by Lorna Poplak
Like Cloutier and Pitre, thirty-eight-year -old Elizabeth Popovitch was wearing black when she climbed the thirteen steps to the gallows at the Welland County Gaol at 1:00 a.m. on December 5, 1946. Her husband, George, a forty-five-year -old paper maker, had preceded her by forty-five minutes. Both were accompanied on their last journey by the Reverend Harvey G. Forster, the man who had married them one year earlier.
The couple had been tried and convicted of murdering Elizabeth’s employer Louis Nato, the owner of a small store in Thorold. In a dying statement at the Maplehurst hospital, reported in the Niagara Falls Gazette in August 1946, Nato said that he had been driving the Popovitches in his car when they attacked him. “His money was removed and he was stripped of his trousers. One of his assailants said there was only $280 and there should be more,” the hospital’s superintendent testified in court. “They then … began kicking and pounding him. Nato begged for mercy, saying, ‘You’ve got my money, what more do you want?’” Police said that Nato had given Elizabeth $1,000 after her first husband died to pay off her bills and buy clothes for her three children.
Standing among the hundred-strong crowd in the street outside the jail yard, where blazing floodlights had turned night to day for the hanging, were two of Elizabeth’s daughters. One of them, just thirteen years old, had visited her in her cell the previous day. The third daughter, reported Gwyn Thomas of the Toronto Daily Star , had been “unable to stand the strain” and had fled to the United States a few days earlier. Also present was Elizabeth’s distraught brother, who had come from Hamilton hoping to say a last farewell. The bus was delayed, and he missed the 10:00 p.m. cut-off time.
“I asked to see the sheriff,” said the man, who wished to remain anonymous to shield his family and job in Hamilton, “and they told me he wouldn’t see anybody. I tried everything to see Liz before they hanged her but nobody would see me. Mr. Forster tried to get me in but he had no success. There were ten in our family, but there is one less now.”
“God bless him,” was the message Popovitch relayed via Forster to her brother, and he broke down in tears.
On January 19, 1649, a young girl of fifteen or sixteen was found guilty of theft and hanged in the town of Quebec. This was purported to be the first execution in Canada. Three hundred years later, also in Quebec, the Sault-au-Cochon air disaster would mark the end of the long-standing Canadian tradition of hanging women.
What irony that the first attack against civil aviation in North America was no terrorist incursion, as originally feared, but a squalid domestic murder. In the mid-1900s, getting a divorce in straitlaced Catholic Quebec was still not a straightforward matter. Would the outcome have been different if Albert Guay had simply been able to separate from his wife? Remembering appeal court judge Bissonnette’s view that most of the individuals involved in the tragedy were “a regular sink of moral depravity,” and his further comments that they lacked “personal decency and the most elementary rules of moral conduct,” it would probably not have made the slightest difference to Guay’s decision to bring down a plane to kill Rita Morel, without concern for the other innocent victims who would surely perish with her.
And what of Ruest and Pitre, who were originally viewed as dupes but subsequently tried and convicted as Guay’s accomplices? The evidence against Ruest was mostly circumstantial, and he was very possibly not guilty. Pitre’s situation was more complicated. Some commentators have suggested that she may have been innocent, a position held by two of her judges of appeal. Pitre loudly protested her innocence to the end, but her tight and cozy relationship with Guay sank her.
Marguerite Pitre stepped onto the scaffold in the early morning of January 9, 1953. Afterwards, prison authorities said that she showed no fear and that “everything was normal.” This brought the tally of women hanged in Quebec since Confederation to five. And she was the eleventh, and last, woman ever executed in Canada.
It would take another nine years to bring to an end the hanging of men.
Chapter 14
The Last Drop
I magine sitting down to question someone wearing a terrifying black mask with slits cut out for eyeholes! That’s what happened to CBC reporter Paul Soles in a television interview with Canada’s last hangman just before capital punishment was abolished in 1976.
Looking like a deer caught in the headlights, Soles asked John Ellis if he wore the mask for executions.
“No,” replied Ellis. “All I wear is a black suit, black bow tie, white shirt, and black shoes. I’m not there to frighten him. I’m there to execute him.”
“If the vote goes for abolition,” asked Soles, “and there’s no longer a need of a hangman, how do you think you personally will feel?”
“Well, I’ll feel that I’ve served the country in the best way that I know how.… I have met the requirements that the country required. I’ve done my job and I’m retired.”
What became of Ellis when the vote did go for abolition in 1976, putting an abrupt end to his professional career? According to one account, the retiree, in his fifties at the time, spent the winter months in Florida like thousands of other Canadian snowbirds; another report in 1984 stated that he was living in the Bahamas.
It is quite surprising that we know so little about Canada’s last hangman. John Ellis was not his real name, but one he adopted, like several other executioners before him, in honour of John Ellis, a well-known British executioner in the early 1900s. Was Ellis a farmer from Ontario, as some have suggested? Or a travelling salesman who went to church regularly? Or was he actually the owner of a trailer park in Ontario, somewhere between Belleville and Kingston?
We don’t know what Ellis looked like, either. However, Mark Bonokoski, a Toronto Sun reporter who met him face to face in 1975, did shed a little light on the enigmatic Mr. Ellis: “I didn’t know exactly what to expect from a hangman, but I certainly wasn’t expecting a short (maybe 5-foot-8 ) stocky and somewhat overweight little man with a greying moustache who looked more like a benign bookkeeper.”
We do know that John Ellis hanged at least fifteen men. His last job was a double hanging at Toronto’s Don Jail in December 1962. From then on, he performed no further official duties.
It looks as if Ellis had quite a stash of pocket money to spend during his first few years of retirement, though. Tucked into the 1985 annual report of Ontario’s provincial auditor (along with a critique of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario for cost overruns and the Ontario Provincial Police for massively overstocking on items such as heavy winter breeches) was the revelation that the Ontario government still had the hangman on its payroll, even though his last working day had been more than twenty years previous. According to a report in the Toronto Star in November 1985, Ontario paid a “provincial executioner” $200 a month for eight years after the abolition of capital punishment in 1976, which, according to provincial auditor Douglas Archer, added up to the tidy sum of $20,000.
Brian Pitkin, appointed York County sheriff in 1984, alerted the auditor to the monthly cheques, and the payments were stopped. Pitkin felt it was unlikely that the services of a hangman would ever again be required, even if there were a return to capital punishment in the future. But he had nothing further to add to our meagre cache of information about John Ellis. When interviewed by Bonokoski in 1987, he said: “As a matter of fact, I cannot even remember [Ellis’s] real name any more. All I remember is sending him his last retainer cheque, somewhere around October or November in 1984.” His final contact was a call to Ellis some time later to see if he was interested in a hanging job in Delaware. Ellis was not.
One thing we know for certain: John Ellis was a firm believer in capital punishment. As he told the CBC’s Paul Soles in 1976, “I feel that people are … that has so much to say about capital punishment has never seen an execution. They don’t realize just how humane it is.” Criminals, he added, preferred it to life imprisonment.
What unfolded in 1962 after the murder trials of the last two priso
ners facing execution in Canada stands in stark contrast to Ellis’s claim that criminals preferred hanging. Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin did not want to die, and appeals to save them began immediately after the death sentence was imposed on them on May 10 and June 13 respectively. There were letter-writing campaigns, television programs, and newspaper articles and editorials. The two men’s spiritual advisor at the Don Jail, Salvation Army chaplain Cyril Everitt, sent impassioned pleas to Canada’s prime minister and the minister of justice on their behalf, and a team of lawyers championed their cause right up to the Supreme Court of Canada.
All the appeals failed. And so the paths of Ronald Turpin, Arthur Lucas, and John Ellis collided just after midnight on December 11, 1962. While a group of protesters waved banners in the bitter cold outside the Don Jail (CHRISTMAS IN A GRAVE, HANGING IS ALSO MURDER ), Turpin and Lucas stood back to back on the gallows platform with black hoods over their heads. The hangman sprang the trap and down they went together, plummeting into history as the last two men hanged in Canada.
As shown by Robert Hoshowsky in The Last to Die , Turpin and Lucas came from radically different backgrounds.
Ronald Turpin was born and raised, if you could call it that, in Toronto. Psychiatric assessments at the time of his trial revealed him to be an angry and damaged individual, his childhood poisoned with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. His mother struggled with her own demons and often found solace in alcohol. When Turpin was eleven, his mother turned him over to the Children’s Aid Society. He never forgave her for taking that step, which he regarded as her ultimate act of cruelty. He bounced from foster home to foster home, and once he hit his teens, from reformatory to reformatory. Before he entered adulthood, his litany of convictions already included shoplifting, burglary, car theft, forgery, and escaping from custody. Along with his criminal record, he carried a fear of police bordering on paranoid. He told everyone who would listen that the cops were out to get him.
So when he broke into the Red Rooster Restaurant in Scarborough to steal $632.84 in bills and coins in the frigid early morning hours of February 12, 1962, Turpin, twenty-nine years old, was already very well known to Toronto police. As he drove away after the robbery in his rusty old Pontiac truck with bald tires and a battered right front headlight taped into position, he met his nemesis — a Toronto police officer in his cruiser. Constable Frederick John Nash, a thirty-one-year -old married man with four kids, had just come on duty, and he pulled the truck over. Nash hauled Turpin out of the vehicle and grabbed the keys. Unfortunately, along with his loot, Turpin had a loaded Beretta semi-automatic pistol stashed under his seat — and Nash found the gun.
There were no witnesses to what happened next. By the time passersby and other officers came on the scene, Nash lay dying on the roadway, his body peppered with bullets; Turpin was wounded in his arms and face.
“He shot me first” was one of the last things Nash said. Turpin, however, insisted that Nash attacked him first, slamming him against the police car, and was pistol-whipping him when the gun went off in Turpin’s face.
The bottom line was that Turpin had killed a policeman. And without remorse, it seemed. “Everybody’s gotta go sometime,” he said with a shrug, as reported later by homicide detective Jim Crawford. Turpin was charged with murder.
The stakes were high. By 1961, the law had been changed to differentiate between capital murder, which carried the death sentence, and non-capital murder, which would result in a life sentence. Killing a cop was a capital offence.
Arthur Lucas, who died on the scaffold with Turpin, was an African-American gangster born in Cordele, Georgia, in 1907. According to some reports, Lucas arrived in Toronto in November 1961 with murder on his mind. His mission, they said, was to execute Therland Crater, a police informant from Detroit who was scheduled to give evidence in an upcoming drug trial, and his girlfriend, Carolyn Ann Newman, who worked as a prostitute.
November 17, 1961. The grim sequence of events began at 6:30 a.m. on that chilly fall morning with a terrified call to a Bell telephone operator. As the call progressed, the horror-struck operator, Elizabeth Williams, heard “a series of really loud screams and then a few moments later there was like a fumbling sound, like as if somebody was perhaps trying to get the receiver, and a kind of like baby cries.” Realizing that she was plugged in to the gruesome sounds of a woman being murdered, she put the call through to the police emergency operator. When the police arrived at the rooming house in the quiet Annex suburb where this scene had played out, they found the two victims. Their throats had been slashed with gangland efficiency. Crater had also been shot four times, perhaps to make sure that he was truly dead.
“Double Murder Victims Executed By Hired Killers,” howled the Toronto newspapers. The hunt was on to purge Toronto of this spate of American gangsters infecting the city with theft, drugs, and prostitution.
Lucas soon became a person of police interest. He lived in Detroit, where he had a history of drug dealings with Crater. He was in Toronto at the time of the murders and had visited Crater and Newman earlier that very morning. There were bloodstains in his car. He owned a .38 Iver Johnson revolver, the type used to shoot Crater. The gun was subsequently found by a safety patrol officer on the Burlington Skyway bridge, located on one of the main routes between Toronto and Detroit. He owned the heavy gold ring that was found on the bloodstained bed inches away from Newman’s dead body. Lucas was arrested in Detroit twenty-one hours after the slayings and extradited to Canada, where he was tried for the murder of Crater.
His mug shot shows a heavy-set, sullen man with close-cropped black hair and large, bulgy, expressionless eyes. A slew of psychiatric reports described him as anti-social, vicious, and, with an IQ of 63, having the intellect of a “moron.” What he shared with Turpin was a history of childhood abandonment and abuse and an extensive criminal record. His crimes — forgery, armed robbery, drug trafficking, and pimping — were much more serious than Turpin’s, and much more violent.
The trial of Regina v. Lucas began in Toronto on April 30, 1962. Before long, as noted by Hoshowsky, the Crown had built up a strong but largely circumstantial case, so circumstantial that Ross MacKay, the lawyer defending Lucas, complained bitterly to the judge.
Arthur Lucas at the time of his arrest in 1961. Doubt persists to this day as to whether Lucas was capable of planning and executing a double murder with the precision of a professional hit man.
“The difficulty is, Mr. MacKay, that you do not regard circumstantial evidence as a matter of each piece being consistent with innocence,” replied the judge. “The question for the jury to decide is on the collective circumstances, are they consistent with innocence.” Does this sound familiar? Justice James Chalmers McRuer was the same judge who had stressed the admissibility of circumstantial evidence in the Sullivan manslaughter case some eleven years previous.
MacKay was everyone’s dream lawyer: young (twenty-nine years old), charismatic, drop-dead gorgeous, and fast gaining a reputation as a top-notch criminal lawyer. However, in spite of his charm and multiple talents, he did not find a sympathetic ear with McRuer.
The veteran judge was then in his seventies. He was regarded as a great legal reformer at the time (and still is). In addition, he had presided at multiple murder trials, sending many convicted murderers to the gallows, including Boyd Gang members Steve Suchan and Lennie Jackson in 1952. For this, he had earned the nickname “Hanging Jim.” His other nickname was “Vinegar Jim,” and MacKay, to his dismay, saw much of this side of McRuer’s character during the trial. For example, when MacKay objected to having the shocking, bloody pictures of Carolyn Newman taken at the crime scene and at the morgue admitted as evidence, the judge overruled him.
As shown during the appeal process and in a series of investigative reports in the years that followed, the case against Lucas was seriously flawed. The court relied on damning testimony from Lucas’s friend, drug addict and drug dealer Morris “Red” Thomas, who claim
ed that Lucas had been run out of Toronto by morality officers. Thomas also identified both the gold ring found at the crime scene and the gun found on the Burlington Skyway as belonging to Lucas. However, the gun was not positively identified by ballistics experts as the weapon that fired the bullets into Crater’s body. Other troubling questions persist. Why was no real effort made to locate Willie White, who shared Lucas’s hotel room in Toronto and who might have provided him with an alibi? How could such a slow-witted, slow-moving individual as Lucas have planned and executed a double murder with the precision of a professional hit man? Lucas’s fingerprints were all over his car; why were none of his prints found at the crime scene?
In his summing up for the defence at the trial, Ross MacKay tried his best to raise some doubts of his own to prove that Lucas didn’t “fit the bill.” Given the amount of blood that spurted out at the murder scene, why weren’t Lucas’s clothes drenched with blood if he had done the killing? If he were a professional killer, why would he register at a hotel using his own name? And would a hit man pay social visits to his victims before killing them, as Lucas openly claimed to have done? Who could believe the testimony of the drug addict and liar who claimed to be Lucas’s friend? And who could prove that the gun found on the Skyway belonged to Lucas?
It was a hopeless task. On May 10, 1962, the all-white, all-male jury came back after five hours with a verdict of guilty.
Then, and right to the end, Lucas continued to proclaim his innocence.
MacKay found himself in the hot seat again three weeks later, when he returned to court at Toronto’s City Hall to defend Ronald Turpin. Again, with few resources and little money, the odds were stacked against him and his client. Judge George Gale allowed the jury to probe Turpin’s previous record to establish if he was the kind of person likely to shoot a police officer. MacKay, however, was not permitted to question the good name of Frederick Nash, the police officer who was shot.