Practically Perfect (7 page)

The miller was picking up roots in a field near his house when his wife passed him around 2:00 p.m. on the way to her garden. As she walked by she noticed a man in the near distance, but thought nothing of it. About five minutes later she thought she heard a shot. Thinking it was just a hunter, she continued gardening. In retrospect, she should have paid more attention. The milling business she and her husband operated was one of the largest in the area, and the couple was known to keep on hand a large amount of money. It was this rumour that attracted the attention of Shelley, and it was he who she saw walking towards Shoup.

A little before 4:00 p.m. Mary Shoup started back to her house, expecting to chat with her husband on the way. She thought it a little odd that he was not in the field, so she walked to the farm nearest theirs and asked her stepson if he knew where his father was. He did not, so she returned home to start preparing the evening meal. She did not think much about her husband’s absence until he failed to show up for supper. She was now worried, and when she saw a man stop to water his horse, she rushed out to talk to him. He told her he had not seen her husband, and she walked out to the field where Christian had been working. That was where she found him, a bullet wound just to the right of his mouth.

Almost as soon as the police were informed of the murder they suspected that Shelley was somehow involved. Finding him would not be difficult. With two fingers missing from one hand, and a habit of hanging around cafés and bars, he was seldom far from sight. In Simcoe, the largest town near the Shoup murder scene, the police talked to William Lambert, a friend of Shelley’s. What he had to say removed any doubt about the identity of Shoup’s killer. Lambert said that a little less than a week earlier he, Shelley, and a few others were standing outside a local hotel when Shelley asked if anyone wanted to help him out. He told them he was going to shoot and rob the town’s mail carrier, and “also mentioned a hog buyer and Mr. Shoup. He said the hog buyer came into a town where there was no bank, and that he always carried six or seven hundred dollars. He would get him first, then the mail driver, and then Mr. Shoup, after which he would beat it for Detroit.”
[27]

The officers investigating Shoup’s murder contacted their counterparts throughout the area, and less than twenty-four hours later a constable in Woodstock noticed a small group of men talking on a street corner. He noticed one of them was missing two fingers on one hand, and he walked over and arrested Shelley for rape. Once Shelley was taken into custody there was little talk about the sexual assault (Shelley admitted right away that he was guilty), but there were a lot of questions about Shelley’s whereabouts the afternoon Shoup was murdered. The young killer was arrested on suspicion of rape on May 12, and within forty-eight hours pled guilty and was on his way to begin a two year sentence in Kingston Penitentiary. His absence did nothing to slow the investigation into Shoup’s death, however, and when a coroner’s jury concluded that the miller almost certainly was killed by Shelley, the career criminal was charged with murder. Three weeks later he was committed to stand trial. The result was foreordained. Seven months after vowing that someone would be dead by the end of the week, it was Shelley’s turn to face his destiny.

Although Emerson Shelley spent most of his life in trouble with the law, he seldom accepted responsibility for his actions. His conviction for murdering Christian Shoup meant that the stakes were much higher this time, but Shelley had little doubt he would survive his ordeal. When one of the jail’s spiritual advisers showed up the morning after he was sentenced to hang, he dismissed the unfortunate man at once. When a second man of the cloth appeared, he too was sent away. Turning to one of his guards, Shelley asked, “What the hell are these preachers coming around for?”
[28]
It turned out that the condemned young man had a plan in mind, which he firmly believed would see him released from prison. The plan: I didn’t kill Shoup, my buddy James Carr did. For it to work, however, Shelley required Carr’s presence. To obtain it Shelley told his jailors that he had something to say by way of a confession, and could they send someone to his cell to hear it.

And so it was that two weeks after being sentenced to hang, Shelley confessed to taking part in the robbery of a general store. His accomplice — John Carr. By the way, Shelley added, it was Carr who actually shot Shoup. Carr was promptly arrested, and just as Shelley hoped, he was put in the cell next to his. The men talked freely, and with a guard within hearing distance, Shelley turned the conversation to Shoup’s murder. Speaking in a voice loud enough for there to be no doubt about what was being said, he discussed the killing as if it was planned and carried out by Carr. Shelley’s attempt to shift blame for the murder was sufficiently obvious that no one in authority was the least interested in what he had to say. Having lost his audience, Shelley moved on to Plan B. He began to act erratically, displaying what he no doubt thought were signs of mental illness. His efforts persisted, and in time jail officials asked that he be examined by “alienists.” The doctors, now referred to as psychiatrists, quickly concluded Shelley was faking, and there was no reason on the ground of insanity to delay his execution. The prisoner’s spiritual adviser had been telling him for some time that he would do better to make himself ready to die than play act at being unbalanced, and forty-eight hours before he was scheduled to hang, Shelly finally agreed.

He wanted to make one last confession. This one, he assured his minister, would be the truth. And what a confession it was. He started by blaming his plight on his upbringing. “I was never sent to Sunday School or Church. [I was] taught that there was no God, and that sin did not amount to anything, except among Church people. That I might do what I wished and it was all right so long as I got off with it.”
[29]
Then Shelley turned to his best friend, John Carr, and described in detail the first serious crime he was asked to commit.

When I was quite young John Carr wanted to kill his wife’s parents. He said I could do it with a shot gun, and that as John’s wife was the only child, he would get all the money. He offered me a hundred dollars and a black horse for the job. He said, “You go up to the old man’s through the night and lay for him at the barn when he comes out to do the chores. When he comes out you shoot him, and if his wife comes out to see what is wrong shoot her.
[30]

Reflecting on his past misdeeds seemed to energize Shelley, and he recalled crime after crime, almost all of which he committed with Carr. “The first thing we did together,” he said, “was to steal chickens,” and with that he launched into considerable detail. Then, he said, they stole a woman’s watch and purse. He thought that was one time Carr showed considerable ingenuity. The men were in a local train station when they noticed a woman sitting by herself, reading a book, her purse sitting nearby. Shelley told his listeners that the two sat behind her, and Carr took from his pocket a long copper wire, which he carried for just this kind of opportunity. Carr attached a hook to the end of the wire, and manipulated it through the seat separating the crooks from their target, and snagged the purse. “I got twenty-five dollars out of that steal.”
[31]

Through his stories Shelley made it clear that he was not someone who took a slight lightly. After a quarrel with a relative of Carr’s, he burned down the house of the man’s father. “I understood there was no insurance on it, so I burnt it.”
[32]
On another occasion a friend offered him $1 to burn the home of a neighbour, with whom the friend was having a disagreement. Shelley did so.

On a third occasion Shelley decided he did not like a neighbour, and burned his house as well.
[33]
However, it was not the use of fire that came to characterize the various crimes perpetrated by Shelley, but guns. A case in point was the robbery of an area storekeeper.

The old man, who lived all alone, was in his house and had locked up for the night, but we saw some sign of light at a back window. I left the rig and Carr turned the horse round, and stood at the front door while I went round the back to the store door. When I rapped the old man asked my name and would not open the door. I told him I was Oran, one of his neighbours, but he would not open the door. Then I told him I wanted his money, and he said he had none. I flourished a revolver in front of his window and threatened to shoot if he did not open up. He ran out the front door and passed Carr who stood so surprised that he let him go. There was nothing left but to take what we could eat, for no money could be found.
[34]

Shelley’s recollection of his life of crime ended with a retelling of the Shoup murder. The recollection was chillingly brief. “I went up to him where he was picking up some sticks off the ground, and told him I wanted his money. He would not give it to me. I drew my revolver and told him I would shoot if he did not. He just looked at me and then ducked and ran at me, and I shot him as he came.”
[35]

The night before he was executed Shelley slept for about six hours and then ate a light breakfast. By the time he finished his spiritual adviser arrived. He was one of the men so curtly dismissed the day after Shelley was convicted for murder. The two spent forty-five minutes in prayer, and were still on their knees when the hangman entered. Without delay he pinioned Shelley’s hands behind his back, and then led the condemned man into an adjoining cell, where a wooden trap door had been built over a hole cut in the floor. Shelley said nothing as he took his position on the trap, and remained speechless when the executioner slipped a hood over his head and a noose was tightened around his neck. While this was going on the condemned man’s spiritual adviser was reciting the
Lord’s Prayer
. As he came to the end, the trapdoor was released. For the next twenty minutes Shelley’s body hung in the cell below, and before he was yet dead a black flag was raised over the jail house, visible evidence that a sentence of death had been carried out. No one outside the prison seemed to notice. “There was,” said a reporter who covered the execution for a local newspaper, “very little unusual stir about the square during or immediately after the hour of execution.”
[36]

Larry Hansen was a member of a club numbering less than a dozen Canadians — he was convicted of two separate murders. At the time of the first murder, which occurred in 1976, he was living alone in this house. Following his parole, he moved back in, but sold a parcel of land just south of his residence to a man who was once in the witness protection program. In 1998 he became Hansen’s second murder victim.
Author’s photo.

A few days before the execution, Shelley’s mother received permission to bury the body of her son in Jericho Cemetery, near the grave of his father. In a sad irony, Christian Shoup lay less than a metre away, his grave not yet covered with grass. A little further down on the other side was the last resting place of Michael Hall. The graves are visible evidence of both a killer, and his crimes.

Larry Harold Hansen: Killed by His Best Friend

Larry Hansen was his second victim’s closest friend, and even sang at his funeral. Years earlier he sold John McKay the parcel of land on which McKay and his wife settled, about 100 kilometres north of Brandon, Manitoba. The two became neighbours, regularly sharing meals, along with their hopes and aspirations. Yet in the early hours of a spring morning in 1998, Hansen waited in a bush outside his friend’s isolated farm house, and as the unsuspecting McKay drove out of his yard, he shot him.

When McKay’s wife heard three shots fired in rapid succession she rushed from her house to see what happened. Two hundred metres in front of her she saw her husband’s truck, his body lying beside it. A few minutes later a passing motorist noticed a woman half seated on the ground beside a man who even at a distance appeared not to be moving. Beside them was an older model truck, its driver-side window shot out, and beyond it, tacked to a fence post, a
NO SHOOTING
sign.

Local residents initially thought the killing was payback for McKay’s work as an informant in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police sting known as Operation Decode. In exchange for $250,000, he provided information to police that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a gang of smugglers who used snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles to transport contraband liquor and cigarettes into Manitoba from North Dakota. Credence was given that theory because in the weeks preceding his murder, McKay received a number of death threats, one of which came from a man charged as a result of his testimony. So it was natural that many area residents thought the victim’s death was an act of revenge.

Certainly news media made that connection. Almost every story about the killing started with reference to McKay’s work as “a former police informant.” The reports brought an immediate response from the dead man’s wife. She was upset by descriptions of her husband as an informer. “An informant is when you get caught and you are getting yourself out of it by snitching on someone else.”
[37]
Her husband, she said, never did that. “Why drag him through the mud when he was only trying to do the right thing? He was excellent. He tried his best. He gave his all with no credit in return.”
[38]
Investigators, however, were never persuaded that the murder of the Mountain Road resident had anything to do with “payback.” According to an RCMP spokesperson, “That is the obvious observation about this but at the same time it’s not the only or the strongest theory we are pursuing.”
[39]