Practically Perfect (21 page)

Genio Bulega lived near the Pawluks. The day he died a neighbour arrived at the home of the retired farmer to ask for help loading hay. He found the yard strangely quiet, and decided to enter the residence to investigate. He found Bulega sitting in a chair, the top of his head blown off. A shotgun lay beside his body. One end of a piece of binder twine was tied to its trigger, and the other end was wrapped around one of the feet of the dead man. On a table across the room investigators found an unusual, unpunctuated, bloodstained letter, held in place by a carving knife. Officers immediately became suspicious when they opened the suicide note. It was dated more than a month before its author allegedly shot himself, and urged police not to suspect Pawluk of killing his wife.

Please don’t bother anybody about [Julia Pawluk] she was at my place on Monday ... she want me to go away with her and I told her I couldnt go with her she had been bothering me all summer I couldnt go with her and I cant stand her now wherever she went ... don’t bother him [John Pawluk] any because he is not to blame for anything this all I have to say goodby everybody please dont bother about his wife.
[7]

Any doubt investigators might have harboured that Bulgea was a murder rather than suicide victim was dispelled when they found blood on the inside of the letter. Not only was it impossible for Bulgea to have shot himself and then fold the note, it was unlikely he could have handled the shotgun without leaving evidence that he had done so. The gun had been wiped completely clean of fingerprints. But notwithstanding evidence pointing to his involvement in the death of Bulgea, Pawluk may still have avoided a murder conviction had he not on two separate occasions confessed to killing his wife.

The first time he unburdened himself occurred before Bulega died. A neighbour dropped by for a visit following Julia’s disappearance. Without prompting, Pawluk told his startled guest that he no longer had a wife. Asked what he had done to her, he said he shot her with a .22 rifle and buried her body under a manure pile.
[8]
Pawluk’s second confession came after Bulega’s murder, while he was being held in the Headingley jail awaiting trial for killing his wife. A friend serving a six-month sentence for obtaining goods by false pretences shared a cell with Pawluk. Again, without prompting, Pawluk confessed to killing his wife. “I hope, now that they have me, they will hang me right away. I don’t want to be continually pulled around in the courts.”
[9]

Manitoba’s cemetery of the executed, where the unclaimed bodies of men hanged in the province between 1932 and 1952 were reinterred after a flooding Red River destroyed the area in which they were first buried. The body of John Pawluk and a handful of other men were moved about a mile west of the jail. There they were interred in a small cemetery located in the middle of a field.
Author’s photo.

Pawluk need not have worried. Despite taking the stand to deny making either confession, a jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of guilty. Pawluk did not react when he was sentenced to death, and after his judge left the courtroom he calmly relit a half burned cigarette and walked back to his cell with a smile on his face. There were no smiles two months later when the forty-nine-year-old was led out of the death cell that connects to the gallows at the Headingley jail. Less than sixty seconds after Pawluk started his walk the trap was sprung. The
Winnipeg Free Press
summed up the feeling of those who witnessed the execution. “Had he been less talkative it might have been difficult to connect him definitely with the killing.”
[10]

John Pawluk was hanged on August 21, 1936, and buried near the Assiniboine River on the grounds of the Headingley jail. Thirty-eight years later his and fifteen other bodies were disinterred and reburied in a small enclosure a mile west.

James Alfred Kelsey: A Tendency to Talk Too Much

James Kelsey was a good person who did a terrible thing, but were it not for his tendency to talk too much, he would almost certainly have gotten away with the perfect murder, despite the fact that the person he and his brother beat to death was a close family friend.

In December 1959, Kelsey and his brother Lloyd Cross lived in Welland, Ontario. Although he had no record and was never involved in crime, Kelsey listened when his sibling talked of a way the pair could make some easy money. They were drinking at the Reeta Hotel when Lloyd said all they had to do was hire Sam Delibasich, a family friend and local cabbie, to drive them out of town. Then they would knock him out, take his cab to Toronto, and sell it to a used car dealer. On December 9, that is what they did. They asked Delibasich to drive them to St. Catharines. When they were only a few miles out of Welland the brothers asked the taxi driver to turn down a deserted side road, and then told him to stop. The three men smoked cigarettes for a bit before Kelsey quietly drew from his clothes a hammer and hit Dalibasich over the head. Cross then grabbed the weapon and hit their friend a second time. The badly injured driver managed to get out of the taxi and he started running across a field, closely pursued by Cross. When the elder brother caught up, he knocked Dalibasich to the ground. The winded and frightened cabbie held up his wallet, and as Cross took it Kelsey arrived on the scene. He told his brother that they had to kill Dalibasich, because if they did not, he would go straight to the authorities. “To make sure, I stuck an ice pick into Sam’s back.”
[11]
In fact, it turned out that Kelsey stuck it in three times while Dalibasich was alive, and another three after he died.

The brothers left their victim lying in the field and drove to Toronto, stopping once to throw into Lake Ontario some of his belongings, together with the hammer and the ice-pick. When they reached Toronto, the killers made several attempts to sell the cab, but there were no buyers, so they abandoned it on a downtown street. Kelsey and Cross then checked into a hotel, and the next day made their way back to Welland. A resident of the apartment building in front of which Dalibasich’s vehicle was left noticed it, and after three or four days contacted the police. They promptly had the cab towed away. The body of Dalibasich, meanwhile, lay unnoticed until December 17, when it was discovered by a rabbit hunter. Although the police quickly connected the body with the cab abandoned in Toronto, they had nothing else to work on, and their investigation ground to a halt. That is the way things would likely have remained were it not for a radio program.

Sometime in the two years following the murder Kelsey moved to Niagara Falls, New York, and a group of his childhood buddies began driving across the border for regular visits. In September 1951, the guys decided to take a trip to Buffalo, and on the way they listened to the radio program
Gang Busters
. When it ended Kelsey asked if anyone remembered the Dalibasich murder. Without waiting for a response, he started to talk. Aubrey Merritt was likely Kelsey’s best friend, and for the next several months brooded over what he heard. In January 1952, he got in touch with the Welland police. When they interviewed Kelsey’s girlfriend, she said she too was told about his involvement in the murder. With that investigators decided they had enough to lay charges against the brothers, and they were charged with murder. Kelsey made it easy for investigators — he confessed to everything. He even agreed to accompany the police to Toronto. Along the way he pointed out the various stops he and his brother made more than two years earlier. Kelsey showed investigators the road leading to the field where the murder occurred, and where he and his brother threw the murder weapons into Toronto Bay. In Toronto Kelsey took officers to one of the used car lots where they tried to sell the cab, and to the spot on Bloor Street where it was abandoned.

The Crown decided to proceed against Kelsey first, and on March 10, 1952, his preliminary hearing got underway in Welland. Even at this stage if the young killer kept his mouth shut, he may have gotten off. But when he was asked if he had anything to say, he held nothing back. Kelsey’s two confessions were the only direct evidence the police had linking him to the murder of Dalibasich, so it did not come as much of a surprise when during his September trial he repudiated everything. He also refused to testify on his own behalf. That meant that all his lawyer could do was to introduce evidence of his previously good character, and argue that there was nothing in his past to suggest he would have allowed himself to become involved in such a brutal murder. His former girlfriend said the same thing. Asked if she believed what her boyfriend told her about his involvement with the Dalibasich murder, she said no, she did not. “I didn’t believe him because he was always a good guy.”
[12]

But by then it was too late. Since Kelsey did not challenge the evidence heard by jurors, and no evidence was led to suggest he had a reason to incriminate himself in a murder, the jury was free to accept as truthful everything they heard. On September 18, it returned a verdict of guilty. To make matters even worse for Kelsey, jurors refused to append to their decision a recommendation for mercy. The convicted killer was sentenced to hang early in the new year. Before then, however, his lawyer appealed the verdict to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Although it dismissed the request, it did grant a stay of execution until March 10, 1953, so Kelsey could take his request for a new trial to the Supreme Court of Canada. That meant he would be alive to give evidence at the trial of his brother, which got underway in mid-January. Kelsey again refused to testify. Since he was already on death row, there was nothing the Crown could do to force him to change his mind. For his part, Cross denied any involvement in the murder. According to his legal counsel, Kelsey acted alone when he murdered Dalibasich, and the lawyer told jury members they should not believe anything Cross’s brother told the police. After all, Kelsey was not only a deserter from the Canadian army; he was “a low character.”
[13]
The jury seemed to agree, and on January 13, 1953, it found the accused not guilty.

A month and a week later the Supreme Court heard Kelsey’s appeal, and reserved judgment. Kelsey’s death sentence was postponed pending their decision. On March 16, Kelsey was once again advised that he was to hang. Before that could happen, however, the federal cabinet commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. With that, the man who talked too much was transferred from his death cell to Kingston Penitentiary.

Killers on the Run

Walter Pavlukoff and Henry Séguin had a lot in common. Both were carpenters, both spent much of their adult life in prison, and both escaped after committing murder. Pavlukoff was a native of British Columbia and fled a massive manhunt to live for years in Ontario. Séguin did the opposite: he murdered in Ontario and hid out on Canada’s west coast. They had more than one thing in common, but the most memorable is that just before they were to be hanged, each committed suicide virtually in front of their death watch.

Henry Séguin: From Ontario to British Columbia

The execution was to have taken place at midnight. Everything was ready.
A grave was dug the day before, hacked out of the frozen ground in a section of the jail courtyard near the outdoor scaffold. The executioner arrived from Montreal about forty-eight hours earlier, and after supervising construction of the gallows was killing time in the office of the prison warden. Nearby, police officials from Ontario and British Columbia were chatting in small groups. Just before the condemned prisoner was to begin his death walk he asked for privacy while he used his night pail. When his priest entered his cell a few minutes later, everything started to go sideways. Within minutes the killer lay dead. How it came to this is the stuff of fiction.

The story started in either Cornwall or Maxville, depending on whether you begin with the killer or his victim. Henry Séguin was born in Cornwall, a city in eastern Ontario approximately four hundred kilometres east of Toronto. Maxville, the hometown of his victim, is thirty-two kilometres north. To suggest that Séguin had a troubled childhood is a gross understatement. He was only nine when he was convicted of break, enter, and theft and sentenced to an indefinite term in an industrial school run by a Roman Catholic order known as the Christian Brothers. He was released four years later.

Six months after leaving St. Joseph’s Industrial School Séguin was back, again convicted of theft. Within days of re-entering the facility he escaped, albeit for only a day. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday he was sent home, where his criminal career began in earnest. With only a grade two education and no occupational skills, he took to crime as naturally as a Labrador retriever to water. Less than a year after being paroled from St. Joseph’s he was sentenced to a seven month term in a provincial jail, and no sooner had he been released than he received a suspended sentence for another theft. Within weeks he was arrested yet again, re-entering the Guelph jail as a seasoned criminal. It could have been worse. A more serious charge of robbery with violence was dismissed on a technicality.