Practically Perfect (8 page)

Although McKay’s background demanded that police look into the possibility that his death was connected to Operation Decode, Hansen’s history suggested he was a more likely suspect, and within hours of the murder of his neighbour the police arrived on his doorstep. Hansen admitted that before the shooting he was walking in the bush near the victim’s house, but said he was over a kilometre away. When he heard gun shots Hansen said his first thought was that someone was shooting at geese on the small lake that bordered his property. By the time he reached the road, police cars were everywhere.

Hansen was seen by some of those attracted to the McKay yard-site by the sound of shooting, a solitary figure standing a few dozen yards north of where his best friend lay dead. It struck many as odd that Hansen just stood watching, and then casually turned and walked into his farm yard. It was not the reaction expected of a next door neighbour, let alone a friend. The story of the murder, however, actually started twenty-two years earlier, over an argument about a tree.

Much of the land around Erickson, a town about an hour’s drive north of Brandon, is owned by the Crown. The right to graze cattle and cut timber is often given to owners of property adjacent to Crown land. Occasionally the rights are split, so one neighbour has grazing rights, another the right to cut trees. In 1976 Hansen owned grazing rights on land across a municipal road from his farm. Joseph Baraniuk was his neighbour and a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor, and he owned timber rights on the same parcel of land. The day before Baraniuk was killed he and a friend were harvesting trees opposite the farm of Hansen. Their efforts attracted his attention, and Hansen confronted the men. Baraniuk told him that he had the right to cut whatever timber he wanted, including the tree Hansen told the men was special to him. With that Hansen turned and walked away. The next afternoon the timber-cutters returned, and Hansen was waiting. While his friend was skidding logs out of the bush, Baraniuk worked alone. Hansen walked up to him and shot him in the chest with a single blast from his 12-gauge shotgun. He then reloaded, stood over Baraniuk, and shot him in the head.

Six months later Hansen pled guilty to a charge of second degree murder, and was sentenced to life in prison. During his sentencing the statement he gave police was read into the court record. In it he said the land on which his victim had been cutting trees had always been important to his family.

That land has been the best part of our families’ holdings for as long as I can remember and people have always more or less respected it as if it were our property. We left the bush close by because it looked nice. Lots of times the cows would lie under that tree and chew their cud when they came home. When I saw that greedy bastard cut down that tree I just went completely berserk and shot him.
[40]

When he was paroled from prison Hansen returned to his farm. One afternoon while having coffee with friends he was asked what it felt like to kill someone. He looked up and, without any trace of emotion, said “It’s not as hard as you’d think.”
[41]

As McKay drove out of his yard the Thursday morning he was murdered he may have been thinking of his son, born a few weeks earlier; or perhaps he was reflecting on how much more comfortable his life was now, compared to the two years he and his wife spent on the road waiting for publicity over his “secret agent” work to die down. It was work he made no attempt to keep secret, certainly not from Hansen. “The first time I met him, that’s when he told me the story of being a secret agent. Anybody he’d made friends with, he’d tell them what he did and why he did it.”
[42]
Hansen talked about his victim a lot in the days following McKay’s murder. In one interview he said that, “He told me he heard there was a $50,000 award on him dead and $100,000 if he was brought in alive because they wanted to run him through a combine. But I don’t think he was scared. He was proud of what he had done.”
[43]

Although there is no evidence reporters covering the murder investigation noticed discrepancies in the various statements Hansen made to the press, the differences were there. In a comment made the day after the shooting Hansen said when he walked out of the bush he saw six police cars surrounding the victim’s truck. Five days later he changed his story.
Now when he came out of the bush he saw only the victim’s truck, and nothing else. Nobody was around, and no vehicles were in the area, which was why he was stunned when the police arrived an hour later and informed him that “his good friend had been killed.”
[44]

This photo is of the area directly beneath the gallows at Manitoba’s Headingley jail. The partially covered pit served two purposes. It provided a margin of error for cases when a prisoner was dropped further than intended, avoiding a repeat of one case in which an unconscious killer slowly strangled to death while suspended on his knees. The pit also was the collection point into which urine and other body fluids dripped. The four-step set of stairs beside the pit was used by jail doctors to check the heartbeat of executed prisoners.
Author’s photo.

During his funeral McKay’s pastor spoke of the close relationship the deceased had with Hansen. The dead man often invited his neighbour over for meals, and Hansen was like a grandfather to McKay’s son. The two were so close that McKay’s widow asked her neighbour to sing at John’s funeral. Ironically, the song Hansen chose was “I have a Friend.”

Two months after the shooting Hansen was convicted of dangerous driving and driving while impaired. Because he was still on parole from the murder of his “other” neighbour, he was sent back to Stony Mountain Penitentiary for violating the conditions under which he had been released. In mid-September 1998, Hansen hanged himself in his cell. A police spokesperson said “it would be premature to suggest the case is closed as a result of the suicide.”
[45]
Nonetheless, the RCMP ended its investigation.

A week after Hansen committed suicide he was buried in the same cemetery as his best friend. The man he killed nearly a quarter of a century earlier is buried six miles west.

3

Reprieved to Kill Again

One of the arguments often advanced against giving convicted killers a second chance is that they might use it to murder again. All three stories in this chapter are of individuals who murdered someone, were sent to death row, and at the last minute had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Each of them used their second chance to kill again.

Garry Richard Barrett:
One Second Chance Too Many

Garry Richard Barrett likely did not deserve all the second chances life gave him. He had two opportunities to be a loyal husband and loving father, but threw them away when he murdered his stepson. Then the federal government commuted his death sentence, and gave him a chance to make something of what remained of his life. That opportunity was also squandered. Instead of being thankful for what he had been given, Barrett grew increasingly resentful and morose and with one swing of an axe assured himself a place in Canadian history, becoming one of few people hanged in a federal penitentiary.

Although Barrett was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1852, his descent into self-destruction and murder started when he was about to turn fifty. The father of eight got a job on the railway, and deserted his wife and children to start a new life on the American frontier. He eventually settled in Utah, where in due course he met a widowed mother of three. His Mormon wife-to-be was a practical woman, and accepted the realities of the time, which suggested she was better off with a man she did not love than with no man at all. So it was that Barrett converted to Mormonism, and with his new family in tow, headed for northern Saskatchewan. The Barretts put down roots at Egg Lake, approximately fifty-eight kilometres north of Prince Albert. While the widow Johnson and her children were accepted in the tiny community at face value, the same could not be said of Barrett. He was a gloomy man, given to wild swings of emotion, and it was apparent to even a casual observer that he was struggling with inner demons. The birth of a baby boy did little to calm him, and he grew preoccupied with the idea of killing his family, and ending his misery. Some nights he sat alone in the kitchen, oblivious to the sounds of the children and his wife’s entreaties to come to bed. Around 11:00 p.m. on October 13, 1907, he came to some kind of resolution. When he went upstairs his wife was already in bed, but instead of joining her, he sat in the darkness and began talking.

He told his wife that he felt that he was nothing but a servant. Everything on the farm belonged to her, including the cows and pigs, even the chickens. He was going to slaughter them all, thereby removing the barrier he felt separated her from him. His straight-laced wife had suffered through similar rants of self-loathing for months, and was fed up. Go ahead, she said, kill everything, just pay me what the animals are worth. She told him that she gladly would take the kids and head back to Utah. Her lack of sympathy for what he was going through incensed Barrett, and he grabbed a revolver and forced his wife onto her knees. The widow’s two eldest children heard the commotion, and silently edged into their parent’s bedroom. There they saw Barrett walk over to their mother, put the gun to her head, and pull the trigger. But instead of an explosion, all they heard was a click. The sound galvanized twelve-year-old Burnell, and he grabbed his stepfather’s arm. Barrett flung the young man off, pointed the gun at him, and once more pulled the trigger. This time the pistol worked. The bullet hit Burnell’s arm, severing an artery. The boy’s mother struggled to her feet in an attempt to help her son, but Barrett forced her back to the floor, and for the second time, threatened to kill her. After what must have seemed an eternity to his wife, Barrett suddenly turned and left the room.

Burnell’s mother bound her son’s arm in an effort to stem the flow of blood pouring from the wound, then left him with his sister while she ran to the home of her nearest neighbour, two miles away. Within minutes a group of armed men descended on the Barrett residence. They found Barrett trying to re-bind the bandage now soaked in blood. The posse took control of Burnell and his stepfather, loaded both into a wagon, and headed for Prince Albert. When they arrived the men turned Barrett over to the police and rushed Burnell to the hospital. He was in critical condition, and although he hung on for a week, he was never given much chance of surviving. Barrett was charged with murder, and a little less than eight months later he went to trial. When the authorities were able to prove that the alleged killer was never legally married to his victim’s mother, she was allowed to testify. But even without her evidence it was obvious that Barrett killed his stepson. The only real question was whether it was an accident or murder. The trial got underway on June 2, 1908, and lasted two days. Barrett took the stand in his own defence, and testified that all he wanted to do was scare his wife; he never meant to hurt anyone. “It was me that done it,” he told jurors, “but it was an accident. It was a self-cocker and it went off.”
[1]
Ethel, the younger of his two stepdaughters, disagreed. “There was no accident about it. I seen him turn and shoot my brother.”
[2]

Members of his jury did not believe Barrett’s version of events, but while they had no doubt that the shooting was murder, they had qualms about whether Barrett should hang. The federal cabinet shared their misgivings, especially after the minister of justice informed it that with proper treatment Burnell Johnson should not have died. Shortly before he was to hang Barrett was informed that his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. With that the killer was transferred to the Alberta Penitentiary at Edmonton, and for what remained of his life was known as “Prisoner 135.”

Barrett never adjusted to life in jail, and he grew increasingly morose and dejected, obsessed by what he felt was an unjust verdict. He certainly never learned to appreciate what the Edmonton penitentiary had to offer. It was one of the country’s newest prisons, with room for thirty-seven male and five female inmates, and featured two kitchens, a library, and several large workrooms. Shortly after entering the facility Barrett was diagnosed with a heart condition. To protect what remained of his health he was reassigned from heavy duty to the carpentry shop, where he was made a runner. Six months after entering prison he asked Richard Stedman, the deputy warden, for permission to see the doctor. Like Stedman, Barrett was a Mason, and he no doubt expected that his request would be granted. But Stedman said no. Barrett asked again, several times, and on each occasion Stedman turned him down. There was nothing physically wrong with Barrett, he said, and after every request the convicted killer was returned to the carpentry shop, where he and four fellow inmates worked under a supervisor and a handful of guards.

For the next three months things settled into a routine. Barrett was his gloomy self, and made it clear to one and all that he hated his surroundings. In hindsight, the warning signs should have been obvious. As Barrett grew more despondent, he began complaining that Stedman was using Masonic symbols to threaten and torment him. His mood darkened, just as it had a year and a half earlier. Still, on April 15, 1909, no one, least of all Stedman, was concerned when the deputy warden entered the carpentry shop. Stedman walked past Barrett to the shop supervisor, who wanted to show him a chain he just finished repairing. Neither noticed Barrett pick up a hatchet. As Stedman leaned over to inspect the chain, Barrett moved up behind him and struck the unsuspecting man on the back of his neck, nearly decapitating him. Blood spurted everywhere, completely covering the bench and everything on it, including the mortally wounded deputy warden. One of the inmates working near Stedman rushed over and tried to help. The deputy was tugging at one of his pockets, and the prisoner asked if he wanted his watch. Stedman could only manage “time” before collapsing.