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The Deadly Game of Hangman

I n March 1902, Stanislaus Lacroix was executed in Hull, Quebec, after murdering his wife and a neighbour. A rare photo shows the condemned man standing on the trap door beneath a gallows. His arms are pinioned with black straps, and a cap is draped over his head. The noose dangles down beside him. Gathered around are four men. Two priests in their cassocks and the sheriff with his cocked hat, gown, and sword stand to his right. And on the left, the same side as the noose, the hangman waits, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. Three other officials — doctors, perhaps? — are at the bottom of the scaffold. Two of them look up toward the doomed man. Within moments, the trap would be sprung and Lacroix, as described in the Ottawa Citizen , would be “dashed to eternity.”

But many other individuals were involved in the game of Hangman in Canada before that final grim act took place. Unlike the vaguely grisly children’s guessing game, real Hangman truly was a matter of life and death. If you were convicted of murder, there was one, and only one, sentence available — hanging.

The game began with a death, and 704 times in Canada’s first century, it ended with a death, too.

So before we get too far ahead, let’s meet some of the principal players whose specialized roles made them stand out from the rest.

The execution of Stanislaus Lacroix in Hull, Quebec, March 21, 1902.

First, there had to be a body: spread-eagled on a city street, slumped over a desk, buried in a shallow grave in field or forest. Even in the one and only case where the convicted man, Louis Riel, was hanged for high treason and not for murder, there was a body. Thomas Scott, a troublesome adventurer from Ontario, was court-martialled and executed by a Métis firing squad during the Red River Rebellion in Manitoba in 1870. Blame for his death was laid squarely on Riel and played into Riel’s own trial and execution some fifteen years later.

The ink was scarcely dry on the British North America Act that established the Dominion of Canada in 1867 when Official Murder Victim Number One, François-Xavier Jutras, a farmer in St-Zéphirin, Quebec, met his end by strychnine poison. The very last murder victim, killed in a hail of hammer blows just before capital punishment was abolished in 1976, was Georges Nadeau, a thirty-four-year -old paint-shop instructor at the Cowansville Penitentiary, Quebec.

For every victim, there has to be an aggressor — a man, woman, or child who pulls the trigger or plunges the knife or slips arsenic into a cup of tea. Nadeau’s nemesis was French-Canadian Mario Gauthier, just nineteen years old. Gauthier became one of the last eleven men ever to spend time on death row in Canada. By that time, death sentences were routinely being commuted to less severe punishments, but in his case, it wasn’t necessary. The Court of Appeal granted him a new trial, and he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. He ended up being sentenced to eleven years for his crime.

When Mary Lane of Brandon, Manitoba, a pregnant mother of four children, was shot at close range on the afternoon of July 5, 1899, suspicion initially fell on a tramp with a foreign accent. The vagrant had come to the Lane residence and had shot Mary when his request for food was refused. Or so said Emily Hilda Blake, the Lanes’ twenty-one-year -old domestic servant, who had arrived in Canada from Britain as an orphan some ten years previously. The city was in an uproar over the news, but within four days, the real perpetrator was in custody. It was Blake herself. Police investigations revealed that she had purchased the gun used in the shooting. Once confronted with the evidence against her, she confessed.

The youngest individual ever convicted of murder (and hanged) in post-Confederation Canada was sixteen-year-old Archibald McLean. Archie was the most junior member of the Kamloops Outlaws, a gang of four Métis youths who caused chaos in the Fort Kamloops area of British Columbia in the late 1870s. The desperadoes kicked off their life of crime with robbery. As quoted by Hamar Foster in his essay on the Kamloops bandits, one neighbour complained, “This is a fine state of things, to be terrorized by four brats who have threatened to burn the jail in order to destroy the records of their deeds.” The so-called brats moved on to horse rustling, then to murder. Archie shot at point-blank range the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Kamloops representative, John Ussher, who was generally in charge of law and order in the settlement. Ussher had led a poorly armed posse to the outlaws’ camp in search of a stolen stallion. The gang followed up that murder with the random killing of a sheep herder, on the unlikely pretext that the man had drawn a gun on them. A much larger, better armed, and very angry posse flushed them out of the cabin where they had taken refuge, threatening to burn them out if they didn’t surrender. The youths were locked up in the Kamloops jail pending their trial at New Westminster, British Columbia.

With the accused in custody, the official tasked with organizing the trial was the local sheriff. But if you think of a sheriff as a dude in the Wild West walking down a dusty road with a shiny star on his chest, spurs clanking on his heels, and a pair of six-shooters on his hips, think again. That archetype did not live in Canada. Agreed, the Criminal Code defines sheriffs as “peace officers.” The official Service Canada website adds that “sheriffs execute and enforce court orders, warrants and writs, participate in seizure and sale of property and perform courtroom and other related duties.”

While some Canadian sheriffs in earlier times and in smaller centres might have been rough-and-ready types, others were more like Ernest Charles Drury, farmer, writer, and premier of Ontario from 1919 to 1923. After his fall from power, Drury spent a few years dabbling in federal politics. In 1934, he was happy to be appointed sheriff, county court clerk, and local registrar of the Supreme Court for the County of Simcoe, Ontario — all for the “princely” salary of $3,750 a year.

Farmer, writer, and premier of Ontario Ernest Charles Drury, 1920. One of his duties as sheriff of Simcoe County, between 1934 and 1959, was to organize three murder trials.

As sheriff, Drury had a number of unpleasant “related duties” to contend with in the course of his twenty-five years on the job. Evicting tenants when they defaulted on their rent was one of them. Another was organizing three murder trials. He found the second of these particularly disturbing. In his memoirs, Farmer Premier , Drury described the prisoner as an “Indian boy” of about eighteen years. Without provocation, the youth had stabbed a friendly night watchman twenty-three times with a sharp piece of scrap metal snatched from a factory workbench.

Once the case went to trial and the action moved into a court of law, writes Ken Leyton-Brown, counsel for the Crown and the defence conducted interviews to choose the six- to twelve-member jury. Jurors were supposed to represent the public, but this was generally not the case. Women, or First Nations people for that matter, could be victims or murderers. But never jurors.

In court, the judge, invariably a man, became the most powerful player in the game. Inspiring fear and respect, he swept into the courtroom in his black robes at the beginning of a trial. Everyone rose, and he took his seat on a special raised platform, dominating the room.

Guided by the judge, the jury would weigh the evidence, decide whether the accused was guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt (or of the less serious crime of manslaughter, or not guilty), and deliver a verdict. Jurors played a supporting role right up to the dying moments of the trial, when the jury foreman stepped forward on their behalf to deliver his one and only speaking line: “Your Honour, we find the accused guilty as charged,” or, for the lucky ones, “not guilty.”

The jury’s decision was most often driven by the judge’s charge after all the evidence had been presented by the lawyers for the prosecution and the defence. This was an important step, notes Leyton-Brown, especially in difficult cases or where the law was complicated. The judge was generally very fair, but he sometimes made his opinions, positive or negative, crystal clear to the jury. In 1904, George William Gee of Woodstock, New Brunswick, was accused of murdering his young cousin and one-time girlfriend, Millie Gee, by shooting her twice in the side. In his review, a stern Chief Justice Tuck ordered the jury: “Don’t, gentlemen, allow any mock sympathy to hinder you in rendering your verdict. Now go and do your duty.” Are you surprised that the jury found Gee guilty?

As they usually knew that the accused would be hanged if found guilty, juries often struggled with returning this grim verdict. They sometimes hesitated to convict youths or people with families. Complicating this might be uncertainty about the identity of the perpetrator and scanty or largely circumstantial evidence — these and other factors made the jury leery of accepting someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When they felt particularly unsure, they exercised the option of recommending mercy. In one remarkable case in 1923 in Montmagny, Quebec, farmer Gustave Dubé was found guilty of shooting his wife. The jurors were horrified when they realized this meant the death penalty. They recanted, protesting that they thought the charge was manslaughter. Perhaps subscribing to the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse, the judge refused to budge and Dubé went to the gallows.

As with modern cases, the judge’s role was to decide whether evidence was admissible or inadmissible, interpret the law, and guide the jury’s decisions. In capital cases prior to 1976, however, there was one notable addition. With a guilty verdict, the judge’s final act was to deliver the death sentence. He would sweep out of the court, only to return immediately, to even more fear and respect, wearing a black cap upon his head and sometimes black gloves as well. As Leyton-Brown points out, these theatrics and rituals at the time of sentencing — cap, gloves, and the set wording of the death sentence itself — came to Canada, like most other court routines, courtesy of the mother country, Britain. They were all designed to underline the power and majesty of law and state.

Often the judge would lash out in his final address to the prisoner. In 1878, Michael Farrell, a violent man much feared in Ste-Catherine, Quebec, shot and killed a neighbour who was using a right-of-way through Farrell’s property, in full view of the neighbour’s children. As reported in the Quebec Saturday Budget , Justice Monk had this to say: “I cannot immagine [sic ] how a man of your position and intelligence could possibly have conceived and carried out so terrible a crime. I will not recall to your recollection the horrible, sanguinary scene which took place, when you slew your victim in the presence of his little children and his friends, and slew him as you did, prisoner, without any provocation.” According to the paper, Monk was very much more distressed than the condemned man, who sat calm and stone-faced throughout the judge’s address.

Who would live and who would be condemned to death by judge and jury? The answer was often unpredictable. Take the opinion of Simcoe County’s Sheriff Drury on two of the murder trials he oversaw. The first was the case of the eighteen-year-old Indigenous youth accused of stabbing a night watchman. The defence tried to prove that “he was mentally dull and perhaps retarded,” but the judge and jury were hostile. The youth was sentenced to death, with no recommendation for mercy. The second case was that of two young men, also eighteen or nineteen years old, who shot, threw into a swamp, then shot again — this time to death — an older man who had made sexual advances to them. They were soon arrested and tried in Barrie, Ontario. The jury found them guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and the judge gave them less than the maximum sentence.

As Drury wrote of both cases in his memoirs:

The savage nature of the young Indian’s crime, which might reasonably have been taken to indicate mental instability and thus serve as an argument for clemency, quite evidently predisposed both judge and jury against the prisoner. I wonder if they had read stories of Indian massacres? In the second case, clearly a deliberate and cold-blooded murder, the youth of the prisoners, the squalor of their environment, and above all the exist­ence of the death penalty, just as evidently predisposed judge and jury in their favour.

Once the trial was over, prisoners were generally sent to the local prison to await execution. They were segregated in a special section called death row and kept under constant surveillance. Although phys­ically restricted, every condemned person was allowed unlimited access to a spiritual advisor, generally a Christian minister.

The minister taking care of the spiritual needs of inmates at the Don Jail in Toronto, Ontario, in the early 1960s was Salvation Army chaplain Cyril Everitt. “I will see you in heaven,” Everitt said to Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas as the two men stood on the scaffold at the Don Jail just after midnight on December 11, 1962. Moments later, they dropped through the trap door together, the last ever to hang in Canada. In their final days on death row, as their appeals sputtered and died, Everitt visited them two or three times a day to cheer them up and pray with them. What was rare in this case, as Robert Hoshowsky points out in his book on Turpin and Lucas, The Last to Die , was Everitt’s deep affection for his charges: he visited their graves for many years after they died.

The public, too, became invested in the spiritual well-being of prison­ers on death row. The burning questions were: Would those doomed to die be redeemed? Would they in some way repent for the error of their ways? In religious terms, what society wanted more than anything was for evildoers to be saved from sin.

What society also desperately wanted was for evildoers to confess. As noted by Leyton-Brown, this would remove any last lingering doubt about whether justice had been done, or whether police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and sheriffs had been complicit in sending an innocent person to the grave.

Best of all was repentance and confession together. Robert Neil, hanged in Toronto for the stabbing death of a prison guard, as reported in the Toronto Daily Mail on February 29, 1888, stood beneath the crossbeam of the gallows and said in a firm, clear voice, “Now I am here I would like to say I did not mean to kill that man.… I forgive everyone and hope to be forgiven.” A rough arrow scratched on a wall at the Don Jail marked his grave.

Of course, things didn’t always end as neatly as the public would have liked. Michael Farrell, the Quebecer found guilty of killing his neighbour in 1878 for using a right-of-way through his property, made a confession in court when sentence was passed: “That man had liberty as well as any other to pass by that road, as long as he fastened up the gap after him.… If he had put up the fence after him he would have been alive today, and I would not have been here.” In reporting his words, the Quebec Saturday Budget commented with horror and sadness on Farrell’s “apparent unconcern and vindictiveness.”

Government officials also had an essential role to play in deciding who should go to the gallows and who should be spared.

When someone was convicted of a capital crime, the presiding judge was required to submit a detailed report to the minister of justice in Ottawa. The federal Cabinet and officials of the Department of Justice would review the case. At the end of this sometimes lengthy process, Cabinet would make the ultimate decision on what sentence to impose. If they resolved that the law “be allowed to take its course,” an Order-in-Council was issued instructing the local authorities to proceed with the execution.

According to author and historian Carolyn Strange, “condemned persons’ chances of commutation were clearly linked to assumptions about the dangerousness of certain criminals and the culpability of various categories of offenders, as well as to public anxieties about changing rates of criminal violence.” And what swayed the Cabinet’s opinions at one time could have the opposite effect at another, tilting the balance for, or against, the condemned person. Indigenous peoples (that is, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples), for example, were initially treated leniently, but as time passed, racial paternalism evaporated, especially if white people were in the gunsights.

Take the case of the Copper Inuit living on the shores of Coronation Gulf in the Arctic. In 1916, two Inuit men named Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were arrested for the murder of two French missionaries. They were in­itially tried in Edmonton in 1917 and acquitted, then retried in Calgary and convicted of murder. Their sentences were immediately commuted to life imprisonment. In 1919, the men were released and returned to the Arctic. This leniency was aimed to teach the Inuit people about Canadian law and to “Canadianize” them. If the Inuit were to kill again, they would have to suffer the consequences.

And the consequences proved to be harsh. In 1922, a young Inuit named Alikomiak, arrested with his uncle Tatamigana for the killing of an Inuit man and a baby, shot a Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal whom he believed had insulted him. Later the same day, he shot a Hudson’s Bay Company man.

Killing whites? Strategically acceptable to the Canadian authorities in 1917, but no longer tolerated in the 1920s. “As kindness has failed in the past I strongly recommend that the law should take its course and those Eskimos found guilty of murder should be hanged in a place where the natives will see and recognize the outcome of taking another life,” thundered T.L. Cory, commissioner of the Northwest Territories.

In 1923, Alikomiak and Tatamigana were tried at Herschel Island in the Yukon Territory. Since trial court officials brought along with them an executioner and lumber to build a scaffold, it was fairly clear what the outcome of the case would be. Public controversy about the case spread across the country, with some arguing that it was a travesty of justice to try sixteen-year-old Alikomiak in a language he could not understand and others insisting that Canada’s sovereignty should be maintained and respected. But despite this, the government was determined to make an example of the two Inuit men, and they were hanged in February 1924.

Not everyone convicted of murder went to the gallows, though. Just over half the 1,533 people listed in the official inventory of Department of Justice capital case files as having received the death penalty escaped the noose. In some cases, their sentence was commuted or quashed; in others, they were given a new trial leading to a reduced sentence or acquittal. Some prisoners awaiting execution died in jail. Chillingly, some unfortunates committed suicide.

So who was most likely to be executed? Statistics show us that certain groups of people, such as young working-class males and men from ethnic and racial minorities, were particularly vulnerable. The poor were often targeted. Women were generally treated leniently, as were Indigenous people in the early stages of their association with whites. However, racist thinking among the ruling classes would sometimes evoke pity for “lesser” peoples but at other times reflect fear and hatred of “the other.” In short, there were never any guarantees, consistent application of the law, or immutable rules or principles in what Strange calls “the lottery of death” — capital punishment in Canada.

The main players are all assembled. Let’s not forget the second-stringers, important in the action, too: police officers, homicide detectives, doctors, court officials, Crown prosecutors crossing swords with lawyers for the defence, jailers, and families of the victims and accused.

And standing by on the sidelines, waiting for his turn, is the most contentious participant of them all: the hangman.

The game is on.