Uncover - S15: "The Village 3" E7: Atonement

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Years of sustained pressure finally pay off as the policing culture shifts to include activists’ input into their investigations. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-village-the-montreal-murders-transcripts-listen-1.6479960

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Joe Rose's death and Sex Garage and the murders of gay men and, you know, the AIDS conference in 89 and Quebec Human Rights Commission hearings on gay and lesbian by trans issues. You know, they're each like throwing a pebble into a pond. And they reverberate. They create waves that reach people and places and things that can't help but grow. I've said it before, and it bears repeating.

What happened here in Montreal in the early 90s transformed the way we talk about violence, about AIDS, about homophobia, and what it means to be queer. Here is the Parc de l'Espoir. This is also a place l'Espoir. This is also a place where I was with Joe. So I'm back in the village, with Louis-Alain Robitaille, who we met at the beginning of

this series. He's showing me around the Parc de l'Espoir, the Park of Hope, a tiny patch on a street corner, now a village landmark. But it was not even a park back then. It was an empty lot. And some activists put a lot of pressure on the city of Montreal to turn it into a memorial for gay people who died from AIDS. It was ACT UP Montreal who first used the space

to gather and grieve. About three years ago, after the Orlando massacre, we held a vigil here, and all the politicians were here, and we had about 5,000 people here on the street. It was full, full, full, as wide as the street. As Robitaille and I walk through the village, he points out the changes he's been part of over the last three decades.

Oh, this is the surveillance camera that Mr. Cadell had installed. Went from 30 aggressions to three the next year. So quite significant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Louis Allain wasn't always an activist. But after his friend Joe Rose was killed in 1989, he began to fear for his safety.

I thought it could have been me. I could have been that guy that night and they just thought that I looked too gay and that was reason enough to just push the knife in my heart. He died right there. You know? He died instantly

like in the bus. And I think it had that effect on a lot of people. It was such a big loss to lose a guy who was not afraid like that and who was ready to make things better. It was a loss that's still hard to describe to me. But it was traumatic enough that I left Montreal for six months. When he came back, he was determined to honour his friend and became an activist. Over the years, the village has become a safer place, thanks in part to the work of ACT UP.

But then, a few years ago, Louis-Alain noticed a change. And suddenly, in 2013, we had all these aggressions, and nothing was being done. He immediately created a Facebook page, Le Carré Rose, the Pink Square, a new collective against homophobia and violence in the village. Square, a new collective against homophobia and violence in the village. And within 24 hours, we had 2,000 people liking the page. So we knew that there was something there. That kind of traction got everyone's attention.

The media, the mayor, and the police, who soon got in touch. With the Pink Square, we were going to meet them and we got good assistance and they really listened to us and it really changed a lot. They assigned to the Pink Square a gig cop who would help victims of homophobic attacks. He would go to their place to take the deposition. Like, this is major.

This is almost a friendship, you know? Like, it's like, yeah, we know you, we respect you, you want to do this, and we're going to help you. If you compare that to police raids when I got in Montreal, it's not a joke to be a gay guy anymore. It's not acceptable to call somebody a faggot anymore, you know? This is completely the opposite of when I got in Montreal.

The complete opposite. So what changed? And how? It may have started with community pressure, but a lot of the changes happened behind closed doors and led to answers about whether or not a serial killer was preying on gay men in the village in the early 90s. I am Francis Plourd. This is The Village. The Montreal Murders. Episode 7, Atonement.

We in Montreal are a community of minorities. We need to learn how to address barriers of ignorance of one another, because ignorance breeds fear, and fear breeds violence. We just turned a page of history. We had so bad relations with the police, it's like night and day. If only Joe Rose, a gay brother, clear by her death, would see us now. Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! In 1991, Montreal's Homicide Squad initially rejected the idea that they were dealing with a killer on the loose. We don't think that it could be a serial killer, not at this time. But as the body count mounted, homicide chief Pierre Sangolo started to take the possibility seriously. We have concentrated together eight files from last year and the year before,

and the two latest murders. from last year and the year before, and the two latest murders. And at this present time, there is a special analysis that is being done. That special analysis included assigning new detectives to cold cases. Sangalo also sent one investigator to expand their scope outside of Quebec, a mission that turned out to be eye-opening.

Detective Michel Proveau headed to Brampton, Ontario, to meet with a group of investigators, homicide detectives from across the country, even profilers from the FBI. For several days, some of the top experts in North America sifted through Montreal's police reports, trying to establish a profile. It was the first time Montreal's homicide squad analyzed the murders this way. In the end, though, they concluded that the presence of a serial killer was unlikely.

I lit a huge light, a 200-watt light. I really enjoyed it. But Provo says the trip was a wake-up call for other reasons. The experts concluded that Montreal's murder investigations were completely inadequate. No photos of the victims, none of the crime scenes, and typically no coroner's report until weeks after the crime. The Montreal police were not even connected to the national database profiling victims and suspects across the country. The experts in Brampton said these flaws were crippling their investigations.

Provo says he left the meeting shaken. As soon as he was back in Montreal, he told Sangolo they had a major problem to fix. Sangolo took the recommendations seriously. It's when the gay and lesbian community, and Provo credits the gay community for making that happen. It was the trigger. He said it was their insistence that forced the Homicide Squad to take a closer look at how it approached its investigations.

But that change happened behind the scenes. And it would take another two years for the community to finally feel heard. Je vous remercie d'être ici ce matin. A couple of words in French, a resume a bit in English. In 1993, the Quebec government held hearings into violence and discrimination against gays and lesbians.

We knew that we were basically making history. We were living history. This is Fonimi. He chaired the hearings. We're talking about people being killed, people being strangled, people being stabbed to death. And we felt that it's about time that we should do something to address the violence, because violence begets violence.

Violence could encourage violence, would normalize anti-gay violence, anti-AIDS violence. And also because of the, you know, this sex garage, the raids and the conflict with the police, we could feel the boiling point. As police were about to testify, they had a choice to make. They could deny the problem or own it. Up until the last minute, Michael Hendricks had little hope that they would do the right thing. And the police arrived about quarter to nine.

And they had a huge pile of documents. And they said, oh, forget about what you've already presented. You got it. Just throw it away. We're going to do it. This is the new presentation. Well, it was a bit of a surprise. It's my responsibility to make sure that the

things are done without discrimination. They said that they felt that this was an important moment for them to start working with the gay and lesbian community on questions of violence. In other words, they folded like a tent overnight. Now suddenly they were promising the Human Rights Commission and all of Quebec, by way of the media, that they were going to get off their chairs and do something, and we were going to get to the bottom of the story. I felt like Cinderella, and it was like, you know,

you get invited to the ball, and the Prince Dance was with you. You know, it was amazing. And now, all of a sudden, the community was showing that they cared. And they were no longer embarrassed to say that homosexuals mattered. It was a stunning victory. And promised to be a huge shift in the way that law enforcement worked with the gay community. huge shift in the way that law enforcement worked with the gay community. But Michael and his fellow activists were about to find out just how crucial their input would become to police investigations.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Like many of the other victims, Harry Nolan was stabbed to death. In this case, the knife was left in his neck. In the morning of the 6th of December, 1993, the phone rang, I answered it, and a policeman said that there had been a murder

that would appear to be a gay murder the night before, and that he would like Douglas and I and Roger to come to the Homicide Department. For the first time ever, police called on activists from the community to help solve these so-called gay murders.

They put the photos on the table, laid them out all, said, this is the guy, that's the story. Do you know him? No, we never heard of him. 57-year-old laborer

living in the West End. But we could read the scene, and some of the usual paraphernalia for gay relations was there, including an amyl nitrate or poppers, which was constant on bedroom scenes and in kitchen scenes in the murders. It was clear that the police didn't know much about gay life. And they were honest.

They said, what in the world is this thing? What's that thing? You know, look at this odd photo we found in the room. What's that mean? You know, and stuff like that. And we could interpret as best we could. But Douglas had an enormous repertory of gay culture, and he could read just about anything.

Like what? Well, a question from the policeman is, why would anyone have put rubber gloves next to the bed? That was for certain sex acts that require rubber gloves to make sure that there's no transmission of disease. But it didn't dawn on them that those were sex toys, really. And other sex toys, like dildos, they knew about that and stuff like that. But more subtle things, no. How would they know they didn't participate in gay life? Now that members of the community had direct access to the case files,

they could also share news of how the investigations were unfolding. We are saying now that there is not a serial killer from what we have seen this morning, but there certainly is a series of murders and a phenomenon that has developed. But Douglas Bouclet-Couvret and Michael Hendricks saw something else missing in those files. You see, in the case of our murders,

their lives were private, and no one knew those things about them, and the families were ashamed of them, so there was almost no family to look after them. Douglas and I decided that we were going to become the family of each new cadaver. Michael Hendricks would keep working with the police and he says that one man was ultimately responsible

for improving relations with the community. Jacques Duchesneau. He took over as chief of police shortly after the human rights hearings. One of Duchesneau's first acts was to invite Michael, Douglas and their friends to his inauguration. They were the only civilians in the room. It was a special occasion. Mr. Duchesneau made a speech in which he referenced us and said that he intended to open the police department. We were the first strangers to be involved. We would not be the last.

And he welcomed us. and he was sincere. Jacques Duchesneau is a household name in Quebec. He made headlines in the 80s for arresting his own boss for drug trafficking. Saint-Jérôme. We should be there in four minutes. To Dirty Sharp. So, that's a camera there on the left.

Duchesneau agreed to meet us, but it would be a bit cloak and dagger. He told us to head into the parking lot by the church in Saint-Jérôme, north of Montreal. Once there, he'd give us a call. And we wait. Yeah. What time is it? Two-thirty. Two-thirty-two, actually.

Oh. Oui, allo? C'est Jacques Duchesneau. Duchesneau is still working, investigating corruption in the city. Oui, bienvenue, je vais vous expliquer pourquoi tantôt. Duchesneau is still working, investigating corruption in the city. We followed his directions to the back of a plain brick building. Duchesneau greeted us by the door and quietly led us into an empty office. Bonjour, Monsieur Duchesneau.

Looking for a great van. Early on, in 1994, when he made his speech in front of the police department, insisting on equality and fair treatment, Duchesneau knew he was breaking new ground. And at the end of the speech, a civilian member came to me and he said, thank you. I said, what for? He said, I'm going through that myself. My son just told me he was gay. Didn't know what to do. So he said, you know, hearing my chief mentioning that,

you know, it was all right. He said, I feel better. You know, I think I was getting my message across. Society was evolving. So we had to put our act together. Of course, they hit a few hurdles along the way. In February of 1994, police raided the Cox Bar on St. Catherine Street. 165 men were arrested for being found in a body house. Again. The exact kind of targeting the gay community had been decrying for years. Activists demanded a meeting with the chief of police. And they came in my office and we had a conversation

and I saw two leaders who believed in what should be done and they explained to me that it was unfair. Michael Hendricks told me about this meeting too, although he described it being a bit more heated. And Mr. Duchenne did his mea culpa after yelling at us for not being on his side, then accepted the fact that it was going to never happen again. And it did stop.

And they started treating us like people, as bad or as good as they are with other citizens. That's what we wanted. Only the equal treatment, not better treatment. From there on, the road got smoother. Duchesneau introduced community policing. Smaller stations cropped up across Montreal's neighborhoods and one opened in the village. And Michael and Douglas continued to collaborate with the police for a few more years. It went on for at least into 1996. Policemen came from other places, like from the Maritimes, with their photos, and asked

us to read them for them, and also from Toronto. and asked us to read them for them, and also from Toronto. We learned a lot about gay life ourselves, and kind of people and situations that, pickles that people get into. And it's really the leaders of the community that brought the pieces together. Afterwards, that's when we started arresting people because we got the pattern.

One after the other, they succeeded. The first day, we'd look at the pictures with them, and then we would keep up with them. In other words, it was a very good public relations tool for them. And we shut up. We stopped complaining. There were no more disputes. It just quieted down really quickly. And no more murders.

Well, fewer murders. And now, police were solving more of them. In 1995, police swiftly dealt with the brutal killing of local actor Richard Niquette, arresting two people within days of the murder. Later that year, police managed to solve another case, also described as a hate crime. We just turned a page of history. We had so bad relation with the police, it's like night and day. Yes, they'd made an important change. But it had come with a price. 17 lives.

Richard Galland. Joe Rose. Brian Booth. Young-Swa Mock. Gaétan Éthier. Robert Assali. Normand Garraud. Marc Bellereve.

Pierre-Yvon Croft. Garfield Walker. Yves Lalonde. Daniel Lacombe, Michael Hogue, Robert Pinchot, Roland Gagné, Warren Ealing, and Harry Dolan. In 1994, a guy named Stéphane Corbet confessed to the killing of Garfield Walker three years earlier. Another man eventually came forward for the 1993 murder of Michael Hoag. Then, in 1998, there was a third confession. And with this one, police learned that there was, indeed, a serial killer hunting in the village. He said it was like hunger, it was a strong need.

Michael McGray, a large man with a clear psychopathic drive, had a spotty and varied criminal career. He was first arrested for robbing a cab driver in New Brunswick in 1987. But by that time, unbeknownst to police, McRae was already a killer. He was in and out of jail over the next decade, mostly for smaller crimes.

But this left him the opportunity to kill again, including two victims in Montreal's gay village. Robert Asselet, a retired schoolteacher, was his first victim. Lawyers say Michael McRae wasn't homophobic, but he was homicidal. McRae, while on day parole, had asked for a three-day pass to visit Montreal during Easter weekend in 1991. Homosexuals were easy victims. You could go in a bar, have a conversation, get invited,

and profit from a favorable moment to attack and kill your victim. On March 30th, he met Robert Asali at a bar in the village. The two watched hockey, had a few drinks, then went home together. He beat and stabbed Asli 16 times. The next day, he targeted Gaétan Éthier, who invited him back to his apartment. After stabbing Ézié, McGray disappeared for two months

before landing back in prison. In 1998, he was picked up for the double homicide of a woman and her daughter in their apartment

in Moncton. McGray started telling the police about other murders he had committed across the country over the last decade, including those of Robert Assali and Gaétan Éthier.

McGray is currently serving seven life sentences. The murders of Gaétan Éthier and Robert Assali are what led Michael Hendricks to raise the alarm about a killer on the loose, only to be told by police there was no such thing. That it took the killer's confession, a guy who was already known to police, to solve the murders, still raises questions about what the police were or weren't doing. To this day, seven of the Montreal cases remain unsolved, leaving their families and their friends without resolution.

Some continue to speculate even today. I'm sure there is a serial killer. I'm sure of that. Even after all those years? Yes, yes, yes. He's probably dead. Out. Roger Leclerc has outlived many people in this story.

It's a triumph, as he has been living with HIV for almost half his life. So I go to the pharmacy once a month, take my pills for a month. So this is for a week. So

morning, dinner, lunch, dinner, and before go to bed. so this is the pills that's quite a cocktail yeah but it's not only for AIDS there's three of them

who are for AIDS you know I do have the same formula since 99 always the same thing yeah each time I see the doctor 99. Always the same thing. Yeah. Each time I see the doctor,

are you sure? Yes. Is it a winning formula? Go on. It's fine. When the doctors told me that I was seropositive, for me it was clear that I was going to die. That was clear for me. So there was no way out. You're gonna die. So get used to that. But for me it was, okay, I'm gonna die. But in the same time, I was happy about the life I had. I'm proud of what I am. I'm proud of the life

I had. I'm just gonna live these three months and that's it. I was surprised three months not dying, not even sick, six months nothing. It's 30 years now. Others, including his friend, Douglas Bouclet-Couvret, were not so lucky. Douglas was a good living, very sensitive, beautiful man. He was like a surprise box all the time. I loved that man. After losing many of their friends, Michael Hendricks and his partner René Leboeuf took on another fight.

ACT UP, when they got here for the 5th World Conference on AIDS, back in 89, they had a list for things that had to be changed. And number 25 on the list was recognizing gay and lesbian relationships. René and I were never into marriage. We did not have wedding bell blues. But they became convinced that marriage was key to equality. We felt that we would never get to the bottom of our social problems without having full integration in society.

That was in 1997. It would turn into a seven-year battle. And in April 2004, we finally got married. And so as a result, gay marriage at least came to us by way of the AIDS conference here in Quebec and then by way of the Human Rights Commission. It was like a dream come true after all that time going through a lot of lawyers,

trying to understand the law, trying to get accepted by the gay community. It was very good satisfaction. We're very happy, and then we can go on with our life after that. that. As I sit with Michael and René, I can't help but think of them, and all who fought

with them in those years, as unsung heroes. ACT UP struggled for years to improve healthcare, AIDS research, policing, marriage, and now a new generation of activists are working to dismantle I struggled for years to improve healthcare, AIDS research, policing, marriage. And now a new generation of activists are working to dismantle systemic racism and transphobia. The fact I can live my life without fear and enjoy the same rights as others, I owe that

to their generation. And though the battle is never won, that round was most certainly theirs. Yeah, I think we won the long game. And the reason I know we won is because kids don't think it's a big deal. is because kids don't think it's a big deal. Last week, I was in the metro, and there was just besides me two young lesbians who were kissing, sit in the metro. I had never thought it was possible,

something like that. And just go in Montreal, go in Sherbrooke, go anywhere. You will see gays. They are appearing. We can see them, hear them. So that is the change. And I love that. The stigma is gone in this generation.

So yeah, we won the long game. And I'm proud of that. It doesn't seem to me like we're any different than anybody else, except that we didn't have any choice. But when it came to gay life, what happened to us was we didn't invite HIV into our lives. It came, and did it change things? We always thought of ourselves as just different people,

that's all, you know, in society, and we kept a low profile because we knew that it was dangerous to be gay. Once HIV hit, it was time to act up. And that's what we did. Season 3 of The Village has been produced by Carrie Haber, Michel Gagnon, and me, Francis Plourd. If you've been moved by this series, the first two seasons of The Village

are available on the CBC Listen app or everywhere you get your podcasts. And if you're interested in hearing what our colleagues at Radio-Canada are doing with this story, you'll find the French-language production of Le Village, Meurtre, Combat, Fierté, over at audio.ca. And if you want to learn more about serial killer Michael McGray,

you can check out Uncover, Dead Wrong. Investigative journalist Tim Bousquet follows the story of Glenn Assoon, a man wrongfully convicted for the murder of Brenda Way in Nova Scotia in 1995. McGrath was a suspect in this case. It's shocking, it's riveting, and raises questions about our institutions. Special thanks to Alex Laplante, Jeff Turner, and dave donnie who helped with our studio recordings special thanks as well to joe rogers for his help with the archives our story editors are chris oak and damon fairless our digital producer is esky robert editing mixing and sound design by gabrielle

clark and julia whitman even a guard is our video producer ben shannon designed our artwork Editing, mixing, and sound design by Gabrielle Clark and Julia Whitman. Evan Agard is our video producer. Ben Shannon designed our artwork. Our cross-promo producer is Amanda Cox. Kerry Haber is the series showrunner. Executive producer is Cecil Fernandez. The director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. I'm Francis Plourd. Thanks for listening.