by Lorna Poplak
MacKay had a fatal flaw: an excessive weakness for alcohol. By that time, he was drinking heavily. Lucas had been aware of this during his trial and was harshly critical. “The lawyer … drank,” he complained later. “Well, you could smell it.”
During Turpin’s exceedingly stressful trial, MacKay’s alcohol abuse became more and more noticeable. He would show up late for court, sometimes clearly suffering from the after-effects of a binge. And he was scattered, not focused enough on what might have been Turpin’s strongest defence: that he had acted in self-defence.
Again, the jury took just a few short hours to deliver their verdict on June 13, 1962: guilty, with no recommendation for mercy.
Lucas and Turpin spent their final days on death row in the Don Jail talking, reading the Bible, and singing hymns with their spiritual advisor, Cyril Everitt. On the day before they were hanged, they ate their last meal at 6:00 p.m. (steak, potatoes, vegetables, and pie), then received a visit from Lucas’s appeal lawyer, Walter Williston. Williston confirmed the grim news — all their appeals had failed. They would be dead before morning.
As reported by Hoshowsky, Williston added, “If it’s any consolation to you, you may be the last men to hang in Canada.”
“Some consolation,” said Turpin.
At midnight, Turpin and Lucas met John Ellis. The hangman would receive $1,000 from the York County sheriff’s office for the next few minutes’ work.
At 12:01 a.m. on December 11, 1962, with Everitt walking alongside, the two men were led to the execution chamber and hanged together, back to back.
Notification dated December 10, 1962, that the Governor-General-in-Council would not interfere with the death sentences passed on Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin. The two men were hanged back to back at Toronto’s Don Jail the following morning, making them the last to be hanged in Canada.
Final hangings; final gruesome bungle.
Turpin died quickly. But, in an interview with the Salvation Army’s internal newsletter, Everitt said, “Lucas’s head was torn right off. It was hanging just by the sinews of the neck. There was blood all over the floor.”
Had Ellis miscalculated Lucas’s weight, as Everitt believed? Perhaps he was drunk, as others suggested. Homicide detective Jim Crawford attended the double hanging and spoke afterward with Ellis. The hangman, said Crawford, was completely sober. Ellis himself had a different theory: the near decapitation was caused by the fact that Lucas had syphilis, which had weakened the bones and blood vessels of his neck.
The ultimate irony: one of the last two men hanged in Canada was every hangman’s nightmare — a heavy man with a weak neck.
Chapter 15
Under Lock and Key
W hen Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin dropped through the trap door in December 1962, a ninety-year-old Toronto tradition came to an abrupt end — hangings at the Don Jail. Starting in 1872, thirty-four men in total were executed there.
Executions were initially carried out in the northeast exercise yard, but in 1905, the gallows were moved indoors to a disused latrine in the east wing. Then, in September 2007, during excavations for the new Bridgepoint Health complex being built beside the old jail, a grisly discovery was made: the remains of fifteen executed men in the exercise yard. Newspapers had long dubbed this area “Murderers’ Row” or “Murderers’ Graveyard.” Now, a professional site investigation proved them correct.
To help identify the bodies, old newspaper reports and other archival sources were used to build up a historical profile of the men executed at the Don, with details like their age, or the clothes they were wearing when they were executed, or the location of their burial in the yard. These profiles were then painstakingly compared to archaeological data (shell buttons, a copper cross, the remains of workboots with felt lining) and biological data (missing teeth, metal tooth fillings, prominent nasal bones) found in the field.
One of the fifteen bodies unearthed in the exercise yard by archaeologist Ron Williamson and his team was that of twenty-year-old John Traviss of Newmarket, Ontario. In a fit of jealous rage, Traviss had shot a rival for the love of a farmer’s daughter. He was the very first person to be executed at the Don in 1872 and the first to be buried in the yard.
Also excavated was the grave of George Bennett, alias Dickson, his skeleton still clad in well-preserved remnants of the black suit he had worn for his hanging in 1880. Bennett was an employee of The Globe newspaper in Toronto, sacked for “intemperance,” a euphemism for excessive drunkenness on the job. In an altercation in March 1880 with his former boss, the proprietor of the newspaper and Father of Confederation George Brown, Bennett pulled out a gun, and in the ensuing scuffle, discharged it. Brown suffered what The Globe called “a severe flesh wound.” This escalated into a fatal infection, and he died seven weeks later. Bennett was convicted of murder, hanged, and buried in the jail yard on July 23. The last burial at the Don was that of Edward Stewart, a thirty-three-year -old labourer executed on March 24, 1930, for killing a Gerrard Street butcher during a robbery attempt.
By 1930, the requirement that executed persons be buried where they had been hanged was no longer being strictly enforced. From then onward, there were no further burials at the Don — bodies were generally claimed by family or friends. There were exceptions, though; after Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin were hanged, their corpses were immediately whisked away by prison officials to be buried at the Prospect Cemetery in Toronto.
In 1931, the mayor of Toronto remarked that many of the cells at the Don Jail were so narrow a fat horse could not be backed into them. By that time the Don was developing a fearsome reputation. A 1952 enquiry, for example, found that “the cells are very small and have no toilet facilities, necessitating the use of night pails.… Due to overcrowding beds have often to be placed in the corridors, under most unsatisfactory conditions.” As reported by the Montreal Gazette in 1973, an Ontario Supreme Court grand jury called the Don dehumanizing and a potential fire hazard. “Any person, whether convicted or not, would leave this place demoralized and condemning society.” Tuberculosis and other diseases caused by overcrowding were rife.
It had all started off with such great promise.
The idea of the new Toronto Jail was put forward in the mid-1800s, as a replacement for the primitive and exhausted hell holes that had until then housed short-term prisoners — those awaiting trial or with sentences of less than two years. The building would be airy and bathed in natural light. There would be a hospice to care for Toronto’s “poor, needy and disabled,” and a working farm. And what better place to locate all these splendid structures than on a parcel of land overlooking the beautiful, meandering Don River? After all, as British penal reformer John Howard wrote in 1777, “A county gaol, and indeed every prison, should be built on a spot that is airy, and if possible near a river, or brook. I have commonly found prisons situated near a river, the cleanest and most healthy.”
The Auburn prison system, established in the United States in the 1820s, heavily influenced both the architecture of the new jail and the proposed treatment of its inmates. There would be a central administrative building with two wings containing long rows of small cells extending to the east and west. During the day, prisoners would toil together on the prison farm or in communal work areas inside the prison; at night, they would be segregated in individual cells. Strict discipline would be imposed and silence maintained at all times.
British immigrant William Thomas, the hotshot architect who had already designed some of Toronto’s finest buildings (such as St. Lawrence Hall), was chosen to draw up the plans in 1852. This grand palace for prisoners would have a central pavilion, an Italianate style facade, and columns embellished with wavy, wormlike lines. Construction began in 1858.
From its very beginnings, however, the project was plagued with problems. Thomas died of diabetes in December 1860, leaving his sons to carry on. Construction was way over budget and massively delayed, not helped by a compromised foundation tha
t had to be rebuilt and a fire that destroyed most of the building just before it was completed. Insurance, naturally, didn’t cover the costs of reconstruction.
The highly touted farm and airy, light-filled working areas where inmates would spend their days soon went the way of the dodo, and prisoners ended up spending both their waking and sleeping hours crammed into the poky cells. Small wonder there were numerous escape attempts over the years. These were mostly unsuccessful. In one creative effort, as mentioned in Bridgepoint Health’s brochure on the history of the Don Jail, James Bass and Melville Yeomans used kitchen utensils to dig a hole, which they concealed with cardboard and strawberry jam. Security guards, perhaps on the hunt for stolen spoons and jam, soon discovered the hole and put an end to their plan. However, Frank McCullough, a drifter awaiting execution for the murder of a police officer in 1918, managed to saw through the bars of his cell and escape, and in 1951 and 1952, members of the Boyd Gang, a flamboyant four-man group of bank robbers, broke out not once but twice.
The original building was officially shut down in 1977. Its replacement, the adjoining east wing completed in 1958, did nothing to improve the tarnished reputation of Toronto’s forbidding prison. This extension, in its turn, was closed in 2013 and then demolished to make way for Bridgepoint, a new rehabilitation and complex care hospital.
Toronto’s forbidding Don Jail, as pictured in 1949 or 1950. The first man to be executed there was John Traviss in 1872 and the last two, Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas, were hanged simultaneously in 1962.
For Torontonians who may have become too big-headed about how appalling their local lock-up was, a reality check: there were others just as squalid scattered throughout the country.
Definitely not on the list was the Kingston Penitentiary, commonly known as the Kingston Pen, the grim stone pile that has dominated the eastern end of Lake Ontario since 1833. A penitentiary is a very different animal from a jail. Historically, a jail was a local or provincial institution, its purpose being to serve as a sort of holding tank for prisoners awaiting trial or with sentences of less than two years. A penitentiary, on the other hand, was and still is run on the federal level, a place that houses prisoners serving long terms to atone for their crimes (think “penance”). One of the most common questions asked by curious visitors who stroll across the road from Kingston Pen to Canada’s Penitentiary Museum is: Whereabouts in the penitentiary did hangings take place? And the answer is … nowhere. Because executions were the responsibility of local or provincial authorities, Kingston hangings took place at the Frontenac County Gaol, formerly located behind the Frontenac County Court House but demolished in 1973.
Look no further than the Carleton County Gaol on Nicholas Street in Ottawa, Ontario, for an excellent example of a terrible jail. Designed by architect H.H. Horsey, it was regarded as a “model gaol” when it first opened in 1862, embodying the finest principles of prison reform. Its stellar reputation did not last very long. Some of its “features”? No lighting, no ventilation, no heating, no toilets. Buckets, anyone? Hardened criminals mingled with minor offenders, punishments were unnecessarily brutal, and very little effort was made to rehabilitate prisoners. Once described as “a monstrous relic of an imperfect civilization,” it was shuttered in 1972. The jail now operates as a hostel — the paying guests don’t seem to mind the rather cramped quarters and the resident ghost, which may be that of Patrick James Whelan. Whelan, you will remember, was convicted for the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee and hanged in 1869. He was the first of three men who walked from the narrow cell on death row to the noose dangling from the permanent gallows at this prison. The other two were William George Seabrooke, executed for the murder of a gas station attendant in 1933, and Eugène Larment in 1946, found guilty of shooting a police detective during a botched robbery.
There were other prisons with permanent gallows dotted around the provinces, like Headingley Gaol in Headingley, Manitoba, or Bordeaux jail in Montreal, Quebec. But you would have had to travel way across Canada to find a jail worse than the Don. It’s gone now, demolished in 1992, but for seventy-nine years, the Oakalla Prison in Burnaby, British Columbia, served as a model for what a prison should not be.
It didn’t start off that way, of course.
Oakalla was conceived as a new centrally located prison farm to serve the lower British Columbian mainland, replacing the hopelessly inadequate institutions that existed at the time. It would hold around 480 prisoners, either sentenced to terms of less than two years, or awaiting trial or transfer to a federal penitentiary. Like the Don, it would embrace the Auburn system of penology — harsh discipline and hard work for inmates during the day, solitary confinement at night. Also like the Don, there would be hangings.
None of that went down well with the locals.
“Not in My Back Yard!” cried the NIMBYists.
“Nonsense,” replied the authorities. This prison would usher in a whole new era of penal reform to the province.
Fine intentions, to be sure. But soon after Oakalla’s grand opening in 1912, reality proved to be very different. Inmates complained of the noise and violence, and of rats and other infestations. Overcrowding was always a big problem. By the 1950s, the population of the prison averaged well over six hundred, and in the early 1960s, there were often more than a thousand inmates crammed inside. As reported by the Vancouver Sun , provincial judge Cunliffe Bartlett, after spending two days at Oakalla in 1979 at the invitation of corrections officials, described the prison as a “cold, hostile environment.… It is hopelessly outdated, old, patched up and not clean.”
It was not a very secure place, either. Earl Andersen describes Oakalla in Hard Place to Do Time as “a punishing yet easily escapable institution.” The statistics he quotes are startling. Between 1940 and 1990, more than 890 men, women, and young offenders escaped from the prison.
Riots and other incidents became commonplace. In April 1936, the Montreal Gazette reported that what the warden called a small group of “agitators” had started a food strike over the lack of variety in their diet. “Too much beef!” they beefed. There was “considerable shouting” but no violence on that occasion.
Things were radically different in October 1952 when around a hundred men rioted, causing what The Gazette called “heavy property damage,” and leading to calls for an emergency program to correct the “shocking conditions.”
There were several women’s riots in the 1970s and early 1980s, a violent protest in September 1982, and a rampage in November 1983. On New Year’s Day 1988, thirteen prisoners, described as armed and dangerous, embarrassingly escaped from the segregation unit, a concrete bunker located under an unused cow barn. They had been sent there after causing disturbances such as rioting, lighting fires, and attacking prison personnel. They claimed their actions were provoked by the behaviour of guards, who beat up an inmate for talking in church. One of the escapees accused the guards of being drunk and turning fire hoses on prisoners in their cells.
But you would agree that a jail like Oakalla was not always a pleasant place to work in, either.
As reported by the Toledo Blade in May 1956, Bruce Larsen, city editor of the Vancouver Province , spent a horrendously tense afternoon in the prison barbershop bargaining with three inmates who were holding a prison guard hostage. After five hours, and a promise to print their story in a special edition, the convicts removed the razor they were holding to the man’s throat and the pair of shears from his back and released him unharmed. “My legs were a little weak, my throat too dry,” was Larsen’s understatement at the end of the ordeal.
Cunliffe Bartlett, the provincial judge who had spent two days in lock-up at Oakalla in 1979, remarked: “Your first impression is that a lot of good people are trying hard under terrible circumstances to do the best job they can.”
In 1919, Oakalla became Hanging Central in British Columbia. Over the next forty years, forty-four prisoners were executed. The first man hanged, on August 29, 1919, was twen
ty-year-old Alex “The Skunk” Ignace, a young First Nations man who shot his wife on the Kamloops Reserve. On April 28, 1959, tugboat worker Leo Anthony Mantha was the last prisoner executed for the stabbing death of his lover, Aaron Jenkins. There were also several double hangings at Oakalla, and, in 1936, even a triple hanging.
The gallows at Oakalla garnered dubious fame in April 1937 — two prisoners, Gordon Fawcett and Blackie Campbell, coolly made their getaway by gaining entry into the execution chamber itself, possibly aided and abetted by a staff member. As this room was used for storage when it wasn’t being used for hangings, the escapees fashioned ropes from sheets and blankets, sawed through the bars on the window, lowered themselves down to the ground, and scuttled off to freedom. Campbell was shot to death in a botched bank robbery some months later. Fawcett, who had made it all the way to California, was arrested in 1941 and jailed in the States before being transferred back to Oakalla.
An eight-hour standoff in 1990 sounded the final death knell for the facility (by now called the Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre), and the following year, the doors were slammed shut for good. In 1992, the wreckers moved in. What replaced the largely unlamented prison complex was a townhouse complex of more than five hundred units with scenic views of Deer Lake and the North Shore mountains.
Final victory to the NIMBYists.
A forbidding stone face frowns down on you as you climb the stairs to the great front doors of the Don Jail. Father Time is watching you. Enough to give you a guilty conscience, if you don’t already have one. Says former Don custodian Paul McMaster, “Someone coined the phrase years ago ‘Every man that walks through these doors, walks through time.’”