One day in February 1965, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was behind the wheel of a Chevrolet that was speeding after a Sûreté du Québec patrol car on Highway 20.
Published at 2:02 am. Updated at 5:00 am.
The “provincial police” came to arrest his friend Jacques Hébert in Montreal and took him to the Quebec courthouse, where he was charged with contempt of court. Hébert decided that he would not respond to the judicial summons; It is therefore manu militari that the author and publisher is held accountable for his outrage.
PRESS PHOTO ARCHIVE
Jacques Hébert and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968
Trudeau was only elected as an MP nine months later before becoming prime minister in 1968. At the time he was a law professor and not a very active member of the bar. In this capacity, he rushes to the aid of his friend Hébert – the newspapers of the time particularly remember the name of his “real” lawyer Maurice Marquis.
The crime of Jacques Hébert? A scathing pamphlet against the Quebec justice system, the title of which was borrowed from Zola: “I Blame the Coffin Assassins.”
This book had such an impact that it forced the convening of a commission of inquiry in addition to the trial of its author. Above all, it has deeply entrenched the belief in public opinion that Wilbert Coffin, hanged in 1956 for the murder of three American hunters, was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
The author Daniel Proulx
Fifty-eight years later, author and screenwriter Daniel Proulx responds to this epochal book1. For him, the scandal lay not in the Coffin trial, but in the media’s falsification of this “injustice,” which was not an injustice.
In 2007, after reviewing all the archives, Clément Fortin came to the following conclusion in a book whose title could have done without a question mark: The Coffin affair: a hoax?
Proulx, who has long written about famous causes in La Presse, has translated his recent OHdio podcast into print, albeit with a more biting tone. The main defendant is now called Jacques Hébert…
In June 1953, the families of three American hunters were worried. The three men, Eugene Lindsay, 47, his son Richard, 17, and Frederick Claar, 20, a family friend, left Pennsylvania to hunt bears in Gaspésie. They were supposed to stay there for a week, but after three weeks there is still no news of them. Their remains, eaten by animals, were found in the forest in early July.
The “last person to see them alive” was Wilbert Coffin, 39, a World War II veteran who lives by odd jobs and dreams of making money buying claims and mining for minerals. He told police he helped Lindsay’s son repair his Jeep by buying him a gas pump and drove him back to the hunting camp, where he ate with the trio. He says he was paid $40 for his work.
The three Americans were never seen alive again. But the day after his visit to the workshop with young Lindsay, Coffin set off towards Montreal in a borrowed car. During his trip, he drank and handed out huge tips in U.S. dollars, despite being generally destitute. When he returned to his girlfriend’s home in Montreal, he showed the Americans several stolen items.
The man is quickly named as a suspect.
At the end of a trial held in Percé in 1954, Coffin was found guilty and sentenced to hang. All his appeals will fail. He will be one of the last to be hanged in Quebec’s Bordeaux prison – the last execution in Canada took place in 1962.
During the trial, some journalists questioned the quality of the evidence. One of them published a very critical book about the trial. And it is these texts and reports that inspired Jacques Hébert to write first “Coffin was innocent” and then his famous “J’accuse”.
For Hébert, the “assassins” of Coffin are essentially the regime of Maurice Duplessis. His thesis, roughly (but not so) summarized, was that the government of the day needed a perpetrator to show Americans that this crime would not go unpunished. It is true that the judiciary has sent its most famous lawyers to Percé. It is also true that Coffin’s lawyers, two young recruits from Quebec, were no match.
The fight against the death penalty, which was only officially abolished in Canada in 1976, is also the background for Jacques Hébert’s fight.
But even if the trial was far from perfect, there is nothing that can truly confirm that it was a miscarriage of justice, let alone a conspiracy to convict a seemingly innocent person.
The evidence against Coffin (the golden opportunity, the money and the stolen items) was serious. His lawyer did not let him testify, and miscarriage of justice advocates accuse the lawyer of causing his harm. They often forget to mention that the same lawyer himself picked up a rifle, believed to be a rifle committed in a camp (he admitted to picking up “a package”). A lawyer’s assistant claimed to have thrown her into the river from the Quebec Bridge, but denied the claim. She was never found.
Hébert’s book caused such a scandal that a commission of inquiry was convened, chaired by Judge Roger Brossard, in which all the jurors testified. Everything was checked in detail. Hébert had a bad time and had to admit that he had neither attended the trial nor read the stenographic notes, and he also published several errors. Conclusion: Coffin’s guilt was beyond question, whatever one might think of the trial and of course the death penalty.
Some of those who had come to his defense, like Claude Ryan in Le Devoir, changed their shoulder rifle and, like a journalist, shot Hébert in flames without severity.
Hébert was therefore accused of contempt of court (by Attorney General Claude Wagner, father of the current head of the Supreme Court). Then the court fined him $6,000, despite the efforts of Trudeau, who invoked nothing less than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (he would be the father of the Canadian Charter 18 years later). The Court of Appeal subsequently acquitted Hébert, concluding that his linguistic exaggerations were such that the public could guess the exaggeration and make distinctions.
Since this “triumph” in the appeal process, everything has happened quickly, as if the false truth of this book full of errors and extrapolations had imposed itself. The film that emerged 20 years later took up the same thesis: Coffin may have stolen, but he didn’t kill.
The Coffin affair is ultimately less judicial than the media. How does a “truth” become anchored in opinion and then in collective memory without considering the facts?
Proulx is careful not to conclude with absolute certainty that Coffin is guilty: we still regularly see new theories about the “real” assassin.
But Coffin’s defense attorneys are almost all guilty of the same crime: few have read the entire trial. Above all, no one has read the now largely forgotten Brossard Commission report…
1. I blame Coffin’s defenders, Art Global.