of Tommasina Teolis of Montreal.

  Teolis had come up with a brilliant way to extricate herself from her unhappy marriage. She hired a hit man, Leone Gagliardi, to bump off her husband, Nicholas Sarao, offering Gagliardi a cut of Sarao’s $5,000 life insurance policy. Gagliardi invited so-called “high school gangster” Angelo Donafrio along for the ride. The two men lured Sarao to the Blue Bonnet Racetrack in Montreal, where they beat him to death. Grilled by police, Gagliardi confessed. Teolis and her accomplices were sentenced to death, and all three were led to the gallows at Montreal’s Bordeaux jail on March 29, 1935. Arthur Ellis, master hangman, officiated.

  The day began badly. Ellis had decided to hang the two men together; he had handled double, and even quadruple, hangings (like that of the Hochelaga Gang) with great competence in the past. Not this time. Neither man was killed by the drop; both died slowly of strangulation.

  Then it was Teolis’s turn. As usual, Ellis had gone to the jail the day before the hanging to examine Teolis and calculate the length of rope he would need. The authorities, he claimed, refused to let him see her and instead handed him a slip of paper giving her weight as 145 pounds. As it turned out, that was what she had weighed when she first went to prison. She was now nearly forty pounds heavier. Also, like Prockiw, Teolis had a weak neck.

  In March 1935, hangman Arthur Ellis miscalculated the length of rope required for the execution of husband killer Tommasina Teolis, and she was decapitated. This shocking event led to a huge public outcry and signalled the end of Ellis’s career.

  Leone Gagliardi was one of Tommasina Teolis’s accomplices in the murder of her husband, Nicholas Sarao. Gagliardi confessed when questioned by the police, and he preceded Teolis to the gallows in March 1935.

  What happened next once again highlighted the importance of calculating the length of the drop accurately. The rope used on March 29, 1935, was way, way too long, and Tommasina Teolis’s head was severed from her body.

  You may remember Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s words in the House of Commons in 1917 that there was “something revolting in the idea that a woman should be sentenced to death.” Well, if sentencing and hanging a woman was ungentlemanly and disgusting, beheading a woman was beyond repulsive.

  Angelo Donafrio was the third person implicated in the murder of Nicholas Sarao. He and Gagliardi were hanged together.

  The newspapers pounced on the gruesome story. “Head Torn From Body By Noose” was the headline in Windsor Ontario’s Border Cities Star . “WOMAN KILLER DECAPITATED BY CANADIAN NOOSE,” shrieked the Miami News .

  “There is no earthly reason for such a thing to happen,” said Teolis’s attorney in a protest to the Department of Justice. “It was horrible.”

  The catastrophe put an end to the practice of allowing the public to get tickets to watch hangings. It also put an end to Arthur Ellis’s career. He was never actually fired; instead, he was quietly boycotted. Sheriffs simply stopped sending him work.

  In July 1938, the Montreal Gazette reported that Ellis, aged seventy-three, had been found starving in a Montreal rooming house and was near death in the Ste. Jeanne d’Arc Hospital. He was “penniless and alone after months of vain searching for some means of self-support,” having subsisted since his ouster as hangman on handouts from friends.

  Ellis died the following day of what was described as “a brief illness of undisclosed nature.” Modern researchers say that his death was caused by an alcohol-related disease. Fewer than twenty people, most of them cops or newsmen, attended his funeral. And even though they had been separated for six years, his wife, Edith Grimsdale, was also there.

  “He was a good man, a good man,” she sobbed.

  Newspaper reports published at that time suggest that “abusive,” rather than “good,” might have been a more accurate description of Ellis’s husbandly behaviour.

  Grimsdale survived her spouse by twenty-two years. Loyal to the end, she insisted on being buried alongside him in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.

  Today, Arthur Ellis is remembered in two ways — one public and one very private.

  Every year, the Crime Writers of Canada celebrates the best of this country’s crime and mystery writing. At a splendid gala, winners are presented with an Arthur Ellis Award, a wooden figure nicknamed “Arthur” with a noose around its neck that “dances” when you pull a string.

  You will find the other memorial to Arthur Ellis in Section N of the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal. On a small mound with a backdrop of trees stands a simple headstone for Alexander
A. English and Edith Grimsdale. And beneath their names, two words: AT REST.

  Chapter 10

  Reasonable Doubt

  T he sudden death in October 1883 of a young pregnant woman in Artemesia Township (near Owen Sound, Ontario) sent a shiver of shock and horror through the small farming community. Rosanna Leppard, aged twenty-five, had been married for just six weeks to fifty-five-year -old labourer Cook Teets when she became violently ill during the night. Within hours, she was dead. The doctor who performed the post-mortem was suspicious. So were the coroner and the twelve jurymen at the inquest that followed her death. Her symptoms — stomach pains and vomiting — strongly pointed to death by poisoning. The contents of her stomach were sent away to Toronto for analysis. The report that came back confirmed everyone’s suspicions: Rosanna Leppard had died of strychnine poisoning. There was no evidence to show that she had committed suicide. “No! ” thundered the Markdale Standard on November 22, 1883, “every fact seems to point to one of the most heartless, cold-blooded murders, having been committed in our neighbourhood, that has ever stained the annals of crime in our country.”

  But who committed it?

  When the local policeman, Constable Fields, searched Teets’s house, he found a half-filled bottle labelled STRYCHNINE — POISON . Fields also found a $4,500 insurance policy on Rosanna’s life, payable to Teets in the event of her death.

  “Follow the money!” is a common refrain in politics and police procedurals. In this case, the money trail led directly to Teets, the beneficiary of his wife’s life insurance policy. He was arrested for murder, and he spent the next year locked up and awaiting trial in the Owen Sound Gaol.

  Onlookers were shocked at the change in Teets’s appearance when the case went to trial in November 1884. According to one news report, he had been clean-shaven and controlled at the coroner’s inquest after his wife’s death, with tightly compressed lips and an almost rigid expression on his face. Now, he was dishevelled, with a long flowing grey beard and a heavy moustache. Sweating profusely and breathing with difficulty, he seemed restless, uneasy, and in great pain.