CHAPTER
2
The First World War was a bloodbath in Europe, and brave Canadian soldiers gave their lives all across France and Belgium. Many spent their last days lying in trenches under a hail of bullets and exploding shells. There was nothing they could do except fire at enemy soldiers.
Meanwhile, back on Canadian soil, two young French Canadians were doing whatever they could to avoid going off to war. Their efforts would lead to a number of vicious and cowardly murders and result in one of the largest manhunts ever seen in Saskatchewan.
What ended in bloodshed on a tiny prairie farm east of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, began in the town of St. Hyacinthe, Quebec. It was there that Dr. Joseph Gervais, a mysterious character who dabbled in hard drugs and hypnotism, met two young men, Jean Baptiste St. Germain and Victor Carmel, while playing violin at a local dance. Gervais had a magnetic personality and easily persuaded the two young men to return home with him to Montreal. Later, in August 1917, the three men moved together to the heart of the Saskatchewan prairie.
Dr. Gervais and his two friends had formed a close and unusual bond. The doctor rented a farm in the Steep Creek area, 45 kilometres from the city of Prince Albert. The two young men worked for the doctor without pay, and the arrangement seemed to suit all three. St. Germain and Carmel were draft dodgers who were intent on avoiding the recently imposed conscription that would have sent them off to the western front of the war. Dr. Gervais had promised he’d hide them away where no one would find them, and they’d jumped at the chance. The doctor was pleased—he now had two handsome young men at his beck and call.
While Gervais lived in the log cabin farmhouse, he helped the younger men dig a cave in the side of the riverbank above the South Saskatchewan River. There the two lived, hidden away from the world. The cave was an elaborate underground construction, with main tunnels and escape tunnels, all properly shored up by timber supports. It also had secret exits linking it to the barn and stable up on the farm. Furnished with a stove, table, beds and chairs, it was so cleverly concealed—with heavy forest growth hiding its entrances—that no one in the community even knew it was there. Indeed, a great deal of planning had gone into its construction. Fearing that one day the Canadian military would come for them, St. Germain and Carmel had fashioned their cave in a way that would allow them to easily shoot anyone who approached.
Not much farming was ever carried out on the farm, but this strange trio always had a good supply of meat on the table. It was later discovered that they were raiding neighbouring farms at night, slaughtering cows and bringing home the beef. Despite this, the people in the community pretty well left Dr. Gervais and his seldom-seen companions alone.
Only one neighbour, Adolphe Lajoie, showed any real interest in what was going on at the recently rented farm. Unfortunately, Lajoie died when his farmhouse burned down one night. Authorities found his badly charred body in his bed with his pipe alongside him, a testimony to the tragic smoking accident that had taken his life. Or so they thought. Later, they would be forced to revisit this “accident.”
On November 15, 1918, four days after the First World War ended, Prince Albert’s deputy sheriff, James McKay, was sent to Dr. Gervais’ farm on a routine matter. Gervais had neglected to pay for some horses he’d bought, and McKay had been assigned to seize them under a court order. The young officer was whistling as he got out of his Model-T Ford and crossed the farmyard to open the barn door.
Upon spotting the deputy sheriff, St. Germain and Carmel began to panic. Without warning, the two draft dodgers opened fire from inside their hideaway. McKay was badly wounded and slumped against a tree trunk to try to hold himself up. At this exact moment, Dr. Gervais arrived back at the farm—with a guest.
Gervais had been called away earlier that day to treat a neighbouring farmer’s wife, who was in a coma brought on by Spanish influenza. The flu epidemic had already brought the spectre of death to many farms as it swept across the prairies. While tending his patient, the doctor had seen McKay’s Model-T Ford pass the house, heading toward his farm. Concerned at the sight, he’d asked the sick woman’s son, 20-year-old Joseph Desormeaux, to drive him back to his farm in the family’s horse-drawn carriage. He’d said the matter was urgent.
Gervais and Desormeaux arrived at the top of the hill as the wounded McKay was still clinging to the tree trunk. Almost unable to believe his eyes, Desormeaux watched in horror as the doctor jumped into action and helped the two men finish off the deputy sheriff. They shot him in the hands to make him let go of the tree, and then forced him down the hill toward the river. When he struggled to get up, they shot him again, and he suddenly went still.
Desormeaux had just witnessed a murder. He was certain the three men would kill him next. Instead, they forced him to help dispose of the corpse. With Desormeaux’ assistance, the killers tied McKay’s body onto a plank of wood, weighed it down with stones and slid it under the ice of the South Saskatchewan River.
Still fearing for his life, Desormeaux watched as the doctor took charge of erasing all signs of the crime. Gervais chopped down the blood-smeared tree that McKay had clung to and burned it, together with all the bloodstained leaves on the ground. Then he carefully raked over the tracks made by McKay’s Model-T Ford. When they were satisfied that not a trace of McKay was left (except his car), the three men returned to their dugout cave for a meal. They took Desormeaux with them and offered him food. The man couldn’t eat. He wanted to go home, but they held him there, explaining they still had one more job for him to do.
The three killers then had Desormeaux use his team of horses to tow McKay’s Model-T Ford a kilometre along the riverbank to a depression. There, the men rolled the car down the embankment, dismantled it and smashed the parts into small pieces, which they buried. It was as if McKay had never been on the property. There was now no car, no body and no crime scene. Just the severe inconvenience of one eyewitness.
Gervais turned to Desormeaux, who was sure his life was about to end. At gunpoint, the doctor told Desormeaux he was letting him go, but warned that they would kill him if he ever told another living soul about what he’d seen. Badly shaken and barely able to believe his luck, Desormeaux raced away from the farm and back to his home. His family later recounted that he had acted strangely upon his return. He had constantly paced up and down, chain-smoking, but had refused to tell his family what was troubling him.
When James McKay failed to return either to his office or his home back in Prince Albert, his friends and family became worried. What they feared most was that he’d suddenly taken ill with the dreaded influenza and was lying somewhere in desperate need of medical help. After four days of waiting and worrying, they started searching for him. It didn’t occur to anyone that something criminal might have befallen him. The Prince Albert Daily Herald ran a tiny blurb on November 19 with little hint of any perceived danger. All it said was, “Sheriff’s bailiff James McKay is missing since Friday. He left the city to go to the farm of Dr. Gervais in the Steep Creek district.”
On that same day, Saskatchewan Provincial Police sergeant Stanley Kistruck was sent from Saskatoon to the Steep Creek district to look for McKay. He called at the Gervais farm on the pretext of checking whether the influenza epidemic had spread that far yet. He looked around the property, searching for clues, but McKay clearly wasn’t there. Nor were there any signs that he ever had been there. Satisfied, Kistruck left.
As the sergeant was driving away, he met Joseph Desormeaux, who stopped him. It was the chance the young man had unconsciously been waiting for. Still in shock from what he’d seen four days earlier, Desormeaux had not breathed a word of the murder to anyone for fear that the killers would punish him. However, upon seeing Sergeant Kistruck, he realized it was time to come forward. The young man unburdened himself to the sergeant, spilling the whole grisly story. Desormeaux described how the three men had killed the deputy sheriff, dumped the body in the river, buried the car and forced him at gunpoint to help them. Shocked at the story, Kistruck immediately took Desormeaux to Prince Albert, where the latter was locked away in police protection—at his own request. Desormeaux had remembered vital details, including how there were underground tunnels, secret trap doors, defensive trenches and dugouts in and around a huge cave at the farm. He also told the authorities that the three men seemed to have an arsenal of weapons.
The next day, November 20, Kistruck personally led a provincial police posse to the farm, backed by a detachment of soldiers from Prince Albert as well as local men who had volunteered to help. At the farmhouse, Kistruck immediately arrested Dr. Gervais, who was still asleep in bed. Protesting his innocence, the doctor was taken back to Prince Albert while the soldiers began a search for St. Germain and Carmel. Thinking the pair might be hiding in the barn, the soldiers set it on fire, but did not smoke anyone out. The posse then realized that the two fugitives must have scurried underground through their tunnels into their main dugout.
As the soldiers began to search a thickly wooded area for an entrance to the dugout, Corporal Charles Horsley, a 22-year-old member of the 1st Depot Battalion, came across a wooden trap door in the ground and immediately tried to pry it open with his bayonet. Suddenly, shots rang out from underground. The two fugitives were shooting at Horsley through the wooden door. Wounded, he staggered back and turned to flee from the danger. Another shot was fired, and Horsley fell dead with a bullet through his lung.
A soldier who had been searching alongside Horsley then saw the two fugitives emerge from the dugout and disappear into the thick undergrowth. He got off one shot, but the pair managed to escape. When news of Horsley’s death reached the Prince Albert jail, Dr. Gervais showed absolutely no surprise or remorse. He boasted that his two companions had designed and fortified the underground tunnels so well that they could kill 40 men without ever getting caught.
The soldiers retreated from the scene. Before they left, however, they blasted the dugout and its underground tunnels with dynamite, ensuring the fugitives could never use the elaborate system again. The small newspaper story about the missing deputy sheriff that previously had warranted only a paragraph was now the headline on the front page of the Prince Albert Daily Herald: TWO SLAIN AT STEEP CREEK
For the next four days, the Steep Creek district became the focal point of one of the largest manhunts ever seen in Saskatchewan. Police, soldiers and volunteers searched tirelessly for St. Germain and Carmel. Fear spread through farms in the area as families realized that two desperate and heavily armed men were on the loose in their midst.
Late on November 23, two rough-looking strangers who claimed they were hunting turned up at a farmhouse located about 10 kilometres east of Prince Albert. They asked the man of the house, Charlie Young, for some water, and Young obliged. Before dawn the next morning they called again, this time asking for and getting food. The pair explained that it was too cold for hunting and told Young that they had decided to return to Prince Albert. But Young was suspicious of the story. He knew there was a manhunt underway in the area and thought he ought to warn police about the strangers. Afraid that the pair was hanging around outside his home and might hear him make the call, he waited all day Saturday until he was sure they were gone. Finally, at 11 o’clock that night, he telephoned the police with his information.
Early in the morning of November 25, the manhunt shifted to Charlie Young’s farm, where the posse surrounded a haystack. Minutes later, Jean Baptiste St. Germain and Victor Carmel, who’d both been hiding inside the haystack, were arrested. The Prince Albert Daily Herald published a dramatic account of the capture that ended the manhunt. It reported that the leaders of the posse had fired shots in the air and had then shouted to the two fugitives to come out with their hands up or the police would riddle the haystack with bullets. Out they came. “They were in a state almost bordering upon collapse from hunger and exposure and were taken without a struggle,” wrote a Prince Albert reporter. Both men had handguns with them when they surrendered, and they told the posse where the police could find the stolen rifles they’d hidden in the woods.
Later that day, after they’d been manacled and secured in the Prince Albert jail, St. Germain and Carmel confessed to being draft dodgers and to having shot and killed both the deputy sheriff and the soldier. For the first time, the police heard the chilling details from the lips of the killers: how James McKay had been whistling happily to himself, completely unaware of any danger when they had both opened fire on him; how he’d clung to a tree, still trying to stand; and how they had shot him repeatedly until he finally collapsed and died. Then they told the police how they’d dumped McKay in the South Saskatchewan River. Divers were sent to the river to search under the ice, but they couldn’t find McKay’s body. In fact, it’s never been found to this day.
As the investigation continued, another startling claim was made. Dr. Gervais revealed to police that one of the young men, Victor Carmel, was responsible for the murder of Adolphe Lajoie, the Steep Creek farmer who had been curious about the trio. Gervais asked an officer if the police remembered a fire at a farmhouse where a farmer had been burned to death. They remembered the incident very well. Investigators had found Adolphe Lajoie’s pipe alongside his body and concluded the farmer had caused the fire himself by smoking in bed. But Gervais’ next statement stunned them all. The doctor told them that investigators had found the pipe beside the bed because that’s where Victor Carmel had planted it to make the death look like an accident. Carmel had shot Lajoie in the head and placed his body in the bed, his pipe next to it. According to Gervais, Carmel had committed the murder because he’d felt that Lajoie knew too much about him and St. Germain and might go to the authorities. Then, just before Carmel had set the farmhouse ablaze, he’d stolen all the guns he could find. These guns provided the bulk of the killers’ arsenal.
Astounded that the fire investigators had missed critical evidence, the police exhumed Lajoie’s body. They found the telltale bullet hole in the late farmer’s skull. Then, to cement Gervais’ claim, Victor Carmel confessed to the killing.
All three men were charged with the murder of James McKay. The trial before a jury of 12 men at the Court of King’s Bench in Prince Albert was delayed until May 10, 1919, because the deadly Spanish flu epidemic was still ravaging the prairies. Dr. Joseph Gervais, then 41, based his defence on a plea of insanity. His lawyers pointed out that while awaiting trial, he had spent most of his time in prison in floods of tears. He had even tried to hang himself with a knotted sheet, but the guards had saved him.
Meanwhile, Jean Baptiste St. Germain, 30, and Victor Carmel, 28, both claimed to have been under the hypnotic spell of the doctor and therefore were not responsible for their actions. But the jury didn’t believe any of them.
All three were found guilty of murder and were sentenced to be hanged on September 17, 1919. When Chief Justice Brown came to sentencing, he unleashed one of the most emotional harangues ever heard in a court of law. In its annual report for 1919, the Saskatchewan Provincial Police Force quoted the judge’s speech at length. This excerpt of his address to the prisoners reflects both revulsion at the murders they’d committed and society’s disgust with draft dodgers:
The crime of which you have been found guilty was so revolting that the posse of police and soldiers displayed British fair play in not shooting you on sight. Although France lay bleeding from one thousand wounds at the hand of a tyrannical, unscrupulous, and ruthless foe, and the spirit of France—which one would have thought would have appealed to you—called forth the sympathy and support of all heroic men within the Empire, you valued your own lives as more important than these things. You went into hiding. You dug yourselves into the ground. You conspired to defeat your country’s purpose and shoot down like dogs the men who were trying to do their duty. Under the circumstances, simple justice would seem to demand that you go to the gallows in dishonour and shame, and suffer the extreme penalty of the law.
And they did. They had one rather routine stay of execution, but on October 17, 1919, a special scaffold was erected to take all three men at once. With one pull of a lever, Dr. Joseph Gervais, Jean Baptiste St. Germain and Victor Carmel all plunged downwards, their nooses snapped tight and they were hanged.