Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  Who killed Lynne Harper? The documentary came up with one highly possible answer to Isabel LeBourdais’s anguished question. It described a long-lost psychiatric file — that of Sergeant Alexander Kalichuk, an airman stationed in Clinton in the late 1950s with a “weakness for alcohol and little girls.” In spite of a history of sexual offences, and in spite of police warnings to the public, Kalichuk was never considered a suspect. He died of alcoholism in 1975.

  In 2001, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada) launched an application for ministerial review of Steven’s conviction under what was then Section 690 of the Criminal Code. The wheels were turning faster now, with public opinion firmly on Steven’s side.

  In June 2006, the Ontario Court of Appeal conducted a three-week hearing where fresh evidence was heard.

  If you had been sitting in the jury box at Steven’s trial back in 1959, would you have gone with district pathologist John Penistan’s expert opinion on Lynne’s time of death, or that of internal medicine specialist Berkely Brown? If you said John Penistan — bad choice. Because as early as 1966, even Dr. Penistan had rejected Dr. Penistan’s expert opinion in what he called an “agonizing reappraisal” of his autopsy findings. As it emerged at the hearing in 2006, the good doctor had tried out at least two other time-of-death scenarios before settling on the thirty-minute window: the first version had Lynne’s death occurring some time after midnight on June 10; the second put the time of death as much later on the morning of June 10. Both these versions would have exonerated Steven, who had an alibi for those times. Neither was made available to the defence or jurors during Steven’s trial.

  Given Penistan’s flip-flopping about the time of Lynne’s death, the Court of Appeal concluded that the doctor’s evidence was “reasonably open to the allegation that his opinion shifted to coincide with the Crown’s case.”

  The court also declared that Steven’s conviction had been a miscarriage of justice that “must be quashed.” And what did that mean, you may ask? It meant that egregious errors of procedure or law had occurred, serious enough for his conviction to be overturned.

  Steven had not proved “his factual innocence” — vital DNA evidence that might have identified the killer was lost, presumed destroyed — but in August 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal finally acquitted him of the murder, meaning that his guilt could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

  The Ontario government, through their spokesman Attorney General Michael Bryant, was quick to issue an apology (always much easier to do when an individual has not already been hanged): “The court has found in this case, in light of fresh evidence, that a miscarriage of justice has occurred. And for that miscarriage of justice, on behalf of the government, I am truly sorry.”

  The last words, though, belong to Steven Truscott. He maintained his innocence from the very beginning, and his story never changed, even though it took forty-eight years for him to clear his name. As reported in the Toronto Star in August 2007, he said, “They finally got it right after all these years. I’m so used to fighting. Now we don’t have to fight anymore.”

  Steven Truscott received a settlement of $6.5 million from the Ontario government for his pains. His personal battle was over, and he once again retired to the shadows. But he would step back into the fray, he has said, if any attempt were ever again made to reinstate capital punishment in Canada.

  Chapter 13

  The Last Women to Hang

  O n the morning of Friday, September 9, 1949, Canadian Pacific (CP) Airlines Flight 108, en route from Montreal to Baie-Comeau on Quebec’s north coast, made a brief stopover in Quebec City to take on passengers and additional cargo. The baggage was loaded into the freight compartment at the forward left side of the Douglas DC-3. One of the items was a cardboard box labelled FRAGILE, addressed to Alfred Plouffe of Baie-Comeau, which had been delivered as expedited mail just prior to takeoff. The plane was scheduled to resume its flight at 10:20 a.m., but it left five minutes late.

  At 10:45 a.m., the plane dropped out of the sky and crashed into a rocky bluff near Sault-au-Cochon , forty miles northeast of Quebec City, before plummeting into dense bush below. Eyewitnesses on the ground agreed that the aircraft had been flying normally when white smoke started billowing from the left side. The plane was still in the air when they heard a deafening blast, which sounded like dynamite exploding. They saw no accompanying fire or flame.

  There were nineteen passengers on board — ten men, six women, and three children. All of them were killed, as was the crew of four. Twenty-three people in all perished that morning. Oscar Tremblay, a Canadian National Railways employee working near the crash site, told the Schenectady Gazette that “they all died outright. There were arms and legs and even heads torn from bodies.… The front of the plane seemed to be in one piece and it was jammed with broken and twisted bodies as if they had been thrown forward in the crash.”

  News of the disaster spread like wildfire. Three of the doomed passengers were top New York–based executives of the Kennecott Copper Corporation. With the Cold War heating up, could this be an anti-American attack by Soviet-bloc terrorists?

  Forensic investigations confirmed that the crash was no accident. Engineers concluded that the plane disintegrated in mid-air on account of an explosion caused by what they called “an exterior agent” placed in the left front luggage compartment. Traces of explosives were found among the debris. It turned out that the plane had been brought down by a time bomb stuffed with dynamite and triggered by an electric fuse, a battery, and a clock mechanism.

  Fears of a Communist plot were soon dispelled. What emerged instead was a sordid tale of adultery and murder. As Quebec appeal court judge Bernard Bissonnette put it: “It clearly appear[ed] that the principal characters of this pathetic tragedy constituted a regular sink of moral depravity.”

  The first of these principal characters was identified within ten days of the blast: Marguerite Ruest Pitre, a thirty-nine-year -old Quebec City waitress. The RCMP described her as the woman in black who had delivered the express package to l’Ancienne-Lorette Airport just before the plane took off from Quebec City. When questioned by the police, Pitre explained that she had dropped off what she thought was a statue at the request of her good friend Joseph Albert Guay. Guay immediately became the main focus of police investigations. The third person implicated in the case was Pitre’s brother, clockmaker Généreux Ruest.

  Two weeks after the blast, Guay was arrested and charged with murder. Police claimed that he had masterminded the bombing with the express purpose of killing his wife, who had been a passenger on the downed aircraft.

  Thirty-year-old Guay was described by newspapers of the day as “a slim, wavy-haired Quebec jeweller,” “boyish looking,” and “dapper.” A year earlier, he had fallen firmly and acrimoniously out of love with his wife and the mother of his child, Rita Morel, and madly in love with a seventeen-year-old waitress, Marie-Ange Robitaille. Guay was a close friend of Pitre’s and the employer of her brother Généreux Ruest. Guay could always count on Pitre’s enthusiastic support. After Robitaille’s parents kicked her out, disgusted by her illicit relationship with a married man, Pitre took her in. When Robitaille broke off her liaison with Guay, it was Pitre who persuaded her to kiss and make up. What might have contributed to Pitre’s great intimacy with Guay was that the jeweller had given financial assistance to her and her husband, Arthur Pitre, with loans of up to $1,500. In August 1949, the couple still owed him about $600 on two promissory notes, which Guay had finally handed over to his bank for collection.

  Guay himself was deeply in debt. With his business failing and his love life falling apart, he opted for the easy way out. He would simply purchase a life insurance policy on his wife … and then get rid of her. What better way to collect a tidy sum of money, save his business from bankruptcy, and marry his mistress?

  In August 1949, according to Robitaille, Pitre had told her that Guay intended to poison his wi
fe. But he soon came up with a darker plan. He asked Pitre to purchase ten pounds of dynamite, which she dutifully obtained from a hardware store in Quebec City. That evening she handed Guay the twenty sticks of explosives along with dynamite caps and fuses. Guay’s initial idea was to pay a taxi-driver friend, Roland Beaulieu, to take Morel for a ride, during which Beaulieu would jump from the car. The dynamite secreted in the trunk would explode, and Morel would be blown to smithereens. Beaulieu refused point-blank.

  Guay’s final scheme was conceived in late August and executed in September 1949. He enlisted the help of Ruest, generally described in the press as “a crippled watch-maker,” to manufacture a dynamite-detonating device. According to Ruest, Guay had told him that the purpose of the bomb was to clear land he owned at Sept-Îles, Quebec. Guay persuaded his wife to fly to Sept-Îles on a buying trip on September 9 and told Pitre to air-freight the package containing the time bomb on the same plane.

  From then on, it would be smooth sailing. The bomb was set to go off when the DC-3 would be flying over the St. Lawrence River, and it would plunge into the water and, presumably, disappear with little prospect of a proper investigation. But the best-laid plans often go astray, let alone the poorly conceived ones. The plane left a few minutes late, as planes often do, and the bomb detonated over land — which greatly simplified the search for answers.

  For Pitre, the fallout from the bombing was swift. She tried (unsuccessfully) to commit suicide, claiming that Guay had urged her to do so about ten days after the crash. He even supplied her with “little white pills” to speed things along. At that time, she said, he shocked her with the information that the package she delivered to the airport had contained a bomb, and she would be held responsible for the murders.

  Guay’s case went to trial in February 1950. Crown prosecutor Noel Dorion called Lucille Levesque to the witness box. She was the CP Air employee who had sold Guay a ticket for the doomed flight. Guay, the Montreal Gazette reported, paid $40.40 for his wife’s return ticket to Sept-Îles. As for his wife’s life, fifty cents was what he obviously considered it was worth — that’s what he paid for the $10,000 life insurance policy he bought at the same time. On cross-examination, Levesque stated that she had not tried to sell Guay insurance; he had specifically asked for it. A few hours after the crash, Guay showed up at her counter with his little daughter in tow. He burst into tears and had to be consoled by a priest when told that the plane had been downed with no survivors.

  Dorion called Guay “a hypocrite with a diabolical turn of mind.” On March 14, 1950, Judge Albert Sévigny openly wept as he gave his charge to the twelve-man French-speaking jury. “The law of God and of her country gave Mrs. Albert Guay the right to live. Nothing escapes the law of God. You have to fulfill the law of your country.”

  The jury took just seventeen minutes to carry out this duty. They returned a verdict of guilty.

  Ruest and Pitre both swore their innocence, but Guay had no intention of going down alone. In a damning statement after his conviction, he confessed to the crime and fingered the sister-and-brother pair as his accomplices.

  Guay was hanged at Montreal’s Bordeaux jail on January 12, 1951, for the murder of twenty-three people. Reportedly, his last words were “Bien, au moins je meurs célèbre!” (“Well, at least I die famous!”).

  Ruest was arrested on June 6, 1950, and tried in November of that year.

  In his earlier testimony as a Crown witness at Guay’s trial, Ruest freely admitted that he had manufactured the detonator for the bomb, but he insisted that the work had been done on Guay’s instructions. He also claimed that he had no knowledge of the real purpose of the device. He was clearly terrified of his boss. As reported in the Montreal Gazette , before being arrested, Guay had said to him: “You’d better watch out. If you say anything to the police about the work you did for me you’ll have me to deal with.”

  Much of the evidence against Ruest was circumstantial, and many have questioned whether he actually was a party to the plot. But he, too, was sentenced to death by hanging. Suffering from crippling osseous tuberculosis, he was transported to the gallows in a wheelchair. He died, aged fifty-four, on July 25, 1952.

  Marguerite Pitre — or Madame le Corbeau (Mrs. Crow), as the press called her because she always wore black — was arrested on June 14, 1950, and her trial began on March 6, 1951. The Crown claimed that her motive for murder was purely financial: Guay had promised to tear up the $600 promissory notes if she ferried the time bomb to the airport.

  As pointed out by Greenwood and Boissery, a mountain of circumstantial evidence tipped the scales against Pitre. She had very close and personal ties to Guay, acting as go-between in his amorous activities. Her brother had worked for the jeweller, and the three of them had been spotted talking behind closed doors just before the bombing. She had known in August that Guay wanted to dispose of his wife. And the most damning question of all: exactly when did she learn that the package contained a bomb? She contended it was ten days after the blast, but her own husband testified that she had told him at the time of delivery that the parcel was dangerous.

  The French-speaking, twelve-man jury deliberated for twenty-nine minutes. Guilty. Trial judge Noel Belleau was harsh: “It is not necessary for me to add that with such an odious crime, of which the accused has been found guilty, I find it impossible to recommend clemency.”

  A telegram dated January 8, 1953, conveying the refusal of the Governor-General-in-Council to commute the sentence of Marguerite Pitre. She was hanged the following day, making her the last woman ever executed in Canada.

  By the time Pitre’s turn came to meet the hangman, both Guay and Ruest had been hanged, and her husband, Arthur, had died after a short illness.

  On January 9, 1953, beneath the headline “Buxom Widow Pitre Goes To Gallows For Part In Time-Bombing Of Plane,” the Ottawa Citizen described the last few hours of Marguerite Ruest Pitre’s life on earth. On the afternoon of January 8, Pitre was accompanied from Quebec City to the Fullum Street Women’s Prison in Montreal by two plainclothes police officers and a nun. The “stocky” Madame le Corbeau was a thinner and much less confident woman than the one who had “punctuated with wisecracks” the murder trials of Guay, her friend-creditor, and Ruest, her brother. She was an angrier one, too. When photographed through the car window, she yelled at policemen that she had been promised no pictures. She was hanged at Bordeaux jail, dropping through the trap at 12:35 a.m., and was pronounced dead at 12:50 a.m.

  The details of this case — the air disaster, the loss of twenty-three lives, the sordid actions of those convicted for the murders — made it notable. It was additionally newsworthy because women were so rarely hanged in Canada. The Ottawa Citizen noted that Pitre was the first woman to be executed in Quebec since February 1940, when Marie-Louise Cloutier was hanged for murdering her husband, and the first in Canada since Elizabeth Popovitch followed her husband to the scaffold at Welland, Ontario, in December 1946 for the murder of a Thorold shopkeeper.

  Of the three, Cloutier was definitely the odd woman out — the only one tried, convicted, and hanged for killing her spouse — although in the grand scheme of things, of the eleven women executed in the period from 1867 to 1976, seven were husband killers. Cloutier was the last of them.

  In a place and time — Quebec in the mid-1900s — where the gold standard for womanly behaviour was still the role of wife and mother, Cloutier stood out. She had no children, and after twenty years of marriage to Vilmont Brochu in St-Méthode, Quebec, she was looking for something to spice up life on the farm. In 1936, as noted by Dale Brawn in Practically Perfect , she started a relationship with the hired help, Achille Grondin, but conducted another affair on the side with neighbouring farmer Adolphe Gilbert. Both men were besotted, and quite happy to help when she professed the desire to rid herself of her spouse. The two of them hoped to accomplish this by putting a curse on Brochu. Cloutier, very practical, believed that poison would do the job more effectively, a
nd in late 1936, she set to work dosing her husband with arsenic. The months dragged on, but Brochu, despite several bouts of acute illness, stubbornly refused to die. The plotters upped the ante: a two-pronged attack — hex and poison — did the trick. Brochu became violently sick and died in August 1937.

  By the following day, Cloutier had made a request to have her husband’s life insurance policy paid out to her; two days later, Grondin had moved in; and by October, they were married — too speedy by far. Neighbours started whispering, and Brochu’s grieving sister took her suspicions to the police. Brochu’s body was exhumed, and traces of arsenic indicated that he had not died of indigestion, as stated on his death certifi­cate. The newlyweds were taken into custody during their honeymoon.

  Cloutier, dressed in deep mourning black, was tried in September 1938 at St-Joseph-de -Beauce, Quebec.

  As criminologist Sylvie Frigon points out, childlessness was seen as central to Cloutier’s crime. In his address to the jury, trial judge Noel Belleau (the same judge who would later preside over Pitre’s trial) asked: “What could a woman with no children and no tenure in a home do?… When there are no children, a woman alone in a house may be victim to many errors.”

  After a trial lasting seventeen days, the jury took one hour and fifteen minutes to come to the conclusion that Cloutier’s errors had been of the murderous kind, and they returned a verdict of guilty.

  Grondin, too, was sentenced to death, and the couple’s appeals to the Quebec Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada all failed. After nearly a year and a half on death row, both were hanged. Although by law the executions should have taken place in the village of St-Joseph-de -Beauce, the locals were horrified at the very thought. They petitioned the Quebec government to move the location to the Bordeaux jail in Montreal. This was granted, and first Grondin then Cloutier walked to the scaffold in the early morning of February 23, 1940.