Madame le Corbeau

Marguerite Pitre was the 13th and last woman to be hanged in Canada. She was executed on January 9, 1953 in Montreal.

Known as ‘Madame le Corbeau’ (Madame "The Raven") because she always wore black clothes, she walked to the gallows at 12:35 a.m. on January 9, 1953 and was pronounced dead 15 minutes later. Jail authorities said she displayed no fear and ‘everything was normal’. In addition to being involved in Canada’s worst mass murder to that date Mrs. Pitre would have one other distinction — she was to be the last woman hanged in Canada.

At midnight January 8, 1953, Marguerite Pitre stepped from the black car in front of Bordeaux Jail. Buxom, 43, and icy calm, with two nuns she hurried through the gates of the hushed prison. As she climbed to the third floor, prison guards uneasily patrolled the yard beneath the scaffold and additional prison officers walked nervously up and down the cell tiers of E Wing which overlooked the gallows. For 24 hours an air of despondency had pervaded the old prison, emanating from the guards and reinforced by the prisoners. After a few moments with her escorts, Marguerite Pitre walked to the ante-room where the hangman waited. Newspapers across Canada carried accounts of the hanging, with The British Columbian at New Westminster on the Pacific Coast reporting under a large black heading: “Madame Corbeau goes to gallows", “Mrs. Marguerite Pitre, a 43-year-old Quebec city housewife who put a time-bomb aboard an airliner that later crashed and killed 23 persons, was hanged early today at Bordeaux jail as Canada closed the books on its most fantastic murder in history."

See also

• Albert Guay
• Capital punishment in Canada

References

Anderson, Frank W. (1982). Hanging in Canada: Concise History of a Controversial Topic. Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.. pp. 54–62. ISBN 0919214932.