Rampage (9 page)

Much of Swift Runner’s adulthood was spent in marital bliss, fathering five children by his radiant wife. He traded regularly with the white man and lived a nomadic lifestyle, hunting and tracking buffalo across what is now central Alberta. As the years went by, however, fewer and fewer of these great beasts roamed the plains. Increasingly, the confident and capable Swift Runner found himself unable to provide meat for his beloved family. There was many a night when his children fell asleep with empty bellies. The world was changing beyond Swift Runner’s understanding or capacity to adapt to it, sapping his self-esteem and drowning him in the darkest depths of depression.

While food was scant, there was always an abundance of whisky. As his mood blackened, Swift Runner began to partake in the white man’s poison. The alcohol redirected his internal frustrations and resentments outward, and he began to sob uncontrollably and lash out at those around him. His personal philosophy changed along with the prairie; where he had once been a revered contributor to his tribe, he now saw all men as isolated entities in constant competition for resources, and paranoia set in. The once good-natured Swift Runner developed a reputation as a violent and volatile man, and people did their best to avoid him. Voices whispered to him now in tones that only he could hear. Cruel fantasies flooded his thoughts, sweetening his resentment with visions of revenge and exacerbating his homicidal tendencies. Physically, he was numb, as if an alien entity were slowly invading his body. Hope was disappearing from his life faster than the buffalo.

By the winter of 1878, the psychological door keeping Swift Runner’s murderous impulses at bay was rotten and rusted at the hinges. The cruelty of that bleak season, fuelled by whisky and self-loathing, would prove to be the blow that sent it crashing in. Camped out in the snows nearly 130 kilometres north of Fort Saskatchewan, Swift Runner had been forced to slaughter the dogs to feed his family. With his stomach aching, his memories began drifting back to the smoky fires of his youth, where tribal elders had told tales of the Windigo — a hideous monster who possessed a man’s soul and drove him to cannibalism.

The presence of the Windigo seemed to grow stronger with his hunger. It was now mid-February 1879, and whenever Swift Runner went out to hunt he found himself returning empty-handed. A strange throbbing pain pervaded his muscles, and he felt something raking at his skin. No longer did he leave in search of prey — instead, his covetous eyes shifted to his own family. Of stronger resolve, his mother-in-law and brother set out looking for food, followed soon after by his wife and all but one of his children. Alone at the camp with the hapless boy, Swift Runner finally succumbed to the Windigo’s maddening cries. One night as his son slept, Swift Runner approached him in a trance-like state, as if he were watching himself from afar. His head was pounding like a tribal war drum. Hefting his rifle, he fired into the boy’s skull, but the shot was not fatal. Swift Runner had seemingly become so inept at hunting that he could not even murder a sleeping child. Tears streaming from his eyes, Swift Runner frantically seized a knife and plunged it repeatedly into the boy’s torso, until the smell of blood pervaded the air. As the red rivers of life ran dry, Swift Runner bashed in his son’s head with a club, hastening his inevitable demise. He then went to work with the axe, butchering the corpse before cooking the slices of meat over the fire. Mouthful by mouthful, he consumed the child with an animal-like neutrality, leeching the marrow from his splintered bones. In doing so, he sated his hunger and re-established an inner equilibrium — at least for the time being.

Swift Runner relaxed in front of the glowing embers, savouring the taste of blood and the smoke from his pipe. Then, leaving what remained of his first victim behind, he set out in search of the others. It wasn’t long before he caught up with his wife, his favourite son Red Hawk, and his three daughters. There must have been something in her husband’s demeanour which betrayed the presence of the Windigo, for Sun-on-the-Mountain lied and told him that his brother and mother-in-law had perished somewhere in the wilds. But Swift Runner saw right through her. Early the next morning, as she slept, he fired a bullet through her neck. She shuddered momentarily, then lay motionless. Hefting her body into his strong arms, he carried his dead wife into the firelight, where he carved her up like a deer. His two eldest daughters were murdered next, gazing up in terror as he rained savage blows onto their heads with his hatchet. Promising that no harm would befall him, he ordered the terrified Red Hawk to melt snow for his cooking pot, and set about chopping his daughters into meat. Together, Swift Runner and his son dined on the women’s flesh. All the while his last surviving daughter, a baby, lay helpless in the darkness. Still the Windigo’s belly rumbled. Cinching a rope around the infant’s neck, he strung her from a lodge pole, pulling down on her little feet so she would strangle quicker. Minutes later, she joined her sisters in the cooking pot.

Whether it was hours or days later we do not know, but eventually Swift Runner followed his remaining family members’ tracks and found them asleep in the forest. He crept up on them like the sun over the horizon, knife in hand. The blade tore savagely through his mother-in-law before he shattered her face with a club. So silent was the attack that it failed to rouse his brother. At point-blank range, Swift Runner aimed and fired into the man’s head, killing him instantly. He eviscerated and sliced up the corpses, hanging strips of their flesh from the surrounding trees. Then he fed. Red Hawk watched passively. On the surface, Swift Runner had defied the odds, surviving the terrible winter famine. Yet so much of him had died alongside his family in those snows: his identity, his sanity, his future …

The ducks returned with the spring, and Swift Runner and Red Hawk were soon dining on their succulence. The two were now nearing the Egg Lake (Lake Manowan) settlement, where Swift Runner expected to be found out and arrested for his horrendous crimes. It was time to dispose of the last witness. While they sat feasting around the fire, he plunged the blade into Red Hawk’s sternum, observing the spark drain from the boy’s gaping expression with a stony detachment. There was no need to cannibalize his son, yet he did so anyway, despite the plenitude of fowl. Forevermore, he would walk this earth as a Windigo; no flesh could ever satisfy him like that of humanity — a weak species to which he no longer belonged.

Shoeing the Devil’s Hoof

On August 16, 1879, Swift Runner stood before six white jurors, charged with slaughtering and cannibalizing his family. The trial was a dull one-sided affair; Swift Runner’s race and poverty, along with the grotesque nature of his crimes, made the suggestion that he could be innocent a mere formality. Within twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of “guilty,” and the dreamy-eyed Cree was sentenced to death by hanging. After the trial, his mood turned decidedly jovial. Grinning ravenously, he ogled a particularly rotund guard nicknamed Frenchy, his pupils gleaming.

“You would make fine eating,” Swift Runner held up three fingers. “There must be that much fat on your ribs.”

“
Cochon
[pig], you too will make good eats
pour les coyotes
,” Frenchy retorted. “But they all poisoned will be.”

Over the coming weeks, Swift Runner’s upbeat disposition took a turn for the worse. Confined to a cramped, malodorous cell, he began to fixate on the image of his corpse dangling from the gallows. Nightmares and headaches plagued him like the flies hovering around his face, making him lethargic and temperamental. He became convinced that the very walls and floors of his cell were gazing contemptuously upon him — signs that the first rivulets of remorse were beginning to seep into his stony heart. Piece by piece, memories of the massacre reawakened in his conscience, and though he attempted to relay these to the police, the very act of living seemed to exhaust him. He found renewed strength in Catholicism. Twenty days before his execution, the converted convict confided the sickening details of his crimes to Reverend Father Hippolyte Leduc. Weeks later, Leduc accompanied Swift Runner to the gallows, laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder as his fellow Natives beat their drums and sang the death song to hasten his passage to the “Happy Hunting Ground.” When the repentant giant met his demise at the end of a rope and was buried, the Cree wondered why the executioner hadn’t cremated him. Didn’t he know that the only way to destroy a Windigo was to burn it? Like the buffalo, this age-old wisdom was lost in a world now dominated by the white man. Coincidentally, so was the Windigo.

Unlike schizophrenia, which is observable in numerous individuals across the globe, Swift Runner suffered from a “culturally specific” syndrome. These disorders “are generally limited to specific societies or culture areas and are localized, folk, diagnostic categories that frame coherent meanings for certain repetitive, patterned, and troubling sets of experiences and observations.”
[26]
In laymen’s terms, they are mental illnesses that occur only within certain cultures. One example is the Malaysian phenomenon of “amok,” described as “homicidal frenzy preceded by a state of brooding and ending with somnolence and amnesia.”
[27]
The “Windigo syndrome,” which drove Swift Runner to devour his family in the winter of 1878/79, is confined chiefly to the Native Americans of central and northeastern Canada, though its prevalence today is practically non-existent.

   
      
Rosaire Bilodeau

Victims:
6 killed/2 injured

Duration of rampage:
October 25, 1934 (difficult to classify)

Location:
Quebec City, Quebec

Weapon:
Revolver

Rosaire Sees Red

Rosaire Bilodeau served his country faithfully during the First World War, battling his way through mustard gas in the black, muddy trenches of France. Though he would survive the Germans’ poison clouds, he remained tormented by its effects for the rest of his life. Upon returning to Canada, he settled in the Limoilou ward of Quebec City, the oldest district in the provincial capital. Bilodeau was on friendly terms with his neighbours and family, but remained a bundle of nerves, and never married. Despite his anxiety and health problems, he managed to secure a job as a mail carrier at the post office on 3 Buade Street (the name would only change to Rue de Buade in 2000). Rattled by the war and accustomed to the structure of military life, Bilodeau found solace and purpose in his dull routine, and in remaining close to his older sisters and extended family.

When he was laid off from the post office in 1932, the fragmented psyche he had so precariously reassembled began to collapse. He had done his duty and once again been hurt and abandoned as a result. Trying to reinvent himself as a prospector, Bilodeau travelled around the province in search of hidden riches in the earth. Yet the freedom of entrepreneurialism was ill-suited to his character, and invariably he found himself returning to the post office to beg for his job back. When his pleas were refused, Bilodeau developed a persecution complex. Like
Marc Lépine,
Pierre Lebrun,
and
Denis Lortie,
he became convinced that a certain subsection of society was responsible for his personal failures and frustrations. As Lebrun would do sixty-five years later, Bilodeau focused on his co-workers — and as with Lebrun, who also suffered from visible anxiety disorders, his resentment may have been somewhat merited. However, Bilodeau’s bullets would fall first upon his own family.

Love Letters

October 25, 1934, was a perfect day for a drive in the countryside, and Rosaire Bilodeau had little trouble convincing his cousins Gaston Gauvin, twenty, and Fernand Gauvin, eighteen, to accompany him on a trip to St. Therese de Beauport. Located on the northeast periphery of Quebec City, it was a place of true scenic beauty, where the Montmorency River flowed south through clustered pines over an eighty-three-metre waterfall to drain into the St. Lawrence. The thirty-eight-year-old led the two young men into a small forest far from the highway. Without warning, Bilodeau produced a revolver and gunned them down in cold blood. With their bodies concealed by the undergrowth, he calmly drove back to lure his cousin Yvette Gauvin, twenty-one, and his two older sisters, sixty-three-year-old Marie and sixty-two-year-old Rosalie, to the same wooded area. As they trod in single file along the leafy path, he opened fire, spraying the foliage with their blood.

Two hours later, Bilodeau marched into the post office at 3 Buade Street and asked to speak with J.G.L. Morin, the postmaster. Given his history of begging for his job back, there was nothing unusual about the situation, and Bilodeau was admitted to Morin’s office. He entered to find Morin seated with divisional superintendent Octave Fiset and senior mail clerk Moise Jolicoeur. Before the three could process what was happening, Bilodeau pulled a revolver from his pocket and fired two shots into Morin. As the postmaster toppled to the floor, Fiset and Jolicoeur grappled with the gunman and tried to wrest the weapon from him. Bilodeau squeezed the trigger twice again, sending bullets ripping through the sixty-year-old Fiset’s body, and grazing Jolicoeur. Hearing the shots, post office employees contacted the police. Constable Patrick Horrigan rushed to the scene to find Bilodeau mumbling into a telephone. Horrigan tackled the gunman, took control of the revolver, and placed him under arrest. Octave Fiset would later die from his wounds, though Bilodeau’s initial target, Morin, would pull through.