Maritime Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

they took their final drop. Frances and Marie were also allowed to attend. Amazingly enough, the boys’ long-estranged father, William Bannister, came to see the boys on their last night. “I had to come and say goodbye,” he told one curious reporter.
    I wonder what they thought, looking at the man who had stepped so completely out of their lives thirteen years ago, now standing there on the very last night of their earthly existence.
    At eleven o’clock, when the moon was hanging high in the New Brunswick twilight, Arthur Ellis slid a black hood over each of the boys’ heads. Daniel broke his cool and asked that the hood be removed long enough for him to say a final prayer. Then the hood was replaced.
    Ellis fit each hand-tied noose carefully over the boys’ throats. At six minutes after one o’clock, the lever was thrown, the heavy trap doors swung open, and Daniel and Arthur dropped into eternity. Ellis kept them hanging for twenty interminably long minutes before they were removed from the gallows and placed in a pair of plain pine coffins that had been waiting all night for them in a nearby hallway. The coffins were carried up the hill in a flashlight procession.
    Waiting graves had been dug carefully with preordained and legislated precision, seven feet and four inches long, six feet wide, and four and a half feet deep. Not a single relative was present to claim the bodies. Even William Bannister, the boys’ father, did not stick around for the funeral—as basic a ceremony as could be imagined. The boys had been raised in the dark and were buried in equal squalor.
    Three and a half years later, May Bannister left her prison cell and vanished into the sordid and tawdry pages of history.

don’t blame the dog
    Francis Xavier Gallant
Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island
1812

    M alpeque Bay, long known for its tasty world-famous oysters, is also known as the home of Prince Edward Island’s first sentence for murder.
    In the late eighteenth century, Francis Xavier Gallant and two of his brothers sailed from Shippegan, New Brunswick, and settled in Prince Edward Island. The journey was a fairly easy one.
    Xavier was a little teapot of a man, short and stocky. He walked with a quick, nervous waddle, which earned him the nickname “Pingouin” or penguin, from his two brothers. He settled along the shores of Malpeque Bay, eking out a bare living as a tenant farmer on Lot Sixteen.
    Xavier met his wife-to-be, Madelaine Doucet, shortly afterwards. Together they raised a family of seven children. Life seemed happy. They were a poor but hard-working family who believed in their dreams.
    Then something bad happened—something that would cast the Gallant family into a collective nightmare. Xavier made a shrewd deal with a local merchant, Thomas March. The business deal brought him a profit of several hundred dollars—an awful lot of money back in those days. This should have been a benefit, but the money brought with ita terrible curse.
    Xavier became obsessed with his small fortune. He spent hours counting and recounting his treasure. He hid it in several places about the house—the attic, the basement, the larder. He would move it from hiding spot to hiding spot, determined to keep it safe from theft.
    â€œThe entire pack of you craven dogs are out to get my money,” he told his wife and children. “But I will fool you all.”
    He stopped working completely. “Why should I work?” he asked his family. “I have all of this money.”
    â€œYes,” said his wife. “And soon it will be gone.”
    â€œOnly if the witches take it,” Gallant replied mysteriously. “And I can fool them too.”

A Witch Must Die
    A short time after that argument, Gallant began to sleep out of doors in the woods. “It is safer out there,” he would tell anyone who asked. “God can come and look down and see me more