Arrest, Trial, and Aftermath
For his wife’s funeral, Guay bought a huge floral wreath, about six feet tall. One of his neighbors was a Time magazine correspondent, who told him at the funeral parlor of news reports that his wife’s plane had been downed by a bomb. A seemingly stunned Guay responded: “I can’t believe it! There’s nobody monstrous enough to blow a plane!” However, the ostentatious displays of innocent grief did not keep the police investigators from zeroing in on him.
He made things easy for them. Only three days after the plane crash, Guay tried to collect on a $ CAD 10,000 insurance policy (equivalent to about U$110,000 in 2019) that he had taken out on his wife the day she was killed. That was on top of a $ CAD 5,000 policy (about U$55,000 today) taken in 1942. Simultaneously, it was discovered that a mystery woman had appeared at the airport that day to ship a heavy parcel to a Baie Comeau address. Investigators discovered that the woman, who had arrived by taxi, had told the driver to avoid bumps. As she informed the cabbie: “these aren’t eggs I’m carrying“.
Within days, the woman’s identity was revealed: Marguerite Pitre. She told police that Albert Guay had given her the parcel to send to Baie Cumae, and insisted that she did not know what was in it. Then things took an even more dramatic turn when Pitre was rushed to the emergency room soon thereafter, having attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. In the hospital, a distraught Pitre told police that Guay had handed her the parcel, telling her that it was a bomb, and that he had later encouraged her to commit suicide, by insisting that she would be blamed for the crime.
Joseph-Albert Guay was arrested on September 23rd, 1949, and charged with murder. In his subsequent trial, which took place five months, later, all the sordid details came out. The Guays’ rocky marriage; the extramarital affairs; J. Albert’s desperation to win back Marie-Ange; the turn to murder; soliciting the help of the siblings Ruest and Pitre in building a bomb; the manipulation of Rita Guay into boarding the doomed plane; the crocodile tears and fake grief afterward.
A jury found Guay guilty in February of 1950. “Your crime is infamous: it has no name“, the judge declared, before sentencing him to death by hanging. Genereaux Ruest and Marguerite Pitre professed their innocence, with Ruest maintaining that he thought the bomb was for clearing a field, while Pitre, walking back her hospital statement, claimed that she was unaware the parcel contained a bomb. Guay torpedoed them both after his conviction, by issuing a statement that his accomplices were in on the plan from the start, and so testifying at Ruest’s trial. Guay was hanged on January 12th, 1951. His last words were: “At least I die famous“. Ruest was hanged on July 25th, 1952, and Pitre followed them to the gallows on January 9th, 1953 – the last woman to be hanged in Canada.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Murderpedia – Joseph Albert Guay
Mysteries of Canada – Joseph Guay, the Worst Mass Murderer in North American History
New Yorker, November 7th, 1953 – It Has No Name
Ottawa Citizen, February 23rd, 2009 – ‘Your crime … has no name’: The Bombing of Flight 108
Vice, January 23rd, 2018 – The Strange, Sad Story of the Last Woman Executed in Canada
Virtual Museum of Canada – The Albert Guay Affair
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