John Diefenbaker. Arthur Slade
become prime minister, because it is “more than a goal; it is my destiny.”
Like John’s mother so many years before, Edna does not laugh. She looks at this man who is a hawk in court but a wallflower in social situations. She sees the ambition in his eyes. Desire. She knows it will be hard to teach him how to relax in public. To remember people’s names. But she is a good teacher. They begin discussing how this goal can be accomplished.
In the spring of 1929 in Walmer Road Baptist Church in Toronto, John George Diefenbaker and Edna May Brower were married. The wedding was in Toronto because that was where Edna’s brother’s lived.
John suddenly emerged from his shell. At the reception he moved through the crowd with Edna, talking, joking, shaking hands and hugging her. Not a trace of aloofness. Not even an awkward moment. And to top it all off, he even danced with Edna.
That put to rest the gossip that she had chosen a dud.
They returned to Prince Albert and John continued his career. But with the support of his wife, he was a stronger man.
And his legal practice had grown by leaps and bounds. He now employed two lawyers and eight secretaries and had a yearly take-home pay of $4573.00. He was one of Saskatchewan’s most prosperous lawyers.
A shotgun blast in the middle of the day. Nick Pasowesty, a successful farmer, was murdered on his own land. No one knew who pulled the trigger, but an RCMP investigation found the family weapon that fired the shell and discovered that Pasowesty was highly disliked by his neighbor and had a rather rocky relationship with his third wife, Annie. The Mounties dug deeper and quickly focused on the youngest son, John, a spendthrift seventeen-year-old who had apparently bragged about shooting his dad.
After a brief interrogation, the boy confessed to the crime. A week later he changed his tune, saying his mother had pulled the trigger. “She told me that I should say that I have killed my old man because I might get out of it somehow because she would get some lawyers for me.”
That lawyer turned out to be John Diefenbaker and this was his first murder case. He faced an uphill climb – the trial judge was Mr. Justice George E. Taylor, who had been intimidating defence lawyers for over forty years. He preferred prosecution to leniency and Diefenbaker had butted heads with him a number of times in the past.
John first questioned Annie on the stand, but several lines of inquiry were shot down by the judge. Next Diefenbaker tried to convince the judge that the boy’s first confession was inadmissible because the boy was under stress and had been arrested without being allowed to speak to his family. The judge cut Diefenbaker off and explained that the confession would stand: “I must say that I feel so convinced that I could not hope that any further consideration of the matter would alter the conclusion at which I have arrived.”
Diefenbaker began to sweat. He had to put doubt in the jury’s mind by implicating the boy’s mother. Unfortunately Diefenbaker had made a serious mistake, he hadn’t subpoenaed the RCMP officer who wrote down the boy’s second confession. Diefenbaker had believed the prosecution would call the officer. Too late, Diefenbaker asked to call his witness up. The judge disallowed the request and rebuked Diefenbaker in front of the whole courtroom. “If you want evidence,” the judge lectured, “it is your duty to get it yourself. Proceed please.”
Diefenbaker had only one choice left. He put the boy in the witness box. The prosecution carefully and politely tore holes in the boy’s suggestion that his mother was the killer. By the time the prosecution was finished, the boy looked like a cunning murderer.
“Annie Pasowesty,” Diefenbaker said in his closing arguments, “committed this crime. A schemer, a plotter, she contrived an arrangement where she could kill her husband and throw suspicion upon her son. And worse. Then she induced this boy to confess to the crime, to take that responsibility upon himself and steer all suspicion away from her.” He hoped his words would be enough to put doubt in the minds of the jury.
The prosecution continued to insist the boy could not be believed. The judge echoed that conclusion.
Five hours later the jury returned with a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced John Pasowesty to be hanged at Prince Albert jail on February 21, 1930.
It was a loss, but Diefenbaker, who disliked capital punishment, had one final ace to play. He had a psychiatrist examine the boy. The conclusion: John Pasowesty had a mental age of eight or nine years.
With this new information John petitioned the federal cabinet for clemency, and the boy’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
“I knew I wouldn’t die,” John Pasowesty sobbed as he clutched the telegram from Ottawa. “I don’t know about spending the rest of my life in jail, but I think I’ll like it better than hanging.”
For Diefenbaker, it was almost a victory.
The Pasowesty trial was immediately followed by Diefenbaker’s second murder case, which he took on without a fee. His client, a Polish immigrant named Alex Wysochan, was involved in a love triangle that ended with the death of Antena Kropa, and her husband was the only witness. Stanley Kropa’s version was that Alex Wysochan, his wife’s lover, had broken into the Kropa house while drunk and threatened to shoot him. Stanley leapt out a window then heard four shots and his wife’s anguished cry. The police arrived to find Antena fatally wounded, and her lover lying drunk beside her.
Wysochan, who spoke only through a Polish interpreter, had a different version of events. He said that Stanley had found him drinking at the Windsor Hotel and invited him home, then started a fight and pulled out a gun. Antena got between them, four shots rang out, and Antena crumpled to the ground. Wysochan collapsed in a drunken stupor.
Diefenbaker, who was suffering from his gastric ulcer and had been bedridden for parts of the trial, tried to convince the jury that Wysochan’s story was true. At first he advised his client to stay off the witness stand and say he didn’t remember anything of the night. That way the charges might be lowered to manslaughter and Wysochan would only have to spend ten years in jail. “I’m innocent, why should I?” Wysochan replied. He went to the stand. The jury, all men of British background, took an immediate dislike to this European immigrant who drank and had committed adultery.
“Admittedly, Alex Wysochan dishonoured the Kropa home,” Diefenbaker said in his closing arguments, “Admittedly, he was immoral in his relations with Antena Kropa. But he is not charged with these things. He is here today charged with the killing of Antena Kropa, the woman he loved and had no reason to kill.”
The prosecuting lawyer didn’t take a rational, calm approach to his closing arguments. Instead, he called Alex “this little rat,” “this reptile,” and “the dirty little coward.”
The jury convened for five hours, broke for the night, and in the morning returned with a guilty verdict. Wysochan was sentenced to the gallows and the judge immediately called up the next case. Diefenbaker just happened to represent the next defendant, too. He had a brutally hard day.
Diefenbaker filed an appeal for Wysochan’s verdict, but no reprieve was granted and Alex Wysochan was hanged in Prince Albert on June 20, 1930.
“A few months after the trial it was established that he was innocent,” Diefenbaker said in his memoirs. For him, to have a client hung was the ultimate failure. “My profound respect for human life is based on religious conviction. I do not believe in capital punishment.”
From 1930 to 1936 Diefenbaker fought four more murder cases. A woman accused of smothering her newborn child was found not guilty. A grand success. Diefenbaker was becoming a dramatic genius. He had learned how to use his penetrating eyes and to control his voice so the jury would hang on every word. Many a witness feared to face John in court.
Even