Maritime Murder (3 page)

The preliminary hearing started early on Monday, January
13
,
1936
, in the Moncton courthouse. Reportedly, a couple thousand spectators attempted to cram into the courthouse. Before the trial could begin, they had to be forced to wait outside in the street. At nine o'clock in the morning the doors were opened briefly, and approximately three hundred spectators crowded into the courthouse. The rest of the curious crowd remained outside, circling the courthouse and nosily attempting to peek in through the windows.

There were, of course, the usual preliminaries that needed seeing to. Eight minor cases of public drunkenness and vagrancy were summarily dealt with by Chief Justice Jeremiah Hayes.

Finally it was time for the Bannister hearing to begin. The defendants were led in. The Bannister brothers were dressed in work pants, tattered sweaters, and oversized gum rubber boots. Both looked surly and unwashed. Arthur picked at his teeth with his dirty fingers, grinning and giggling as the jurors were led in. Daniel was wearing a floppy, ear-flapped, dirty brown hunting cap.

“Remove your hat,” a bailiff ordered. Daniel laconically dragged the cap off of his hay-coloured head of uncombed hair. He looked about the courtroom as if he were bored, swinging and fiddling nervously with the hunting cap in his hands. May Bannister sat stolidly with her arms folded across her chest in a picture of stubborn, uncooperative denial. Daughter Frances seemed the happiest of all four of the Bannister family, staring about the courtroom with great interest, and chewing gum loudly.

“Who speaks for the defendants?” the judge asked.

The
Bannisters' defence attorney, F. W. Robertson, was less than happy with the position he found himself in. With a town full of angry citizens stockpiling torches and practicing their lynch knots, Robertson felt the odds were definitely stacked against him winning the verdict.

Fortunately, fate intervened and took those worries off his hands. While he was still shuffling with his trial notes, postponing the inevitable, a stranger sprang to his feet and spoke up.

“I speak for the defendants,” the stranger said.

The stranger's name was Murray Lambert. He had come to town hoping for a bit of ready publicity.

“I have a signed retainer from the Bannister family,” Robertson protested.

“As do I,” Lambert replied, waving a sealed envelope in the air. “I spoke to them earlier in the morning while you were still shovelling your boiled breakfast oats into your stomach.”

May Bannister grinned smugly.

“I will take this matter before the New Brunswick Barrister's Society,” Robertson threatened. “I will protest.”

“You do that,” Lambert calmly said. “And give them my highest regards. In the meanwhile, I assure you that I will speak for May Bannister.”

Robertson barrelled toward Lambert, who stood calmly waiting for the man, not showing one whit of fear. A fist fight nearly broke out between the two lawyers. The bailiffs stepped between the two men, the clerk of the peace ordered an adjournment, and the magistrate agreed with the order. The proceedings would continue two days hence, on Wednesday.

The Bannister family met with both lawyers, and returned to announce that they had signed formal documents. May Bannister had begun the day with one lawyer, but wound up hiring Lambert.

It turned out that Lambert had actually been retained by an unknown benefactor of the Bannister family. Whoever the benefactor was, their investment proved to be a sound one. Lambert tenaciously fought and disputed every motion and testimony. Legal technicalities and petty quibbling became a commonplace occurrence throughout the entire hearing.

Was it effective? It was, to an extent. Lambert's arguments did wear down resistance. People simply became tired of listening to the constant testimony, rebuttal, and repudiation. They tuned out, stopped paying attention to what was being said, and tended toward making hasty assumptions. Some of the courtroom was even swayed by Lambert's continued argument that this was a clear-cut case of the power structure turned against the unfortunate poor.

The Bannisters were their own worst enemy in this hearing. May's insistence on keeping her mouth closed and not offering any information made her look all the more suspicious. Daniel and Arthur continued to giggle and grin. They didn't seem worried or bothered at all by the notion of either imprisonment or hanging. Frances, on the other hand, continued to argue that she had nothing to do with anything that had happened that night. “I just held the baby,” she said. “I wanted to keep it safe.”

The youngest Bannister, Marie, followed her mother's lead and said nothing. The court could not decide if she was old enough to even understand the gravity of the situation her family was in.

“She is too young to understand what an oath actually is,” Lambert argued. “If you think she is old enough to understand, then the court must give me the time to prepare her for trial. She is a member of the family and therefore she is my obligation.”

Finally, the defence and the prosecution came to a compromise and agreed to adjourn for five days. It was agreed that they would use the time to reform, deliberate, and otherwise rest their weary ears. They would meet again on the morning of January
20
,
1936
.

Everyone knew that Murray Lambert, for all of his windbaggery and talk, was simply buying time for his client. He was very good at stalling the path of legislative procedure. A second appeal and a second adjournment bought him another week's worth of delay.

The
rcmp
decided to put that unexpected gift of time to good use. They ordered the exhumation of the recently interred Philip Lake.
The corpse was subjected to further medical investigation. During this investigation, an X-ray revealed the presence of a .
22
calibre rifle bullet imbedded in the wreckage of Philip Lake's skull.

This was a critical piece of information. Up until that point, it was thought that Lake had died from a skull fracture resulting from a possibly accidental blow to the head. With the discovery of the bullet, murder seemed a much more likely possible verdict.

Following that discovery, a search began for the murder weapon. Several hundred citizens and railroad workers were called out. Armed with nothing more than shovels, they proceeded to dig alongside the trail that the Bannisters had made in their flight from the Lake homestead. The searchers were instructed to dig along the path, carving a swath as wide as a grown man might conceivably throw a rifle. One of the searchers was quoted as saying that the search party “must have shovelled half the snow in Westmoreland County while we were out there hunting for that blasted rifle.”

Frances Bannister was brought out to retrace her flight in the snow. She seemed oddly eager to help the authorities in any way she could. Whether she was actually displaying a degree of civic duty, or whether she was merely trying to save her own skin, is quite debatable.

After three days of digging,
rcmp
Constable J. A. Fenwick uncovered the broken butt of a .
22
calibre rifle from a snow bank. The last bit of evidence fell into place.

On Tuesday, January
29
, the court assembled, and the last of Lambert's delaying tactics played out. The Bannister family was led into the courtroom. The brothers smiled as if they were walking to a family picnic. May Bannister continued to scowl at those assembled about her. Young Frances looked nervously about the courtroom and fretted with her hair.

By coincidence, the date of the final verdict happened to be the same day of the funeral of King George
v
, who had died early that week.
Frances Bannister had been listening to a radio upstairs in one of the courtroom's holding cells while the sentence was being read. She had left the radio turned up and playing loudly as the family walked slowly into the courtroom, seemingly accompanied by the distant, crackling strains of Handel's “Funeral March.”

T
he final arguments were heard. Lambert continued to argue that the baby belonged to May Bannister. He argued that Daniel Bannister had been tortured and tormented by police into testifying. He argued that Frances Bannister had been bribed with candy. He argued that there was not enough evidence to prove that anyone in the Lake household had been murdered. He argued that there was no proven connection between the broken rifle, the bullet inside Philip Lake's skull, and the Bannister family. Finally, he argued that anyone could have visited the Lakes' homestead that night and done the deed. One by one, each of Murray Lambert's arguments was raised and defeated.

“There is absolutely nothing in this case to warrant reduction of the charge to manslaughter,” Chief Justice J. H. Barry told the court. “It is murder or nothing.”

Arthur Bannister was declared guilty of murder and kidnapping. “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead,” Barry said,
“and may almighty God have mercy on your soul.”

“She could have went either way,” Arthur declared nonchalantly, as he calmly accepted a cigarette from a spectator in the crowd.

May Bannister was found guilty of harbouring a kidnapped infant. Even then, she remained unremorseful. “Hang me if you like,” she said. “I don't need no prayers. Just bury me deep enough so the birds don't peck my eyes out.”

However, May Bannister was not to be hanged. She would serve three and a half years in Kingston Prison. Eventually, she received time off for good behaviour. Daniel Bannister was also found guilty of murder, but the jury decided that his role in the events warranted mercy.

This wasn't good enough for lawyer Lambert. He would clear his clients or die trying. Upon appeal, a second trial was allowed. The fact that
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Sergeant Bedford Peters actually fainted in the witness box as he examined the late Philip Lake's gold teeth neither helped nor hurt the proceedings. However, at the end of the second trial, both Daniel and Arthur Bannister were convicted to be hanged.

Perhaps May should have stuck with her first lawyer.

On September
22
,
1936
, the famous Canadian hangman Arthur Ellis arrived in Dorchester Prison. He supervised the construction of a proper gallows. The black flag was raised at the Dorchester county courthouse to signal an execution.

Daniel played it cool. He allowed no trace of worry or fear to show in his actions before the hanging. Arthur, on the other hand, raged and threw a tantrum in his cell. He seemed to think that he was being framed and ought not to be there.

Visiting was allowed early in the evening. May spent a little time with her boys before they took their final drop. Frances and Marie were also allowed to attend. Amazingly enough, the boys' long-estranged father, William Bannister, came to see the boys on their last night. “I had to come and say goodbye,” he told one curious reporter.

I wonder what they thought, looking at the man who had stepped so completely out of their lives thirteen years ago, now standing there on the very last night of their earthly existence.

At eleven o'clock, when the moon was hanging high in the New Brunswick twilight, Arthur Ellis slid a black hood over each of the boys' heads. Daniel broke his cool and asked that the hood be removed long enough for him to say a final prayer. Then the hood was replaced.

Ellis fit each hand-tied noose carefully over the boys' throats. At six minutes after one o'clock, the lever was thrown, the heavy trap doors swung open, and Daniel and Arthur dropped into eternity. Ellis kept them hanging for twenty interminably long minutes before they were removed from the gallows and placed in a pair of plain pine coffins that had been waiting all night for them in a nearby hallway. The coffins were carried up the hill in a flashlight procession.

Waiting graves had been dug carefully with preordained and legislated precision, seven feet and four inches long, six feet wide, and four and a half feet deep. Not a single relative was present to claim the bodies. Even William Bannister, the boys' father, did not stick around for the funeral—as basic a ceremony as could be imagined. The boys had been raised in the dark and were buried in equal squalor.

Three and a half years later, May Bannister left her prison cell and vanished into the sordid and tawdry pages of history.

Francis Xavier Gallant
Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island
1812

M
alpeque Bay, long known for its tasty world-famous oysters, is also known as the home of Prince Edward Island's first sentence for murder.

In the late eighteenth century, Francis Xavier Gallant and two of his brothers sailed from Shippegan, New Brunswick, and settled in Prince Edward Island. The journey was a fairly easy one.

Xavier was a little teapot of a man, short and stocky. He walked with a quick, nervous waddle, which earned him the nickname “Pingouin” or penguin, from his two brothers. He settled along the shores of Malpeque Bay, eking out a bare living as a tenant farmer on Lot Sixteen.

Xavier met his wife-to-be, Madelaine Doucet, shortly afterwards. Together they raised a family of seven children. Life seemed happy. They were a poor but hard-working family who believed in their dreams.

Then something bad happened—something that would cast the Gallant family into a collective nightmare. Xavier made a shrewd deal with a local merchant, Thomas March. The business deal brought him a profit of several hundred dollars—an awful lot of money back in those days. This should have been a benefit, but the money brought with it
a terrible curse.

Xavier became obsessed with his small fortune. He spent hours counting and recounting his treasure. He hid it in several places about the house—the attic, the basement, the larder. He would move it from hiding spot to hiding spot, determined to keep it safe from theft.

“The entire pack of you craven dogs are out to get my money,” he told his wife and children. “But I will fool you all.”

He stopped working completely. “Why should I work?” he asked his family. “I have all of this money.”

“Yes,” said his wife. “And soon it will be gone.”

“Only if the witches take it,” Gallant replied mysteriously. “And I can fool them too.”

A short time after that argument, Gallant began to sleep out of doors in the woods. “It is safer out there,” he would tell anyone who asked. “God can come and look down and see me more clearly.”

Gallant's condition grew even stranger. When his farm dog followed him out into the woods at night, Gallant grew suspicious. “That dog is a witch,” he swore, making the sign of the evil eye. “I can see in its eyes that it has laid a curse on me. No doubt it wants my money.”

No amount of arguing could convince Gallant otherwise. He became obsessed with the old mongrel, going to great measures to walk around the poor beast. Finally, early one morning, he took the dog out back to the wood pile, took a short-handled broadaxe, and cut the dog's head off.

He walked into the house and dropped the dog's head on the breakfast table. “The sorcerer is dead,” he declared. “He has laid his last curse.” Everyone's appetite was promptly spoiled.

Gallant wasn't bothered by it at all. He sat down and began to eat as if nothing odd had happened.

Then, one month later, on June
11
,
1
812
, Gallant did something even worse.

It was a Thursday morning. Gallant had been arguing with Madelaine. He swore that she was not his wife at all. He claimed that she was actually married to his son, Fidèle.

“Isn't there anything I can do to convince you of the truth?” Madelaine pleaded.

“Let us go,” Xavier Gallant told his wife, taking her by the hand. “I want to take a quiet walk with you in the woods.”

What could she do? He was her husband, even if he didn't know it. So she went with him, quietly.

He took her out into the woods and cut her throat open with the same broadaxe he had used on the family dog. “That fixes that,” he said to his dead wife, as he buried her remains under a heap of leaves. He stood up and smiled to himself. He felt at peace.

Three days later, on the morning of Sunday, June
14
,
1812
, Xavier Gallant calmly led a group of searchers to the spot where he had placed her body. “There she is,” he said. “Right where I put her.” He was calm throughout the entire proceeding.

On the way to the Charlottetown jailhouse, he spotted two full-grown geese. “Do you see those geese?” he asked the constable. “Those geese are the angels of St. John and St. Paul. You can tell by their wings. They have forgiven my sins and they have told me I would go to heaven if I sent the witch there first. I've been delivered. I can do no wrong.” He was still smiling calmly as the jail cell door slammed shut.

On July
3
,
1812
, Xavier Gallant was brought to the Supreme Court of Prince Edward Island to stand before Chief Justice Caesar Colclough and his assistant judges Robert Gray and James Curtis. Twelve English-speaking men were called to serve as Gallant's jury. They were William McEwen, Richard Chappel, James Wilson, Peter Hewitt, Joseph Dingwell, Donald McDonald, George Mackey, John McGregor, David Higgins , Nathan Davis, Joseph Avaard, and George Aitkin.

“That is a lot of English to try one Acadian,” Gallant joked dryly. “Don't you feel a little outnumbered?”

John Frederick Holland, the adjutant general of militia as well as a local justice of the peace, was called upon to act as translator for the defendant, as well as for the eleven witnesses who were summoned to court, the bulk of whom could not speak a word of English.

James Bardin Palmer, judicial counsellor for the Crown, was appointed to stand in Gallant's defence. Six of the witnesses were called for the Crown: Victor and Fidèle Gallant, sons of the accused; Jean-Baptiste Gallant, Xavier's cousin; Prosper Poirier; Daniel Campbell; and Colonel Harry Compton. There were five witnesses for the defence: Placide Arsenault; William Clark; George Blood; Samuel Cameron, Xavier's closest neighbour; and Lange Gallant, Xavier's oldest son.

The trial lasted only a day. The bulk of the witnesses agreed upon one thing: Xavier Gallant was as crazy as a man who jumps into a river to get out of the rain.

Fidèle Gallant swore that his father had been driven mad by money. “It was the money that did it,” Fidèle said. “If you hang anybody, you ought to hang the banker.”

Prosper Poirier, a close neighbour, agreed. “On my word, it was one too many dollars that caused Xavier to kill his wife Madelaine,” Prosper declared. “When Xavier was poor, he was a loving husband to his wife, and a very hard worker.”

The jury adjourned at six o'clock. An hour and a half later, the jury found Xavier Gallant guilty of murder, but they asked that the court show mercy to a man who had so obviously taken leave of his senses. However, Chief Justice Colclough was not moved by the jury's plea for clemency.

“Xavier Gallant, I do find you guilty, and I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until dead. Following that, your body will be delivered into the keeping of a medical college, where it will be cut into pieces and anatomized so that we might find the root of your dark madness. May God have pity upon your mortal soul.”

Gallant's lawyer, James Palmer, rose to his feet at these words and begged the court for a stay of execution, which was granted. Xavier Gallant was kept in the Charlottetown jailhouse for a total of fifteen months.

The conditions were not kind. The jailer was provided with a meagre allowance for food and firewood. The prisoners slept upon dirt floors, dressed in whatever rags they were arrested in, and lay in their own natural filth.

It was even worse for Xavier Gallant. The jailer, Caleb Sentner, was ordered to feed Gallant and see to his needs. He was promised a payment of fifteen shillings per week, which would have been more than adequate. The sum was to have come from the liquidation of the prisoner's property, which was to have been arranged by the coroner, Charles Serani.

For whatever reason, this payment did not materialize. Sentner went to Gallant's friends and family to ask that they supply bedding and fresh clothing for the prisoner. However, they informed Sentner that the coroner had sold all that off. The sheriff sent two old blankets, but they wound up being used to help tie Gallant to the floor to prevent him from injuring himself. A straitjacket was recommended, but like the bedding and clothes, the straitjacket did not materialize.

Time moved on. Gallant's condition worsened. Charles Serani, the coroner, seemed to have developed a case of amnesia when it came to the matter of the disposal of Gallant's property. Finally, the court ordered that the jailer must bathe the prisoner in an infusion of strong tobacco and peppermint, to kill off any vermin. The sheriff, in turn, was ordered to provide proper clothing. But it was too little, too late. On November
6
,
1813
, Xavier Gallant died on the dirt floor of the Charlottetown jailhouse. A coroner's inquest, performed by Serani's replacement, Fade Goff, declared that Xavier Gallant had died “from a visitation from God, and in a natural way.”

Pretty words, but they did not change the undeniable fact that Xavier Gallant had died from lack of food, poor living conditions, and the bone-chilling cold of a brutal Prince Edward Island November. Something needed to be done.

But what?

On the day of Xavier Gallant's unfortunate death, the Island Council held a special emergency meeting. It was resolved that the deputy clerk of the council would demand a proper and honest accounting of the disposal of Gallant's property from the old coroner, Charles Serani. The jailer, Caleb Sentner, related in great detail how badly the jailhouse was in need of a proper allowance for adequate food and bedding. It was resolved that this matter would be dealt with. A motion was made, and a policy set into action. At least some good had come from these terrible happenings.

Thirty years later, an English court passed the McNaughton Rules, after deciding that Charles McNaughton—the man who had attempted to assassinate British Prime Minister Robert Peel in
1843
—was not guilty by reason of insanity. By
1858,
the McNaughton Rules were accepted in Prince Edward Island, forty-five years too late for Xavier Gallant.

Gallant is said to have been buried under a crossroads along the Malpeque Road, a fate usually reserved for suicides and lost souls. The ghost of his beheaded wife, Madelaine, is still said to haunt this area on certain hot June nights. I am not quite certain how her ghost grew from being simply the victim of a casual throat-slashing into an actual decapitation, but perhaps the legends suggest that “Pingouin” Gallant cut a little more deeply than history would have you believe. In either case, I hope that the two of them have found some sort of peace upon the other side of the grave.