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Words by Bruce Deachman, Artwork by Robert Cross
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•
James Shorey, an Ottawa janitor, was on his way home on a cold, October night in 1945, when he saw three young men he felt were up to little good.
One of them was vainly trying the door handle of the Thomas Jewelry store before the group turned from Bank up to Albert Street.
Shorey followed at a discreet distance, watching as they tried the door of another store — the Dominion at the corner of O’Connor — then turned their attention to the parked cars nearby.
“I saw them monkeying around the car and knew they were up to something,” he said.
Shorey slipped away to phone the authorities.
Over at police Station No. 1, at Queen and Elgin, the site of today’s NAC, the somewhat routine nighttime call was met with enthusiasm from Ottawa police Det. Thomas Stoneman.
Det. Thomas Stoneman.
The reason for his excitement?
Just one night earlier, three young men had stolen a blue 1940 Plymouth and broken into the Canadian War Museum on Sussex Drive, where they had smashed display cases and stolen three Thompson sub-machine guns, or Tommy guns, as well as a handful of revolvers and some ammunition.
While the RCMP was in charge of the investigation into the break-in, the matter of the stolen car, which had been taken from Albert Street across from the Wellington Street Public School in LeBreton Flats, was assigned to Stoneman, a 37-year-old with 14 years’ experience on the Ottawa force.
“It has been speculated in some circles,” reported the Citizen following the break-in and theft, “that the perpetrators of the gun robbery might either be the Polka Dot gang which has been terrorizing towns throughout central Ontario over the past several weeks or, if not, there is a possibility the trio may be the three men still wanted by police authorities in Parry Sound.”
Stoneman hopped into a prowler car and, with Const. Russell Berndt riding shotgun in only his second day on the job following a 3½-year stint in the navy, sped to the scene.
Shorey, meanwhile, had returned to watch the three men, who were standing on the sidewalk outside the Bytown Inn, a tavern on O’Connor Street, across from the Bell Telephone building.
As the cruiser pulled up, Shorey pointed out the three to the officers. Stoneman and Berndt got out of the car, and the trio, seeing them, split up, with two heading in opposite directions along O’Connor. The third, Eugene Larment, remained where he was, standing between the two canopies leading into the bar.
Although just 24, Larment had a lengthy rap sheet, most of it small potatoes stuff, beginning as a 16-year-old. But a double-armed robbery count in Brockville in 1940, when he was 18 or 19, netted him a pair of concurrent six-year sentences at Kingston Penitentiary.
With his hand in his coat pocket, Larment felt the cool handle of his nickel-plated .32-calibre revolver as Const. Stoneman approached. Three of the gun’s chambers held bullets.
With Stoneman taking care of Larment, Berndt stopped the man walking south on O’Connor to ask him what he was doing. Wilfrid D’Amour, also 24 and a former Kingston Pen inmate, told Berndt that he wasn’t with the other two; that they had just stopped him to ask for a light.
Stoneman, meanwhile, was standing on O’Connor Street, six or eight feet from Larment. “Come here,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
“What do you want?” replied Larment. Before Stoneman had a chance to reply, Larment pulled out his revolver and fired from the hip, hitting Stoneman in the left side.
The bullet grazed Stoneman’s left lung and came to rest in his aorta, close to his spine. Stoneman fell to the street in a heap. Shorey, still watching, ran to call police again, this time to request backup and an ambulance.
Larment, meanwhile, turned his gun on Berndt, who had sought cover after the initial shot was fired. “I ducked behind one of the canopies and the fellow fired,” Berndt would later recall. “The bullet missed me and I don’t know where it went. I pulled my revolver out of my pocket and rushed around the canopy.” Seeing his opportunity, D’Amour fled, as did Larment, both heading north on O’Connor, with Berndt in close pursuit.
A second squad car arrived, and constables Thomas Walsh and John Hardon, along with Flt.-Lt. Arthur William Appleby, joined in the chase.
With Hardon gaining on the pair, Larment turned and fired his final shot. Unrelated, Hardon stumbled and fell, and Berndt, thinking his colleague had been hit, fired a shot above Larment’s and D’Amour’s heads. A plate-glass window exploded. Berndt fired a second shot, at their legs, missing.
Just before reaching Metcalfe Street, Larment and D’Amour cut left into an alleyway. Flt.-Lt. Appleby eventually overtook and caught D’Amour, while Const. Hardon continued to follow Larment, the gunman. Const. Berndt returned to aid his colleague, Stoneman, who lay still on O’Connor Street, moaning.
As he chased Larment over numerous back-alley fences, Const. Hardon heard his target’s empty revolver clicking. In the yard behind The Dunkirk Hotel, Larment rested a minute, hiding behind a parked car. Hardon couldn’t see his prey in the dark, so he kept behind the last fence, waiting.
Larment finally made his move, darting from his hiding spot behind the Dunkirk Hotel and making a beeline back to Albert Street, with Const. Hardon in close pursuit. The pair very nearly ran into the arms of beat patrol Const. Henry Gravelle who, only a block away when he heard the initial shots, had come to investigate.
Larment briefly pointed his empty revolver at Gravelle, then threw it away in the street, its handle breaking as it landed on the road. At the corner of Albert and Metcalfe streets, Gravelle ordered Larment to stop, firing a shot above his head. Larment ran on, ducking into the first laneway he could find. It was a dead end, with only one way in and out. Gravelle followed, with Hardon some distance behind. Gravelle fired another warning shot above Larment’s head.
Larment was trapped. He tried hiding behind a large tree in one corner of a yard, but Gravelle spotted him and warned he would shoot if Larment made a false move. Hardon arrived, handcuffed Larment, and he and another constable dragged Larment to a waiting car.
The whole fracas, as the papers occasionally called it, lasted just minutes. Walsh recalled that as he and Hardon returned to the station with Larment, “We noticed a crowd on the road, in front of The Bytown Inn, and seen Detective Stoneman lying on the road, in a pool of blood.”
Ambulance and taxi driver Albert Gauthier arrived from his stand just blocks away and rushed Stoneman to The Ottawa Hospital where, at 1:20 a.m., just 18 minutes after Shorey had made his initial call to police, he was admitted, in critical condition.
•
Thomas Dougal Watson Stoneman was born on a farm near Mortlach, Sask., and it was a small private joke of his that he was a “rootin’-tootin’ man of the Wild West.” He came east with his family — his father, J.A. Stoneman, was transport commissioner — and joined the Ottawa police force in 1931. A decade later, he was appointed detective, a position in which he flourished. He famously helped apprehend two men responsible for the 1942 holdup of Montreal’s Tic Toc Club, where a watchman and clerk were tortured with matches to get them to open a safe containing $3,000 (the equivalent today of nearly $45,000). Stoneman was also involved in a 1942 shooting at the Avalon Club, while assisting Montreal detectives capture bandits wanted for armed robbery.
“As a policeman ‘out of uniform,’” wrote the Citizen, “Tom Stoneman patrolled the city in a prowler car and succeeded, with the aid of other members of the department, in keeping crime in its dark corner.”
His wife, Lois, believed he would make police chief one day.
He was tall — 6’3″ — handsome and gregarious. Loyal and loving to his family, he put his younger brother, Earl, or Stoney, through engineering school at Queen’s University. He was also entrepreneurial, owning and operating a small sawmill on 400 acres near Val-des-Monts, Que., and selling wood in the ByWard Market and on Main Street.
He met Lois Cleary when she was a hostess at Murray’s Restaurant. She was 5’5″ and 13 years his junior, and in 1943, the two were married in a United Church ceremony. Cleary was Catholic, but her priest refused to marry the couple after Thomas, a non-practising United member, refused to agree to the priest’s condition that they raise their children Catholic. At the time of his shooting, the couple had a pair of 13-month-old twins, Richard Thomas and Jill Lois. They lived in Overbrook but, with the twins’ arrival, were looking to buy their first home.
As doctors at The Ottawa Hospital attended to Stoneman that night, detectives at the police station questioned and took blood samples from Larment and D’Amour. Albert Henderson, meanwhile, the third of the trio, waited for his friends at the corner of Wellington and Lyon streets. He, too, was 24 and had previously done time, including the same stretch in the Kingston Pen as Larment.
An hour passed, and Henderson began to wonder if Larment had somehow managed to get home ahead of him. He walked three doors west on Wellington to Larment’s home — where the West Memorial Building now stands — and knocked on the door. Larment’s mother, Louise, answered. No, she told him, Eugene was not at home.
He’s in trouble, Henderson explained, telling her that he — Henderson — was in a laneway relieving himself when he heard shots fired and saw Eugene and D’Amour run away. He saw a police officer fall to the street and heard more shots being fired.
Quite clear to Louise during Henderson’s explanation was that he was drunk. She told him to go home and go to bed, which he did, walking the half dozen blocks to his parents’ house in LeBreton Flats.
Around the same time, Larment and D’Amour were being informed that they would be charged with attempted murder.
Later that morning, Larment’s sister, Lorette, went into her brother’s bedroom and retrieved the burlap sacks containing three Thompson submachine-guns. She carried them to the empty, condemned house next door and hid them under some boards and stones by the entrance to the cellar.
Henderson’s drunken sleep, meanwhile, was short-lived, with police knocking at his door at around 6 a.m., not even four hours after he’d returned home. His father, Joseph Henderson, led detectives to his room where he slept on a day bed. Albert said little when Det. Cavan informed him he was being taken to headquarters for questioning, other than that he’d been drinking the night before and that he hoped the interrogation wouldn’t take long as he had to work that day. After Albert had dressed and was put in a squad car, his father gave Cavan a Colt .45 revolver that Albert had hidden the night before, around dinnertime, in the summer kitchen. Upon discovering it, Joseph hid it elsewhere in the house so that his son wouldn’t find it. Its serial number matched that of one stolen from the War Museum.
Police also searched the house on Arlington Avenue where D’Amour lived with his 17-year-old wife — they’d married the previous May — and their year-old baby, as well as his wife’s parents. There they found a number of knotted handkerchiefs that Det. Insp. Duncan MacDonell said “were knotted in the form of a triangle, which could easily have been used as masks.”
At the third man’s, Larment’s, home, police uncovered the hidden weapons, as well as groceries and a gun stolen from a general store in Glasgow Station, near Perth, on the same night as the War Museum heist.
Three hours after he was shot, meanwhile, doctors at the hospital described Stoneman’s condition as improved but still “very critical.” He had been given blood and plasma transfusions, they said, but couldn’t be moved for X-rays. Newspapers followed his condition over the next few days with some optimism. On Thursday, the day after the shooting, he was administered oxygen to assist his breathing, but by Friday it was reported that he was “much brighter,” while Saturday brought further improvement.
Privately, however, attending doctors held out scant hope for his survival, a prognosis that changed little over the weekend, as pneumonia took hold in both his lungs. At 7:45 on Monday morning, the 29th, Thomas Stoneman died, becoming the first Ottawa police officer killed in the line of duty.
“A killer’s bullet,” wrote the Citizen, “has written ‘finis’ to a promising career in law enforcement and protection of the public.”
A DARK COMING OF AGE
Jill Stoneman Hopkins, barely a year old when her father died, recalls Stoneman’s half-brother Doug describing that day to her. “Doug was hanging around the house,” she says, “waiting for his Uncle Stoney to come back from the hospital, and Doug said ‘Nobody said anything to me, but I could tell things were going really badly. I saw Uncle Stoney get out of the car, and I just ran. Jill, I ran like the wind. I ran and ran and ran, because I knew. Your father was my favourite person in the world, and I knew that he was dead.'”
The priests at her church were less kind, with one of them telling Lois, “Mrs. Stoneman, you got what you deserved, marrying outside the church.”
“My mother,” says Hopkins, “never darkened the door of a Catholic church again.”
Later that morning, detectives went to Stoneman’s home to get his topcoat and suit coat, and to Hulse and Playfair funeral home to collect his shoes and other clothes. They identified his body at the morgue, and delivered a piece of his aorta, with the bullet still embedded in it, to an RCMP pathologist, according to reports.
The following day, Larment, D’Amour and Henderson were charged with murder.
“Other prisoners who crowded the same dock were removed to seats at the side to make room for the trio,” wrote the Citizen, “whose slight pallor showed their inner nervousness although they indicated no outward sign of emotion.”
It was described as a dark coming-of-age for the city.
“Every member of the department, from chief down to the newest rookie,” the Citizen noted, “is mindful that a new chapter has been written into the crime history of the capital.”
“Peace has its heroes no less than war,” said Rev. J. Richmond Craig at Stoneman’s funeral service. “We mourn a workman who need not be ashamed. We mourn as a city, as guardians of the peace, as neighbours.
The Hulse and Playfair funeral chapel on McLeod Street was filled with mourners, including a guard of honour composed of 30 police constables, and the six detectives who served as pallbearers.
“All Ottawa mourns a tragedy, and in every home there is an echo of what we are doing here, for sorrow is city-wide. The common duty of a guardian of the peace was well done and faithfully accomplished by a man of quiet and unassuming nature, inflexible in the performance of duty as he saw it. He gave service to the city with an upright character.”
Craig also addressed the nature of Stoneman’s death when he said to the congregation: “The menace of juvenile delinquency has been brought very close to the heart and life of Ottawa. Our schools, we are told today, are a less costly investment than our penal institutions. Our homes need a boost of spiritual grace.”
Outside the chapel, thousands of Ottawans solemnly lined downtown streets for 15 blocks as Stoneman’s procession made its way to Beechwood Cemetery on a cold and sunny Thursday, the first of November. The RCMP band played Nearer My God to Thee, Beethoven’s Funeral March and Handel’s Dead March in Saul, while mayors, police and fire chiefs and officers, city officials and thousands more looked on.
“Many women,” wrote the Citizen, “were openly in tears and here and there strong men obviously struggled to master emotion.” Office workers and navy Wrens gathered to watch from the steps of the Cartier Square drill hall, while others looked on from the rooftop.
The procession continued east on Laurier, passing just a block from the Nicholas Street jail where Larment, D’Amour and Henderson awaited their fates, and on to Beechwood, where Thomas Stoneman was lowered into his grave to the strains of Abide With Me:
“Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
Her husband’s death, meanwhile, left Lois in dire financial straits. Stoneman was earning $2,500 a year when he was killed, the equivalent today of a little more than $35,000. Had he been incapacitated in the line of duty, he would have collected a pension of $1,500 annually. Instead, his 23-year-old widow’s entitlement was only $45 per month for her, plus an additional $10 for each of their two children until they turned 16 (or 18 if they remained in school), for a total annual income of $780 (or $11,000 today). Although there was discussion amongst civic authorities following Stoneman’s death to do more for the families of officers killed in the line of duty, little came of it. Lois and her children were forced to move around in the years following her husband’s death, and when she remarried in 1950, her portion of the pension was cut off. In the meantime, the city provided no headstone.
Stoneman’s grave remained unmarked for 45 years, until 1990, when Lois erected one.
A NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE
When it was built in 1862, the Carleton County Gaol on Nicholas Street was considered a state-of-the-art facility. By the 1940s, however, the four-storey stone building had a well-earned reputation as a brutally inhumane prison. In 1930, 15 years before Larment, D’Amour and Henderson were incarcerated there, the Royal Commission on Public Welfare harshly condemned the jail, calling for its immediate replacement. Its small cells — some measuring just one metre wide by three long — lacked lighting, heat, ventilation and plumbing, yet it wasn’t until 1972 that the jail was finally closed and turned into a youth hostel and tourist attraction.
There had, by the time of Stoneman’s death, been just two official hangings at the jail. (There have also been at least seven known extrajudicial hanging or attempts by prison guards.)
In 1869, about 5,000 people gathered to watch the hanging of Patrick J. Whelan, who was famously convicted of the murder a year earlier of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
In 1933, 23-year-old Billy Seabrook was hanged there for the December 1931 murder of gas station attendant Paul Emile Lavigne.
About a week and a half before their trial was to commence, Larment, D’Amour and Henderson, determined not to be counted among the victims of the jail’s gallows, official or otherwise, decided to make a break for it.
Wilfrid D’Amour
The three were being held in individual cells on the jail’s third floor, in a short corridor that had been barred from the rest of the block. With them was another prisoner, William Bradd, who was awaiting a hearing to appeal his three-year sentence for breaking into pharmacies and stealing narcotics.
Shortly before 6 p.m., the four were allowed out of their cells and into a common area for dinner. After eating, they engaged the guard watching over them in conversation, then invited him in to clear their dirty dishes. They began to stroll back to their cells as the guard opened the door to their short corridor. With the door unlocked, the trio swung around and charged, beating the guard about his face while Bradd alone continued on to his cell. Stripping the guard of his keys, they threw him in a cell, locked it and headed for the stairs.
There they met a second guard who, hearing the commotion, sprinted up from his post on the stairway. As with the first guard, the trio beat the second about the head and locked him in a cell.
The acting senior guard, Percy Hyndman, who had been overlooking prisoners on the second floor, also came running, and was hit over the head with a heavy broom handle, leaving a wound that eventually requiring five stitches to close. Beaten badly and with blood running into his eyes, Hyndman crawled and stumbled down the stairs to the first floor while a fourth guard fought with the trio. Once on the main floor, Hyndman shouted a warning through the peep-hole hatchway that separated the cell block from the jail’s inner office. The guard on duty there called the police and the jail’s acting governor, Ralph Ayers, who was across the street having supper at the Albion Hotel, on Daly Avenue.
Meanwhile, the struggle with the fourth guard continued. Having missed him with the broom handle, two of the three would-be escapees turned a powerful fire hose on him, forcing him back into the stairwell and down to the second floor, where their length of hose, and their luck, ran out.
Ottawa police arrived and stormed through the ground-floor cell block and up the stairs.
Another guard called to the three men from a dark corner: “If you take one more step it will be your last.” The trio surrendered, first retreating to where the second guard was, releasing him from the cell in which they had locked him, then giving him the keys so he could release the first guard. They then returned to their cells and allowed themselves to be locked up.
Jeen Hyndman (now Jeen Coulas) was only a teenager when the attempted escape occurred, and remembers that her mother was angry when Jeen’s father, Percy, came home late.
“What took you so long?” she called out. It was Jeen who first noticed her father’s injuries.
“He had blood all over his shirt and clips in his head to hold the skin together,” she recalled. “I didn’t see the rest, but I heard my mother telling people on the phone that his groin was purple from being kicked, and they damaged his kidneys. He only lived about two years after that, and left my mother and four kids destitute. We didn’t have enough money to pay the next month’s rent and went to live with my grandparents then.”
At the time, though, Jeen said, guards had no employment benefits such as paid sick leave, and so her father returned to work a few days later. “We had to eat and pay the rent.”
THE TRIAL
Mr. Justice Barlow arrived from Toronto on Sunday, Jan. 13, and court proceedings against the three men commenced the following day.
The chief prosecutor was deputy attorney general Cecil L. Snyder, who, coming into his 38th murder case, boasted a conviction record of 37-0. He was assisted by Raoul Mercier. Walter E. Haughton argued for the defence, assisted by George Addy.
Eugene Larment
The three — D’Amour and Henderson in blue pin-stripe suits, Larment in a salt-and-pepper jacket with dark trousers — were “no longer the defiant and seemingly confident trio they were at their preliminary hearing last November,” wrote the Citizen. Their voices were barely audible as each rose to his feet to enter his plea: “Not guilty.” Haughton argued for separate trials for his clients. The judge ruled against him.
The 12-man jury was selected Wednesday morning, as the defence exhausted 48 of its 60 allotted challenges. Two potential jurists admitted they were opposed to capital punishment, while a third confessed he was a friend of Stoneman’s. Another, civil servant Thomas W. Bradley, voiced his opposition to capital punishment, but too late: he had already been sworn in, and the judge would not excuse him. As it was a capital case, the dozen men of the jury were to remain sequestered until all the evidence was heard and their verdict delivered.
The accused entered the packed courtroom just before 11 a.m. One court attendant remarked of the crowd: “This looks like a real gate. Too bad we can’t charge them admission. We could make a fortune here.”
Some of the most damning evidence against Larment came on Thursday, when Const. John Hardon testified that when he showed Larment the revolver retrieved from the street following the shooting, Larment replied, “That’s my gun.”
RCMP ballistics expert Insp. James Churchman testified, meanwhile, that the same nickel-plated revolver — Exhibit 5 — was the one that fired the bullet that killed Stoneman. Doctors, policemen and witnesses all testified, prompting the prosecutor to suggest late in the morning that the case against Larment was pretty much complete. The Crown would turn its attention to D’Amour that afternoon.
On Friday and Saturday, the original statements given to police by the three following their arrests were read in court, and nothing in them exonerated any of the accused. Each cited different reasons for being there in the first place — Henderson said they went downtown to find a bootlegger. D’Amour said they went to steal a car. Larment stated there was no plan when the three headed out. But none denied his involvement. Larment had lied about where he got his gun, initially claiming he bought it for $25 from a stranger at a tavern. He also claimed he’d consumed “easily” about 50 glasses of beer on the afternoon and evening before he shot Stoneman. Claiming he didn’t know that Stoneman was a detective, he testified that he fired only to scare Stoneman enough to allow him to run away. “If I had not been under the influence of liquor, I would never have done that because there was no reason for it.”
The prosecution’s barrage intensified on Monday, as Snyder drew one admission after another “with machine-like precision,” including that Larment had stolen a car and robbed the War Museum, and that the three were drunk when Stoneman was shot.
Facing D’Amour, he asked, “Do you agree with me that, as a result of you and your companions carrying weapons, a young police officer was mowed down, cut off in the prime of his life while carrying out his duties?”
“Yes,” D’Amour replied, “I guess that’s about it.”
“What was it that Det. Stoneman prevented you three men from doing the night he was shot down?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Snyder also shot holes through Larment’s contention that alcohol was the chief factor in the shooting.
“You stated on Saturday that you wouldn’t have fired that shot if you hadn’t been drinking?” Snyder asked.
“Yes,” replied Larment.
“You wouldn’t bother anybody if you weren’t drinking?”
“No, I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“Were you getting anything to drink in the county jail, any liquor or beer?”
“No, sir, just water.”
Snyder then called Percy Hyndman into the courtroom, where everyone could see his bruises, scars and stitches.
“Then did you not hold this man a few weeks ago,” he continued, “while D’Amour tried to choke him and Henderson hit him over the head with a piece of wood?”
“I don’t know. I am not sure. I know I didn’t hit him.”
“But the three of you attacked him?”
“Yes, I had him by the arm.”
“Why did you attack him?”
“We were going to jump him and lock him up in a cell.”
“I suggest to you that you, D’Amour and Henderson don’t need liquor to be cruel and vicious.”
Larment’s reply was almost inaudible as he turned his gaze to the courtroom floor: “I’m not cruel or vicious.”
The following day, defence attorney Haughton delivered an impassioned two-hour closing argument that, according to the Citizen, was “received by members of the legal profession as one of the most stirring defence pleas ever heard during a major trial in an Ottawa court.” In it, he stressed the background of the three, blaming their early home lives and environment for the “position they find themselves in today.”
“Canadian justice,” he said, “demands that you put away prejudice and any pre-conceived ideas or opinions you may have concerning this case. And this includes opinions and points of view you may have heard in conversations about the case, or which you may have read in newspaper accounts of the occurrence.
“You are the 12 reasonable, just and true men who will have the responsibility of deciding the guilt or innocence of the accused on a charge of murder. … You are the masters of the facts — it lies within your power to say whether these men are guilty or whether the death of Det. Stoneman came about as the result of a tragic mistake.”
Haughton reminded the jury that Larment didn’t know Stoneman was a policeman when the two met. Larment fired, he argued, not with malice intent but in self-defence. It was, he said, a misunderstanding. He argued, too, that the shooting was an independent act by Larment, and not a group effort by the three accused.
“I have spoken with many people since my association with this case, and I know how many people feel about it. Sometimes I feel that I have been here for days, as one might stand at the ocean trying to sweep back the tide. I hope the seas of prejudice will subside and I pray that the winds of preconceived ideas and opinions will pass away. I believe and hope so, but I make no false pretense to you. The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to condemn these young men. I know that. Men and women who do not think and who have not heard the evidence may applaud. The cruel and thoughtless will approve. But we are not looking for approval and applause. We are looking for justice.”
On Wednesday, Jan. 23, Justice Barlow addressed the jury, pointing out that if they believed that Larment pulled the trigger knowing it might cause death, and if he was “reckless as to whether death ensued or not,” then they must find him guilty of murder. If they believed that through drunkenness he was unable for form intent or realize the likely consequences, they should find him guilty of manslaughter. And if they believed he fired in self-defence, they must find him not guilty.
He noted, too, that in his opinion the evidence showed conclusively that all three were guilty of “a cruel and brutal murder,” but that the decision was the jury’s to make, not his.
“Gentlemen,” he advised, “use your own good, common sense.”
The jury deliberated for just under four hours before returning to the courtroom at 4:15 p.m. on the afternoon of Jan. 24 with its verdict.
“A momentary rustle of smothered excitement swept through the crowd,” reported the Ottawa Journal, as jury foreman F.G. Berrill delivered a guilty verdict for Larment, whose pallor was chalky white, sweat streaming from his brow.
Larment showed no outward sign of emotion, added the Journal, “other than to lean a little farther forward in his seat and wrinkle his brow. He looked gaunt and strained as he watched the faces of the jurymen.” His mother, meanwhile, sobbed, holding a handkerchief to her face.
D’Amour and Henderson were found not guilty.
After the verdicts were delivered, Haughton requested an individual poll of the jury. One by one, each rose and uttered the single word “Guilty.” Thomas Bradley, the jurist who a week earlier asked to be excused on the grounds of his opposition to the death penalty, sat and wept after repeating the verdict. (He later announced he was donating the fees he was paid as a jurist to the Ottawa Boys Club. “The club does much to keep young boys off the street and give them healthful and useful recreation,” he said.)
The judge then addressed Larment. “I have now a very painful duty to perform,” he said. “Eugene Larment, have you any reason to offer why the sentence of the court should not now be passed upon you?”
“What I have to say to Your Lordship,” answered Larment, “is I am absolutely innocent of my crime with which I am charged. I am also very, very sorry. I am sorry and I regret ever since I have been charged for what happened last October. I have prayed. I have prayed to God for the misunderstanding which occurred to me. I have done my best and now I am found guilty. All I have to say is I am not guilty.”
“Eugene Larment,” said Barlow, “you have been found guilty of murder by the jury, and the sentence of this court is that you be taken from here to the place whence you came, and there be kept in close confinement until the 27th day of March, 1946, and on that date be taken to the place of execution and be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
Leaving the prisoner’s box, Larment’s hand visibly shook as he lit a cigarette. Barlow then addressed D’Amour and Henderson before they were taken back to jail, reminding them of how lucky each was.
Outside the courtroom, D’Amour and Henderson were almost jubilant at their acquittal. “Well-built and darkly handsome,” wrote the Citizen, “D’Amour sighed deeply and fumbled for a cigarette while the special guards prepared to remove him and Henderson across to the jail. He grinned at a Citizen representative and remarked, ‘Well, I guess that’s that!’”
The Journal reporter noted that the pair walked out of the courtroom and looked at him. “What happened?” asked the reporter.
“’We got off,’ smiled D’Amour.”
Two days later, the pair were remanded without plea, facing charges related to the War Museum heist and auto theft. Five additional charges were to be added at their court appearance on Feb. 1. The two were subsequently sentenced to 29 and 27 years, respectively, in a penitentiary.
THE EXECUTION
Larment was hanged at 12:32 a.m. on March 27, 1946, with jail chaplain Brigadier Herbert Porter of the Salvation Army providing him spiritual comfort. Larment, it was reported, remained calm and resigned throughout. Unlike with the shooting, attempted jail break and trial, Ottawa’s major dailies barely covered it. The Journal ran a four-paragraph story on Page 3, with the headline “Eugene Larment Hanged in Ottawa.” The Citizen’s coverage was even more sparse: “Eugene Larment Pays Penalty” announced its two-paragraph brief on Page 11.
Official witnesses for the hanging were Sheriff Sloan, jail governor Archie Graham, and jail guards. According to guard Percy Hyndman’s daughter, Jeen, the hangman came from Toronto. “Nobody knew what he looked like; he arrived at the jail with a bag on his head.
“But for one of the witnesses, they picked the guard who accidentally let (Larment) out of the cell, and he passed out during the hanging. And he woke up in the hearse beside the dead body, as kind of a practical joke — they were getting even with him.
“It was a little consolation to my dad to hear that story.”
Larment’s body was delivered to his family, and subsequently buried in an unmarked grave at Beechwood Cemetery. He was the last man to be hanged in Ottawa.
EPILOGUE
For Hopkins, too young to remember her police officer father, he was kept alive in the stories the family told, particularly at Earl’s cottage in Copper Cliff, where she and her brother spent at least a month each summer, and through a scrapbook of commendations and clippings that she discovered when she was a teen and spent hours and hours poring over.
“I now have a very soft spot for cops,” she says, “and great respect.”
“But one of the tragedies is that the man who killed him was the last person hanged in Ottawa,” she says. “As a survivor, I don’t think that brought any resolution — I think it only made it harder.”
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The murder of Detective Stoneman: A real-life Ottawa crime drama
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The murder of Detective Stoneman: A real-life Ottawa crime drama
Thomas Stoneman was the first Ottawa police officer killed in the line of duty. Photo illustration by Dennis Leung. Original photo care of Ottawa Police Service
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Percy Hyndman was a guard at the Carleton County Jail on Nicholas Street in January 1946 when accused murderers Eugene Larment, Wilfrid D'Amour and Albert Henderson tried to escape. Hyndman was badly beaten in the incident and died four years later as a rersult of his injuries. Bruce Deachman/Courtesy of Jeen Coulas.
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