Practically Perfect (10 page)

Rose and Tedesco hit it off in prison, and they were probably both amused and irritated by Boyko’s insistence that he would rather hang than live with communists. To provoke the Ukrainian, they constantly badgered him about his anti-communist beliefs. Boyko’s growing irritation reached the boiling point on November 24, 1948, when his daily ration of tobacco suddenly disappeared. The murderer was convinced Tedesco stole it, and when his victim was bent over a machine in the prison carpentry shop, Boyko plunged a chisel into his back, killing him almost instantly. The act made the former army officer the first person in the history of Montreal to face a second murder charge after being sentenced to hang for a previous killing.

As was the case almost exactly two years earlier, Boyko immediately confessed to the murder. He said that:

Many Sundays we walk in prison yard. All the time Tedesco and Fred Rose talk together and one time Tedesco tell me that Fred Rose said to him, me no Communist, me Fascist. Tedesco is rob man [thief] and Communist and for that I hate him and I kill him. Yes, I kill Tedesco and want jury and judge give me sentence, anything I will thank them.
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On May 6, 1946, a Montreal jury obliged and three months and three weeks later so did a hangman.

Albert Victor Westgate:
Fascination Leads to Murder

Although Albert Victor Westgate was born into money, his English parents were embarrassed by his troublemaking, and in his mid-teens he was shipped to Canada. Like other “remittance men” of the early twentieth century, his family sent him enough money to assure his survival, but not enough to return home.

Westgate arrived in Winnipeg at the start of the First World War, just in time to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was immediately sent to France with the 1st Canadian Division’s 5th Battalion, eventually leaving the army with an honourable discharge, and wounds to his head, arms, and stomach. When he returned to Winnipeg he got a job driving a taxi. He was a hard worker, and seldom spoke, earning the nickname “Wordless Westgate.”

Early in 1924, Westgate met Lottie Adams, the wife of a store detective. He became infatuated, buying her gifts and paying messengers $1.00 for each of his letters they delivered to her residence. Westgate’s overtures became too much for the Adams family, and Lottie asked him to leave her alone. In mid-February 1928, he begged for one last meeting. She agreed, and two days later Westgate picked her up, in full view of her neighbours. During their drive around the city Westgate pleaded with Lottie to run away with him. When she refused, he stopped the car near a golf course, pulled out a .32 calibre revolver, and fired, missing Lottie but sending a bullet through the vehicle’s roof. Lottie realized the trouble that she was in and tried to fight Westgate off, badly bruising herself in the process. Westgate’s second shot hit Adams in the left side of her head, splattering blood all over the inside of the car.

For some unknown reason Westgate stabbed the obviously dead woman in the face, dragged her into a ditch, and hit her four times over the head with an axe. He then covered her body with snow and drove away. Unfortunately for him, he was so preoccupied with throwing her clothes out the window he drove into a snow bank. Half a dozen people asked if he needed help before a tow truck finally arrived. Westgate then drove to his rooming house, where he tried to wash off Lottie’s blood before returning the car to its owner.

Although Lottie’s husband reported her missing, the body of the dead woman was not discovered for almost fourteen days, and then it was found by chance. An unusual mild spell started melting the snow that had fallen the previous two weeks, and a man walking his dog noticed a human hand sticking out of a drift. Before the day was out Westgate was arrested. His trial lasted four days and ended in his conviction. Although Westgate was sentenced to be hanged, his lawyer appealed the verdict, arguing that because a juror suffered from dementia twelve years earlier, he should have been disqualified from serving. The Court of Appeal agreed and ordered a new hearing. It too ended with a guilty verdict.

For a second time Westgate was sentenced to be hanged, but two days before he was to die his sentence was commuted to life in prison. During his fourteen years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary the diminutive killer (he stood only 5’6 ” and weighed just 136 pounds) was a model prisoner. After he was paroled in June 1943, he took a room in a Winnipeg boarding house and got a job as a mechanic. Two months later a sixteen-year-old girl moved into an adjoining apartment.

Edith Cook left home because of her parents’ lectures over her fascination with older men in uniform, and she quickly became infatuated with the forty-two-year-old war veteran. Although Cook worked as a waitress in one of Winnipeg’s most popular restaurants, she agreed to give up her job and move to Vancouver with Westgate after he promised to pay her way and get her a job. The pair made plans to leave in early December 1943. But Westgate had no connections in British Columbia, and he was prohibited from leaving Winnipeg because of his parole conditions. Apart from those things, he could not even afford the price of Edith’s train ticket.

Notwithstanding his economic circumstances, Westgate suggested that Cook rent a room at the Marlborough Hotel for the time remaining before their departure, and on December 2, she moved into unit 503. For the next day and a half the two were seen several times in the hotel, but sometime in the subsequent twenty-four hours Westgate squeezed Edith by the throat until she stopped breathing.

When Edith’s parents did not hear from her by Sunday they became frantic and went to Westgate’s rooming house to ask if he had seen her. He said that he had not, but suggested they look for her at the Marlborough, even volunteering to accompany them. Although they received no answer to their knock, they noticed a strong odour coming from room 503, and had a chambermaid open the door. Inside they found Edith, lying in bed with the covers around her head, obviously dead. Westgate was held on a coroner’s warrant until the cause of death was established, and then formally arrested. Four months later his third murder trial got underway. It lasted six days, and like his previous hearings, ended with a verdict of guilty. For the only time in Canadian history, a murderer was three times sentenced to hang for committing two separate murders.

In 1943 Albert Victor Westgate, a decorated veteran of the First World War, was paroled after serving fourteen years in penitentiary for murdering the wife of a Winnipeg store detective. Within a few months of his release he strangled a sixteen-year-old waitress. After his execution he was interred in the military section of Winnipeg’s Brookside Cemetery. To satisfy an enraged public, his headstone was removed, leaving him to spend eternity in an unmarked grave.
Author’s photo.

Albert Victor Westgate was executed just after 1:00 a.m. on July 24, 1944. At that time the
Criminal Code
provided the bodies of those executed were to be buried within the walls of the institution in which they were put to death. Because Westgate was a veteran, however, his body was released, and he was given a military funeral. Later the government re-thought its decision, and although Westgate’s remains were left undisturbed, his headstone was removed.

Whether out of anger at their daughter’s killer, or in frustration with a legal system that gave him a second chance to murder, the Cooks filed a $100,000 lawsuit against Westgate. The Manitoba Court of Appeal dismissed the claim, but it is the only time in our nation’s history that a man on death row was sued by the family of his victim.

Albert Victory Westgate is buried in the military section of Winnipeg’s Brookside Cemetery. Edith Cook is also buried in Brookside, a short distance from her killer.

Loved Ones Tell All

Canadian law has long protected the communication between spouses. Historically, that meant that a wife and husband could not testify against each other. Children, on the other hand, were free to say whatever they wanted, both in and out of court. So are lovers. The stories in this chapter are about people who were once close to a murderer, but who could not keep a confidence. In each case, the result was that someone had to die.

Oliver Prévost: The Piggery Murders

The two pig farmers were like so many late nineteenth-century Canadian pioneers: they worked hard, kept to themselves, and lived with few luxuries. Still, they were making progress. In the few years he had been in Canada, René D’Aubigné settled comfortably into the farm and pig business he and a partner purchased three kilometres north of Port Arthur, Ontario (now Thunder Bay). The two men built a new residence next to the long, low stable in which they housed their sixty-five pigs, and to give each some semblance of privacy, the house was occupied by D’Aubigné, while Fred Carrier lived in a smaller, older shanty a few dozen yards away. On Thursday, February 11, 1897, whatever dreams of their business future the partners shared came to an abrupt end.

Just after 6:00 a.m. two men on their way to cut cordwood passed the pig farm of D’Aubigné and Carrier, and noticed the smouldering remains of buildings. They also saw a mule, a calf, three dogs, a cat, and a few geese standing near a haystack, about halfway between what were once two small houses and a shed. Their first reaction was that there had been a tragic accident; tragic, because plainly visible in the ruins of one of the buildings were what looked like human remains.

By noon a coroner’s inquest was convened, and its members taken to view the accident site. The inquest then adjourned until the next day, when one witness after another swore that the fire was no accident. When the session ended, jurors had reached five conclusions. First, it would have been impossible for a fire to have spread from D’Aubigné’s house to the building occupied by his partner without setting fire to the haystack that separated the structures, particularly when the wind had been blowing away from Carrier’s shack; second, the night he died the door to the residence of D’Aubigné was fastened shut by a wooden peg shoved through an iron hasp — from the outside; third, footprints in freshly fallen snow led to and from the burned buildings; fourth, it was inconceivable that two men living within a few metres of sixty-five pigs would not have been awoken by the squealing of the animals as they were burned alive; and last, if Carrier’s body had fallen through the wooden floor of his shack after it was destroyed in the fire, the debris that covered him would have been beneath his remains, not on top of them. Jurors also thought it odd that the calf, which was habitually tied in a shed during the night, was found outside with a rope around its neck, a rope that had been cut.

Oliver Prévost was among the last witnesses heard by jurors. He testified that he and his wife were living in the Victoria Hotel, long abandoned by the time they moved in, and that the day before D’Aubigné and Carrier died he purchased from them a horse, a hog, and some potatoes. He said that after delivering the potatoes, Carrier declined an invitation to stay for supper, and headed home.

On February 26, the coroner’s jury reconvened. Among those heard was a young man who testified that the evening before the fire he saw Carrier driving a sleigh on his way home from town. The witness said a woman in a black dress with a shawl covering her head was walking beside the cutter. Although the route Carrier was taking was not one he usually took on his way from Port Arthur to his piggery, the young man did not think anything was amiss. Asked if the woman appeared to be trying to hide her identity, the witness said no, he did not think so. As it later turned out, he was wrong.

Following the testimony about the sleigh and the mysterious woman, the inquest adjourned until the next afternoon, when jurors met for the final time. Unbeknownst to anyone, among the last witnesses heard was the woman in the shawl. Because she was sick in bed, the evidence of Rosanna Gauthier, who described herself as Mrs. Prévost, was taken from her in the form of a written statement and read to jury members. She had nothing to say that they had not already heard. In fact, the jurors concluded they had heard all the new evidence they were likely to hear, and ended their deliberations by concluding: “That the said R. Dabin [René D’Aubigné] and F. Corrier [Fred Carrier] came to their death on the night of the 10th of February, 1897, through foul play, at the hands of some party or parties unknown to the jury, and that the buildings occupied by the men were set on fire to cover up the crime.”
[1]

The cover-up worked perfectly, for about ten months. By then the killers had gone their separate ways: Rosanna Gauthier to her husband and home in Valleyfield, Quebec, and Oliver Prévost back to a life of crime. Even then things would have been different had not Oliver harboured a sense of resentment he could not contain, or had the insanity that ran through his family not finally surfaced.

The beginning of the end came in November 1897, when Prévost pled guilty to stealing furs and pork in Renfrew, Ontario. Because of his lengthy criminal record, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Before he was transferred from Pembroke to the Kingston Penitentiary, he told the attorney prosecuting him that he had something to get off his chest. His story was equal parts fact and fiction, but it certainly captured the attention of his listener. According to Prévost, a little more than a year earlier he met Rosanna Gauthier, who was then in her late teens. The two were travelling from Montreal to Valleyfield, and through her he met her husband. In time the men agreed to become partners in the hotel business in Port Arthur, but when it came time to head west, Gautier changed his mind. Rosanna, however, was still enthused about going, and she, Prévost, and Prévost’s three children left without him. Prévost told the Crown Attorney that Rosanna was fascinated by poison, and she carried a small container of it wherever she went. Early the previous February two men stopped by the derelict hotel in which he and Rosanna were living, and they stayed for supper. For no reason he can understand, Gauthier poisoned them. Realizing the trouble they were in, the couple loaded the bodies on to a sleigh, and headed out for the men’s farm. There he and Gauthier laid the corpses on their beds, and after stripping them of everything of value, set fire to their houses to cover up their crime. A short while later Prévost and Gauthier separated.