Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108

Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108, known as the Sault-au-Cochon Tragedy was a Douglas DC-3 operated by Canadian Pacific Air Lines (registry CF-CUA S/N: 4518), that was blown up by a dynamite time bomb on 9 September 1949. The plane was flying from Montreal to Baie-Comeau, with a stopover at Quebec City, when it was destroyed. All 19 passengers and 4 crew members were killed in the explosion and crash.

Investigators discovered that three people, Joseph-Albert Guay (23 September 1918 – 12 January 1951), Généreux Ruest (1898 – 25 July 1952), and Marguerite Pitre (5 September 1908 – 9 January 1953), had conspired to destroy the plane to obtain life insurance money. Guay had also wanted to kill his wife, who was a passenger, so he could marry his mistress. All three were tried for murder and executed.

Background

Joseph-Albert Guay was born the youngest of five children on 23 September 1918 in Charny, Quebec. His father was killed in a railroad accident when he was five and the family moved to a suburb of Quebec City. During the Second World War Guay obtained a draft deferment and worked at the St. Malo Arsenal. In August 1941 Guay married Rita Morel and moved to Quebec City, where he worked at the Arsenal and sold jewelry and watches on the side. There he met Généreux Ruest, the brother of Marguerite Ruest. In 1945, Guay began selling jewelry full time. The family moved to Sept-Îles, where they had a daughter.

Pitre was born in Saint-Octave-de-Métis, Quebec. She ran a boarding house at Saint-Roch, and was known by her neighbours and later the press as "Madame le Corbeau" ("Madame Raven") because she always wore black. or ''La femme Pitre'' in Quebec.

Motive

In the summer of 1947, Guay met and started an affair with 17-year-old waitress Marie-Ange Robitaille (she told Guay she was 19). Robitaille knew Guay was married and had a child, but Guay introduced himself to her parents as a young single man under the alias of "Roger Angers". In about a year, Guay was calling Robitaille, whom he was now regularly meeting, on the phone two or three times a week.

In November 1948, Guay's wife learned about the affair and told Robitaille's parents, who then kicked their daughter out of the house a few hours later. Robitaille contacted Guay, who then called Marguerite Pitre. Guay and Pitre were close friends, with Pitre saying she was like a mother to the younger man. Robitaille had actually been living with Pitre for a while. She owned a boarding house near where Guay and Robitaille met, and had helped arrange some of their meetings. Guay asked Pitre if she could take in Robitaille, to which she agreed. Pitre herself moved a week later, while Guay, despite being in debt, paid for the other apartment.

Robitaille's parents quickly changed their minds about kicking their daughter out and wanted her to return home. However, it was difficult to communicate with her. Afraid of her parents causing trouble if they found out where she was, Robitaille pretended that she was living in Montreal. In early 1949, however, she decided she wanted to return home and leave Guay. Robitaille borrowed $50 from the owner of the restaurant where she worked and bought a railroad ticket to Montreal. However, Guay followed her to the train and told her that if she didn't come back, he'd made a scene. Robitaille went back with Guay to the apartment. Guay then warned Robitaille against escaping by burning her gloves and going to bed wearing her coat. The next morning, in an effort to embarrass her into staying put, he bit her in the face several times. Guay then cashed in Robitaille's unused train ticket.

In April 1949, Guay suddenly decided that he wanted to murder his wife. He offered a family friend, 21-year-old Lucien Carreau, five hundred dollars to carry out a hit. His plan was that Carreau would kill Rita with poisoned wine. Carreau called Guay crazy and refused. In June 1949, Guay's wife became fed up with him, took their daughter, and moved in with her mother. Robitaille finally left Guay, returned to her parents, and got a different job at a closer restaurant.

As Robitaille was walking to work one day in June, Guay pulled a gun on her and threatened that if she didn’t return to him, he'd shoot himself, and maybe her as well. Robitaille refused. Guay persisted, but fled after a policeman heard them arguing and approached the two. The officer escorted Robitaille to her workplace and waited to see if Guay would return. When he did, Guay was arrested and charged with attempted assault with a deadly weapon. Guay called Pitre, who got him a lawyer. The lawyer managed to get Guay's charge reduced to illegally carrying a firearm. After spending only that one night in jail, Guay was fined $25 and set free the following morning.

Two days later, Guay called Robitaille and said they had to meet. She reluctantly agreed, and Guay told her that his wife was going to have her arrested for damaging his reputation. Guay said Robitaille needed to immediately flee to Montreal and hide there until the alleged threat went away. Robitaille fled to Montreal with Guay. There, he bought her some new clothes, and apparently paid so much attention to her that she agreed to fly with him to Sept-Îles. However, the two were fighting once more within a week.

At the end of July, Robitaille left Guay once more. Guay left her a note as she left. "I love you terribly," it read. "We'll be together again very soon." The end of the note instructed Robitaille to destroy it afterwards, but she did not. At this point, Guay became serious about trying to kill his wife. He believed the only way he could be with Robitaille would be to marry her, as a divorce would've been difficult to obtain, especially at the time.

Guay reached out to Pitre's brother, Généreux Ruest, a clockmaker, to construct a time bomb to destroy an airplane. He was allegedly inspired by a Philippine case with an extremely similar alleged motive, widely reported by North American media earlier that year. Given the technology at the time, it would be easy for him to avoid detection as long as the plane was destroyed over water. He offered Ruest money and a discount on a ring that he wanted to buy for a woman, if he helped. Ruest agreed and sought the help of his sister. From time to time, Guay would lend money to Pitre. As a result, he was in a position of leverage with her as well. Guay offered to annul Pitre's $600 debt to him if she helped in the plot, to which she agreed.

While they were planning the attack, Pitre proposed an alternative plan. They could enlist the help of her apartment's neighbor. Pitre was on good terms with him, and he was a taxi driver. Pitre said he could take Guay's wife for a ride with a time bomb in the trunk. At a certain point, the driver would pretend that something had gone wrong with the engine, and he and Guay would get out and look for help, leaving Guay's wife by herself. After a few minutes, the bomb would explode, killing Rita.

Guay and Ruest encouraged Pitre to go ahead with her plan, and she invited the taxi driver to her apartment. She exposed basic details of the plan while Guay listened from behind a curtain. The taxi driver said he was unwilling to destroy his cab and left. Fearing that he'd spill the beans or betray them, Pitre followed him and said she'd been only joking. With the alternative plan out of the picture, Pitre bought dynamite, fuses, and detonation caps at a hardware store (at the time, the sale of explosives to Canadian civilians was registered, but not strictly regulated). She gave these materials to Guay, who gave them to Ruest to make the bomb. While Ruest worked on the bomb, Guay took his wife and daughter to Sept-Îles for a week of supposed reconciliation.

Guay decided to blow up an airplane while his wife was on board. To convince his wife to board the plane, he gave her two suitcases of jewelry which he had in storage since early August. She agreed. Guay contracted a $10,000 insurance policy on his wife on the day of the flight. The plot was successful. All 23 people on board, including Rita Guay, were killed. Four of the victims were children. All but three of them were Canadians. The three exceptions were the president, president-designate, and the vice-president of the Kennecott Copper Corporation.

Flight 108

Flight 108 was a Douglas DC-3 operated by Canadian Pacific Air Lines flying from Montreal to Baie-Comeau with a stopover at Quebec City.

Guay calculated that the explosion would send the plane into the Saint Lawrence River which would have made any forensic investigation very difficult with the technology of the time. A five-minute takeoff delay caused the plane to crash instead at Cap Tourmente, near Sault-au-Cochon in the Charlevoix region of Quebec, killing all 23 persons on board – four crew members and 19 passengers including four children. The bombing was the first attack against civil aviation in North America and received wide news coverage locally and abroad.

Arrests, trials, and executions

Days after the bombing, Pitre attempted suicide, but failed. At the hospital, she told police that Guay had handed her the parcel, saying it was a bomb, and then encouraged her to commit suicide by saying she would be blamed. Pitre denied knowing the package was a bomb. The investigator in charge, Rene Belec, fully believed her story. Most of the locals thought Pitre was lying and were outraged when she was not charged with murder. Police had to place her under guard to protect her from being lynched.

Albert Guay was arrested two weeks after the crash and tried in February 1950. He did not testify in his own defense. Guay's only display of emotion throughout the entire trial happened when Robitaille took the stand and said she didn't love him anymore. Guay was found guilty of murder on 14 March 1950.

The judge, Albert Sévigny, cried as he presented the jury a photo of Rita's body (of all the victims, her body was coincidentally the only recognizable one). Upon being convicted, Guay was sentenced to death by hanging. Before passing sentence, Sévigny declared to Guay, "Your crime is atrocious. It has no name."

Guay did not file an appeal, "for reasons known only to myself," he said. The prosecutor said that if Guay could not live with Robitaille, he did not want to live at all. Guay was executed on 12 January 1951, at the age of 32. Before he was executed, he confessed that Ruest and Pitre were involved.

Ruest and Pitre both maintained their innocence. Pitre claimed that Guay had told her that the package she was transporting contained a statue, and Ruest also claimed that he thought the bomb was to be used to clear tree stumps from a field. After his conviction, Guay sent an extremely detailed 40-page document directly to Premier of Quebec Maurice Duplessis. In it, Guay claimed that Ruest and Pitre had knowingly aided him with the bombing. As a result, Ruest was arrested on 6 June 1950, and tried in November of that year. The jury was given the option of convicting him of manslaughter, but chose to convict him of murder.

He was sentenced to death by hanging, which was carried out on 25 July 1952. At his death, he was aged 54. Suffering from osseous tuberculosis, he had to be transported to the gallows in a wheelchair. Marguerite Pitre was arrested on 14 June 1950, and tried separately, beginning 6 March 1951. Following a guilty verdict, she was hanged on 9 January 1953, the thirteenth and last woman to be hanged in Canada. All three executions took place at Bordeaux Prison in Montreal.

Aftermath

Six years later on 1 November 1955, a copycat airplane bombing was apparently inspired by the Guay affair, the same way Guay himself had been apparently inspired by the Philippines woman who blew up an airplane bomb to kill her husband. The bombing of United Airlines Flight 629 by Jack Gilbert Graham killed all 44 people aboard, including his mother. Graham's motive was his mother's mistreatment of him as a small child, and featured similarities to the earlier bombings including placing a dynamite time-bomb in the target's suitcase and, just like Guay, Graham had purchased life insurance on his victim shortly before the flight.

In popular culture

The incident, subsequent trials and execution of Guay and his accomplices was notorious in Quebec and was inspiration for the fictional '' The Crime of Ovide Plouffe'' (''Le Crime d'Ovide Plouffe'', a 1982 novel by Roger Lemelin and 1984 film of the same name by Denys Arcand). In 1949, Lemelin had been a friend and neighbour of Guay, as well as being the Quebec correspondent for '' Time'' magazine. The novel ''Cape Torment'' by Richard Donovan is based on the case.

See also

* Aviation safety
* Capital punishment in Canada
* List of firsts in aviation

References

{{Reflist

Airliner bombings
Airliner accidents and incidents in Canada
Mass murder in Canada
Mass murder in 1949
Canadian Pacific Air Lines accidents and incidents
Aviation accidents and incidents in 1949
1949 murders in Canada