“The Indian Ahan,” read the dispatch in the British Columbian this date in 1865, “will have expiated his crime upon the gallows ere these lines meet the public eye. The execution will take place in the rear of the jail early this morning.”
Ahan and another Tsilhqot’in (or Chilcotin) were of the party of Klatsassin, whom we have already met in these pages. Months after the Chilcotin War’s salutary mass execution, the luckless pair were arrested trying to pay what would have been a routine-for-them bit of blood money.
Both were condemned; Lutas received clemency, and his freedom. (”I eagerly availed myself of some favorable circumstances in the case of Sutas and sent him back pardoned to his tribe. A sufficient number of Indians has now perished on the scaffold to atone for the atrocities committed last year.”)
Ahan’s execution in New Westminster, now part of the Vancouver, B.C. metropolis, isn’t dead, though — and isn’t even past.
Over the course of the past year, a public school project in the city that had been built over an old pauper’s grave that might have become the hanged man’s resting place was gravely (ahem) complicated by the continuing Tsilhqot’in search for Ahan’s remains. While Ahan’s own situation remains unresolved, the suit on his behalf eerily outlined the macabre past lurking everywhere beneath our workaday feet.
On this date in 1870, a troublesome Anglophone was shot in Fort Garry by the rebellious Metis provisional government.
The Red River “Rebellion” pitted the Métis people — Francophone mixed-race descendants of Europeans and natives, constantly referred to as “half-breeds” in the period’s literature — of the inland plains against the Canadian government that had just bought the rights to their land from the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Needless to say, this sale was not effected with reference to the consent of said land’s inhabitants, which makes the term “rebellion” something of a misnomer — rightful authority was not clearly constituted, and in this period it would be negotiated on the fly.
Distrustful of the Ontario government and the Red River Settlement’s own minority of Anglo settlers, Louis Riel led a headquarters in Upper Fort Garry.* Riel’s negotiations with Canadian authorities set the parameters for the future province of Manitoba.
Parallel to the diplomatic overtures, however, were skirmish-level military hostilities.
Scott, an Irish-born Orangeman of fiercely anti-Catholic disposition, was captured with a few dozen Anglos attempting to mount an assault on Metis holdings and imprisoned in Fort Garry. He escaped with some of the other prisoners, but was re-arrested making a return trip to attack the fort again and liberate the remaining captives.
Scott’s execution this day helped inflame anti-Metis sentiment and contributed to the Riel government’s collapse a few months later.** But the guy makes a bit of a problematic martyr because — and we want to be fair here — he seems to have been an unmitigated prick.
The leader of Scott’s fatal expedition, Charles Boulton, was likewise condemned by the Metis, but Riel pardoned Boulton and even offered to bring him into Riel’s own government. Scott, by contrast, let no one be mistaken about his contempt for the half-breeds and abused his captors; his particular sentence was procured on the grounds of having defied the provisional government’s authority and threatened Riel.
Since Riel was looking for someone to make an example of, he was the guy.
As so often with firing squads, the execution was a botch … and upon that botch was laid, according to the testimony of a Metis opponent of Riel quoted by Boulton, a downright sadistic final chapter. (It must be noted that both the original source and the man citing it have an interest in maximizing the alleged brutality of Riel.)
Six soldiers had been chosen to shoot Scott. I have here again to write the name of a man whose behaviour in that circumstance reflects on him the greatest honour. Augustin Parisien, one of the six soldiers, declared openly that he would not shoot at Scott; in fact, he took off the cap from his gun before the word of command ‘present’ was given. Of the five balls remaining, only two hit the poor victim, one on the left shoulder, and the other in the upper part of the chest above the heart. Had the other soldiers missed the mark undesignedly, or had they intentionally aimed away from Riel’s victim, it is not known. However that may be, as the two wounds were not sufficient to cause death, at least sudden death, a man, named Guillemette stepped forward and discharged the contents of a pistol close to Scott’s head while he was lying on the ground. This ball, however, took a wrong direction. It penetrated the upper part of the left cheek and came out somewhere about the cartilage of the nose. Scott was still not dead, but that did not prevent his butchers from placing him alive and still speaking, in a kind of coffin made of four rough boards. It was nailed and plated in the south-eastern bastion, and an armed soldier was placed at the door. This would seem like a story made at one’s ease, if there were not several credible witnesses who, between the hours of five and six in the evening, heard the unfortunate Scott speaking from under the lid of his coffin, and it was known that he had been shot at half-past twelve. What a long and horrible agony, and what ferocious cruelty was this on the part of his butchers. The words heard and understood by the French Metis were only these ‘My God, My God!’ Some English Metis, and those understanding English, heard distinctly these words: ‘For God’s sake take me out of here or kill me.’ Towards 11 o’clock — that is, after ten and a half hours of frightful agony — a person, whose name I shalt withhold for the present, went into the bastion, and, according to some, gave him the finishing stroke with a butcher’s knife, with a pistol, according to others. After having inflicted the last blow on poor Scott, that person said, as he was coming back from the bastion: ‘He is dead this time!’ The corpse was left for a few days in the south-eastern bastion, being guarded by the soldiers, relieving each other in turn.
* The site — most of the fort is demolished — is now in downtown Winnipeg.
** Riel himself had a colorful career ahead of him, which ultimately delivered him too to the annals of the executioner.
Just after midnight this day in 1956, Wilbert Coffin hanged for murdering three American tourists — a case that has since entered Canadian annals as a paradigmatic wrongful execution.
Under the pressure of losing tourist dollars to breathless coverage in the U.S., and with the aid of a desultory defense attorney, the Coffin case was rushed along to completion. Though sympathy in Gaspe seems to have been considerable, its elevation to cause celebre was likewise bound up in Quebec politics, pushed by foes of powerful, unscrupulous premier Maurice Duplessis.
Gadfly journalist Jacques Hebert (not the guillotined French Revolution demagogue of the same name, of course) published three books on the case (the 1963 volume immoderately titled J’accuse les assassins de Coffin landed him in jail)
While the death penalty vanished from Canada, the Coffin case has never fully faded as a public controversy. And it’s had something of a revival around the hanging’s recent 50th anniversary, with the government flirting with a posthumous pardon.
The Gaspe guitarist who appears in the above piece, Dale Boyle, makes his Wilbert Coffin song (and details about the case) available on his web site.
Lew Stoddard’s blog covers the Coffin case in exacting detail from the standpoint of a strong advocate of the hanged man’s innocence. The Coffin family itself also maintains wilbertcoffin.com, naturally dedicated to clearing Wilbert’s name.
Still, even should officialdom ultimately side with the apparent judgment in the court of public opinion, a wrongful execution is a wound that can never be salved.
I’ve often wondered what went through my brother’s mind when they came and took him out of his cell to take that last walk to be hanged. You can’t imagine what it’s been like to live with this all these years. It’s like a black, black hole that never ends.
On this date in 1864, five Tsilhqot’in warriors were hanged as common criminals in Quesnel, British Columbia, for resisting white incursion during the Chilcotin War.
The only possibly authentic image of Klatsassin extant. (From this image archive.)
An indigenous nation in northern B.C., the Tsilhqot’in or Chilcotin* had been relatively insulated — though not completely isolated; they had well-established fur-trading contacts from the early 19th century — from the colonization that had swept the continent over the preceding centuries.
In 1862, two cataclysms turned that world upside down.
First, a smallpox epidemic sweeping out of mining camps decimated the Tsilhqot’in population.
Second, gold was discovered in the adjacent inland Cariboo region — and the ensuing gold rush to the inaccessible vein saw whites laying multiple roads through Tsilhqot’in territory. At least one of the entrepreneurs racing to complete the first road might have exploited tribal labor and forced women into prostitution.
The specific internal mechanisms and deliberations that triggered the response are lost to us, but the community must have felt itself under siege — and certainly the building projects, unchecked, would serve to project crown authority into the tribal land. The roads, too, are a specific trigger in the European encounter with North American natives. If it had not been gold, it would have been something else, and soon.
The Chilcotin War or Chilcotin Uprising erupted in April 1864 when a Tsilhqot’in party slew a civilian road-building crew. Bloodthirsty rumors (sometimes unreliable) of Indian atrocities quickly set abroad in the colonial capitals.
Despite almost limitless land to disappear into, the leader, Klatsassin (or Klattasine, or Klatsassan), was captured that August with seven of his followers by the expedient of luring him under assurance that they would be treated as prisoners of war.
Instead, they were tried as common murderers. Five were condemned — including both Klatsassin and his son. (Two others were arrested the following year, and one of them hanged as well.)
In 1993, the government of British Columbia apologized for the executions.
And “Canadian Mysteries” is the apt title. “Klatsassin,” in the native tongue, simply means, “we do not know his name.”
The peak in the center of this photograph is “Mount Klattasine,” and the glacier stretching towards the upper right is also named for the hanged war chief.
* Many other transliterations are possible: e.g., Tsilqut’in, T?inlhqot’in, Chilkhodin, Tsilkótin, Tsilkotin.
On this date in 1763, a young woman shuffled off this mortal coil and into Quebecois folklore.
She’d made the mistake of outliving two husbands, and was convicted (with her father) of having been the instrument of their demise. Gibbeted after her death — a punishment not used in France, but Quebec had been captured by the English in the French and Indian War — her corpse became a figure of ghost stories and popular superstition, haunting passersby and playing poltergeist.
But why take it from me? Here’s the unhappy fate of Madame Corriveau, in puppet theater. (There’s also a compressed 12-minute version available.)
Devotees of the written word can get their fill in two 19th century texts available free from Google Books: a passage in Maple Leaves, and a historical novel in which she figures as a character, The Golden Dog. Her French Wikipedia page is here.
On this date in 1839, five French-Canadian Patriotes were hanged at Montreal’s Pied-du-Courant Prison for their parts in an abortive rebellion against British authority.
This day’s hangings were the result. And while Britain would keep Canada unified, it would never seamlessly absorb her French subjects. So the men who mounted the gallows this day, and others who fought the British, are commemorated on Quebec’s National Patriotes Day, intentionally scheduled to oppose the national — and distinctly English-flavored — Victoria Day in May.
Accounts — which also recorded that one of the hanged men was able to free a hand and resist the rope with it, and to get his feet to a supporting beam from which he had to be pushed — recalled Charles Hindelang’s final words thus:
I declare that I die with the conviction of having fulfilled my obligations with dignity. The sentence that struck me is unjust; I forgive those who bore it.
The cause for which I sacrifice myself is noble and great. I am proud of it. I don’t fear death. The blood that is spilled will be washed away with blood. Let the responsibility fall on those who deserve it.
Canadians, my final farewell is the old French cry:
On this date in 1869, Irish immigrant Patrick Whelan was hanged at Ottawa’s Nicholas Street Gaol for the assassination of Canadian politician Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
McGee, a Father of the Confederation — Canada as a self-governing dominion was only months old when he was gunned down in Ottawa — was the first politician assassinated in the country, and for a century more, the only one. He may have been a sort of proto-Michael Collins, shot by onetime fellow-travelers in the Irish nationalist movement for going legit with the English.
It’s an open question whether the tailor convicted of his murder was actually one of them. Whelan, like McGee, was an Irish immigrant and supposedly a Fenian sympathizer. He also matched the gunman’s description.
Whelan was snatched up within 24 hours and convicted on essentially circumstantial evidence.
Hanged in a snowstorm before thousands, he maintained his innocence to the end — a plea that has had its advocates in posterity, including a high-profile recent play. Whelan bolsters his own case by haunting the jail where he met his fate … a structure which still stands today, now serving as a (singularly atmospheric) hostel.
Whelan is sometimes reported as the last man publicly hanged in Canada, although apparently he is not.
On this date in 1951, Albert Guay was hanged in Canada for one of the earliest commercial airline attacks — bombing a Canadian Pacific Airline flight to murder his wife.
Stuck in a loveless marriage with little recourse to divorce, Guay’s loins burned for a young mistress.
He engaged a watchmaker colleague, Généreux Ruest, to make a bomb, and the latter’s sister, Marguerite Ruest-Pitre, to air freight it on the doomed plane. Both would maintain their innocence of the plot, but after Guay’s own conviction, he implicated both — possibly in an attempt to delay his own hanging.
A time bomb in the luggage hold of this airplane took 23 lives on September 9, 1949, for which three people were executed — and inspired a copycat crime with 44 more deaths and one more execution.
Guay had intended the plane to explode over the St. Lawrence River, eliminating the forensic evidence, but a slight delay before takeoff laid the damning debris over the land. The flight’s entire complement of four crew and nineteen passengers — including three top executives of the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation — perished.
The crime had ample media attention both north and south of the Canada-U.S. border — flight still being something of a terrifying novelty for the general public. Guay’s purchase of life insurance for his wife on the day of the trip was not inculpatory, but a standard procedure for air travelers.
Guay’s last words caught the irony of his celebrity: “Au moins, je meurs célèbre” (”At least I die famous”).
A few years after this day’s events, an American attempted a similar crime, with similar results.
Forty-five years ago today, two men linked by nothing but fate stood back to back on the gallows of Toronto’s Don Jail and became the last hanged in Canada.
The doomed men were far from Canada’s greatest criminals. The 29-year-old Turpin was a small-time thief who shot a policeman while fleeing a restaurant robbery; the 54-year-old Lucas was convicted of killing an FBI informant despite lingering questions over his guilt and his mental impairment. Both were petty criminals with little previous violence to their history, seemingly almost too small for the historical role that even on the night of their hanging they seemed probable to play.
The Last to Die is the first book about Canada’s last execution, and has been met with generalacclaim. CourtTV Canada recently profiled the story:
Executed Today: Why you, why now, why this book? What brought you to it?
Robert Horshowsky: I’ve worked as a freelance writer for almost 20 years now, and in that time, some stories were assigned to me, while others were the product of my own imagination. This book, like many before it, got its start as an article.
In 2001, I was in the library at Maclean’s magazine, where I worked as a Researcher-Reporter. They have a large section on Canadian history, and I saw a book by John Robert Colombo, who is very well known for his works on history and trivia. I believe the book was 1001 Questions About Canada. Picking up Colombo’s paperback, the first page I turned to asked, “When was the last execution in Canada?” The brief paragraph mentioned Ronald Turpin, a Canadian criminal, and Arthur Lucas, a Black man from Detroit. Both men were hanged on Dec. 11, 1962. Since it was a book of trivia, there wasn’t much more information than that, which got me thinking, “I wonder if I can pitch a story on the 40th anniversary for the December 2002 issue of Maclean’s?” Although it is a weekly news magazine, Maclean’s often ran articles on subjects of historic note, and the story I submitted on Turpin and Lucas was very well-received by the editors.
The one thing I have been accused of my entire working life is over-researching a subject, and the piece entitled “The Last Night of the Condemned” was no exception. My editor at the time said, “You’re not writing a book” in regard to the amount of research I had conducted, and I took this, perhaps subconsciously, as a challenge.
I was hooked by the stories of Turpin and Lucas for a number of reasons. There had never been a book about them, a fact that still boggles my mind. The end of the death penalty in different countries is a subject that is widely covered. The last two men to hang in England, for example, were Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans. They were executed in 1964, and a book was published about them a year later. Turpin and Lucas were hanged in 1962, and my book was published in 2007, 45 years after the fact. Of course, there were newspaper and articles about them, a chapter here and there, or a mention in a law textbook, but not much else, certainly not a book. Through my research I soon discovered that others had attempted plays and documentaries about the two, with little success. This made me wonder if the subject was cursed, which is certainly how I felt sometimes.
ET: What effect did writing the book have on you?
The book took a toll on me physically and mentally. Research at times was slow and painful, and obtaining documents – especially from the Canadian government – was a tedious and frustrating process. In Canada, we have something called the Freedom of Information and Access to Privacy Act, which I used over and over again to obtain jail records, court documents and the like on Turpin and Lucas. In the United States, I used the Freedom of Information Law to access documents on Arthur Lucas; since he was an American from Detroit, I figured there would be rap sheets and the like on him, which there were. All these documents were very useful, but getting hold of them was a real challenge, since you have to prove the person you’re inquiring about is dead, that no other persons will be incriminated or named in the documents, etc.
The hardest thing for me to deal with was the cancer that took my mother’s life in March of this year. Her last wish was that I finish this book, and I struggled against two deadlines: the publisher’s, and my mother’s. As soon as I finished a chapter, I gave it to mom to read, followed by the next. Completing the book was a bittersweet experience: although she read the entire thing, mom didn’t live long enough to see it published, passing away six weeks before it was printed. In hindsight, I’m shocked I didn’t fall to pieces. The most difficult section for me to write was the funeral of Frederick Nash, the policeman shot to death by Turpin. I wrote this after interviewing his widow, and three of his four daughters – the eldest was 11, and one of them, Karen, was only two months old when he died. That was tough, the mental image of these little kids holding flowers outside the church, not quite realizing that their father was never coming home again. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write an entire chapter about those people left behind, like officer Nash’s children, the Salvation Army chaplain who was with Turpin and Lucas when they died, and many others involved in the cases. Far too often, true crime books focus almost entirely on the killers, and not enough on the families of the victims.
ET: Canada was trending towards abolition, and Lucas and Turpin knew themselves that they might be the last ones hanged. Was it just happenstance, or was there some intentionality in pushing these cases in particular? What was the fallout in Canada?
RH: In the early 1960s, there was a push in many countries to eliminate capital punishment, and Canada was no exception. As early as 1914, a Canadian Member of Parliament named Robert Bickerdike introduced a private members’ bill for the abolition of the death penalty. Although it was defeated, there were other members’ bills over the years. In 1935, a woman named Thomasina Sarao was unintentionally decapitated during her hanging in Montreal, which led to more and more executions in Canada taking place behind closed doors. Sarao’s beheading didn’t directly lead to the end of capital punishment, but the idea of a woman dying in such a gruesome fashion certainly didn’t help the pro-death penalty camp!
Ronald Turpin
By the 1950s, more changes were made to Canada’s Criminal Code, limiting the reasons a person could be executed. By 1961, changes were made which divided murder into a capital and a non-capital crime. One of the reasons you would die was for the murder of a police officer, a crime committed by Roland Turpin when he shot Fred Nash in February of 1962. There was always the possibility that even though you were found guilty of murder, the jury could recommend mercy, sparing your life. This didn’t happen in either Turpin or Lucas’s case.
Prior to the executions of Turpin and Lucas, there were a number of appeals for both men. The Salvation Army chaplain who was spiritual advisor to both men, Cyril Everitt, even appealed to the Prime Minister at the Time, John Diefenbaker. Law professors tried to fight the hangings, with no effect.
There was no doubt Ronald Turpin killed the police officer. I believe he suffered from some sort of mania or persecution complex. This certainly wouldn’t absolve him of shooting and killing a cop, but there is no doubt – to me at least – that Turpin was mentally unstable.
Arthur Lucas
As for Arthur Lucas, there was a lot of evidence against him, and all of it was circumstantial. Chaplain Everitt wasn’t to save both men body and soul, and he believed with all his heart that Arthur Lucas was innocent.
There wasn’t so much fallout after the hangings as there was serious doubt. Doubt about the guilt of either man, especially Lucas, who was convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence. Doubt about the competency of their legal representation, which was conducted by a brilliant but alcoholic lawyer named Ross MacKay, who acted for both Turpin and Lucas. Imagine it: MacKay was just 29 years old and inexperienced. Turpin and Lucas were his first and last capital cases, and he had no budget, compared to the estimated $40,000 spent by the government to prosecute Lucas alone. On top of that, Mackay had less than three weeks between the trial of Arthur Lucas, and the trial of Ronald Turpin. There is evidence that MacKay showed up to court hung over on some days. And the majority of the newspapers were against Turpin – who had a lengthy criminal record for break-ins and the like – and Lucas, who was slow (his IQ was just 63, borderline retarded), and happened to look like a killer. Read More
ET: What about some of the other participants in this drama? Who’s the unsung character in this story?
RH: There are a number of unsung characters in the book. The two that stand out most remain Ross MacKay and Chaplain Everitt. MacKay the lawyer had a problem with the bottle all his life, but representing the last two men to be hanged in Canada just made his predicament much worse. After the trials, a popular Halloween costume among lawyers was a noose worn ‘round the neck. One lawyer would ask the other, “Who are you supposed to be?” and the response was, “One of Ross MacKay’s clients.” It was very sad, since MacKay didn’t have a hell of a lot to work with. The Canadian courts had thousands of dollars, veteran detectives, top prosecutors and forensic experts at their disposal; MacKay had a unrepentant client who murdered a policeman and left his four daughters without a father, and a menacing-looking Black American pimp who was accused of coming to Canada and murdering a witness in an FBI drug trial. Neither man drew much sympathy from the press or the public, but MacKay did his best to represent them.
Chaplain Cyril Everitt
The other key unsung hero is Chaplain Everitt. He was the Salvation Army Chaplain at Toronto’s Don Jail, where Turpin and Lucas were hanged. He befriended both men about 10 months before they were hanged, and went to see them several times a day to talk, pray, or play chess or checkers. Everitt truly believed people could be rehabilitated, and did everything he could to save the lives of these two men. Both Turpin and Lucas had lousy childhoods full of neglect and abuse, and Everitt was probably the only decent men they ever knew in their lives.
In many ways, Everitt’s bond of friendship with the two cost him more than I’m sure even he could imagine. Everitt devised a signal with the hangman, and shared it with Turpin and Lucas. The key word in the scripture he would read as they stood on the gallows was “Salvation,” and they knew the second they heard it that it meant they were about to die. He not only saw them hang, but conducted their funeral service at three in the morning with the full moon over his head. He said he would be with them “to the end,” and the man kept his word.
Perhaps there are those of us who could bear to see a stranger hanged, but a friend? Two friends? I’m not suggesting Everitt lost his mind over what happened – the man continued to do work for the Salvation Army for many years afterwards – but the experience of befriending Turpin and Lucas and seeing them die affected him for the rest of his life. He visited their unmarked graves all the time until he simply got too old and couldn’t do it any longer.
ET: It’s clear from the promotional copy that the botched hanging is a specific area you cover. What happened, and how did it stay so hush-hush in such a high-profile event?
RH: The code of secrecy among police officers is strong, but the code of silence among jail guards is virtually unbreakable. The few Don Jail guards I talked to would not go on the record under any circumstances, and one of them said he feared losing his pension if he discussed in detail what really happened to Arthur Lucas. This was 40 years after the fact. The retired police officers I spoke to were much more forthcoming, especially the homicide cops, who are a pretty fearless bunch. The extreme reluctance to talk is one of the reasons why details of the hangings didn’t come to light until many years later – in fact, some people thought Turpin and Lucas were buried on the Don Jail grounds, another common misconception.
The Don Jail’s former gallows area
The story of what happened the night of the hangings became blurred over time, even by people who were there, like Chaplain Everitt. He gave a number of interviews to the media over the years, usually on the anniversary of the hangings. In a 1981 documentary, Everitt said Turpin fainted on the way to the gallows. “They had to carry him,” said Everitt, who believed Turpin never regained consciousness. In every single interview he gave before 1981, Everitt never once mentioned Turpin fainting, nor did he reveal what happened to Lucas until a few years before he himself died in 1986.
One of the rumours is that Turpin did not just faint when he saw the noose hanging in mid-air, but that he actually dropped dead on the spot of a heart attack. If this happened today, there would have been a great kerfuffle to revive the condemned man or woman, only to have them put to death at a later time. In Canada, the common belief was callous but pragmatic: he’s going to die in a few moments, so why delay the inevitable? There was no other word except Everitt’s that Turpin fainted; one of the police detectives present at the hanging told me, “Turpin didn’t faint. He hanged.” I put a lengthy footnote in the book about this. All accounts I tracked down said Turpin was conscious when he died on the gallows. The only odd thing about his death is that there is a cemetery record that has the word “accidental” written next to his name. I’ve never had a satisfactory explanation about that one. It could be some past cemetery employee’s idea of a joke, or a one-word protest against capital punishment.
As gruesome as Turpin’s death was, Lucas’ end was far more disturbing. It was a double execution, two nooses, with both Turpin and Lucas standing back-to-back on the same platform, black hoods over their heads. No one talked about what happened to Lucas for years afterward, and many believe the hangman was drunk and responsible for the mistake, which was not the case. Lucas was practically decapitated. The image of two men dropping to their deaths is horrific enough, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to see blood spraying everywhere when one of them hits the bottom of the rope. Lucas’ head was barely clinging to the rest of his body. Now, try to imagine blood everywhere, and having to climb on a stepladder and press a stethoscope against the chest of each man in turn, listening to their dying heartbeats for almost 20 minutes. That was the responsibility of the jail doctor. The media was told the deaths of the two was “practically instantaneous,” and that’s the story that stuck for decades. Everitt only revealed what happened in 1985, a year before his own death. When he did tell his story, Everitt said the hangman miscalculated Lucas’s weight. This was not the case, since Lucas lost about 50 pounds in jail. It is likely Lucas had syphilis, which would have weakened his muscles, connective tissue and blood vessels, resulting in his near-decapitation. The awful way that Lucas died was a secret Everitt kept from his wife and son all those years.
ET: The Conservative party has made some noises about death penalty reinstatement and backed off supporting Canadian nationals on death row in the U.S. Are there any lessons today’s policymakers ought to be learning from Canada’s last hanging?
RH: Great question. First, anyone who thinks the subject of reinstatement won’t continue to be debated is fooling themselves. Bringing back capital punishment is often mentioned when names like Clifford Olson or Paul Bernardo come up, or when there is a random killing of a young person who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There will always be those who believe that the death penalty is a deterrent, which I don’t believe, for a number of reasons. The majority of us are law-abiding citizens, and few people – with the possible exception of a hit man – don’t get up the morning and think, “I’m going to kill someone today.” What often happens instead is some fool gets drunk, gets into an argument with another drunk, and punches him until he falls and bleeds to death. Is the death penalty a deterrent in that case? Being drunk isn’t an excuse, but was the man or woman’s intent to commit murder? In some instances, the reminder of capital punishment might stop someone from pulling his trigger aimed at a police officer, if they know that that move will result in their own life being taken.
If there’s anything to be learned from the lessons of the past, it is that there is often considerable doubt about a man’s guilt or innocence, despite DNA evidence and expert testimony. For every monster like Paul Bernardo there is a Guy Paul Morin, a David Milgaard, and most recently, William Mullins-Johnson, who was convicted largely on the flawed testimony of a coroner. It cost Mullins-Johnson 12 years of his life, which he will never get back. The same can’t be said for earlier Canadian convictions, like that of Wilbert Coffin, who was hanged in 1956. I wouldn’t trust the testimony of less than three independent experts in any one field if my life were on the line (one Canadian, one U.S., one European), and I certainly wouldn’t expect a Canadian court to rely on anything less.
The aptly-named 
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