The man with the dubious distinction of being the last, lone murderer to await execution on death row at the Don Jail was Quebecker René Vaillancourt.
Not content with sowing mayhem in his native Montreal, Vaillancourt, out on bail at the time, made his way to Toronto on January 31, 1973, to rob a bank. The Toronto Star later reported that the twenty-four-year-old had already racked up thirty-six charges for relatively minor crimes such as breaking and entering, car theft, public mischief, possession of stolen goods, and skipping bail. He had a significant piece of stolen property in his possession when he cruised into town in his black Oldsmobile: a .38-calibre Smith & Wesson Special that he had taken from the house of a policeman.
He later told police that after spending the night at the Gladstone Hotel, he got up early and drove around, finally settling on a promising target: a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch at Danforth and Coxwell avenues in east Toronto. Parking his own car, he “borrowed” a 1965 Pontiac Parisienne to use as a getaway vehicle. His normal haul for breaking and entering in Montreal was only around $200, but he was hopeful — Toronto banks had way more money. He was correct in this assumption, as the robbery netted him the tidy sum of $1,800. He fled in the Pontiac, which he dumped on nearby Drayton Avenue. Then, he headed toward his own car on foot.
Constable Leslie Maitland, accompanied by trainee Constable Brian McCullum, was in the neighbourhood responding to a call about a bank robbery, probably the one Vaillancourt had just committed. Spotting Vaillancourt in the street, Maitland pulled over his police cruiser and stepped out to speak to him.
As reported in the Star, this was how Vaillancourt described what ensued: “When I seen that he was coming for me I took out my gun. He was about seven feet from me and I told him to give me his gun. I waved my gun at him. He didn’t do it and he told me to give my gun to him. He kept coming towards me. He wanted to catch me. I just shot and he fell down on the side walk.”
The first bullet struck Maitland in the chest, and he was probably dead before he hit the ground.
“I chased the other policeman trying to shoot him. He didn’t have a gun out. I got in the car and shot at him from inside the car.”
McCullum did not take out a weapon because he didn’t have one. As a trainee, he was unarmed. It was his lucky day. Vaillancourt fired at least four bullets in his direction but all of them missed.
Maitland, a six-year veteran of the Metro Toronto Police, was a married man with two young boys. His wife, Pauline, was pregnant with their third son. Maitland’s funeral was a solemn affair, attended by police officers from across Canada and the United States. His coffin was ceremonially carried between two rows of saluting policemen.
Vaillancourt knew that he was in real trouble. “I killed the policeman,” he admitted to investigating officers. “I’ll plead guilty and draw my sentence. They will hang me for this but better that than being in jail all my life.” By the time his trial rolled round in September 1973, he had changed his mind. He pleaded not guilty, but the result was the same: he was sentenced to hang, and ended up on death row to await his execution.
On October 23, 1975, the Toronto Star published a feature piece beneath the headline “Rene Vaillancourt: 692 days on Death Row.” The article described in great detail his life as a convicted murderer awaiting execution. Other than prison officials, a Roman Catholic priest, and the jail pastor, Vaillancourt saw no one. After two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, always under the watchful eye of a guard, he was pasty faced and had put on between thirty and forty pounds. He read French-language magazines and sometimes played Scrabble, chess, and cribbage with his guard. He occasionally read the Bible and wrote letters. However, he had stopped taking his daily ration of exercise — thirty minutes walking up and down an adjacent corridor. Reportedly, he never asked questions about a certain metal door, painted red in vintage photos, that he passed en route. Behind that door lay the execution chamber.
In the same report, the Star noted that Vaillancourt had just learned that he would not be hanged as scheduled on October 31. He had been granted a nine-month stay of execution by the federal solicitor general, Warren Allmand.
Although the question of whether to retain or abolish the death penalty was still being hotly debated in 1975, the fact was that no executions had taken place in Canada since December 1962, when Ronald Turpin, twenty-nine, and Arthur Lucas, fifty-four, were hanged back-to-back at the Don Jail.
Ronald Turpin was a small-time Toronto hood who had spent his formative years in and out of foster homes, and later in reformatories for crimes such as shoplifting, burglary, and escaping from custody. Repeated brushes with the law had left him with a pathological fear of policemen, who, he was convinced, were out to get him. So on a frigid February night in 1962 when Toronto police officer Frederick John Nash pulled him over for driving with bald tires and a broken front headlight, his instincts impelled him to fight rather than flight. He was hardly guiltless at the time: he was making a hasty getaway after stealing $632.84 from the Red Rooster Restaurant in Scarborough. Constable Nash found a loaded Beretta semi-automatic pistol that Turpin had hidden under the car seat. After a brief scuffle, shots were fired. Turpin was wounded in the arms and face, but Nash, a thirty-one-year-old married man with four children, lay dying on the roadway.
Arthur Lucas was a different and far more menacing kind of hood. A Black American based in Detroit, his previous offences were serious in nature, including forgery, drug trafficking, armed robbery, and pimping. He had links with organized gangs in the States and had allegedly driven to Toronto in November 1961 to take down Therland Crater, the prime witness in an upcoming drug trial in Detroit. Both Crater and his girlfriend, Carolyn Ann Newman, were found with their throats slashed in what looked like a highly professional gangland-style execution. Crater had also been shot four times. The evidence at Lucas’s trial for the murder of Crater was for the most part circumstantial and relied heavily on the testimony of an unreliable witness: Morris “Red” Thomas, a drug addict and Lucas’s so-called friend. It was also difficult to square the extreme efficiency of the execution with a slow-moving man who was described in psychiatric reports as having the mental capacity of a “moron.”
If you were found guilty of killing someone, you would be sentenced to death. That, quite simply, had been the law since the British legal system was imposed on Britain’s territorial possessions in North America by Royal Proclamation in 1763. In 1961, however, legislation was passed in Canada to reclassify murder into two categories, capital and non-capital. This meant that offenders would face the death penalty if they committed a planned or deliberate murder, murdered someone in the course of committing another violent crime, or killed an on-duty police officer or correctional officer. All other types of murder were classified as non-capital and would carry a sentence of life imprisonment.
Lucas stood accused of premeditated murder and Turpin had killed a policeman. They were both tried for capital murder and sentenced to death on May 10 and June 13, 1962, respectively. A barrage of protests was launched on their behalf, and as their legal appeals wound their way through the courts, right up to the Supreme Court of Canada, they spent their days on death row in the Don Jail talking, playing chess, and reading the Bible with their spiritual adviser and true friend, Salvation Army Brigadier Cyril Everitt, chaplain of the jail.
All these efforts failed: their sentences were upheld.
Lucas and Turpin ate their last meal at 6:00 p.m. on the evening before they died, December 10, 1962 — steak, potatoes, vegetables, and pie, all so soft they could be eaten with a spoon. Knives and forks were strictly forbidden. Shortly afterward, Walter Williston, Lucas’s appeal lawyer, arrived to confirm the sombre news. The federal cabinet, which had the final say on who would live and who would die, had refused to commute their sentences. They would both be hanged just after midnight.
In a 1965 article in Maclean’s magazine entitled “The Final Hours of the Last Two Men Executed in Canada,” Alexander Ross reported that Williston told the men, “If it’s any consolation to you, you may be the last men to hang in Canada.”
“Some consolation,” snorted Turpin.
A small but angry crowd had gathered at the corner of Don Jail Roadway and Gerrard Street East on that bone-chilling December night, carrying posters declaring that “CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS NO DETERRENT” and “HANGING IS ALSO MURDER.”
Their protests were in vain.
At midnight, Canada’s last executioner, a man who called himself John Ellis, escorted the two condemned men, their hands handcuffed behind their backs, forty paces east along the corridor to a steel door that had no handle on the outside. This was the door to the two-level execution chamber. They were accompanied by a group composed of the sheriff, the governor of the jail, four guards, and the chaplain. There were perforated metal plates on the inside edge of the door that lined up with similar plates on the wall just inside the chamber when the door was closed. According to a former guard who served at the east wing of the jail, and who had received anecdotal information from “old timers long past,” once the group stepped into the room, the governor would “drop the bolt”; that is, he would slide a metal bar through the matching holes in the wall and door plates. The door would now be securely fastened from the inside, and, with no handle on the outside, the execution could not be stayed.
After positioning the prisoners back-to-back on the gallows trap door on the upper level of the room, Ellis placed black hoods over their heads and nooses around their necks. At just two minutes after midnight, he pulled the lever and Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin plunged into history as the last two men ever to be hanged in Canada.
The Don Jail’s gallows were ultimately removed, but their ghostly outlines remained etched into the walls of the execution chamber.
John George Diefenbaker had led the federal Conservative Party into office in 1957, and, even though Lucas and Turpin were not saved, fifty-two of sixty-six death sentences were commuted under his watch. In 1963, the Liberals swept into power. They were vehemently opposed to capital punishment, and they made their point of view clear in December 1967, when Parliament voted to suspend the death penalty for civilian crimes for a period of five years. In 1973, this suspension was extended by another five years. Two years before the moratorium was to end, and mere days before Vaillancourt’s stay of execution was due to expire, a formal vote was taken in the House of Commons to answer this burning question: Should Canada retain or abolish the death penalty?
It was impossible to predict which way the vote would go.
The public was firmly in favour of capital punishment, and this was backed by powerful organizations such as the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. But personalities on both sides of the political divide came out in strong opposition. Former (Conservative) prime minister Diefenbaker said of the death penalty: “It’s too dangerous, and innocent men can be executed and have been executed.” Prior to the vote, the current (Liberal) prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, voiced his thoughts in a passionate speech in the House of Commons: “Are we, as a society, so lacking in respect for ourselves, so lacking in hope for human betterment, so socially bankrupt that we are ready to accept state violence as our penal philosophy?”
The individual leading the efforts to force Bill C-84 through Parliament was solicitor general and human-rights activist Warren Allmand. Like Trudeau, he was a committed abolitionist. “I don’t think Canadians are bloodthirsty people,” Allmand told the CBC in 1975. “I know a lot of them don’t agree with me now. But I think I could convince [them] that capital punishment is a bad thing.”
Allmand had an unexpected ally in his quest. Through the clamour and controversy swirling around the retain-or-abolish question rang the clear and courageous voice of Pauline Maitland, the widow of Constable Leslie Maitland. Interviewed by telephone from her home in Glasgow, Scotland, where she had moved after her husband’s death, she said of René Vaillancourt, her husband’s killer: “I hope, as I have always hoped, that the decision will be not to hang him. That is not the answer.”
During the parliamentary debate on July 14, 1976, Allmand read part of a letter from Pauline Maitland pleading for the killer’s life to be spared. Bill C-84 scraped through the House of Commons with 131 votes for and 124 votes against abolishing the death sentence for all civilian crimes in Canada. It was replaced by a sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.
By the mid-1980s, the tide of public opinion was turning. “Why kill people who kill people to show killing people is wrong?” asked a button worn by members of the John Howard Society. A motion to restore the death penalty was convincingly defeated in June 1987. And in 1998 Canada achieved full abolitionist status when all references to the death sentence, even for offences under military law, were eliminated from the National Defence Act.
So, René Vaillancourt was not ultimately obliged to walk the forty paces from his cell to the gallows chamber when his nine-month stay of execution expired. In mid-1976, the Don Jail relinquished its solitary death-row occupant. Vaillancourt was transferred to Millhaven Penitentiary, a federal prison, to serve out his life sentence.
Death row, that grim space where, among others, much-loved Frank McCullough had made himself so thoroughly at home back in 1919, where the Boyd Gang had spent long hours in the early 1950s feverishly hacking away at the window bars to make their escape, and where Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin had whiled away their time playing games, reading the Bible, and chatting to their friend and spiritual adviser, Cyril Everitt, was now officially closed for business.
This did not mean, however, that the cells remained empty. In November 1976, twenty-year-old Eddie Hertrich and his brother were moved into the four-cell corridor, or “range,” now renamed 9 Holding. It was a “pigsty in there,” says Hertrich, with “dried blood and feces everywhere.” Spiderwebs, too. The brothers complained bitterly, and guards brought them buckets and disinfectants to clean up the area. Hertrich remembers that there were rats in the cells. They nicknamed one large rodent “King of the Road”; other rats would scurry when the King came calling. In April 1977, after twenty-three months in the Don, seven of them in the former death row, Eddie was acquitted of major drug charges and released. His brother was convicted.
The repurposed death cells remained in use until the end of 1977. By then, the existence of the jail itself was hanging in the balance.