Practically Perfect by Dale Brawn Read Free Book Online Page A

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