Hangman (16 page)

“Hang” and “execute” were words Ellis never used. He “put them away.” When he retired in 1924, having served as hangman the same length of time as notorious Jack Ketch, he had put 203 away.

In 1932, Ellis was home with his family, sipping tea. For no apparent reason, he leaped from his chair, tore open his collar and rushed to the kitchen for his straight razor. “I’ll kill you,” he bellowed. His wife ran from the house. “I’ll cut your head off,” he cried as his daughter fled too. The police responding found him lying face down in a pool of blood, with two self-inflicted slashes across his throat. The ghosts of the gallows had put Ellis away.

“What effect does hanging have on the hangman?” I wrote again.

*    *    *

Harry and Tom were brothers. Al was Harry’s son. The Pierrepoints, you might say, made hanging a family affair. From 1901 to 1956, the three pulled the lever on more than 800 convicts. Harry hanged 107. Tom got three times that number. The execution shed was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a family pun. Uncle Tom worked a farm with horses, chickens and goats. When young Al came to visit as a boy, he liked to taunt the billy goat so it would charge. What a thrill to see the tether yank it to a halt. In class, Al was told to write an essay on this topic: “What I should like to do when I leave school.” What he handed in began, “When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner …” That wish came true in 1943, when Uncle Tom retired as “Number One” on the official list.

The war and its aftermath kept Al busy. Not only were there home-grown murderers to hang, but there were spies, saboteurs, and war criminals. More than 200 Nazis died on his scaffold, and Al hanged as many as 27 a day.

Lord Haw-Haw. Heath. Haigh. The Beast and Bitch of Belsen. Al’s clients were the rogues’ gallery of the day, but his most important hangings were the pair from 10 Rillington Place.

On November 30, 1949, Timothy Evans walked into a Welsh police station and reported that he had found his wife and fourteen-month-old daughter dead in his London flat at 10 Rillington Place. Police found the strangled bodies in a backyard shed. Evans, a mentally challenged laborer, stood trial for murder. John Reginald Halliday Christie, the man who lived in the apartment below, was the Crown’s main witness. Evans’s defense was “Christie done it.” The jury disagreed. And so, on March 9, 1950, Al Pierrepoint hanged Timothy Evans.

Three years later, Christie vacated his flat. The tenant upstairs came down to clean up and found three naked women dead in a papered-over cupboard. He called the police, and their digging uncovered two more women buried in the yard and Mrs. Christie’s body under the floorboards.

It turned out that Christie was a necrophiliac. “Can’t Do It Christie” and “Reggie-No-Dick” were his names at school. From 1943 to 1953, he had lured the women home to gas and strangle so he could rape their corpses. He kept their pubic hair in a tin for masturbation later. In one of his statements, he also confessed to killing Mrs. Evans.

Al Pierrepoint could—and did—hang Christie on July 15, 1953, but what Britain’s hangman could not do was “unhang” Evans. That case led to an inquiry, which helped spur legislation. The British abolished hanging in 1964, and two years later Timothy Evans was posthumously pardoned.

“Hanging is so final!” I wrote again.

“What effect does hanging an innocent convict have on the hangman?”

*    *    *

So engrossed was I in researching this that I had lost track of time. If Ethan and I were to meet at the office at noon as planned, so much for making any more notes in the library.

I packed up and left.

When I look back on those notes I made the morning of November 10, I’m gratified to see how close I came to solving the mystery.

Perhaps if I had published the piece, the Hangman would have noticed, but as things turned out, printing it wasn’t necessary.

I didn’t know it yet, but my luck as a lawyer was about to change …

Family Ties

Vancouver

Tonight

Our on-again, off-again admin was back at her desk at Kline & Shaw, surrounded by the unpaid bills that threatened to bankrupt our financially precarious law firm. That was six days ago, when I walked in from doing hangmen research at the library. Suzy Wahl was frowning—not a welcome sign—which crinkled the eyes and wrinkled the brow of what was a pixieish face. Her chewed nails were those of a cannibal eating herself alive. One nibbled hand lifted the phone receiver to her ear, while the other poked a shrinking finger at the number pad.

“Why the gloom?”

“Ethan.”

“What’s he done?” I asked.

“The phone you see in my hand is in peril of being cut off. As are the lights overhead and my food supply. But Ethan has me calling around to find and purchase a pair of tickets so you two can cruise.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Not that
writers’
cruise?”

“The very same.”

“Put down the phone. I’ll take care of this.”

As I stormed toward my associate’s office, savvy Suzy waited for me to throw open the door, then called out, loud enough for Ethan to hear, “Tell him to put the cash you save toward a raise for me.”

Ethan was drafting a will.

Startled, he looked up.

“No way,” I fumed. “What a waste of money.”

The flyer for the crime cruise had been mailed to every law office in Vancouver and Seattle, and to all police departments in both jurisdictions, and to every private eye lurking on the fringes, and to West Coast writers who thought they were hotshot armchair sleuths. Someone had come up with this cute idea to raise money for the Northwest Writers’ Festival. Let’s have a mystery cruise restricted in attendance to those who feed off crime. Guests with uniforms should wear them, like a masquerade. Come in costume if you wish, or “dress to kill.” There’ll be an onboard murder committed for all to solve, and a prize awarded to the guest who guesses correctly. Then we’ll dance the night away under a dome of stars.

Whoop-de-do, I thought. That’s the sort of shindig I despise with a passion. The law’s full of them. Backslappers’ bashes.

Since the day Captain Cook planted the Union Jack on these rainy shores, the legal profession in British Columbia has wallowed in backslappers’ bullshit. On a west coast, the waterfront homes are on the west side, so that’s where those born to rule have always settled. Imperialists control the law, as they have always done, so functions put on by West Side lawyers in the name of the whole profession reflect their values and are dull, dull, dull.

The one exception was the East End Bar.

The East End Bar was formed by two defense lawyers and the city prosecutor—all of whom had their offices on the east side of Main—after they soundly concluded that the stuffed shirts of the legal profession didn’t know how to party.

Every so often, the East End Bar would gather for a blowout soirée in a cheesy Hastings Street hotel with fake Polynesian decor. Plastic palm trees and such. Those who assembled were in for a no-holds-barred roast, with anyone in the room a potential target for off-color jokes. The meal was rubber chicken and the booze flowed in a flood, and as the evening progressed, the level of behavior degenerated. Food fights were common, and buns flew freely; the person at the podium was offered a garbage can lid as a shield to protect himself. Outside, near the parking lot, lurked two cops who hated lawyers, waiting to bust every drunk who tried to drive away. As stories spread throughout the profession about what was going on, tickets to those slugfests became the hottest admission around. Soon scalpers were fleecing West Side boys crossing Main to slum. Hanging about the courts, I heard the rumors too, and could hardly wait to partake in that fun. But all that was history by the time I got called to the bar.

What killed the East End Bar was feminists.

The way I heard it was this:

The East End Bar was awash with booze one October night when a clutch of recently called feminists took umbrage at the smutty roasting of Corky Calhoun. Corky had already passed out at the head table. His partner, Hughie Small, was at the podium relating how Corky was such a good lawyer that he once got a client’s buggery charge reduced to one of “following too closely,” when the leader of the party-crashers marched to the microphone. A buxom woman, with wire-rim glasses like those John Lennon wore, she venomously berated the drunks as “teenage boys with hard-ons.”

“Act like a teenage girl with a wide-on,” Hughie replied, “and you’ll fit in.”

“I demand equal mike time,” the outraged feminist dictated. “Tit-for-tat.”

“I’m sure my cowering tats are no match for this lady’s tits,” Hughie shot back.

And that’s when a buttered bun soared across the pigpen, with Hughie deftly deflecting it with the garbage can lid. Unfortunately, it smacked the irate woman on the cheek, bashing her wire-rim specs askew, so they dangled from one ear.

Letters to
The Advocate
and saber-rattling about sexual harassment and assault charges followed. And of course, political correctness was jackbooting in. The East End Bar was a dinosaur facing extinction, out of step with the cinched-in ways of homo sapiens, so the legal functions of today are like those of our fuddy-duddy past, rigidly hammerlocked by guardians of good taste.

That’s why I refuse to attend backslapping bashes where other lawyers gather, and why I was angry to find Ethan wasting funds we couldn’t afford on hobnobbing with bores.

“I won’t sign the check.”

“Cool down and take a seat, Jeff.”

“What’s wrong with you, Eth?”

“I told you this morning on the phone. Family problems.”

“Your mom?”

“Partly. She’s not well.”

“What’s the other part?”

“My older brother.”

I blinked. “Your older brother? That’s news to me. All the time I’ve known you and you’ve never mentioned him.”

“There’s a reason.”

“What?”

“Can I trust you, Jeff?”

“Jesus, Eth. When wasn’t it you and me against the world, buddy?”

“Sorry.”

“You should be.”

“It’s just that …”

I spun my hand like a wheel. “Get it out.”

“Is it legal and ethical
not
to give cops the name of a serial killer?”

“As a lawyer?”

“And a citizen.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“Who?”

“The Hangman,” Ethan whispered.

Suddenly, I grasped what rough shape he was in. If a man drinks every night, there’s a stiff price to pay. What with the baggy, bleary eyes and puffy, ruddy face, my law associate, I now saw, was firmly in the grip of the grape and heading for a crash.

A crash could take me with him.

“You look like shit, Eth.”

“I feel like shit,” he said.

“If we had a shower, I’d stick you under it.”

“When we’re rich, partner,” he replied with a wry grin.

That was a running joke in our office. Anything we didn’t have—which was just about everything—we’d have “when we were rich.”

“The Hangman?” I said. “You think you know who it is?”

My heart was beating fast.

My poker face was calm.

I had not told Ethan about the hangmen piece I was writing to try to lure the Hangman to the piss-splashed door of Kline & Shaw.

“Suzy,” he shouted to the outer room. “Nip out and get us coffee.”

“That’s not in my job description,” our rebellious admin countered.

“Please,” Ethan pleaded.

“Can’t you wait? I’m sure they’ll serve coffee on your fancy cruise.”

“
Pretty
please.”

“That’s better.”

Suzy got up and went out.

Ethan and I had the office to ourselves.

“Jeff, I fear the Hangman is my older brother,” he confided.

You can imagine what went through my mind. For the preceding few days I’d racked my brain to find a way to make the Hangman notice me as a gunslinger, only to have the one person who believed implicitly in my legal ability tell me confidentially that he was linked to the killer of the decade by family ties.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he’s obsessed.”

“With what, Eth?”

“The Peter Haddon case.”

“Haddon? That rings a bell, but I can’t place it.”

“Back in 1993, he was hanged in Washington State Penitentiary for the rape and strangulation of a young girl.”

“Right, Washington’s return to capital punishment. The con that Seattle reporter proved was wrongly found guilty of murder.”

“Justin Whitfield.”

“Wait a sec. He’s the reporter who wrote the piece on the Hangman’s Halloween murder in Seattle last week. The article in the paper you brought to the office the following morning.”

“Justin’s my older brother.”

Wherever this was going, I could hardly contain my excitement. A wrongfully convicted man hanged for rape-murder. A crusading reporter later proving him innocent of that crime. A reporter so obsessed with hanging that he became the Hangman, a murderer who baffles cops with a hangman game that hides his motive.

“Family ties?” I prompted.

“I was born in Seattle, Jeff. My parents divorced shortly after. My dad raised my older brothers and my mom raised me. She met Brad Shaw when he was in Seattle for a convention. He brought her back to East Vancouver to live common law. They later married, and I got his last name through adoption.”

“Ever see Justin?”

“Not till he was out on his own. Mom loathed Dad and didn’t want me under his influence.”

“What makes you think Justin is the Hangman?”

“He witnessed Haddon’s hanging in 1993. He was the only reporter Haddon would meet before he died. The two spent hours together the night of the hanging. The next day, this appeared in the
Seattle Star
.”

From his desk drawer, Ethan withdrew a dog-eared, yellowed newspaper clipping.

“Where’d you get that?”

“From my mom.”

“And she got it from Justin?”

He nodded his head.

“Does she suspect?”

“We haven’t discussed it. But I know she’s worried. I told you, he’s
obsessed!
”

Leaning forward, he handed me the clipping and I read:

“I’M INNOCENT!”—CONVICT’S LAST WORDS

HADDON HANGS

Justin Whitfield

Seattle Star

Walla Walla—He stood before us on the gallows of the state penitentiary, a moment before the hangman cinched the noose around his neck and dropped him to his death, to protest his innocence one more time.

“My last words are—”

His voice broke.

“That I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Be under no illusion. This is injustice. I owe society nothing. I am—”

He choked the words.

“An innocent man. Something wrong is taking place here tonight.”

Then it was over. Peter Brice Haddon was dead. And now I am left with the nagging suspicion that the state of Washington hanged an innocent man …

 

“Whoa!” I said.

My heart skipped a beat.

The hand that held the clipping was the one I had used as impromptu paper to record the hangman game off the TV. Taking a shower had lightened it, but it had not erased the scrawl.

The ink tattoo was:

_E_E_  _ _ _ _E  _A_ _ _ _

“Justin has written a book about the Haddon case, Jeff. The title is
Perverse Verdict.
He sent me a copy of the manuscript and asked if I would proofread it for errors. Justin drove to Vancouver on Tuesday to see Mom and to pick up the pages from me. He was
here
the night of the second Hangman killing.”

“Is that it?”

“No, there’s something else. Just before you came in from the library, Justin phoned to ask if I’d be on the crime cruise tonight.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say. Only that it’s important.”

The street door opened and closed as Suzy returned with coffee.

“That’s why you want the tickets?”

Ethan nodded.

“To see if Justin is or isn’t the Hangman?”

“I need your help, Jeff. There’s definitely smoke, but is there fire?”

Suzy entered Ethan’s office and handed us each a coffee. “I paid for them,” she said. “There’s nothing in petty cash.”

From my pocket I withdrew a loonie and a toonie to reimburse her.

“Well?” she said.

“What?”

“Did you do it? Talk Ethan out of wasting money on a fancy cruise?”

“Suzy, dear,” I said. “Be an angel. If you have to screw him, so be it, but
get
a pair of tickets from any guy who has them.”