Practically Perfect (2 page)

The two lovers might have produced and murdered even more children had they not fought in the summer of 1932. A stable on Stawycznyk’s farm burned earlier in the year, and just weeks after it was rebuilt, it was destroyed again. The first fire may have been an accident, but this time there was absolutely no doubt in Stawycznyk’s mind who was responsible. The bloom, it seems, had withered in his relationship with Yatchuk, and Stawycznyk was convinced that his former lover burned his stable to get even. They fought until November, when Yatchuk put an end to things — literally. She wrote an anonymous letter to the Angusville justice of the peace, suggesting that the authorities might want to look into what happened to five children who, over a period of four years, disappeared from the home of Pauline Yatchuk.

From that point on events unfolded rapidly, and on November 28 the police arrived in force on the Yatchuk acreage. Officers later commented on how surprised they were that Pauline was so willing to talk. In fact, as soon as they asked about the missing babies, she started telling them about her relationship with Stawycznyk and what the two had done. She admitted that she was responsible for the death of one of her babies and accused Fred of killing the others. When she finished confessing, Yatchuk led investigators into her snow-covered yard. Officers with shovels followed her around and wherever she pointed, they dug. The first box was discovered about forty yards from the Yatchuk shack, near a well. The next was located in a garden a few feet away. Then the twins were brought up, and after them, the last victim. With a police officer standing nearby, Stawycznyk watched the digging, periodically complaining about the cold. At one point there was no body where Yatchuk pointed, and he told a policeman to dig a little to one side, through about three feet of snow. Instead, the officer handed the alleged killer a shovel and told him to get to it. It took Stawycznyk only a minute or two to uncover the spot where the body of the last baby was interred. There was not much left, and the district coroner could not confirm whether all, or indeed any, of the children died a violent death.

As soon as the police discovered the remains of the five infants, they took Stawycznyk and Yatchuk into custody and charged them with murder. Yatchuk had already confessed her part in the deaths of the babies, but Stawycznyk denied murdering anyone. He told investigators that he knew where the body of the fifth baby was buried only because he put it there, after he was told to do so by Yatchuk. Besides, he said, he was not the only man with whom she was carrying on.

Less than two weeks later preliminary hearings were held to determine if there was sufficient evidence to commit the pair to trial. Stawycznyk went first. The story Yatchuk told at his hearing was identical to the statement she gave police, and Stawycznyk was bound over for trial. At the end of Yatchuk’s own preliminary, the presiding magistrate decided there was evidence that the fifth child was stillborn and not murdered, and he directed that the murder charges laid against Yatchuk be replaced with charges of concealing a birth. There is some doubt whether that was an appropriate decision. Sixteen days after her preliminary hearing ended, Yatchuk was overheard confessing that she killed her babies by herself.

Nonetheless, when Stawycznyk’s murder trial got underway in early April 1933, he alone was charged with murder. In the months the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spent investigating the infant deaths, a number of evidentiary problems arose. As a result, the Crown decided to withdraw one of the five murder charges laid against Stawycznyk and replace it with a single count of concealing a birth. The Crown would proceed with one murder charge at a time and continue with separate trials until it obtained a conviction. If they did not obtain one, Stawycznyk would be tried on the charge of concealing a birth. Yatchuk would be prosecuted on just four charges of concealment.

As was the case during his preliminary hearing, the principal witness against Stawycznyk was the mother of the babies he was charged with killing. One of the few things to which Yatchuk testified that had not come out earlier was that although she was living from hand to mouth, not once did her lover provide her with financial assistance. In fact, in the five years Stawycznyk carried on his affair with Yatchuk, few people actually saw the couple together. The most neighbours could say was that they noticed Stawyscznyk at the Yatchuk shack “several” times, although a few admitted to being present on one occasion when the two fought and Yatchuk accused Stawycznyk of ruining her life. Even the woman’s thirteen-year-old son was a reluctant witness. All the Crown was able to get him to admit was that his neighbour was a “frequent” visitor.

The jurors empanelled to decide the fate of Fred Stawycznyk sat through four days of testimony, including that given by the accused. He denied murdering the babies and said the only crime he committed was burying the last of Yatchuk’s five illegitimate infants. Under cross-examination, however, he did admit to not wanting any more children, and testified that if his daughter and twin boys found out there was to be a new member of the family, they would leave him. Ninety minutes after it started deliberating, the jury returned with its verdict — Stawycznyk was to be hanged on July 12, in Manitoba’s new indoor death chamber. It took a few moments before the convicted killer realized what he heard, and when he did, tears began streaming down his face. His voice shaking with emotion, he repeated that he did nothing wrong, that the court was ordering an innocent man to be hanged.

By a vote of two-to-one the Manitoba Court of Appeal turned down Stawycznyk’s request for a new trial. The dissenting judge said that in his opinion an injustice had been done to the accused and he urged his colleagues to join him in ordering a new trial. That was not to be, nor was the condemned killer granted clemency, but by then the Angusville farmer seemed to have accepted his fate.

Fred Stawycznyk was a rarity in the annals of Canadian executions; he helped his lover murder at least four of the children born to the couple. Because of the crime for which he died, Stawycznyk was not buried on consecrated grounds. Instead, he was interred in an area a few feet north of the cemetery.
Author’s photo.

The death cell in the Headingley jail, where Stawycznyk spent his last months, is separated from the gallows by a single door. The distance from the cell to the traps is no more than three metres, and Stawycznyk walked it unaided. He stood without moving while his executioner pinioned his legs, calmly looking around the small chamber. Just before the hood was pulled over his head, Stawycznyk was asked if he had any last words. He did, although not many. In Ukrainian he said, “I thank everybody here for the way they treated me, because I am innocent and prepared to meet my Maker.”
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His statement was translated into English by a prison guard, and seconds later the trapdoors on which Stawycznyk stood were opened. For the next twenty minutes his body was suspended over a shallow pit dug into the floor of the room below, to ensure that his feet did not make contact with the ground.

Fred Stawycznyk’s body was claimed by his sons a few hours after he was executed, and it was returned to Augusville. There it was interred close to (but not quite in) a cemetery near the family farm.

William Bahrey: The Brothers in the Haystacks

William Bahrey had a confused sense of propriety when it came to women. On the one hand, he was fiercely protective of his two sisters, particularly Annie. When it turned out that the man she married in the summer of 1931 already had a wife, William killed him to preserve his wife’s honour. Yet shortly after his older brother Alexander married Dora, he began an affair with his sister-in-law. After Alex began abusing her, William killed him too. Despite having the intelligence of a ten-year-old, and the subtlety of a hammer, he got completely away with the first murder; and if he had kept his mouth shut, he would never have been linked to his brother’s death, either.

When the whole business started, Alexander and Dora Bahrey were no longer newlyweds. Although they were still in their twenties, they had a number of things going for them. Alexander was short, very heavy, and not much of a farmer, but he owned his own land, and in the Whitlow district of south-central Saskatchewan he was the go-to guy when it came to bootleg liquor or stolen wheat. William had a homestead next to his brother’s, and helped Alex in his illegal endeavours whenever he could. Above all else, however, William was devoted to his sister-in-law. Alexander knew of the affair, and while it bothered him, he did nothing to bring it to an end. In the fall of 1931 circumstances dictated that the brothers temporarily put aside their squabbling over Dora. Annie Bahrey had been married only a few months when someone found out that her husband, Nestor Tereschuk, already had a wife in Poland. That did not sit well with the Bahreys, yet had Tereschuk not started abusing Annie, it was likely something the family was prepared to overlook. But after the couple separated, and Annie moved in with Alex and Dora, the wound festered.

For a while it looked like the federal government was going to preserve the honour of the Bahrey family for them. It started proceedings to deport Tereschuk to his native Poland, removing the problem without resorting to violence. But the government allowed the bigamist to remain in Canada until everything was concluded, provided Tereschuk reported in every month to the North Battleford detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The wheels of government grind slowly, however, and in the fall of 1932 William decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. On October 31, Tereschuk showed up at Alexander’s farm, where William was visiting, and during the ensuing conversation William learned that Alexander, Dora, and Annie were going to spend the night at his father’s home, six miles away. Tereschuk was not invited. On his way home, William decided this was the perfect time to exact revenge for the dishonour Tereschuk brought on the Bahreys. With his .22 calibre rifle in hand, he walked to a nearby hill, and looked down at his brother’s house. When he saw three people come out, he put his plan in action. William ran to Alex’s barn, and waited. From his vantage point he was ideally positioned to shoot Tereschuk when he left Alexander’s house; but instead of walking past the barn, as William thought he was going to do, Tereschuk went around it.

When he saw his brother-in-law holding a rifle, Nestor knew immediately what he was intending to do, and begged him not to shoot. William ignored him and hit the startled man with the butt of the gun, stunning him. He then picked up the hub of a buggy wheel, which was lying nearby, and beat him to death. Bahrey dragged Tereschuk’s body to a flat area below the house, and as soon as it was dark, came back with his horse. Out of an abundance of caution he shot his brother-in-law in the head, from point-blank range. After that he looped a rope around the feet of the dead man and dragged Tereschuk’s corpse four kilometres to the haystack of a neighbour. The homestead was vacant, and Bahrey had all the time he needed to bury the body in the hay and then set the stack on fire. On the way home he threw the rifle into a creek. At his brother’s farm he found a cap, which apparently fell off the head of his victim when he dragged the man’s body to the haystack. He shoved it down a gopher hole, and covered it with a rock.

In retrospect, it is unlikely that William murdered his brother-in-law without the consent of his father, or at least the knowledge of his family. Immediately after the murder he told his sister he killed her husband, and within days everyone in the district was aware of what happened. Everyone, that is, except Dora.

All the Bahreys knew of the killing of Nestor Tereschuk … the whole bunch knew before I did because they were talking between themselves. When someone said they were afraid that Nestor might come back, the Bahreys said he will never come back. If I would spread this [to the authorities], they would punish me. I am only one, they are a whole bunch. I was a stranger and they were no good to me.
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Until Bahrey confessed to the killing nearly a year later, no one in authority had a clue that Tereschuk was dead.

It is a little ironic that when William talked to Dora of murdering Nestor, he told her that “if Tereschuk don’t know how to live properly with a wife here, we don’t want him.”
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Five months after murdering his brother-in-law, William grew tired of the way his brother was treating Dora. Alex was a brutal man, with little affection and no respect for his wife. So William decided that he too must die.

Within months of their wedding, Alex started beating his new wife, causing her to complain in front of his family that she would rather hit herself with stones than have her husband continue striking her.
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Over time Alexander’s ill treatment progressed from cruelty to brutality. The day after Dora gave birth to the couple’s first child Alex left for a day or two. Before he did, he barricaded the pathway from the couple’s house to the woodpile, forcing Dora to walk through waist-high snow to gather kindling for a fire. When her husband returned she complained. “Don’t you know that a woman will die if she goes out in the snow to get wood the day after a child is born?” He told her that was exactly what he had in mind. “I want it that way for you to die.”
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Despite the fact that most of their fights took place in front of family members, no one aside from William expressed any sympathy for what Dora was going through. After one particularly heated exchange, Alexander asked Nestor what he thought should be done with his wife. The men debated, in her presence, whether it would be better to put a stone around her neck and throw her into a well, or just kill her.
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