Practically Perfect (17 page)

It turned out that the accused was also a little obsessed with putting on a red dress. A friend of the prisoner told the court that when Cloutier was leaving the cemetery following her husband’s interment she was approached by Brochu’s sister. Her former sister-in-law told Cloutier that Brochu was better off in the ground than with her. The widow shot back: “with people like you about, it’s better to wear red for mourning than black.” Asked at her trial if the comment reflected her sentiment towards her husband, Cloutier thought it might have, since by the time her husband died she had no feelings for him whatsoever. The prosecutor wondered whether the witness thought it a bit strange that she used the same expression twice, both times in the context of the death of her first husband. Cloutier said she did not think so. “When I used it first I had been joking. The other times I was angry. They said I hadn’t taken good care of Villemond.”
[11]

Other statements the barely grieving widow made both before and after her first husband’s funeral came back to haunt her. The Crown Attorney focussed particularly on what Cloutier had to say when she heard that the police were thinking about digging up the body of Brochu. She told friends that if they found poison, they would not find very much. The prosecutor asked why she mentioned poison before the police even knew of its presence. “Did you know before the coroner’s inquest into Brochu’s death that he had been poisoned?” Her response did not satisfy the lawyer: “I only knew what the doctors had said that he was poisoned by his liver and his kidneys.” But, he wondered, “how did you know before the inquest then that there was poison in his body — you told Mrs. Joseph Carrier before the inquest and the result of the autopsy was known that “They may find some but they have to see it given.” Different versions of the same question were asked over and over, but Cloutier refused to back down. The clearly exasperated prosecutor asked Cloutier to explain why, after her husband’s body was exhumed, she told detectives if they found anything in his body they could not have found much. She denied everything. “I didn’t say that. I showed them a mortuary card made after my husband died and asked them if the body they dug up looked anything like the picture on the card and they said it didn’t.”
[12]

A subject of considerable interest to all of the participants in Cloutier’s trial was Brochu’s extended illness. The first doctor to treat the former cab driver said Brochu arrived at his office on July 16, 1937, complaining of a severe burning sensation in his stomach. The doctor testified that Brochu told him he had not eaten any bad food, nor had he been drinking. After examining the patient, the physician admitted that he “wasn’t able to determine the cause of his sickness. I decided his illness was inflammation of the stomach and not indigestion as I had first believed. It seemed as though he might have suffered some kind of poisoning through his food.”
[13]
After Brochu left, the doctor said he continued to think about his patient’s condition and decided to stop by the Brochu residence to see how the cabbie was feeling. “I didn’t stay long at the home because Mrs. Brochu did not receive me very well.”
[14]

The next medical practitioner to treat the murder victim was a doctor working at the hospital in Thetford Mines. He testified that Cloutier showed up with her husband on July 21. “Brochu was having considerable pain from his stomach. I was unable to find out what was the cause of his trouble and apparently he did not know himself. His illness might have been caused, I thought first, by contaminated water, improperly cooked food or even green vegetables.” But, he said, after five days of rest Brochu left, “apparently cured.”
[15]

Last to treat Brochu was a physician who examined him several times in the days before the patient died. He was convinced Brochu was suffering from some kind of indigestion. “I treated him with ordinary indigestion and the medicine I prescribed for him did not help. In most cases of that kind, which were common in the district at that time, it would have.”
[16]
When asked about the circumstances surrounding the making of Brochu’s death certificate, the practitioner said his patient’s widow told him that she needed a death certificate before she could collect on her husband’s life insurance, so he made one out, listing indigestion as the cause of death. What he did not know was that Cloutier made the same request to two other doctors. They both refused to provide her with the certificate.

The pathologist who examined Brochu’s body following its exhumation felt very strongly that the dead man was not well served by his doctors. He told the court that after someone consumes arsenic they feel:

violent pains and burning in the stomach, and vomiting follows. The hands and feet swell, the face becomes swollen and the eyes are affected. Later the victim feels pain in his limbs, which finally become paralyzed. There are eruptions on the skin. The victim becomes weaker. The pulse slows up, and then death comes.
[17]

The pathologist, who sat through the trial making notes, said every symptom he heard described was a symptom associated with arsenic poisoning.

During his address to the jury Cloutier’s lawyer dismissed the testimony about witchcraft as “ridiculous and foolish talk,” and then bore down on the crux of the Crown’s case — the evidence that Brochu had been poisoned. That allegation was simply not something an honest and intelligent person could accept as true.

Did Brochu die poisoned? Was it proved he was poisoned? Was poison really found? Medicine says yes. But medicine isn’t a certain science — it’s a theoretical science. Was medicine right before Pasteur? Doctors before him were sure of their ground just as we are sure of ours today. They were wrong though. Doctors giving testimony in courts before Pasteur came didn’t perjure themselves when they said what they thought was truth. They didn’t perjure themselves but they were still wrong. Dr. Roussel insisted the arsenic had been administered to Brochu in more than one dose. But three other doctors who had treated Brochu during his last illness in the summer of 1937 said his sickness was acute indigestion. Now all four doctors were trained in medicine. They should know what they are talking about. But they don’t agree. Brochu was a drinker and evidence during his trial was that liquor often made him sick. Three doctors who treated him said he was poisoning himself through his liver and kidneys. Perhaps he died a natural death. There was no evidence to show Mrs. Grondin ever had arsenic in her hands except for her gardening.
[18]

The defence lawyer concluded with his strongest argument. He caught the Crown’s medical expert in what he referred to as a monumental “error of analysis.” Holding up the container seized from Grondin’s home, he reminded jurors that the expert said it contained arsenic. But that was not true. It was not a mixture of paris green and carbonate of lime, as the Crown’s witness alleged. The supposed poison was nothing more than ordinary wood ashes. “If the doctor made a simple mistake like that, maybe he was wrong when he said there was arsenic in Brochu’s body.”
[19]
The lawyer may have been right, but the jury was not buying his argument. After sitting for a month and hearing testimony from more than one hundred witnesses, it took jurors one hour and fifteen minutes to find Cloutier guilty of murder. Perhaps they came to their decision so quickly because it was divinely inspired. When the jury was told it was to begin its deliberations, the foreman asked the judge for a “special favour.” Could they walk a few steps down the street to St. Joseph’s old Roman Catholic Church and pray for a bit. That is what they did. After spending twenty minutes on their knees, the jurors rose and returned to the courthouse. Ninety minutes later Cloutier was sentenced to hang.
[20]

The trial of his wife ended on October 8, 1938, and Grondin’s got underway before the same judge a month later. His hearing lasted almost as long as that of his co-accused, and much of the evidence was the same. One thing that became clear at the very beginning of the trial was that from the day he became Brochu’s hired man, Grondin was seldom apart from his lover. The murder victim’s fourteen-year-old niece and her brother lived with the Brochus the summer her uncle died. She testified that every day just after lunch Grondin showed up, and as soon as he did the siblings were banished to the second floor of the tiny home. “She [Cloutier] told us she would beat us if we did not leave.” Once they got to the second floor, she said, her aunt lowered a trapdoor at the top of the staircase. “We only came down again after Grondin had left.”
[21]

Although the trial continued for another three weeks, the result for Grondin was the same as it had been for his wife: guilty. His date with the hangman was set for the end of April 1939, by which time his wife should have been dead — except that was not the way things turned out. When Cloutier received permission to appeal her verdict, her death sentence was postponed. After the Quebec Court of Appeal denied her application for a new trial, her sentence was postponed a second time so that she could appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. That court reserved judgment after hearing arguments, and by the time the various appeals of Grondin and Cloutier were dealt with, the couple spent almost a year and a half on death row.

In early February one last wrinkle had to be ironed out before they could be executed. According to law, condemned persons are to be hanged in the judicial district closest to where the crime was committed. In the case of Cloutier and Grondin, that meant their execution was to take place in the village of St. Joseph de Beauce. No one had ever been hanged there before, and its townspeople had no appetite for such a spectacle. By this time Cloutier did not care where she was put to death, she just wanted to get it over with. As usual, Grondin said nothing. When the provincial government was petitioned to change the location of the hanging, it agreed to do so: the couple was to hang in the courtyard of Montreal’s Bordeaux Jail.

Grondin went first. A little over sixteen minutes later his widow began her death walk. She was dropped at 7:10 a.m., and as her body was cut down a black flag was raised to half mast. The tolling bells of the city’s Catholic Churches brought to an end the lives of two lovers who, with a little more patience, may have gotten away with murder.

6

The Two Rolands

Love, booze, and one too many suicides are the themes of the two stories in this chapter. Both are set in the province of Quebec. Sadly, four people died, three of whom were women. In the first tale a killer got away with murder until his lover was overcome by guilt and committed suicide. The police thought it unlikely that a man and wife would each take their own lives, and it was their reopened investigation that sent her lover to the gallows. The second story is all about brutality involving a woman who would do anything for her man. That included killing his wife.

Roland Asselin: Fifty-Five Weeks between Murders

Ulric Gauthier was a big man in St. Telesphore, a small Quebec town located just west of Montreal. The large garage-man was one of the community’s most prosperous business persons, and drank with gusto. His stentorian voice, steeped in liquor, was often heard echoing down the town’s main street. But he died quietly, or at least as quietly as someone who shot himself can die. After Gauthier’s death was ruled a suicide, everyone seemed to forget about him — everyone, that is, except his widow. When she hanged herself three months after her husband died, the authorities thought it was one suicide too many, and reopened an investigation into the death of Ulric. That was bad news for Roland Asselin. One year and three weeks after he shot his lover’s husband in the side of the head, he was called to account.

If Roland Asselin did not have a lot of close friends, he was at least well known. When not driving his cab he often stopped by local garages to kill time. Asselin was at the business operated by Joseph Babineau so often that no one noticed when he began wandering around the garage, opening drawers and poking about. In retrospect, as soon as it was discovered that a revolver was missing, Asselin should have been considered the likely thief. That was not the case, however, and although Babineau noticed the gun was gone sometime in mid-1946, he neither reported it missing nor made an issue of its disappearance. But Asselin knew where it was. In fact, the taxi man made little attempt to hide it. Perhaps that is why he had it in his jacket pocket on November 9, when he picked Gauthier up for a night of drinking.

No one saw where the men went, but the next morning it was all too apparent where Gauthier ended up. His body was discovered lying on a dirt road a few miles out of town by an area farmer. The man slowed as he passed the corpse, but did not stop until he encountered some friends. The group returned to the remains, and despite the shock of finding the body of a man everyone knew, they could not help think that something was not right with the scene. Babineau’s missing revolver was lying on one side of Gauthier, and a bottle of beer on the other. Two things struck the men as odd: the fingers of the garage owner’s left hand were hooked into one of the pockets of his vest, as if he died in the middle of a casual conversation. And the men thought it unlikely someone could shoot himself in the left side of his head with his right hand. It was also strange that although it had poured rain the night before, the soles of the shoes of the dead man were dry, and there were no tracks in the mud leading up to or away from the spot where Gauthier lay.

A few days later a coroner’s inquest was held in a local restaurant. Jurors were undecided about how Gauthier died. Some believed Asselin when he testified that the evening before Gauthier’s body was found the two were out drinking, and he dropped off his passenger near the spot where his body was found. Others were convinced the death was the result of some kind of accident, while a few felt Asselin was not telling the truth. As a result, the inquest was terminated, and a second one convened. This time jurors had no doubt — it was death by suicide. The police promptly closed their files, and life went back to normal.