Horrible murders, flawed trials, and two hangings at midnight: 60 years ago marked the end of capital punishment in Canada

In the end, as they were led to their deaths, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin were model prisoners.

The convicted murderers quietly walked to the second-floor gallows at Toronto's Don Jail to be hanged, back to back, shortly after midnight on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 1962.

Lucas and Turpin obediently stepped up to chalk markings where they were told to stand, on the second-floor gallows of the century-old jail near Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East in Riverdale.

Since Confederation in 1867, there had been more than 700 prisoners executed in Canada, and they were the last before capital punishment was abolished in 1976.

The Lucas and Turpin hangings resonate today with basic questions of racism and fairness still festering, 60 years after that oddly quiet night in Riverdale.

That night, Lucas and Turpin each held their arms behind them to be handcuffed. They remained still as their legs were tied at the knees and ankles with rope.

Their last sight before white hoods were placed over their heads was that of the flat, grey walls in the cramped converted washroom.

The last humans they saw were a chaplain, guards from their cell block and the executioner: a man in a suit who worked under the pseudonym, Jack Ellis," or sometimes John," James" or Arthur Ellis." His work was apparently secret even to his family, who thought he was a travelling salesman. He was paid $500 a prisoner to remove them from society.

All I wear is a black suit, black bow, white shirt, and black shoes," Ellis later told Paul Soles of the CBC television show Take 30." I'm not there to frighten them. I'm there to execute them."

Among the last words Lucas and Turpin heard was Psalm 23 - Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me."

When asked if they had any final words, Lucas and Turpin each said, No."

Then Ellis pulled a switch and the trap door under them sprang quietly open. Lucas was almost decapitated in the process, as Ellis badly misjudged the length of rope needed for the job.

Lucas, 54, had protested his innocence to the end. He had done plenty of bad things in his life, like pimping, and working in the illegal gambling and narcotics trades, but he staunchly denied the murder of an underworld associate in Toronto that brought him to the gallows.

Turpin, 29, was a petty criminal who shot Toronto police officer Frederick John Nash to death after being pulled over on the Danforth.

The lawyer for both men was 29-year-old Ross MacKay, a hard-drinking, brilliant idealist with scant funding and less experience. Lucas was Mackay's first murder trial, Turpin his second.

The Crown's budget was in the tens of thousands of dollars, and they called dozens of witnesses and experts," said Robert Hoshowsky, who wrote the extensively researched book, The Last to Die: Ronald Turpin, Arthur Lucas and the End of Capital Punishment in Canada." Mackay had a few hundred bucks as a budget, and only called a few people to testify."

MacKay had less than three weeks to prepare for the Turpin trial after hearing Lucas sentenced to death.

Lucas and Turpin were both tried and executed within a year of the crimes that brought them to the second floor of the Don Jail.

Lucas was Black and from Detroit while Turpin was white and originally from Ottawa.

Orphaned at eight, Lucas had an exceptionally low IQ of 63 and was described by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as unsalvageable."

Ottawa-born Turpin was abandoned by his mother at age 11. He was transferred to the Guelph reformatory for juveniles, where he was present for a riot in 1952.

Lucas made his way from Detroit to Toronto on Thursday, Nov. 16, 1961, checking into the low-cost Waverley Hotel beside the Silver Dollar Room on Spadina near College Street. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was in town, checking in under his own name. Sharing his room was another man, who signed in as Willie White."

That night, Lucas phoned his underworld associate, Therland Crater, 43, who, hours before, had been released from the Don Jail with his girlfriend Carolyn Newman, 21. They had been jointly charged with keeping a bawdy house. Crater and Newman lay low at a nearby boarding house at 116 Kendal Ave., in the Annex, as Crater was slated to testify for the prosecution in a major American drug trial.

Someone entered the boarding house and shot Crater several times early in the morning of Nov. 17, 1961, then slit his throat from ear to ear. Newman's throat was also slashed. On a bed near her lifeless body lay a zircon ring belonging to Lucas.

A Waverley clerk described Lucas as appearing perfectly normal when he returned to the hotel early Friday morning. He wasn't rumpled or bloody, she said.

The throats of Crater and Newman were cut so deep that the killer would have been soaked in blood, literally drenched," Hoshowsky said in an email.

A bloody revolver was found near the Burlington Skyway, which a Detroit underworld figure connected to Lucas.

Nowhere on the gun or the ring or anywhere else at the murder site were any fingerprints connected to Lucas, raising lingering suspicions that he was set up.

The mysterious Willie White had also vanished.

Without question, Arthur Lucas was a convenient patsy," Hoshowsky said.

Considering the circumstantial evidence against him, his legal representation, anti-Black racism, and the fact aspects of his trial were outrageous, he should never have been executed," Hoshowsky said.

Lucas wasn't charged with the Newman murder but her bloodied bedsheets were presented as trial evidence nonetheless.

Imagine being a juror at that trial?" Hoshowsky asked. The courtroom was stifling hot, windows closed, and these bloody sheets were put in front of you? From what I read, some jurors almost vomited from the stench."

Since his days in reform school, Turpin had grown up into a paranoid, alcoholic petty thief.

Police were aggressively looking for Turpin in the month before Nash's murder. Turpin was, frankly, an irritant to Toronto police," Hoshowsky said. He was on police wanted bulletins, which Nash undoubtedly saw at the station."

Police knocked on doors of Turpin's friends and acquaintances. This increased Turpin's paranoid behaviour," Hoshowsky said.

Then Nash pulled Turpin's truck over on Danforth Avenue for a broken tail light.

It is likely Nash then recognized Turpin from the bulletin," Hoshowsky said.

Exactly how the shootout began wasn't clear, but when it was over, Turpin was wounded and Nash was dying.

Nash left behind a widow and four children.

In his final hours, Turpin tried desperately to make amends and one letter stated, I know you did me wrong, but I can't go into eternity with feelings of resentment on my soul ..."

There were 150 protesters outside the Don Jail on execution night, which was unusually cold. They included 20-year-old Harold Levy of Pro Tem, a student newspaper at York University. Levy would go on to become a lawyer and write about justice issues for the Toronto Star.

To this day, I remember the sheer bleakness of the occasion," Levy recalled. Knowing that two men were about to have their lives snuffed out by a hangman, and the state which was paying him for the night's work - and I remember the sheer ugliness of some of the protesters who gathered to cheer on the execution of the two men."

In their final hours, the convicted killers ate steak with spoons, although Lucas had asked for fried chicken.

As they ate, the hangman calculated the proper length of rope for each man, after noting their height, weight and muscularity.

Ellis was a veteran of 15 hangings. To prepare for the prisoners' midnight walk, Ellis experimented with sandbags of about the same weights as the condemned men.

He also fastened foam from a car seat under the trap door so that the prisoners' death drops would be silent.

Ellis considered himself the ultimate bureaucrat and he did his deadly work without drama. I don't follow a case," Ellis told Soles. If a man is found guilty by a judge and jury, then I'm an instrument of the court to carry out the sentence."

Three hours before the planned execution, Lucas and Turpin were given a mild sedative.

As execution time drew near, Turpin's girlfriend chain-smoked and dabbed tears from her eyes in the Don Heights Unitarian Church.

Finally, at 12:02 a.m., the waiting was over.

Turpin's execution went as planned but Lucas's head was almost torn off, splattering blood onto the Salvation Army chaplain. (The hangman miscalculated the weight and had too much spring in the rope.)

Guards who had shaved and fed and played cards with the condemned men now wheeled their bodies into a room where a coroner's jury waited. The verdict was wholly predictable: death by hanging.

Less than three hours later, they were buried in Prospect Cemetery near St. Clair Avenue West and Caledonia Road.

Their graves were unmarked.

Others markings of that night also faded. The old Don Jail eventually became offices for Bridgepoint Health, with the death-row cells replaced with a kitchenette and washroom.

There were lasting questions that wouldn't go away from the night Lucas and Turpin went quietly to their deaths.

The defence was poorly funded and MacKay was inexperienced and underfunded. The cases were an impetus for Legal Aid funding and better support for the families of officers killed on duty, Hoshowsky said.

Hoshowsky notes the Lucas and Turpin trials also took a huge toll on their lawyer, MacKay, who died on Thanksgiving Day in 1983, the first month his daughter was in law school."

He gave his all to defend those two men, and then they died," defence lawyer Earl Levy told the Star in 1987. It got to him. He had been a drinker before, but his problems really accelerated. He couldn't stand the thought that the state had executed two men - it was a very painful experience for him. Perhaps he got too close to them; it would be hard not to, when you're spending that much time with a client."

There had been legal aid in Ontario since 1951, but it involved lawyers working as volunteers. After the executions, it was argued that this simply wasn't enough. The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario government eventually agreed that things had to be changed so that there weren't excessive demands on volunteer - and often junior - lawyers like MacKay.

There was also a festering fear that perhaps the system had been duped, especially in the case of Lucas. Did Arthur Lucas, a soft-spoken but monstrous-looking hulk of a man, possess the necessary mental capacity to plan and carry out a double murder that bore the qualities of a professional hit, or was he the dupe of an elaborate set-up by Detroit gangsters?" Hoshowsky asks in this exhaustively researched book.

Opinions about the guilt of both men and the morality of the death penalty - which had divided the city's newspapers before the executions - continued long after the two were buried in their unmarked graves in Prospect Cemetery," Hoshowsky writes. The Toronto Star made its stance against capital punishment clear when it printed editorials questioning the secrecy surrounding the hangings, calling them a tacit acknowledgment that capital punishment performs no useful deterrent function.' "

Hoshowsky adds in an interview that the quiet midnight executions at the Don Jail tied into a much larger global debate.

It was a huge turning point," Hoshowsky said. Worldwide, the death penalty was fast disappearing because it was seen as cruel, inhumane, and not a deterrent to committing murder."

That said, Hoshowsky notes that Ellis kept getting a $200 retainer cheque each month from the sheriff of York County until 1985 - nine years after capital punishment was abolished - just in case the death penalty was brought back.

Peter Edwards is a Toronto-based reporter primarily covering crime for the Star. Reach him via email: pedwards@thestar.ca