Hangman (31 page)

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. The plot and characters are a product of the author’s imagination. Where real persons, places, or institutions are incorporated to create the illusion of authenticity, they are used fictitiously. Inspiration was drawn from the following non-fiction and video sources:

Frank W. Anderson,
A Dance with Death: Canadian Women on the Gallows 1754–1954
(Calgary: Fifth House, 1996).

——,
A Concise History of Capital Punishment in Canada
(Calgary: Frontier, 1973).

Brian Bailey,
Hangmen of England: A History of Execution from Jack Ketch to Albert Pierrepoint
(London: W. H. Allen, 1989).

Edna Barth,
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols
(New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

Robert Bolt,
A Man for All Seasons
(Scarborough: Bellhaven, 1963).

William S. Burroughs,
Junky
(London: Penguin, 1977).

David D. Cooper,
The Lesson of the Scaffold
(London: Allen Lane, 1974).

Chuck Davis, ed.,
The Greater Vancouver Book: An Urban Encyclopaedia
(Surrey, B.C.: Linkman, 1997).

Lord Devlin,
Trial by Jury
(London: Stevens, 1956).

Diagram Group,
The Way to Play: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Games of the World
(New York: Paddington Press, 1975).

Charles Duff,
A Handbook on Hanging
(Yorkshire: EP Publishing, 1974).

Howard Engel,
Lord High Executioner: An Unashamed Look at Hangmen, Headsmen, and Their Kind
(Toronto: Key Porter, 1996).

Furman
v.
Georgia
, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

J. H. H. Gaute and Robin Odell,
Murder “Whatdunit”: An Illustrated Account of the Methods of Murder
(London: Pan, 1982).

Gregg
v.
Georgia
, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).

Reinhold Heller,
Edvard Munch: The Scream
(London: Allen Lane, 1973).

Jill Hierstein-Morris,
Halloween: Facts and Fun
(Ankeny, Iowa: Creatively Yours, 1988).

Gordon Honeycombe,
The Murders of the Black Museum 1870–1970
(London: W. H. Allen, 1983).

Roderick Hunt,
Ghosts, Witches, and Things Like That …
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

John Laurence,
A History of Capital Punishment
(New York: Citadel, 1960).

Kindler
v.
Canada (Minister of Justice)
[1991] 2 S.C.R. 779.

Peter V. MacDonald, QC,
Court Jesters: Canada’s Lawyers & Judges Take the Stand to Relate Their Funniest Stories
(Toronto: Methuen, 1985).

——,
More Court Jesters: Back to the Bar for More of the Funniest Stories from Canada’s Courts
(Toronto: Methuen, 1987).

Kirk Makin,
Redrum the Innocent
(Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1998).

Marge Mueller and Ted Mueller,
Seattle’s Lakes, Bays & Waterways: Afoot & Afloat
(Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1998).

George L. Murray, “Manson’s Last Case,”
The Advocate
42 (1984).

Reference Re Ng Extradition
[1991] 2 S.C.R. 858.

Regina
v.
Dudley and Stephens
(1884), 14 Q.B.D. 273.

Regina
v.
Frisbee
(1989), 48 C.C.C. (3d) 386 (B.C.C.A.).

Regina
v.
Morin
[1988] 2 S.C.R. 345, on appeal from
Regina
v.
Morin
(1987), 36 C.C.C. (3d) 50 (Ont. C.A.).

Peter Randall,
Adult Bullying: Perpetrators and Victims
(London: Routledge, 1997).

Reginald Rose,
Twelve Angry Men
(Sidney Lumet, director [1957]; William Friedkin, director [1997]).

J. C. Smith and Brian Hogan,
Criminal Law
(London: Butterworths, 1969).

Frank Smyth,
Cause of Death: The Story of Forensic Science
(London: Pan, 1980).

United States of America
v.
Burns and Rafay
(1997), 116 C.C.C. (3d) 524 (B.C.C.A.).

The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail,
and
The Seattle Times.

Colin Wilson and Patricia Pitman,
Encyclopaedia of Murder
(London: Pan, 1984).

Dilys Winn,
Murder Ink
(New York: Workman, 1977).

The best Dracula? Christopher Lee. Though purists would probably argue for Lugosi.

And what about those cannibals who killed and ate the boy in the lifeboat? Did Dudley and Stephens have a defense of necessity to murder?

No, said Lord Coleridge, the chief justice of the Royal Courts: “Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength or intellect, or what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another’s life to save his own.”

In the case of
Regina
v.
Howe
[1987] AC 417, the British House of Lords recently upheld
Dudley and Stephens
as having decided that necessity is
not
a defense to murder.

America, however, offers another view.

In
U.S.
v.
Holmes
, 26 Fed Cas 360 (1842), also a shipwreck case, the court held that a drawing of lots in similar circumstances would legalize a killing.
The American Model Penal Code
includes a general defense of necessity.

The noose and necessity?

Where would the Hangman rather be tried?

When I’m at a social gathering and someone finds out I’m a lawyer, the question that usually crops up is, “How can you defend someone you know is guilty?”

That depends on your ethics.

Jeff Kline offers
both
answers.

When I’m at a social gathering and someone finds out I’m a writer, the question that usually crops up is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Let me tell you the tale of my brush with Canada’s gallows.

Sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. on March 29, 1974, Miller and Cockriell returned to Miller’s house from a pub in Fort Langley, B.C. They found a beer-drinking party in progress. Something was said about the death of Miller’s brother two years before, when he drove into a ditch at the end of a police chase. There was talk about shooting a policeman, during which Cockriell said words to the effect that if Miller didn’t shoot a cop, he would. As he and Cockriell were leaving the house at about 3 a.m., Miller took with him a 30-30 Winchester rifle and loaded it with one shell in the chamber.

With Miller at the wheel and Cockriell in the passenger’s seat, they drove to Cloverdale, a few miles away. There, the courthouse and the Mounted Police detachment were side by side in one block. To attract the attention of a Mountie, Miller drove around the block several times and Cockriell threw a beer bottle through the window of the courthouse.

Constable Pierlet was driving a marked police car. His relatives were on their way to the West Coast for his upcoming wedding. When Miller’s car attracted his attention, he followed it, flashing his red light. Miller pulled onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. The Mountie pulled his car in behind, and at 4:58 a.m. radioed the license number to the detachment and asked for backup. The constable got out of his car and walked up to the driver’s window of Miller’s car. Miller’s hands were on the steering wheel and the rifle was resting across his arms with the muzzle pointing toward the open window. The constable asked Miller to get out of the car. That was the moment when Cockriell pulled the trigger and the bullet struck the Mountie in the chest. He managed to get as far as his own car, where he fell to the ground. About two minutes after he had made the radio call, the officer was found there by the Mountie who had come to cover him. He died almost immediately thereafter.

Meanwhile, Miller and Cockriell took off. The distress call—“A Member is down!”—went out to prowling patrol cars. The fugitives led police on a wild chase for twenty miles, during which the rifle was thrown out of the car. Eventually, they were forced off the road and arrested.

Convicted of a murder punishable by death, Miller and Cockriell were sentenced to hang. Though the death penalty was still law, Canada had not hanged anyone since 1962. The summer of 1976 saw the issue reach a climax on both sides of the border. The United States Supreme Court restored the death penalty in
Gregg
v.
Georgia.
By coincidence, Canada’s Parliament was to vote on whether to retain the noose on the same day that we were summoned to Ottawa to argue the case of
Miller and Cockriell
v.
The Queen
before all nine judges of Canada’s Supreme Court.

Lawyers have a saying: “Hard cases make bad law.” If you have an important issue to argue, you don’t want it riding on a bad set of facts. In the case of Miller and Cockriell, the Crown’s submission was this: The two appellants planned to kill a Mountie; they went looking for one, found one, and killed him. What we were there to do was strike down hanging.

There is a tradition in Canadian law that says, “If you lose a client to the noose, you see him out.” Hangings in British Columbia took place at Oakalla Prison Farm, where the condemned was dropped down an old elevator shaft. Lose Cockriell’s appeal and that’s what I may witness, I thought.

First came a visit to the Department of Justice, where a somber bureaucrat showed us a list of those on death row, and said that if both the vote in Parliament and the outcome of the appeal backed the noose, the government would have no choice but to hang someone. Guess whose names were at the top of the list.

June 22, 1976, was the day. The appeal began with my senior counsel rising to his feet. To the best of my recollection, what followed was an exchange that went something like this:

“My Lord Chief Justice, my lords, this appeal raises the basic issue of whether the state has the right to put its citizens to—”

He was interrupted.

“You call this a factum?” one of the judges barked down from the bench.

It was a complicated issue. Our factum was long. It had appendices.

“I’m sure if your lordship reads it—”

“Read it! I can’t even
lift
it!”

“My lord, the issue is—”

That’s when the chief justice jumped in.

“Come, come, Counsel. You have no defense. This factum doesn’t conform to our rules.”

There was a pause.

This was not looking good.

And that’s when my partner leaned down to me and said, “Hang on. Those are the liberals I hoped would be
with us
on this appeal.”

Good God! I thought. We’re here to decide whether to hang two men, and the court’s hung up on the length of our factum!

We were in the thick of it against overwhelming odds when a runner came in with the result of the vote in Parliament. He had two slips of paper. The one for retention of the noose read 133. The one for abolition read 125.

Bang!

Snap!

Thump … thu—

In my mind’s eye, I saw our client hang.

As it turned out, he didn’t die. Yes, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the legality of hanging, but the runner who’d come from Parliament had mixed up the slips, and consequently had reversed the results of the vote.

No matter where you stand on the morality of the death penalty, the undeniable fact remains that human foibles infect fallible courts that make irreversible decisions.

This novel was inspired by that danger.

The province in which Slade resides is bordered by the two states that retain hanging. In January 1993, Washington hanged Westley Allan Dodd, who, incidentally, fought for the right to be executed.

In July 1994, while on a flight to Africa to research
Zombie
, I was seated beside a Seattleite. At about three in the morning, somewhere over the Congo, we passed time by playing hangman. The puzzle I wanted to pose for him was
Westley Allan Dodd
, but I didn’t know whether the middle name was spelled
Allan, Allen
or
Alan.

10 Rillington Place
is a film about the Christie/Evans case, the travesty that did away with Britain’s noose. Richard Attenborough played Christie; John Hurt played Evans.

I watched that film again as background for this novel. Afterwards, I was sitting in the dark before a hypnotic fire, sipping Scotch as I developed this plot within my mind, and suddenly a primal shiver wormed up my spine.

His wife was killed, his child was killed, and he was framed for their murders; no one believed him when the real psycho became the chief witness against him at his trial, and the entire British legal system fell for Christie’s perjury. Imagine how Timothy Evans must have felt when he met Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows and the hangman put the noose around his neck.

I didn’t need to imagine.

How he felt was this: