Rampage (40 page)

If Albert Guay thought he could stall his execution by appearing in court, he was wrong. On January 12, 1951, he was taken from his cell to an anteroom at Bordeaux Prison. Though he allegedly said to prison officials, “Well, at least I die famous,” his insouciant facade soon crumbled as he mounted the gallows, trembling so much that he had to be held up by two guards. When the trap opened, he died quickly.

Alas, this was not to be the case with Généreux Ruest. Confined to a wheelchair, the little clockmaker was carted onto the same gallows on July 25, 1952. The executioner, who lacked experience hanging a man in a seated position, miscalculated the length of the rope, and botched the procedure. It took twenty-one agonizing minutes for Ruest to strangle to death, an inexcusable act of torture, regardless of his level of complicity.

In the interim between the executions of her creditor and her brother, Marguerite Pitre stood trial on March 6, 1951. She claimed that at 7:30 a.m. on September 9, 1949, Guay had convinced her brother to collect a hefty box and deposit it in a locker at Palais Railway Station. Pitre had retrieved it an hour later, believing it contained a statue, and transported it to the airport where it was placed in the DC-3’s luggage compartment. However, the testimony of a hardware store clerk from the Lower Town, who claimed to have sold her twenty sticks of dynamite, turned the jury against her. Sentenced to die for her role in the murders, on January 9, 1953, The Raven became the last woman to be executed in Canadian history. Unlike Albert Guay, she reportedly went to her death with poise and dignity.

   
      
Louis Chiasson

“I didn’t want to burn my old people.”

Victims:
40 killed/many injured

Duration of rampage:
December 2, 1969 (mass homicide)

Location:
Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Quebec

Weapon:
Fire

Smoke on the Water

Long before its 2010 merger with Cabano, Quebec, to form the city of Témiscouata-sur-le-Lac, there was Notre-Dame-du-Lac: a pleasant lakeside parish located roughly twenty-five kilometres west of the New Brunswick border. In the early morning hours of December 1968, the community of 2,200 stood poised to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. Some people even hung little flags in the street. By 6:00 a.m. the birthday candles had been lit — smoke appeared from the windows of a local retirement home. Marjorie Bergeron remembers being roused by the sound of voices crying, “My God, they’re trapped! Good God, do something!” Within minutes, the town fire brigade rushed to Repos du Vieillard to find the decrepit wooden building engulfed in flames. So intense was the heat that Fire Chief Joseph Gagnon was forced to park his car downhill, hundreds of feet from the scene. As the screams of burning patients filled the winter darkness, Gagnon sensed it was already too late to avert catastrophe; but, if they could pull together, with a little luck, they could prevent more deaths from happening. Around the same time, Mayor Rene Berube awoke to the sound of frantic hammering on his door. Learning of the situation, he rushed out immediately in search of volunteers to assist the firemen.

To add to the complications, nobody had any idea as to the names, the identities, or even the number of residents at Repos du Vieillard. It was as if the very building had succumbed to Alzheimer’s, its only record books cremated within. Estimates fell somewhere between seventy-one and seventy-eight inhabitants. Fortunat Blanchet, a local priest, grimly recalled the presence of at least seventeen bedridden geriatrics who were physically incapable of escaping.

Before volunteers from nearby Cabano and Riviére-du-Loup arrived to help combat the blaze, ash-faced survivors were already pouring into the street, spreading tales of panic and woe. Seventy-six-year-old Augustin Blanchard recalled an old woman who had decided to head back to the third storey to rescue her savings. She now lay among the estimated fifty dead. Blanchard himself had narrowly escaped death by scaling down a fire escape. Rudolph Beaulieu, sixty-eight, and A.J. Dupont, seventy-three, claimed to have been awoken by the ringing of an alarm bell, which they had initially dismissed as a wake-up call to kitchen staff. Looking outside, they saw black plumes of smoke and orange flames billowing from the main building. Beaulieu and Dupont headed down the fire escape with a few other evacuees, all clad in pajamas and many barefoot. The prudish succumbed to the inferno, walls caving in around them as they struggled feebly into their clothes.

One sixty-four-year-old survivor was particularly eager to talk to the press: Louis Chiasson. A handyman and resident at the home, Chiasson had climbed out of a third-storey window and down a ladder to safety. Earlier, at around 6:00 a.m., he recalled creeping to the first floor bathroom, only to discover the laundry room in flames.
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After sounding the fire alarm, he ran from room to room, attempting to convince others to flee the building. “[I] tried to get an old man to come with me; he wouldn’t go,” Chiasson informed reporters. “I went to the third floor and told some girls to get out of the building, but they wouldn’t move.” After encountering a group of men, Chiasson proclaimed:

I told them the whole building was on fire and they were too scared to move. They just stood there and looked at me.… All the people were very old and sick. That’s what the home was for. A lot of them couldn’t help themselves. There was nothing else to do but stay…. Some of the people who could walk were coming out of their rooms, but no one knew where to go.… I told an elderly couple to get out. She is at Notre Dame Hospital now, but he was crippled and burned in the fire.… It happened so fast everybody was stunned … and then the smoke choked them and they couldn’t see or breathe.… A lot of the people were very sick and the smoke seemed to make them stop thinking.
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Meanwhile, the mayor, firefighters, and volunteers continued to drag distraught survivors from the ruins. Gallons of water from Lake Témiscouata were pumped relentlessly into the inferno. By late morning it had been extinguished, leaving only a bed of ash and coal smouldering by the Trans-Canada Highway.

Sifting Through the Ashes

With a final count of thirty-nine confirmed dead and one individual still missing, the tragedy at Repos du Vieillard would go down as one of the worst fires in Quebec history. Predictably, a host of politicians came out of the woodwork in an attempt to use the calamity to their advantage. Opposition leader René Lévesque of the Parti Quebecois was outraged, declaring the Repos du Vieillard incident “scandalous and bordering on criminal.” Lévesque claimed to have witnessed this “unbelievable fire trap” first hand when he stopped by to campaign in 1966 for the upcoming election. At the time, Lévesque had been Family and Welfare minister, and allegedly told his secretary to inform local department officers to condemn the building. However, Mayor Berube explained that a year and a half before the fire, the Notre-Dame-du-Lac council, with support from National Union member Montcalm Simard, had demanded that the dry wooden building be replaced. Surprisingly, they had received a letter from the department of Family and Social Welfare explaining that this was unnecessary, as Repos du Vieillard met all of the requirements. Department official Paul Archambault explained that the building’s exits, fire extinguishers, and fire escapes had all conformed to standards. The flames had simply spread so fast that these precautions were redundant.

Of all the questions, the most important still remained unanswered: how had the fire started? A nun residing nearby, Sister Helena, corroborated Louis Chiasson’s account that it had begun in the vicinity of the laundry room. One of the dominant theories was that a boiler or other machine had exploded. Suddenly, on January 15, 1970, the Sûreté du Quebec made a surprise announcement: Louis Chiasson had confessed to igniting the blaze, and was now charged with non-capital murder. What dark force had led this sixty-four-year-old native of Miscou Island, New Brunswick, to burn forty innocent pensioners alive?

Firestarter

The first clue as to Chiasson’s motives was unveiled at a coroner’s inquest in January 1970, when, after a seventy-five minute interrogation, the haggard handyman shakily admitted, “I only wanted to set a small fire so that I could put it out and so that everyone would realize how useful I was around the home.… I love old people.… I’ve been unable to sleep soundly ever since the fire.… I didn’t want to burn my old people.” At his subsequent trial, three prison inmates corroborated his story, testifying that Chiasson had explained that he had used paper matches to ignite the blaze as he wanted to “look useful.”

Although it may appear that Chiasson was lying to make himself seem less monstrous, this was probably not the case. In 1980, Anthony Olen Rider, a researcher into arson-related crimes, identified several “types” of firestarters. Among them was the Would-Be Hero, later described by Holmes and Holmes as an arsonist who “rushes into his fire scene, saves a life, etc., and is the apparent hero because of his swift and decisive action.”
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In other words, an attention-starved loser wishes to boost his public image by competently fixing a crisis of his own design. Considering Chiasson’s volubility to the media after escaping the fire, along with his testimony at the coroner’s inquest, this explanation is actually the most plausible. Unfortunately, Chiasson was not even competent enough to control his own inferno. In his attempts to become a “useful hero,” he actually exposed himself as an inept and rather pathetic villain.

Charged with the murder of Albert Lebel — the only pensioner among forty dead who could be positively identified, in January 1971, Chiasson was deemed fit to stand trial at a psychiatric examination in Quebec City. The proceedings commenced on Monday, January 11. During the trial, Chiasson changed his story, claiming his innocence and that his confession was elicited under intense pressure from the police. “I will not plead guilty to the charge until I die,” Chiasson declared. Many thought that would not be long. Word had leaked out that the accused had been experiencing heart problems, and Defence Attorney Denis Rioux expressed concerns that his client might not last the trial. He did, and on January 15, a twelve-man jury in Court of Queen’s Bench found Louis Chiasson guilty of the non-capital murder of Albert Lebel. Judge Fournier sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The shamed convict languished in his cell at Archambault Institution in Ste. Anne des Plaines for nearly two years before his heart finally failed him on November 21, 1971. His death came four days after the fatal attack on fellow inmate Leopold Dion (“The Monster of Pont-Rouge,” profiled in my first book
Cold North Killers: Canadian Serial Murder
). A journalistic flub by a
Montreal Star
reporter led to misinformation that Chiasson had propositioned a psychotic inmate who had responded by almost decapitating him. The error, probably confused with Norman Champagne’s murder of Leopold Dion, was soon corrected.

However, Dion and Chiasson, two of Quebec’s worst multiple killers, remained inextricably entwined in death. Their joint funeral service was held at 2:00 p.m. on November 24 in Montreal. Chiasson’s only brother, Martin, a lobster fisherman, drove over 1,125 kilometres from his home on Miscou Island, New Brunswick, to view his brother’s body. However, upon arriving, he found the casket closed. An official explained to Martin that Louis’s coffin could not be opened because they would then have to do the same to Dion’s, and “The Monster of Pont Rouge,” whose girlfriend had arrived to say her farewells, was too severely beaten for that to be permitted. Martin Chiasson later divulged his suspicions to the media:

Well he die last week. I went up to Montreal to see him and could not see him. I don’t understand the reason how they never show him to me. They say he die from heart attack and there was another guy buried in the same grave, and they say Dion was in the same penitentiary as Louis. I found that funny.… Those two men was buried the same day and they say that Dion fight with another man. Maybe its Louis and Dion fight to death.
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Rumours aside, Chiasson had been admitted to Montreal’s Queen Mary Hospital three weeks prior to his death. Though he and Dion were both buried at St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery, prison official Yves Deschénes was admant: “They are not in the same grave.… Definitely not.”

Chapter 13

The Psychotic

As we have seen in the
Guay
,
Fabrikant
,
Cook
, and
Roszko
cases, the idea that a mass murderer
must
be crazy is a layman’s superstition; all four men were lucid, calculating, and downright evil. However, there does seem to be a greater prevalence of insanity in rampage murderers than in serial killers. Unlike the personality disorders we explored in Chapter 4, “the term
psychotic
refers to delusions, any prominent hallucinations, disorganized speech, or disorganized or catatonic behaviour.”
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