Practically Perfect (15 page)

Once the confession was signed, Collins and his entourage were at once back on the highway to Kingston, and a few days later, to Calgary, Alberta. His trial got underway at a special sitting of the province’s superior court on November 27, 1913. Calgarians lined up hours before court opened, hoping to get a seat in the tiny courtroom. Despite the cool, late fall weather, the court was “crowded to suffocation.”
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That was especially so when Collins was sentenced. Although he sat through much of his trial with his head down, arm hanging over a railing of the prisoner’s box, apparently little interested in what was going on, the accused killer paid rapt attention when the jury returned with its verdict. After the panel’s foreman announced that Collins was guilty of murdering John Benson, Collins seemed shocked. In fact, everyone in the courtroom sat in silence. The only outward sign that Collins understood the significance of what he just heard was a change in his complexion — his face turned white, and he began licking his lips.

The trial judge was Horace Harvey, a Quaker from Ontario who three years earlier was appointed chief justice of Alberta. As soon as he heard the verdict he picked up his pen, and made ready to pass sentence. He told the jurors that he agreed with their decision, and asked Collins if he had anything to say before sentence was passed. The youthful murderer said nothing. Taking his silence as licence to proceed, the judge imposed the only sentence he could — death. Collins was to be taken back to the barracks of the Royal North West Mounted Police, and there he was to be hanged on February 17, 1914.

No one is sure what Collins was thinking, but shortly after he started his two-and-a-half month wait to die he decided not to eat. His jailors grew increasingly anxious, and the
Calgary Herald
equated his conduct to that of early twentieth-century feminists. In refusing to take nourishment, it said, the condemned man was following the example of “militant suffragettes.”
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By January 18, 1914, the condemned prisoner was near death, and jail officials decided to force feed him. That was easier said than done. It took three large guards to subdue the prisoner while a special feeding tube was forced down his throat, and even then there was no guarantee he would gain enough strength to be put to death. Making matters worse, health wise, was that as his execution drew nearer, Collins became more and more nervous, and slept little.

His mood no doubt darkened even more when carpenters began building his scaffold. The sound of hammering and the chatter of workmen could easily be heard in his cell, and even more noise was created by the crowds attracted to the jail when the top of the gallows rose above the fence surrounding the barracks. The throng milling about grew much larger the morning of the execution. Although Collins said he was prepared to die, until the very end he firmly believed his sentence would be commuted.

Because the condemned man was so weak, arrangements were made to carry him to the scaffold. When the hangman arrived at his cell shortly before 8:00 a.m., however, that was not necessary. Although in obvious physical distress, Collins walked unaided, and ascended the steps of the gallows on his own. But the journey took all the energy the twenty-two-year-old possessed, and as soon as he reached the top of the scaffold he walked to an armchair already positioned on the trap, and sat. From the moment he was tied to it things went downhill. Collins was hooded and noosed while sitting, and dropped in that position. If events had been left to take their inevitable course, there might have been a different outcome. But the hangman was anxious, and five minutes after Collins was hanged, he cut the prisoner down; the problem was, the unfortunate man was not yet dead. With an unconscious, but obviously living prisoner lying at their feet, officials debated what to do next. If precedent were a guide, the comatose killer should have been carried back up the scaffold, noosed, held over the open space where the trap doors were once closed, and dropped by guards. The debate raged for nearly twenty minutes before fate intervened and Collins died.

This photo is of a leather strap used to bind the ankles of a condemned prisoner. It took an executioner about two seconds to complete that process. On the only occasion when a prisoner refused to be bound, the executioner used the strap to beat the prisoner into submission.
Author’s photo.

Members of the coroner’s jury empanelled to confirm that the sentence of the court was carried out were required to witness the execution, and to a man were indignant. Their report makes evident the revulsion they felt.

We find that Jasper Collins died in Calgary on February 17, at the barracks of the R.N.W.M.P., as a result of partial dislocation of the neck and suffocation caused by being hanged by the neck following the sentence of death passed upon the said Jasper Collins in the Supreme Court of Alberta.

We further desire to add that in our opinion the sentence of the court was not carried out, owing to the fact that the said Jasper Collins was not hanged by the neck until dead, but was, contrary to the sentence of the court, cut down by the executioner before life was extinct.

We further desire to express our dissatisfaction with the manner in which the execution was carried out by the hangman, and we feel that in the interests of justice, and of the public weal there should be an investigation in order that future executions should be carried out properly.

We further desire to add that we do not in any way censure any other officials.
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Canada has had only one official executioner, but between 1912 and 1934 Arthur Ellis was considered by federal and provincial governments, and the general public, to be the country’s preeminent hangman. But putting people to death was a competitive business, and Ellis did not always get the work. He was, however, a relentless self-promoter, and determined to keep his name front and centre. Although the federal government has sole responsibility for the administration of criminal law and the commutation of death penalties, the sheriff of the judicial district in which someone was to be hanged was the person who hired and paid the executioner who carried out a death sentence. When Ellis heard that Collins was to be executed, he wrote Calgary’s sheriff and offered his services. He was not pleased with the response: “Received yours of February 2. Will not require you, as I have engaged a local man to look after the execution.” Ellis may not have been happy that he was denied the Collins contract, but he was downright alarmed when news reports of the botched hanging contained no reference to the name of the man who carried out the execution. A week after the hanging he contacted the press in Toronto, to set the record straight.

As a man very much in the public eye, I feel that people should know that I was not concerned in the execution at Calgary. I am well known all over Canada and it would hurt my reputation if it were thought that I was responsible. I understand that a man named Holmes, living in Calgary, was hired for the execution. He was a mere novice and I took the matter up with the attorney-general of Alberta before it took place. He would not interfere.
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If young William Jasper Collins had only kept his ill-gotten gains hidden from his Braymer neighbours for a few months, he almost certainly would have gotten away with murder.

Marie Beaulne and Philibert Lefebvre:
Poison Does the Trick

Philibert Lefebvre and Zephyr Viau had a lot in common. The men were friends, each cut wood and trapped for a living near Montpellier, in the southwest corner of the province of Quebec. In addition, both were illiterate, not gifted intellectually, and in love with the same woman. The principal difference between them was that in 1929 the sixty-two-year-old Viau was married to Marie Beaulne, the mother of his eight children, and Philibert was not.

For most of his adult life Viau left his family every year to go into the woods, where for several months he lived in a tiny shanty, chopping wood and trapping whatever animals he could find. In late 1928 he left behind not only his wife and kids, but his friend Lefebvre as well. Romance was long gone from the Viau marriage, although until his last trip into the woods there was no suggestion that loyalty had disappeared as well. That changed for some reason, and by the time Zephyr returned, his wife and his friend were in love. Beaulne gave considerable thought to what she was going to do when her husband came home. Leaving her children was not an option and divorce in a staunchly Roman Catholic settlement like the one she lived in was out of the question; in the end she concluded that murder was the only solution. In early twentieth-century Canada, when wives murdered their spouses, they usually resorted to poison, and so it was in this case.

The first time Beaule put strychnine in her husband’s soup the poison made him sick, but it certainly did not kill him. Beaulne decided to increase the dosage, and on January 22, 1929, she got it right. When the woodcutter died suddenly his neighbours were a little suspicious. Almost everyone suspected his forty-two-year-old widow was carrying on with his thirty-two-year-old friend behind Viau’s back, but that alone was not enough to suggest a murder was committed. The sense that something was not right grew, however, when Marie insisted on burying her husband right away, without waiting for the traditional period of mourning to end. Even with that, Beaulne and Lefebvre would likely have gotten away with murder had not the Reverend Lucien Polydore Major been their parish priest. Major once saw a man die from strychnine poisoning, and what Viau went through triggered a memory. He decided to contact the provincial police. When officers arrived on the scene, just about everyone they talked to told them about Beaulne and Lefebvre, and suggested that the widow’s late husband did not die a natural death.

Two weeks after Viau’s funeral the body of the woodcutter was exhumed and an autopsy performed to determine what caused his death. It did not take long to learn what happened — in the dead man’s stomach the medical examiner found enough strychnine to kill half a dozen people. Beaulne and Lefebvre were promptly taken into custody and charged with murder. Six months after Viau died in excruciating pain, the murder trial of his killers got underway. Neither denied they committed the crime, and after initially blaming each other, accepted responsibility for what they did. Although Beaulne administered the poison that killed her husband, the judge presiding over his trial blamed Lefebvre for the crime. It was he and he alone who provided both the motive and the means to carry out the murder. Worse, Zephyr Viau was given only two or three days between being poisoned and dying, hardly sufficient time to make peace with God. Lefebvre, said the visibly upset jurist, would have two months. And with that the judge told the lovers that they were to be hanged on August 23, 1929.

It soon became apparent to Beaulne’s lawyers that although the widow had neighbours, no one was her friend. After their client was sentenced to hang, the two young barristers who defended her started to circulate a petition for clemency. Over the next few weeks not a single person signed it. The lawyers persevered, however, perhaps because they saw in her case the chance to be thought of as something other than the youngest and most inexperienced members of the Hull bar. It is not known why they did not appeal their client’s verdict, but what they lacked in experience, they made up for in enthusiasm. Because both Beaulne and Lefebvre confessed to poisoning Viau, there was no point in arguing law when they filed their petition for clemency. Instead, they advanced seventeen social and moral reasons for commuting the death sentences. For one thing, the killers were raised in a community where moral and religious training were almost unheard of, a claim that likely did not go over well with the Reverend Father Major. Their ignorance, it was argued, made it impossible for them to appreciate the enormity of what they had done. The lawyers also suggested that when the trial judge asked if there was any reason why sentence should not be imposed on them, neither Beaulne nor Philibert were intellectually aware of what his words meant, or of the consequence of the sentence imposed.

As a kind of backup plan, the lawyers continued in their efforts to persuade members of the condemned couple’s parish to sign a petition in support of clemency. After several attempts, they finally had some success. In the weeks immediately preceding the scheduled execution they obtained five hundred signatures, including those of the priest whose suspicions resulted in the apprehension of Beaulne and Lefebvre, the father of the murdered man, and the father of the victim’s wife. Three days before the murderers’ date with the hangman the federal cabinet rejected their application for clemency. That same day carpenters began constructing the scaffold on which the two condemned prisoners were to die.