Drop Dead. Lorna Poplak
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Cover
Dedication
For my family
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
1 Celebrating Confederation: Three Hangings in the First Year
2 The Deadly Game of Hangman
3 The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery
4 Crowd Control
5 The Hangman’s Job
6 Treason: The Case Against Louis Riel
7 The Petticoat and the Noose
8 The Science and Art of Hanging
9 Arthur Ellis: Canada’s Most Famous Hangman
10 Reasonable Doubt
11 The Troubling Case of Wilbert Coffin
12 Steven Murray Truscott: A Kid on Death Row
13 The Last Women to Hang
14 The Last Drop
15 Under Lock and Key
16 The End of the Rope
17 Beyond Death Row
18 Britain Heads Toward Abolition
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Image Credits
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
— W.H. Auden , from “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” published in Harper’s Magazine , May 1948
Author’s Note
F or the names of people and places in this book, I have generally followed the spelling found in Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867–1976: An Inventory of Case Files in the Fonds of the Department of Justice , Government Archives Division, National Archives of Canada, 1994. I do deviate from this rule, however, when other reputable sources point to a different option.
Another word on spelling: John Robert Radclive was a prominent Canadian hangman in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some sources give his last name as Radcliffe or Ratcliff, but the name is spelled Radclive in this book.
The terms “gaol” and “jail” are variants of the same word, signifying a prison for the detention of people awaiting trial or with sentences of less than two years. Whether a specific prison is named a gaol or a jail depends on generally accepted usage: for example, Ottawa has its Carleton County Gaol as opposed to Toronto’s Don Jail.
I plowed through many statutes and other government documents in my search for materials for this book. Fortunately, I came across a medley of more exciting sources as well. Archival newspapers, for one. In earlier times, both before and after the advent of newer media such as radio and television, people depended on print media, particularly newspapers, for reports on local and world events. These papers, many of which are now available online, serve as a mine of information for modern researchers. Tucked into the reams of virtual newsprint, I found glittering nuggets of information, such as the description of a notorious hangman who snored like a “traction engine” the night before a hanging, or the fact that an axe killer was possibly insane but generally all right, except when he had been drinking, or the poignant details of a condemned person’s last meal. I am also hugely indebted to the wealth of secondary sources — books, articles, and visual and audio materials — I consulted in my efforts to provide a nuanced view of the people, places, and events that featured in the history of hanging in Canada.
Introduction
T he condemned man clutched the wooden handrail of the prisoner’s box, waiting for his sentence.
The judge was wearing a black cap and black gloves when he swept back into the courtroom. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down at the bench and began to read: “Prisoner at the Bar, it becomes my painful duty to pass the final sentence of the law upon you. You have been found guilty of murder. You will be taken from here to the place whence you came and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Death by hanging — a long-standing Canadian tradition.
Capital punishment, the execution of someone found guilty of a crime, dates back to the arrival of European explorers on our shores. In those days, if you were condemned to death, quite a wide range of methods could be used to punish you. You could be hanged, or face a firing squad, or be burned at the stake. You might even be put to death by a multiplicity of methods. For example, just after the first proper settlement was established in Quebec City in 1608, explorer Samuel de Champlain learned that a locksmith named Jean Duval was conspiring to kill him. Duval was arrested, found guilty, hanged, and strangled. Then his head was cut off and stuck on a pike on the highest rooftop of the fort, as “food for birds,” according to the nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman — a stark warning to other settlers who might be considering similar schemes. The display was also meant to serve as a stern message to the local Indigenous peoples that the newcomers meant business.
Samuel de Champlain, explorer, cartographer, and administrator of the colony of Quebec. Originally taken as authentic, this image was later found to be a false portrait, based on a 1654 engraving of Michel Particelli d’Emery.
In 1763, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the first global conflict in history, saw Britain and her allies victorious and France defeated. Large swaths of previously French-owned mainland North America, including Quebec, fell under the sovereignty of Britain. Although Canada remained a collection of separate British colonies until Confederation in 1867, a Royal Proclamation in 1763 replaced the prevailing Canadian legal system with the laws of England.
Within the criminal justice system, the British strongly favoured hanging for the punishment of capital crimes, preferably in a marketplace or similarly busy area to ensure a large audience. Why hanging? Historically, other methods were used, such as beheading for high-born folk or burning at the stake for heretics. But traditionally, the most common form of capital punishment since Saxon times was hanging. The thinking was that, even without optional extras like beheading, hanging was a pretty nasty sentence, well befitting felons found guilty of heinous crimes. By the end of the 1700s in Britain, however, the litany of crimes regarded as sufficiently horrible to warrant the death penalty had swelled to 220, including such nefarious acts as keeping company with gypsies or skulking in the dark with a blackened face.
In Canada, too, public hangings based on the English model gradually became the only method of dealing with serious crimes. As in Britain, the list was long: in the early 1800s, people were sentenced to death by hanging for more than a hundred different offences. Fraud and burglary were on the list. Two men, N. Ganson and A. Jeffreys, were hanged in 1821 for passing forged bills. In 1828, Patrick Burgan of Saint John, New Brunswick, aged eighteen or nineteen, received the death penalty for the double offence of stealing a watch and some money from his former employer and clothing from a sailors’ boarding house. Given the power and pre-eminence of religion in Canada at that time, your very life would have been in jeopardy if you were caught scrawling slogans on the side of a church. You could also be hanged for stealing your neighbour’s cow, which was the fate of B. Clement of Montreal. And just in case you