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Celebrating Confederation: Three Hangings in the First Year

M odiste Villebrun and Sophie Boisclair were desperately in love. The burly lumberjack and his paramour yearned to spend the rest of their lives together. There was just one problem. They were both married — to other people. What were they to do? They lived in the small, conservative French Catholic community of St-Zéphirin, Quebec. In 1867, divorce would have been inconceivable. The church saw to that. They just had to come up with another strategy.

They chose murder.

The first results seemed quite promising. Granted, there were some whispers in the community when Villebrun’s wife, who had reportedly been in excellent health just a few days earlier, died suddenly. The gossip came to nothing, and the lovers were emboldened to press on. Things changed radically, however, when Boisclair’s husband, François-Xavier Jutras, died soon after. To the plotters’ great misfortune, Jutras had fallen acutely ill on a few occasions prior to his death. Suffering from convulsions and abdominal and neck pains, he consulted a doctor. The physician became very, very suspicious when his patient died. An autopsy showed that Jutras’s demise had been caused by strychnine poisoning.

The lovers were accused of murdering Jutras. They were tried sep­ar­ately, each of them by judge and twelve-man jury, in the nearby town of Sorel. By this time, people were paying a lot more attention to Villebrun and Boisclair’s goings-on. As the Crown attorney said in his opening address at Villebrun’s trial: “There is no doubt that the two accused committed the crime of adultery. It does not necessarily follow that a person who forgets God’s commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ will forget the one that says ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but when you are on the downward slope of vice, you do not know where you will end up.”

The trial took ten days, but the jury needed only five minutes to find Villebrun guilty of murder. And the only possible sentence was death by hanging.

Then it was Boisclair’s turn. She, too, was found guilty, but before the judge could pronounce her penalty, she dropped a bombshell.

“Sir,” she told the clerk of the court, “I do not want the sentence of death to be delivered at the present time, because I am pregnant.” Sure enough, as was customary, a specially convened jury of married women and a court-appointed doctor examined her and confirmed her pregnancy.

As Jeffrey Pfeifer and Kenneth Leyton-Brown point out in Death by Rope: An Anthology of Canadian Executions , the two murderers should have been executed together, which might have led to a reprieve for both of them until after the child was born. In the end, Villebrun’s execution went ahead as planned, and on May 3, 1867, he was led to the scaffold alone. Ten thousand people turned up at his public execution. In a weird twist, Boisclair also witnessed the event, albeit reluctantly. The window of her cell overlooked the square where the gallows had been set up.

The British parliament passed the British North America Act creating the Dominion of Canada in March 1867. Even though this execution took place two months before actual Confederation, it is, somewhat confusingly, officially listed as the first hanging in the new nation.

Boisclair escaped the noose. When her baby was born several months later, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the recommendation of the minister of justice. She was locked away for twenty years in the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario.

Department of Justice handwritten memorandum about Sophie Boisclair’s status prior to her release from the Kingston Penitentiary in 1887. It describes her as having been of unsound mind for a number of years.

Sophie Boisclair was described by a surgeon as “of unsound mind” when she was finally released into the care of her son in 1887. Time has fogged so many details of these early cases, but how tempting it is to speculate that this was the same child whose birth had rescued her from the gallows in 1867.

Ethan “Saxey” Allen was an ex-convict originally from Detroit, Michigan. The Detroit Post described him as “a hard character … always found with bad associates” and “rather notorious as a rough and a gambler.” He became the leader of a four-man gang that robbed banks and plundered businesses along the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, always one step ahead of the frustrated police.

The Allen Gang’s luck ran out in the early hours of September 22, 1867; so did that of Cornelius Driscoll. Driscoll, employed for twenty-four years at the Morton Brewery and Distillery in Kingston, Ontario, had started working as their night watchman just two weeks previously.

The gang broke into Morton’s with sledgehammers and crowbars in search of $2,500, which they knew was locked away in the safe. When Driscoll came to investigate the noise, Allen killed him with a sledgehammer. Early the following morning, a local resident found the dead man lying in the distillery yard, and the hunt was on. The gang members fled with their loot, but they were tracked down and arrested in a hotel in Watertown, New York.

The criminals were brought back to Kingston and tried at the Frontenac County Court House. Allen was convicted of murder, although the jury added a recommendation for mercy. The judge did not share the jurors’ merciful sentiments, informing Allen that he held out no hope for pardon. Two of Allen’s accomplices got nine- and ten-year sentences in the Kingston Penitentiary for manslaughter.

The Detroit Post said at the time that the murder “was one of the most cold blooded and brutal affairs of the kind on record,” but it does look as though Allen had a change of heart before he went to the gallows at the Frontenac County Gaol behind the courthouse on December 11. Asked by the sheriff if he had anything to say, he replied: “No, nothing at all. Only I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.” He refused to have the customary black hood (called a “cap”) pulled over his head and, as the hangman pulled the bolt, he said “Lord, have mercy on me,” before dropping to his death.

Legend tells of a ghost that stalked the Morton Brewery and Distillery for many years thereafter. The spirit of Cornelius Driscoll, the watchman who was bludgeoned to death on that September night in 1867, continued to patrol the hallways, checking all the locks.

On November 5, 1867, the citizens of Kingston submitted a petition requesting that Ethan Allen’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. The petition was denied. On December 11, Allen was hanged at the Frontenac County Gaol.

Dominion Day, July 1, 1868 — a special holiday declared by Governor General Lord Monck to celebrate Canada’s first birthday. Just imagine everyone’s excitement when the day finally dawned. There were picnics and parades and speeches and twenty-one-gun salutes and splendid bonfires and even torchlight processions after dark.

The city of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, came up with a very odd way to celebrate this momentous anniversary: to wit, Canada’s third public hanging. A crowd of about eight thousand men, women, and children gathered around a scaffold set up in front of the jail. Onlookers gasped with horror and pity and women fainted as the condemned man, Joseph Ruel, was half carried, half dragged to the scaffold.

He took seventeen minutes to die.

The Montreal Gazette said the next day that “the execution naturally threw all St-Hyacinthe into sadness, and was a damper to all enjoyment of the national holiday.”

As with Modiste Villebrun, love was the undoing of Joseph Ruel.

He was having a passionate and rather public affair with Arzalie Messier, the wife of a farmer named Toussaint Boulet: witnesses at Ruel’s trial claimed to have seen the couple embracing and grappling on several occasions. Under the pretense of helping Boulet with his treatment for what seems to have been a sexually transmitted disease (probably syphilis), Ruel started to feed the farmer a cocktail of poisons. Ruel made the mistake of obtaining these substances (arsenic and strychnine) from local doctors, ostensibly to deal with pesky dogs and foxes. As Ruel had not professed any previous interest in trapping foxes, the authorities became suspicious when Boulet died. The police concluded that he had been poisoned and Ruel was charged with murder.

Arzalie Messier was not charged. As noted by historian Ken Leyton-Brown in The Practice of Execution in Canada , this may have reflected the community’s sympathy toward a woman who had been wronged by her husband. Toussaint Boulet’s disease was seen as proof that he was a sinner who had destroyed his marriage. He had been unfaithful to his wife for a long period, and his risky sexual behaviour endangered her life as well as his own.

But the courts would not tolerate murder. Ruel had poisoned Boulet. The jury found him guilty, with no recommendation of mercy. In sentencing Ruel, the judge criticized him sharply for robbing the victim of both his wife and his life. Ruel was hanged less than two months later.

Remember Saxey Allen’s words as he went to the gallows? “I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.”

That is exactly what the lawmakers and politicians and medical professionals and large numbers of the general public wanted to hear. They hoped — no, believed — that the fear and horror of a death by hanging would deter others from committing heinous crimes.

This deterrent effect worked in two ways, they argued. First, if the punishment were severe enough, it would discourage criminals from perpetrating further monstrous acts. In legal terms, this is referred to as “specific deterrence” and is not really relevant to the capital punishment debate. After all, dead men commit no crimes. Second and more important is the idea of “general deterrence.” This view holds that potential murderers would think twice — or many times — before copying the behaviour of a hanged criminal. And if, after all that, you did go ahead and murder someone — well, then, it was all your own fault if you found yourself hanging by your neck from the gallows.

But there were other lawmakers, politicians, medical professionals, and members of the public who questioned that view. Before Confederation, the prospect of being hanged hadn’t prevented people from committing even minor offences like stealing a cow or a horse, so how could the death penalty be regarded as effective at all?

Once the deterrent effect of hanging came into doubt, other uncomfortable questions arose. Was the only principle underlying capital punishment that of retribution — punishment for wrongdoing — or, even more unsettling, simple biblical-style revenge: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Some claimed that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the execution of murderers was justified, especially when the victim was a policeman or a prison guard, the true protectors of our society. Others, like the late, great Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan, argued that “the real reason why this barbarous practice persists in a so-called civilized world is that people still hold the primitive belief that the taking of one human life can be atoned for by taking another.”

The naysayers pointed to other problems, too. People might go to the gallows simply because they had a tough prosecutor or an inadequate defence lawyer — if they had one at all. This was very clearly illustrated in the case of Elizabeth Workman of Mooretown, Ontario, who was arrested for murdering her husband, James, in October 1872. Scott M. Gaffield notes in “Justice Not Done: The Hanging of Elizabeth Workman” that when Elizabeth’s trial opened on March 20, 1873, it became clear that she had neither a lawyer nor the means to hire one. As a result, the court asked a local barrister, thirty-three-year -old John A. Mackenzie, to handle her case. The trial started the next day, leaving Mackenzie mere hours to familiarize himself with the facts and formulate a defence in this life-and-death battle. All he could come up with was a statement of Elizabeth’s innocence. He neither questioned nor challenged witnesses during the two-day trial, nor did he make reference to the good character of his client or the fact that she was more than likely the victim of spousal brutality. As future prime minister Alexander Mackenzie (no relative of lawyer John A.) argued in a letter in May 1873, “there was no opportunity of bringing out evidence that might tilt in her favour. The unfortunate woman had no counsel engaged, and no one interested in assisting her.” And as for the counsel who was eventually appointed, “what could he do on a few hours’ notice?”

There were yet more troubling questions that emerged in the pro- and anti-capital punishment debate. What if something went horribly wrong during the hanging; for example, if it took too long for someone to die, as had happened to Joseph Ruel?

And, most disturbing of all, what if, by some dreadful mistake, the wrong person went to the gallows?