CHAPTER
8
It’s not every day a murderer and prison escapee leaves such uproar and outrage in his wake that he sparks a new call for the death penalty, causes heads to roll in the nation’s prison system, and his name reaches the very corridors of power in Ottawa. But convicted triple murderer Daniel Gingras did all that and more. The creation of such chaos required a hidden depth of evil and an environment in which it could flourish. Gingras was the necessary embodiment of evil, and those in the justice system in Edmonton handed him a golden opportunity to wreak his havoc on society. Even before Gingras first landed in jail in Edmonton’s maximum security institution, his appalling record of violent crime was far worse than most criminals amass in their whole lifetime—and he had only just started.
We pick up his life of violence in the middle of a dramatic gunfight with the cops in Montreal in 1974, when he was fleeing after holding up a fur store at gunpoint. Police intercepted him and shot him twice, but he survived. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 10 years in prison, which he served in the medium-security penitentiary at Cowansville, Quebec. On November 11, 1978, he escaped. Weeks later, on December 16, this escape cost an innocent man his life. Gingras was on the lam for another month before being arrested on January 21, 1979, with his brother, Claude, and charged with murdering the innocent man, Yves Richer.
Seven months later, in August 1979, Daniel Gingras pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including the horrific second-degree murder of Richer. The court heard Gingras forced his victim onto the floor of a stolen car and executed him by shooting him in the back of the head with a sawed-off 20-gauge shotgun. For this “cowardly vicious act” Judge Rushton Lamb sentenced Gingras to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 12 years. In sentencing him, the judge added some uncomfortably prophetic words: “In your case it is the opinion of the Court that there is very little possibility of rehabilitation.” By all accounts, Judge Lamb’s opinion wasn’t passed on to the prison and parole authorities.
Montreal police had strong suspicions Gingras may have been linked to an even worse crime—a double murder of two sisters. This had occurred during the two months he was on the run, but he was never charged in connection with the case. Gingras and his brother had met two women, Solange Jalbert, 18, and her elder sister Celine, 20, soon after Christmas 1978 at a nightclub, and during early January the women stayed periodically at the Gingras’ apartment. Four days before Gingras was arrested for the shotgun murder, the two sisters were found strangled to death in their apartment. Montreal police pursued the Gingras brothers as their prime suspects, but no charges were ever laid, no other suspects were ever found, and the double slaying remains unsolved to this day.
Gingras started his 1979 life sentence in Montreal, but by 1985 he had earned such a reputation as a prison “rat” for informing on fellow prisoners that he was transferred for his own safety to the Edmonton maximum-security prison. With this move, prison authorities successfully protected Gingras from those around him. But who would protect society from Gingras? The prison authorities certainly didn’t. It was later revealed that Gingras the master manipulator had become once again a star informant for two years at Edmonton, receiving perks for his inside work. The stage was set for disaster.
June 29, 1987, was Gingras’ 36th birthday, and it seemed he was due for another perk after he’d recently ratted on a fellow prisoner. This time his reward was to be a pass out of jail for a day’s shopping at the busy West Edmonton Mall. He would have to be escorted, naturally. The prison authorities, who first planned to have Gingras handcuffed to an armed 220-pound guard for the day, let him choose who he wanted instead and entrusted him to a 52-year-old unarmed social worker.
The implications of this were shocking. Gingras was a violent career criminal and convicted killer who had executed a man in cold blood after escaping from prison once before. His additional criminal record tallied 34 convictions, including six armed robberies, and a sentencing judge had warned he would never change his ways. This man was being let out into Edmonton’s most populated and sprawling building, thronging with thousands of shoppers, with only an unarmed social worker standing between him and freedom.
The prison’s security chiefs vigorously opposed the pass, but were overruled. Regulations forbidding such passes to prisoners like Gingras were ignored, and files detailing Gingras’ full violent background weren’t passed to the National Parole Board, which approved the pass. Finally, the guards who saw him about to leave the front gate of the prison refused to let him out, certain a terrible mistake had been made. They checked and were told to let him through. Even then, they still wrote “AWOL” in the log alongside his name.
Gingras, the birthday boy, wasn’t inside West Edmonton Mall a few minutes before he overpowered his social worker and disappeared into the crowds of shoppers. Now all Canada was at his mercy. After a quick foray to Quebec, Gingras soon travelled back to Edmonton by Via Rail train in early August 1987 with a friend, Joseph Jean Vital Piquette, a rodeo clown and the son of a police chief.
The threat to the community became more dire when Gingras teamed up with another man, Calvin Harvey Smoker, then aged 40, an accused murderer who didn’t have to escape from prison. He was let out on $5,000 bail without even having to put down a deposit. The attorney general’s department had been shocked that an Edmonton judge gave bail to a man charged with first-degree murder and was appealing the decision to the Alberta Court of Appeal. But it was too late; Gingras and Smoker were now running together.
After several days in Edmonton, Gingras decided he could use Piquette’s identification papers to help him spring another convict out of jail for a fat fee. He invited the rodeo clown to a barbeque at the home of a prostitute where he was staying. On August 12, while Smoker watched, he executed Piquette, putting four bullets in him: one in the head, two in the back and one in the chest. Then he took the body and dumped it in a ditch in Edmonton, surprisingly near the prison from which he was still a fugitive.
The next day, Gingras moved south to Medicine Hat, where he and Smoker planned some armed robberies of supermarkets, for which they would need a getaway car. It was the terrible misfortune of 24-year-old Medicine Hat resident Wanda Lee Woodward, an auto upholsterer, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as she came out of the city’s Southview Mall. As she was about to get into her truck, Gingras decided it would make the perfect vehicle for their crime spree. She was hit on the head, knocked unconscious and bundled into her own truck, and the two men drove off with her. It was August 14, and an agonizing nightmare for Wanda’s family began. They had no idea where she was, or if she was alive or dead.
Gingras, meanwhile, had stores to rob. He didn’t need this “woman nuisance,” as he described her, so he bound her hands and feet, tied her shoelaces together and strangled her with them. Then he drove 20 kilometres south of Medicine Hat and dumped her body. All this diversion had wasted a little time in the two men’s busy day, but their plan was soon back on track. By 8 p.m. they were holding up a Medicine Hat Safeway store at gunpoint. Gingras threatened one cashier with his gun and pointed it at a woman customer in the parking lot as the men escaped in Woodward’s truck with $900.
Alberta was paying a high price for Gingras’ birthday present. On August 16, Piquette’s body was discovered in the Edmonton ditch, and the next day Woodward’s truck was found abandoned in a gravel pit three kilometres south of Medicine Hat. There was no sign of Wanda or more than $300 she’d withdrawn at the mall just before she disappeared. The nightmare for Leslie Woodward and his family worsened with the finding of his daughter’s truck.
By now it was time for Gingras to move on again. Late on August 21, as he travelled north towards Fort St. John with a couple of prostitutes in a stolen car, he ran smack into an RCMP roadblock at Grand Cache and was recaptured. Five days later, Wanda’s body was discovered where Gingras had dumped it, and the Woodward family’s anguish reached its depths.
Gingras and Smoker were charged with the two murders in Edmonton and Medicine Hat, and the now familiar wheels of justice revolved around them both in a new string of hearings and trials. For the first time, the whole of Alberta began to learn about the disastrous decisions that had led to this double tragedy, and the first small cries of outrage over Gingras’ escape were heard.
The first clue that serious errors in judgment had been made came when Solicitor General James Kelleher announced that the warden at Edmonton, prison boss Sepp Tschierschwitz, was gone. He’d been “relieved of his post” and farmed out to a Saskatchewan prison where he was to deal with nothing more controversial than planning and resource management. What’s more, said Kelleher, internal inquiries weren’t complete, and more heads could roll in the future. A few details trickled out even before Gingras got to trial. In March 1988, it was revealed that critical prison files detailing the dangers posed by Gingras were withheld from the National Parole Board as it made its decision to approve his infamous day pass. Many people wanted to know why.
So much publicity had surrounded the Woodward murder case in Medicine Hat that it was decided to move the trial to Calgary. In October 1988, the trial opened in the city’s Court of Queen’s Bench, and Gingras pleaded not guilty. It lasted nearly three weeks, but in the end the jury took less than two hours to convict Gingras of first-degree murder. By law, the jury members had been told nothing of Gingras’ past. After pronouncing him guilty, they were astounded to hear of his violent record that included the previous murder in Quebec. On November 16, 1988, Justice Allen Sulatycky handed down the mandatory life sentence with no parole for 25 years, advising the parole board 25 years hence against letting Gingras out even then. The conviction was seen as official confirmation that the blunder of letting a convicted murderer out of prison on a day pass had cost an innocent woman her life. It opened up a flood of public outrage.
Wanda’s father, Leslie Woodward, speaking from the family home in Irvine, a village just outside Medicine Hat, echoed the judge’s warning that Gingras should never be let out of prison again. “I hope he never gets out because he’ll do it again. I’m sure he has no feelings for anybody, for anybody’s life at all,” he said. “Not a minute of my life goes by that I don’t think of her. It should never have happened.” Wanda’s mother, Evelyn, who was pleased justice had been served by the conviction, said the pain of losing her daughter would never be erased.
Wanda’s murder sparked an instant call to bring back hanging in Canada. Medicine Hat MP Bob Porter, whose daughter was a personal friend of Wanda, said Gingras should have been hanged. “I would have no qualms in voting for capital punishment in a case like that of Gingras. This was first-degree murder, premeditated murder,” he said. Other proponents of the death penalty echoed his opinion.
Alberta Bow River Tory MP Gordon Taylor predicted more innocent people would die because killers weren’t being executed. “Murderers like Gingras are laughing at the people of Canada, especially at the bleeding hearts who want to continue to molly-coddle killers,” he said. “The sad part is a lot more innocent people are going to die because some MPs won’t listen to what a majority of their constituents want—the return of capital punishment.”
Wanda’s murder also sparked an immediate and frantic campaign against any convicted murderer being let out of prison on a day pass in future. Victims of Violence, an Edmonton-based lobby group for the families of violent crime victims, organized 10,000 letters to the solicitor general urging that day passes for convicted killers be banned. “If there is no capital punishment for killers, then life sentences must mean life,” said the group’s founder, Gary Rosenfeldt. “Society doesn’t owe it to murderers to let them out on birthday treat day passes, and we want the system changed.”
In the spring of 1989, the repercussions of letting a convicted killer out of jail were multiplied when an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench jury found Gingras guilty of the second-degree murder of Vital Piquette. One witness told the jury Gingras had boasted in jail how he killed Piquette for his identification papers, in what he called “an even trade.” Gingras told the inmate, “I got his papers, he got my bullets.” And the prosecution had an eyewitness—Calvin Harvey Smoker, who turned on Gingras in a deal with the Crown. Smoker, facing a first-degree murder rap in Piquette’s killing, agreed to plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Piquette, with a promise the Crown would recommend he only serve three months in jail. In return, he told the jury he sat in a car and watched Gingras pull the trigger and shoot Piquette to death. At a later hearing, the first-degree murder charge against Smoker in the Woodward murder was reduced, but he was sentenced to three years in jail after being convicted of the unlawful confinement of Woodward and being an accessory to her murder.
After Gingras had been convicted of both murders, the floodgates of anger were flung open. Gingras stirred the pot himself when he persuaded prison authorities to plan a trip for him to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton for plastic surgery on self-inflicted wrist injuries. Then he bragged that he would use the visit to escape again. The trip was cancelled when the escape bid was publicized.
The federal government announced an independent inquiry into the tragedy headed by Edmonton lawyer John Weir, but then infuriated some Alberta MPs by insisting it be held behind closed doors. Calgary Northeast Tory MP Alex Kindy said, “I am very upset. This is no good. The public has a right to know all the facts.” Edmonton East New Democrat MP Ross Harvey said the government was leaving itself open to claims of whitewashing.
When Weir’s report was published on December 20, 1989, its condemnation of the prison authorities was disturbing. Gingras was a dangerous criminal who never should have been released on a day pass, it said, and it laid the blame at the feet of the warden, Sepp Tschierschwitz, and the prison corrections operation co-ordinator, Fred Perrin. The report recommended both men should be retired early.
But the biggest furor was caused by the whole sections blacked out by government censors before the report was released. What the government had made public was bad enough, and now everyone was demanding to know how damning the censored material was. Attorney General Ken Rostad announced that the province of Alberta was looking into the possibility of bringing criminal charges against the prison officials who’d let Gingras out. Scott Newark, the Wetaskiwin, Alberta, prosecutor who spearheaded the campaign to get the independent inquiry in the first place, was livid. He was so angry that what he called “devastating” information had been kept secret by the government censors that he threatened to blow the lid off the case and make public the report’s secret sections.
As the major row boiled in Alberta and Ottawa, a quiet little episode was played out in a Saskatchewan backwater tucked away from the action, where Tschierschwitz had been sent as punishment. Now he and Fred Perrin were given early retirement, fulfilling two of the recommendations in the Weir report. But even kicking Tschierschwitz out of the correctional system altogether didn’t appease Newark. “That deal’s just a golden handshake,” he said.
Prosecutor Newark made good his threat to reveal some of the secrets blacked out by the government in Weir’s report. He told the House of Commons justice committee that one blacked-out passage concluded the prison warden had been “wilfully negligent” in releasing Gingras. Spurred on by Newark, the committee now demanded of the government and Corrections Canada that the full, unedited report be made public, with all its revelations about what really happened during the scandal. But Corrections Canada and Canada’s solicitor general dug their heels in, claiming privacy and security reasons. Few people bought this explanation, as everyone believed they had embarrassing secrets to hide.
By October 1990, the Commons justice committee was planning to subpoena the government into handing over the full unexpurgated version of the report. The scandal dragged on into 1991, until a parliamentary lawyer said the report must be released because Parliament was exempt from the Privacy Act. Finally, after a year-long battle, the persistence of the justice committee was rewarded when its members got to study the full report, including the secret sections Corrections Canada had fought so hard to conceal. The committee still wasn’t permitted to reveal the details to the public, but the facts did come out, thanks largely to a series of newspaper articles by Edmonton Journal reporter Tom Barrett, who had contacts who leaked him the inside story.
It was a shocker. Weir’s report revealed officials knew Gingras was planning escapes in 1986 and 1987, right up to six weeks before they let him out on the infamous day pass. Weir had discovered that vital documents had disappeared from Gingras’ file. One officer, who wrote an official report on overhearing Gingras discussing an escape plan, found later his report was missing. Other guards who filed internal charges against Gingras were surprised no action was taken on the charges and that their paperwork had also disappeared from the file.
Weir found that three prison profile books describing Gingras as a “major escape risk” to be let out only in handcuffs and leg irons had all vanished after the escape. Weir knew these items had gone only by interviewing the officers who’d put them in the file in the first place. Weir also had interviewed officers who couldn’t believe Gingras was being let out and who warned senior officials up the line about the terrible risk they’d be taking. The senior officials said they’d passed on the warning to prison warden Tschierschwitz, but he denied ever being told.
Weir found that Tschierschwitz and Perrin had had many private sessions with Gingras, often in “the hole,” the prison’s segregation unit. One of the sections originally blacked out by government censors covered an incident when Gingras was discovered with three illegal drill bits in his cell, for which he was thrown in the hole. But before the scheduled disciplinary hearing was called, Tschierschwitz released Gingras from the hole and no hearing ever took place. “No explanation is given for this, nor is there any explanation as to why the charge was not proceeded with or otherwise disposed of,” wrote Weir. It was just one of many incidents Corrections Canada obviously never wanted exposed to the light of day.
Weir found that prison staff who recognized Gingras as a hardened criminal and major escape risk were taken off his case and replaced. The convict was manipulating the system in order to get the case management officers he wanted around him. It had paid off. One officer of Gingras’ choosing lied when he prepared the progress summary for the birthday day-pass application. Weir’s report called the summary a “misleading and factually false document.” The summary stated that all the staff on Gingras’ case supported the application, but the other staff members hadn’t been consulted at all, and had they been, they would have violently opposed it. One officer even considered Gingras “the most serious case” he’d ever seen at the Edmonton Institution. The summary also omitted to mention Gingras had murdered someone after an earlier prison escape. Next, Weir found that Tschierschwitz had failed to hold a formal board hearing to consider Gingras’ application for a day pass, where all officers could have expressed their views. Such meetings were standard with any similar application at any prison. Tschierschwitz could offer Weir no explanation why he hadn’t done this, and Weir’s report was highly critical of this omission.
Weir’s report said the actions of Fred Perrin were the most inexplicable. Perrin knew Gingras’ file showed him to be involved in escape plots, drug dealing within the prison and other criminal activities. He even told Weir he had been warned days in advance Gingras was planning to escape if given the pass. What’s more, Perrin told Weir he didn’t doubt Gingras would try to escape, and if he did so, he’d “definitely be dangerous.” Yet Perrin signed the pass, though later he tried to convince other staff members that someone had forged his signature.
After reading the shocking details in the full report for three hours, Tory MP Bob Horner, the Commons justice committee chairman, had one conclusion. “People should have been fired,” he said. Although Tschierschwitz and Perrin were forced to take early retirement, no one was fired.
Meanwhile Gingras continued laughing at Canadians from inside his prison cell. On August 20, 1991, he was married in the special handling unit of Saskatchewan Penitentiary, the rings exchanged through holes in the prison wire barrier. His bride, Judy Maleki of Glendale, California, had fallen in love with the triple murderer when she saw his photograph in the World Weekly News supermarket tabloid newspaper. In an in-depth interview with Calgary Sun reporter Stuart Hunter, Maleki, who once appeared in the film Night of the Living Dead Part Two, described Gingras as her “ideal man” who wrote her letters and poetry every day. “Men have always treated me like a sex object because I’m good looking. Danny isn’t like that,” she said. “I know people probably think I’m crazy but I don’t care what they think. All I care about is Danny.”
The couple was denied a conjugal visit by the prison. Gingras becomes eligible for consideration for parole in 2013. If parole were granted then, he’d be sharing his honeymoon with a wife who would be 71 years old.
The marriage brought bitter resentment from Wanda Woodward’s mother, Evelyn, as she and her husband continued their ongoing lawsuit, suing the government, the corrections service and prison officers in Edmonton for negligence in Wanda’s murder. “Why should he be allowed to get married?” she asked. “He never gave my daughter a chance to get married.”
In the end, the voices the Gingras case raised to bring back hanging were stilled and capital punishment wasn’t reinstated. Yet the controversy never fails to boil over again when violent criminals reoffend and innocents like Wanda Woodward and Vital Piquette pay the price. And there will always be unrepentant killers like Gingras who try to manipulate the justice and prison systems to their advantage.
After all, it is no mistake that he has a two-word tattoo engraved large across his back. It reads, “Murder Incorporated.”