Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  A motion to restore the death sentence was introduced in the House of Commons on June 30. The result, again, had been difficult to predict, but this time the motion was convincingly defeated in a free vote by 148 to 127. This was a “reaffirmation vote,” which would make it twice as difficult ever to reinstate the death penalty in the future.

  “It’s over now,” said Greenspan.

  Chapter 17

  Beyond Death Row

  F or a hundred-plus years, from Confederation to abolition, just over half the 1,533 inmates on death row dodged the noose. They generally owed their rescue to being acquitted or offered new trials, or having their sentences reduced or their convictions quashed.

  Most of them, but not all.

  Some escaped simply by escaping. Most sensationally, members of the Boyd Gang broke free from the Don Jail not once but twice in the early 1950s. In 1952, they made their second escape by sawing through the bars of a window and wriggling out. They then dropped onto a fifteen-foot high wall in the exercise yard, made their way along it to the outer wall of the jail, and disappeared. On their recapture, gang leader Edwin Alonzo Boyd and member Willie Jackson were sentenced to long terms in the Kingston Penitentiary. For Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan, the outcome was far more sinister. They had made the fatal mistake of shooting Detective Sergeant Edmund Tong while on the lam. After being found guilty of murder, they were executed in a double hanging in December 1952.

  Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan were members of the Boyd Gang, who escaped twice from the Don Jail. After their second recapture in September 1952, the two men were sentenced to death and hanged for the murder of a policeman.

  There were other, more chilling, jailbreak tactics. Witness the case of Tony Legato in 1916. George Verne of Alice Street, Guelph, Ontario, was described in 1915 as “a peaceable and respected Italian” by the Acton Free Press . So maybe he shouldn’t have tangled with fellow immigrant Tony Legato, who, according to one source, had ties to the Italian mafia. During a confrontation, Verne slapped Legato across the face and sent him packing. Legato’s answer was to return with a double-barrelled shotgun and blast Verne to eternity. Legato was eventually tracked down in Chatham, Ontario, tried for murder, and found guilty with no recommendation for mercy. His hanging was scheduled for July 5, 1916. On July 3, he spent the day peering out the window of his cell at workmen erecting the scaffold in the yard of the Guelph County Gaol. At 3:00 a.m. the following day, Legato cut his throat with the handle of a tin cup and choked himself to death with strips of his own underwear. Between 1879 and 1954, at least eight other condemned men preferred to take their own lives rather than die at the hand of the executioner.

  By 1963, however, when hangman John Ellis started coiling up his ropes and preparing to spend his sunset years in Florida or the Bahamas, death row was no longer an automatic conduit to the gallows for condemned prisoners.

  Take the case of the inmate they called “The Kid.”

  “They,” as pointed out by author Robert Hoshowsky, were Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, and The Kid was Gary Alexander McCorkell. Shy, vulnerable, and reportedly of limited intelligence, he, like them, was awaiting execution at the Don Jail in 1962. McCorkell was just nineteen years old. Isolated in their small cells on death row, the two older men never actually met the teenager face to face. They knew about him, though, and were greatly concerned about The Kid’s physical and emotional well-being as they waited for their own appeals to wend their unsuccessful way through the criminal justice system. Deeply disturbed when Lucas and Turpin went to the gallows in December, McCorkell then had the dubious honour of moving into the newly vacated Cell Number One on death row.

  Readers of the Globe and Mail on Apr 21, 1962, learned that McCorkell was the eldest son of a single mother. He had two siblings: an eighteen-year-old sister and a brother of sixteen. He worked as a shipper for Robert’s Furniture Ltd. in New Toronto (now folded into Etobicoke), and most of his $55-a-week salary went to help his family. According to his mother, Gary liked music, movies, and roller skating, and from the age of nine, he had played cornet and horn with the Long Branch Salvation Army. Gary was never a very healthy kid, she added. He had suffered constantly from bronchial disorders and nearly died from recurrent kidney infections. What his mom did not say was that, in addition to those serious ailments, his childhood had been plagued with sexual abuse — at the age of four, he was so viciously assaulted by an older boy that he needed medical treatment and was in agony for days.

  According to the Globe and Mail , on the morning of April 18, 1962, McCorkell’s boss, Robert Rotenberg, combed through the warehouse in search of his teenaged employee, fearing that he had been injured by falling furniture. Stock clerk Jack Taniwa joined in the hunt and made several fruitless phone calls in an attempt to track McCorkell down. Morning stretched into afternoon, but the youth was nowhere to be found.

  As the police revealed during their investigations into his crime, McCorkell was hiding close by. He had spotted two children, Ronald MacLeod, three, and Michael Atkinson, two, playing alone in a parking lot adjacent to the warehouse and had lured them into the building. The boys started to wail when they heard the searchers approaching. McCorkell panicked.

  “I put my hand over their mouths to stop them from crying. When I let them go, I thought they were unconscious,” he said in a statement to the head of Toronto’s homicide squad. “I didn’t realize I was going to kill them. It was an accident.” He admitted, though, that prior to this, he had tied the boys’ hands behind their backs and sexually molested them. He tried to revive the “unconscious” toddlers with wet cloths and smelling salts. When that failed, he walked over to the nearby Lake Shore Hospital for help. An orderly went back to the warehouse with him. Just one glance at their small, still bodies was all it took for the medic to determine that both boys were dead. He called the police.

  The molested had become the molester. By the time he went on trial in October 1962 for the capital murder of Ronald MacLeod, McCorkell had a record stretching back seven years or so of sexual attacks on younger boys. Clinically classified as a homosexual pedophile, he had been receiving psychiatric treatment.

  The Crown set out to prove that the toddlers had been tied up, sexually assaulted, and smothered. McCorkell, described by the Toronto Star as “tall, slender and pale-faced with dark wavy hair,” sat quietly, staring straight ahead, as the evidence piled up against him. A pathologist confirmed that the cause of death was suffocation. A psychiatrist testified that McCorkell was not mentally ill when he committed the crime.

  Leading McCorkell’s defence team was one of the heaviest hitters of the day, Arthur Maloney — the same lawyer who had conducted the appeals against Wilbert Coffin’s death sentence in Quebec in the mid-1950s. As noted by Maloney’s biographer, Charles Pullen, Maloney had a reputation for championing the poor and the troubled, often without pay, and he readily agreed to take on the case of this penniless, intellectually challenged, working-class boy. McCorkell, argued Maloney in his address to the jury, claimed the deaths were accidental. Was this a case of capital murder? “You have got to satisfy yourself that you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the stoppage of the breath was for one of two very definite purposes: that is, that the stoppage of the breath was for the purpose of facilitating the commission of the offence of indecent assault or for the purpose of facilitating his flight after committing or attempting to commit the offence of indecent assault.”

  Maloney lost the battle. Although the jury recommended mercy “in the strongest possible terms,” his client was sentenced to hang in February 1963.

  In early 1963, Maloney took the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Again, he claimed that the death was only capital murder if the Crown could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that during the assault, McCorkell had plugged the mouth of his three-year-old victim to facilitate either the commission of the crime or his flight after committing it. The court, again, was not buying this argument. The appeal wa
s dismissed, and the clock ticked inexorably toward February 26, the day McCorkell was to hang.

  Fortunately for McCorkell, he had another exceptionally heavy hitter on his team — Salvation Army chaplain Cyril Everitt, his spiritual advisor at the Don Jail and the man who had passionately but unsuccessfully supported Turpin and Lucas to the bitter end. Everitt adopted a two-pronged approach: “It’s my policy, and I think it should be the policy of all spiritual advisors, to do the best for the body as well as the soul of these people,” he told reporters on February 23. In addition to praying for the young man, Everitt vigorously petitioned both Justice Minister Donald Fleming and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker on McCorkell’s behalf. Impossible to resist: the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  When the federal Liberals swept Team Diefenbaker out of office in 1963, they immediately put the kibosh on hanging by commuting every death sentence that came their way. This was made official in December 1967, when parliament voted to suspend the death penalty for a five-year trial period. The definition of a capital crime was significantly narrowed, now restricted to murders where the victim was a police or correctional officer killed while on duty. As reported in the Montreal Gazette in January 1968, sixteen men (twelve in Quebec, two in Ontario, and two in British Columbia) were awaiting the hangman’s noose for what had now become non-capital crimes. All of these outstanding death sentences were commuted by the federal Cabinet, bringing the number of commutations issued by the Liberal government to forty-four.

  The next major step on the path to abolition came in 1973, with a thirteen-vote majority in parliament extending the moratorium on capital punishment for another five years. More nail-biting for the abolitionists, until their final success in July 1976; in that oh-so-close free vote, Bill C-84 was passed. The death penalty was abolished at last for all civilian crimes.

  At that time, there were eleven hard-core male prisoners, the so-called “Lucky Eleven,” awaiting their fate on death row for capital murders. Eight of them had been sentenced to death for killing police officers, and three for killing correctional officials.

  One of the particularly egregious police killers was Elery Steven Long. He already had a long list of criminal activities on his slate when he scored the death penalty for killing Police Staff Sergeant Ron McKay of Delta, British Columbia. McKay was following up on a disturbance at a gas station in November 1974 when he knocked at Long’s front door, to be greeted with a fatal shotgun blast to the chest. Long fled but turned himself in some hours later, accompanied by his lawyer. At his trial, the jury was impervious to his claim that he had been drunk and did not remember shooting the policeman. They made no request for clemency.

  The Lucky Eleven also included an exceedingly villainous duo who were locked up on death row in Moncton, New Brunswick: Richard Ambrose and James Hutchinson. Their crime spree began with the kidnapping of a teenager, Raymond Stein, who was snatched from his home by two armed and hooded men just before midnight on Thursday, December 12, 1974. The fourteen-year-old was released unharmed after a ransom of $15,000 was paid by his father, who owned a local seafood restaurant.

  Under the grim headline “MONCTON POLICEMEN MURDERED: Bodies found in shallow graves,” the Halifax Chronicle-Herald of Monday, December 16, 1974, announced the news that everyone had been dreading ever since police had seized a motor vehicle the previous Saturday and arrested a suspect in the kidnapping. Ominously, they had found a pair of bloodied gloves in the car. The two slain officers, Corporal Aurèle Bourgeois and Constable Michael O’Leary, had both been working on the case. They had radioed in early Friday morning to say they were investigating a suspicious-looking car. That was the last anyone heard from them.

  The bodies of Bourgeois and O’Leary, both married men with fam­ilies, were discovered in a wooded area about fifteen miles from the city. “The two were found buried in shallow graves Sunday, shot through the head and wearing handcuffs,” reported the Chronicle-Herald sombrely.

  One of the kidnappers-turned-murderers , twenty-six-year -old Richard Ambrose, was already in custody. He was the man found in the car along with the bloodstained gloves. The hunt for his partner in crime, James Hutchinson, aged forty-seven and considered by the police to be “armed and extremely dangerous,” stretched on until Sunday evening, when Hutchinson was finally arrested in a Moncton apartment building.

  Both men were sentenced to hang for the murders. No mercy recommendations for them.

  Three other members of the Lucky Eleven were sitting on death row for murdering correctional officers. Former Vancouver newsman Georges Joseph Péloquin was one of them. In July 1974, he was serving a sentence for armed robbery at Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba when he attacked a carpentry instructor, Stanley Green, with a metal clamp. Green later died in hospital. According to the Globe and Mail in March 1975, Péloquin’s former wife stated at his trial that the pressures of his job as a television reporter drove him to drugs, and a prison psychiatrist testified that Péloquin believed at the time of the murder that he was being persecuted by prison officials. In spite of an eleven-page confession, the jury still made a recommendation for mercy.

  The second of the prison guard killers was Gilles Hébert. He was serving a twenty-five-year sentence for armed robbery in Montreal in June 1975 when he retrieved a hidden weapon and shot two penitentiary guards who had escorted him to hospital for stomach X-rays. Paul Gosselin died; Robert Gravel survived; Hébert escaped. On his recapture two months later, he was tried and sentenced to death.

  And in April 1975, the very last man to land on death row, Mario Gauthier, killed Georges Nadeau, the chief paint shop instructor at Cowansville Penitentiary in Quebec, with multiple hammer blows to the head. At the time of the attack, the Globe and Mail reported, the drug-fuelled Gauthier had just eighteen days of his original sentence remaining. At his subsequent trial, the jury of seven men and five women — a very rare configuration in a system that had traditionally been the domain of men alone — deliberated for less than an hour before rejecting a defence plea of temporary insanity and returning a verdict of guilty with no request for clemency.

  After July 1976, the maximum sentence for first-degree (previously capital) murder became life imprisonment, with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. All eleven death row occupants were transferred from local or provincial prisons to serve out their life sentences in federal penitentiaries. “Parole years away for 11 murderers,” reported the Globe and Mail in February 1977. “First-degree killers can’t expect to be released until turn of century.” At that point, all of them were “serving their time in windowless concrete cells with steel doors.” Hardly first-class accommodation, to be sure.

  Eleven men; eleven commutations. And the Department of Justice case files for the Lucky Eleven were all stamped with the words “Abolishment of death penalty” to explain their getaway from death row.

  Chapter 18

  Britain Heads Toward Abolition

  C anada has Britain to thank for its criminal justice system, which all stemmed from a Royal Proclamation in 1763 imposing English law on Britain’s North American colonies. The British freely exported hanging to their network of dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories scattered around the world. And while Canada struggled to navigate the rocky passage toward the abolition of capital punishment, the mother ship was plying her own difficult course. For once, Canada got there first — 1962 marked the de facto end of hangings in the country.

  Britain lagged behind. Three executions took place in England in 1962 and three the following year in Scotland and England. Also, there was a great deal of public support for capital punishment at the time. (There still is, in fact — as recently as 2010, 51 percent of those surveyed in a poll were in favour of reinstating the death penalty in Britain; 37 percent were opposed.)

  And then in 1964 came the murder of John Alan West, a fifty-three-year-old driver for the Lakeland Laundry in Workington, Cumberland.

&n
bsp; As noted by Elwyn Jones in The Last Two to Hang , Mary Allen of Preston, Lancashire, called the local branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals on Tuesday evening, April 7, 1964, and asked for an inspector to come around to her house and collect a little lamb. Inspector Nairn was pleased to oblige. He was met by Mrs. Allen, her husband, and another man, who seemed to be a lodger. They had been out for a drive that day, Mrs. Allen explained, and had found the animal on the moors between Liverpool and Clitheroe. They were all very concerned because they couldn’t get it to eat properly.

  What the trio neglected to tell the inspector was that they had two small children with them at the time, and that they had been speeding home in a stolen black Ford Prefect, registration number NXC 771. The car was reported to the police that same Tuesday evening as having been suspiciously abandoned in a builders’ yard in Ormskirk, Lancashire.

  Mary’s husband, Peter Anthony Allen, and their lodger, Gwynne Owen Evans, had packed Mary and the kids into the car and gone to Seaton, Cumberland, on Monday evening, April 6. Their plan was to visit Evans’s former co-worker, John (also known as Jack) Alan West.

  As Evans later told the police: “Jack West has been a friend of mine for five years and he told me that if I was ever short of money he would always lend me a couple of quid. I knew he had a load of cash and so did Peter.” And Peter Allen was desperately in need of hard cash to pay a fine and the rates on his house.

  The group arrived at its destination in the early morning of Tuesday, April 7. Evans went to the door alone, finding West up and nursing a headache.