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.
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 especially 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.
On this day..
- 1861: Antonino Aberastain
- 1934: Surya Sen
- 1949: Margaret "Bill" Allen, transgender
- 1830: Agnes Magnusdottir and Fridrik Sigurdsson, Iceland's last executions
- 2015: Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, filmed
- 1874: Three for misshapen love
- 1864: Samuel Wright, by contrast
- 1400: Sir Thomas Blount, "bowels burning before him"
- 1629: Anna Gurren, in the Mergentheimer Hexenprozess
- 2010: Gary Johnson
- 1959: 71 after the Cuban Revolution
- 1928: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray
Hi Monika, you obviously have fear of flying. Because acrophobia is fear of heights. Anyway, are you able to reach the UK by sea maybe? Then you could go Highlands and Islands Jeep tours and still enjoy life. Because they use jeeps only. No planes. People leave many warm words about the trips, so my friendly recommendation to you is to try it.
Extremely sad to hear about this. Now, even though the airline industry is hundreds times safer, I still have acrophobia and prefer traveling by my own car. And not to Canada.
Albert Guay was the lowest scumbag who ever lived. If I had been the executioner, I would have positioned the noose so that his neck wasn’t broken and he would have slowly strangled to death. My his rotten soul rot in hell forever!!!!!
What an asshole, instead of just killing his wife he had to go fcking overkill and blow up a plane with children on it
Albert Guay was a man who was a man who deserved to die on the Gallows. I hope when he died he chocked to
Death. I would not want to know his neck snapped making a fast death.
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