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,