(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this date in 1867, Modiste Villebrun was hanged in Sorel, Quebec, in what would be the last execution before Canada became its own country. His partner in crime, Sophie Boisclair, might very well have been executed alongside him had she not been pregnant.
Villebrun, a lumberjack from St. Zephirin, was having an affair with Boisclair and they wanted to get married. They had two slight problems to deal with, in the form of their respective spouses. In those times, divorce was unthinkable. Murder, apparently, was not.
Jeffrey E. Pfeifer details their crimes in his book Death By Rope: An Anthology of Canadian Executions:
The first victim was Villebrun’s wife, and their plan seemed to work well. No one suspected foul play when the previously healthy woman died, or at least no one could prove anything. Braced by their success, the lovers soon turned their attention to Boisclair’s husband, Francois-Xavier Jutras. Boisclair suggested to her husband that they should allow Villebrun to move in with them since the death of his wife had left him all alone. Jutras agreed to his wife’s request and almost immediately Boisclair began to lace his food with her “special” ingredient. It was not long before the strychnine took effect and Jutras was dead.
Unfortunately for the two lovers, a suspicious doctor demanded an autopsy, which revealed the dead man’s body was saturated with poison. Villebrun and Boisclair soon found themselves arrested.
They were tried separately and both were convicted in short order and sentenced to death. When asked, at sentencing, whether she had anything to say, Boisclair announced she was expecting a baby. She got a temporary reprieve until delivery, and got the opportunity to watch Villebrun’s execution from the window in her cell.
Ten thousand people attended his hanging.
Seven months later, Boisclair gave birth to his child, and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
“Boisclair ended up serving 20 years in the penitentiary,” records Pfeifer, “before being released, a broken woman.”
On this day..
- 1606: Henry Garnet, Gunpowder Plot confessor - 2015
- 1740: Elizabeth and Mary Branch, tyrannical mistresses - 2014
- 1664: Elsje Christiaens, Rembrandt model - 2013
- 1738: Katherine Garret, Pequot infanticide - 2012
- 1909: Jesus Malverde, narco patron saint - 2011
- 738: Copan king 18-Rabbit (Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil) - 2010
- 1946: Not Willie Francis, who survived the electric chair - 2009
- 1808: The Executions of the Third of May - 2008
