Practically Perfect by Dale Brawn Read Free Book Online

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. [6]
    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. [7]
    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