According to Rule 4 of the rules and regs, the bell of the prison or of a neighbouring church was to be “tolled for fifteen minutes before, and fifteen minutes after the execution.” As a variant of this requirement, when Wilbert Coffin was hanged at Montreal’s infamous Bordeaux jail on February 10, 1956, a black flag flew and a bell rang out seven solemn times to announce his death.
So now that executions had moved inside prison walls, you might assume that the days of the inappropriate carnival-like antics of huge crowds at a hanging would be over.
You would be wrong.
Remember that the sheriff was allowed by the Procedure in Criminal Cases act to invite members of the public to attend hangings if he thought it appropriate to do so? Well, he often did. It was not uncommon for as many as two hundred people, among them newspaper reporters, to be given permits to witness a hanging. Sometimes these permissions were used to ram home a message. In 1885, a group of Indigenous men, the so-called “Cree Eight,” were tried for murder and sentenced to hang for their involvement in the North-West Rebellion, the same uprising that saw Louis Riel go to the gallows. The men were hanged together in Battleford, Saskatchewan, on a twenty-foot-high scaffold specially built for the purpose. As a chilling reminder of the power and authority of the state, hundreds of local Indigenous people were rounded up to watch the execution, among them all the students of the Battleford Industrial School.
Gatecrashing was common. Witness the scene when Joseph N. Thibeau of Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, was hanged in February 1881. Thibeau had been convicted for the murder by fire of Charlotte Hill, a resident of the poorhouse that he ran. The New York Times described the “wild disorder” of a horde of around a thousand spectators, among them women and children:
Toward daylight teams of every description began to pour into the town, and soon after 6 o’clock the crowd began to gather in front of the jail inclosure [sic ]. Several crowds, principally from the country, were inflamed with liquor.… With shouts and yells, the mob rushed toward the fence. Clergymen, constables, and citizens tried in every way to restrain the throng, but all to no purpose. Huge beams were used as battering rams, and once an opening was made, poles and hands were used, and the whole front of the high, strong fence was in a few minutes torn down. The scene was one of the most disgraceful ever seen.
Even if you did manage to keep the public out, it was not always easy to shield the gallows from view. Spectators would clamber onto walls and rooftops to watch a hanging. Take the sensational case of Thomas Nulty, age twenty-one, of Rawdon, Quebec, who butchered his four younger siblings with an axe. There were grave doubts as to whether he was responsible for his actions, but the jury found him guilty with no recommendation for mercy. He was hanged in May 1898 at the Joliette Gaol, Quebec. According to the Ottawa Journal , Nulty died “stolid and apparently unconcerned.” By contrast, “fully a thousand laughing, jeering men were present.… So badly had matters been arranged that anyone who possessed a ladder sufficiently long, made up a party of himself and friends, selected a nice sunny spot on either the roof of the gaol or the gaol shed, and stayed there.… The whole thing seemed like a circus, so much so that even Radcliffe, the executioner, lodged a formal complaint.”
It was especially difficult to ensure privacy in smaller centres. As quoted in Terry Boyle’s Fit to Be Tied , Blanche Grant, a young girl living in Parry Sound, Ontario, described the hanging of train robber John Burowski in December 1928 for the murder of Thomas Jackson, a farmer from Waubamik. She wrote that the top beam of the scaffold was clearly visible above the Parry Sound Gaol wall. To mask this, “the wall height was increased by a solid paper fence on the day of the execution.… At midnight of that crucial day the courtyard was ablaze with lights and the shadows of the action could be seen on the paper fence.”
On occasion, it did seem as though the situation actually was improving. Unlike the chaotic scenes at Thibeau’s and Nulty’s executions, all was calm and orderly when Raoul Brodeur was hanged in Sweetsburg, Quebec, in December 1923. Hangman Arthur Ellis sprang the trap, the black flag was hoisted, and the bells of the town church tolled. The jail doctor examined the body and pronounced Brodeur dead. The body was cut down, and an inquest was held immediately. As the Granby Leader-Mail commented, “many persons attempted to witness the hanging, but only the officials and newspapermen were allowed in the jail courtyard.”
Things seemed so well organized that in 1928, after an incident in the United States where a newsman smuggled a camera into the death chamber at the notorious Sing Sing prison near New York City, the Southeast Missourian heaped praise on Canada. At a recent hanging in Canada, “not even a porter was permitted to see the hanging.… The raising of the black flag was all that was made public about the execution itself.… The Canadian method of executing criminals, so far as publicity is concerned, is better than ours.”
Then an incident in March 1935 brought the horrors of hanging squarely to the forefront again. “A Ghastly Hanging” trumpeted the Ottawa Citizen in 1935, when Tommasina Teolis was decapitated during her execution at the Bordeaux jail in Montreal. Enough of capital punishment. This “ghastly and barbarous episode should be made impossible in the future,” was the newspaper’s bitter lament. But hangings continued. All that ended in 1935, as a result of this event, was the practice of giving out tickets to the public to watch them.
One step forward, two steps back. Take the execution of Peter Balcombe in Cornwall, Ontario. In this high-profile case, Balcombe, a young married Canadian army lieutenant, was arrested and charged with murder after the nude body of Marie-Anne Carrier, a women’s reserve army sergeant, was found stabbed to death in a ditch near Iroquois, Ontario. Balcombe had promised to leave his wife for Marie-Anne, but chose a more chilling way of extricating himself from a tricky relationship.
According to the Toronto Star , when Balcombe met his end, “the canvas-covered top of the gallows was plainly visible from the street. The crowd, many of them teenagers, including many young girls, was in a holiday mood, shooting off firecrackers, joking and laughing for more than two hours before the execution took place. Several times, police details had to clear the streets so vehicles could pass as the onlookers pressed forward for better vantage points.”
This happened in 1954: eighty-five years after executions were supposedly removed from public spaces and just eight years before the very last executions in Canada. Nothing, it seemed, could effectively slam the door shut on the frenzied crowds who turned out in droves, clambered onto rooftops, or stormed prison gates to witness an execution.
Chapter 5
The Hangman’s Job
A ccording to the law, the federal government played no role in organizing executions in Canada. As the Montreal Gazette put it in 1936: “The sheriff of a judicial district is the man charged with the execution of the laws, civil or criminal, and consequently is engaged in either hanging people or seizing their furniture, or otherwise annoying them.”
The requirement to organize hangings made the local sheriffs feel really uncomfortable. It could even make them sick. Beneath the headline “Sheriff Cannot Find a Hangman,” The Globe reported in March 1912 that E. Martin, sheriff of Fraserville, Quebec, was “seriously ill from worry over his inability to hire a hangman. With an execution only eight days off, he cannot locate anyone willing and able to take the position, and may have to undertake the task himself.”
And sheriffs did not relish the idea of conducting hangings themselves, especially because the condemned person was very likely to be someone they knew. They were also not confident of their expertise to carry out the job without bungling it.
There were individuals prepared to step in, though. The Globe published a letter in July 1910 that read in part: “I wish to ask you if there is any possible chance for securing the position of assistant executioner.… I am willing to carry out anything that the law requires in connection with the position. I am an Englishman, 34 years old, strong and possessing all kinds of nerve, all of which are absolutely necessary for the position.”
So what would be the basic qualifications for anyone wanting to apply?