Practically Perfect (14 page)

There was so much whispering about the missing Mrs. Kendall that word eventually reached the authorities. A month after their mother disappeared, the two oldest children were interviewed by an inspector with the Ontario Provincial Police. The children were well rehearsed. Asked where her mother was, Margaret said she left after a fight with her father, during which her mother threw a cup of tea into his face. In fact, the daughter recalled, they were having supper when her mother announced she was leaving: “she said I’ll never be back — never — she wasn’t crying…. I want her to be found, but I don’t care if she comes to live with us. I like my daddy best.”
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The children even remembered the clothing their mother wore when she left the house, and the things she put into the shopping bag she took with her.

Probably the most suspicious evidence that came to the attention of the inspector was a cardboard box found by a neighbour in the woods near the Kendall farm. Inside the box were articles of women’s clothing, including two slips and a July edition of the
Farmer’s Advocate
with Kendall’s mailing address visible on the front cover. When the items were examined in the police lab, two bloodstains were discovered on the front page of the magazine. The problem for investigators was that there was no proof the stains were human; and even though Kendall was seen walking through a freshly worked field in the area where the box was discovered, there was nothing concrete to connect him to it. The police eventually dug up the local garbage dump and the fields around the Kendall home, but nothing was found.

So it was that with little to go on, the investigation into the disappearance of Helen Kendall ground to halt. While life for the missing woman’s children went on, times were much tougher than they once had been. For two years the youngsters lived in foster homes, then were returned to the crowded residence of their father and the Hogues. After that Kendall talked openly about what might or might not have happened to their mother. James later recalled that his father seemed almost proud of what everyone suspected he had done. He “always said there was no jail that would hold him. He liked to boast a bit — he discussed it openly in front of us.”
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Anne remembered that when she or one of her siblings accused their father of murdering their mother, he would always reply: “Prove it.”
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After brooding for nine years, Anne could no longer keep the family secret, and in January 1961, she went to the police. So too did Margaret. Before the month was out Kendall was arrested at the Royal Air Force base at Clinton, Ontario, where he worked as a carpenter. By the time his murder trial got underway on October 24, Anne’s brother also gave investigators a statement implicating his father in the disappearance of his mother. With nothing physical connecting Kendall to the crime, the Crown built its case on circumstantial evidence. It was enough. The trial ended after four days of testimony. The presiding judge stressed to jurors that there was nothing in the law that prevented them from bringing in a verdict of guilty in the absence of a body. There was ample evidence, he suggested, for the jury to reach two conclusions: Helen Kendall was dead; and her death was brought about by her husband. In less than three hours the jurors rendered their verdict — guilty.

When Charles Dubin’s appeal of Kendall’s conviction was heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal on January 23, 1962, his petition made reference to a number of legal points, but apart from arguing that the trial judge misdirected the jury, he really had only one thing to ask the court: if Kendall really did murder his wife, why did the couple’s children remain silent for nine years? He argued that when they were out of the control and influence of their father, the children had many opportunities to tell someone — members of the Children’s Aid Society, or the people in foster homes, for instance — about what happened. The appellate court deliberated for just eight minutes before dismissing the appeal. Two weeks later the same court granted the killer a stay of execution so that Dubin could try his luck with the Supreme Court of Canada. There he advanced the same argument, suggesting that the trial judge improperly instructed the jury when he failed to warn jurors against convicting Kendall solely on the strength of the distant memories of three of his five children. The Supreme Court, like the Court of Appeal, disagreed, and unanimously dismissed the appeal. Now all that was left for the killer was to ask the federal cabinet for clemency. This time he was more successful.

Kendall made legal history when he was convicted of murdering his wife. A month earlier the
Criminal Code
was amended to divide murder into capital and non-capital charges. Capital murder involved either a pre-meditated killing, or a murder committed during a burglary, indecent assault, rape, escape from custody, piracy, sabotage, arson, treason, or the killing of a police officer. The sentence for a conviction under either category was mandatory. In the case of capital murder, it was death; in the case of non-capital murder, the sentence was life imprisonment. Kendall was the first person convicted of capital murder after the amendments came into effect. On April 10, 1962, the government of John George Diefenbaker commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. It added to the commutation a condition that he was not to be released without the approval of the federal cabinet. When Walkerton’s sheriff advised Kendall that he was not going to hang, the killer did not say a word.

Since at least the 1920s it has been the policy of provincial governments to release to family the body of a loved one who was executed. Occasionally, that meant a killer was buried near the body of his or her victim. The churchyard burial of murderers was most often allowed when a killer was predeceased by a family member. After two of his children died in infancy, Kendall purchased a plot in the Bayfield Cemetery, near Goderich, Ontario. Before his sentence was commuted, members of the cemetery’s board of trustees feared that the killer would seek to have his body buried next to those of his sons. To avoid that possibility, the board passed a motion refusing to allow the sheriff where Kendall was to be hanged permission to inter his body in Bayfield. That decision did not go down well with the editor of the
Globe and Mail
.

By voting to refuse burial in the cemetery to a convicted murderer, Arthur Kendall, the board of trustees of the Bayfield Cemetery of Goderich have in no way protected or enhanced the sanctity of their ground. Kendall’s sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment, but it is regrettable that anyone should have wished to extend punishment beyond death.
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If Kendall was not welcome in Goderich the same could not be said for Terrance, British Columbia. The killer’s relationship with the west coast town began on February 13, 1971, when he failed to return to the Kingston area minimum security jail, where he was serving his life sentence, after being granted a day pass. At some point Kendall made his way to Guelph, where he posted three letters to the warden of Joyceville Penitentiary. Although the contents of the letters were not released, according to an Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson, “They were rambling letters and he said he had no intention of going back to prison. He even mentioned he is going to write a book about his life.”
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Even if he was serious about penning his autobiography, Kendall did not have time. On February 25, he was recaptured at the Terrace home of one of his stepsons. After that he was returned to prison, and like his wife, disappeared from public view.

Suspicions Linger

Some of the stories of murder and treachery in this book suggest that the perfect crime is often the one committed most openly. That was the case with Marie Louis Cloutier and Achille Grondin, and Marie Beaulne and Philibert Lefebvre, four early-twentieth-century lovers who made no effort to hide their illicit romances. In fact, the longer the affairs lasted, the more they were accepted by residents of the small Quebec villages in which the two couples lived. Although no one in southwestern Alberta tolerated the murder of John Benson by William Jasper Collins, he, like the Quebec lovers, would almost certainly have escaped the hangman had he only exercised a little discretion after the fact.

William Jasper Collins: Too Much Money

In the opening decade of the twentieth century few lawyers around Braymer, Missouri, prospered more than John Benson. Although over the years he acquired property, considerable wealth, and a young wife and child, he yearned for something more. What he wanted was the experience of homesteading on the Canadian prairies. Before that happened, however, he took on one more client, a teenager charged with sexually assaulting his sister. In the days Benson spent preparing for trial he got to know William Jasper Collins well, and for some reason grew attached to the young man. After he obtained an acquittal, Benson became Collins’s benefactor and employer. So it was that when the lawyer filed a homestead claim near the tiny Alberta community of Cereal, he brought Collins with him. Over the next eight months Benson sold his land holdings in Braymer, and on April 4, 1913, he and Collins set off for western Canada. Three weeks later they finished building a barn and a small house, and Benson wrote home, asking his wife to meet him in Saskatoon.

Clara Benson left Missouri on May 3, and when she reached Saskatoon she checked into the King Edward Hotel. Almost immediately she was handed a pair of telegrams, informing her of the death of John Benson. She promptly left for Kindersley, Saskatchewan, to collect the body of her husband. There she saw Collins in a hotel hallway. She rushed to him. “Oh, Jasper, tell me how it all happened.”
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And he did. Not for one moment did it occur to her that he was lying.

Collins told her that he was about a mile from the house watering horses when he heard a loud sound, like a shot. He finished with the animals, and then headed back. He arrived to find the shack on fire, and promptly rushed to the nearest neighbour. By the time he got back to the small dwelling, it was completely destroyed. In the ruins he found what was left of Benson. It was his opinion, said Collins, that Benson must have tried to put gasoline in the oil stove, and thereby caused the explosion.
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When she met Collins at Kindersley, Benson asked him if any money was found in the ruins of the burned shack. She thought it a little strange when he told her there was none, since her husband wore a money belt, and when he left Braymer it contained somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000. Thinking perhaps John might have deposited his savings in a bank, she asked Collins if he ever saw her husband put anything under his pillow at night — perhaps a bank book? He said he did not notice anything because Benson always slept with a coat over his head.

After she met Collins, Clara Benson and the young man quickly left for Cereal, where she made inquiries into the circumstances surrounding the fire and death. She was told that both the police and the local coroner were notified in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and a wire was sent to Braymer, advising friends of the dead lawyer what happened. Because there was no reason to think anything was amiss, no inquest was held. The widow discovered nothing to make her suspect that what everyone was calling an accident was really a murder, so she and Collins headed back to Saskatoon. There she purchased a ticket home for herself and the body of her husband. When Collins told her he did not have enough money to buy one for himself, she bought his as well. As soon as she arrived home Benson made arrangements to have her husband buried, and did what she could to settle into the life of a single parent. It was not long, however, before she began hearing rumours that Collins was spending a lot of money.

Although he was jobless and professed to have no money, Collins started making a number of unusually large purchases. To hide what he was doing, he made them in towns around Braymer, but he brought what he bought back on the train, and in no time what he tried to keep secret was common knowledge. When Clara heard the talk she contacted the Masons. Her husband had been a member of the local order, and his friends in the organization were alarmed enough at what they were told that they hired a Pinkerton detective to investigate. When they received his report, the Masons arranged to have Benson’s body exhumed. There was not a lot of it left. The registrar of deaths for Caldwell County, Missouri conducted the post mortem. He found that one of the dead man’s hands and one foot were completely gone, there was some but not much flesh left on his chest, and a large piece of his skull was missing. There was also evidence of a blood clot at the base of the brain and a hole through his heart. He concluded that the cause of death was a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, and that the heart was struck by a bullet fired after the victim was dead.

With the autopsy report in hand the Masons contacted the Braymer police. They took Collins into custody and searched his room. There they found a money belt containing $1,800 in twenty dollar bills, a fortune for a young man with no income. Arrangements were made to place Collins in a cell in the nearest jail, just down the road in Kingston. Before Collins and his minders got there Collins told them he was prepared to make a deal: if he was taken back to Braymer, he would tell them everything. So they turned around, and within the hour Collins confessed to murder.

My name is William Jasper Collins and I live in Braymer, MO. I left the latter town with John Benson for the Canadian territory to take up a claim with him. Within a week after the completion of the house on the claim of John Benson, while in the house I struck him on the left side of the head with my fist, which knocked him down, and he then pulled a razor and I then drew a gun of .33-calibre and shot him. I then threw the gun away. After he had been dead an hour I poured oil about the house and set it afire. I took his money, which was under his pillow. There is some of the money in the lot taken by Constable Burnett that belongs to me which Benson paid me, but I owed him my expenses to Canada and while there. This sum is in the amount of about $200. This statement is made of my own free will and accord and without consideration of promises of any nature.
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