The Coffin affair, or the making of a myth

One day in February in 1965, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was at the wheel of a Chevrolet which was speeding to follow a Sûreté du Québec patrol car on Highway 20.

The “provincial police” came to arrest his friend Jacques Hébert in Montreal, to take him to the Quebec courthouse, where he was accused of contempt of court. Hébert decided that he would not respond to the summons of justice; It is therefore manu militari that the author and publisher will be taken to answer for his outrage.

Trudeau would only be elected 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. It is in this capacity that he flies to the aid of his friend Hébert – the newspapers of the time especially remember the name of his “real” lawyer, Maurice Marquis.

The crime of Jacques Hébert? A vitriolic pamphlet against Quebec justice, which borrows its title from Zola: I accuse the murderers of Coffin.

This book had such an impact that in addition to the trial of its author, it forced the holding of a commission of inquiry. Above all, it deeply established in public opinion the conviction that Wilbert Coffin, hanged in 1956 for the murder of three American hunters, had been the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Fifty-eight years later, author and screenwriter Daniel Proulx responds to this epoch-making book¹. For him, the scandal was not in the Coffin trial, but in the media fabrication of this “injustice” which was not an injustice.

In 2007, Clément Fortin, after having gone through all the archives, came to this conclusion in a book whose title could have done without a question mark: The Coffin affair: a hoax?

Proulx, who wrote for a long time on causes celebrated in The Press, released his recent podcast broadcast by OHdio on paper, but with a more caustic tone. The main accused 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 from them. Their remains, devoured by animals, were found in the forest at the beginning of July.

The “last person to see them alive” was Wilbert Coffin, 39, a World War II veteran who lives on odd jobs and dreams of making a buck buying claims and prospecting for minerals. . To the police, he said 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 got $40 for his work.

The three Americans were never seen alive again. But Coffin, the day after his visit to a garage with young Lindsay, went on the run with a borrowed car towards Montreal. Throughout his journey, he drank and handed out huge tips in American dollars, even though he was generally penniless. Returning to his girlfriend’s house in Montreal, he showed several stolen objects to the Americans.

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 hanged in Quebec, at the 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 on the trial. And it is from these texts and reports that Jacques Hébert was inspired to first write Coffin was innocentthen his famous I accuse.

For Hébert, the “assassins” of Coffin are essentially the regime of Maurice Duplessis. His thesis, roughly (but not so much) summarized, was that the government of the day needed a culprit to show Americans that this crime would not go unpunished. It is true that justice has sent its most illustrious lawyers to Percé. It is also true that Coffin’s lawyers, two young recruits from Quebec, were no match.

The battle against the death penalty, which was not officially abolished in Canada until 1976, is also the backdrop to Jacques Hébert’s fight.

But if the trial was very far from perfect, there is nothing to really confirm that there was a miscarriage of justice, much less a plot to convict a conveniently innocent person.

The evidence against Coffin (the unique opportunity, the money and the stolen items) was serious. His lawyer did not have him testify, and the proponents of the thesis of judicial error accuse the lawyer of having caused his loss. They often forget to mention that this same lawyer himself went to get a rifle believed to be that of the crimes in a camp (he admitted to having taken “a package”). An assistant to the lawyer claimed to have thrown her into the river from the Quebec bridge, before denying the claim. She was never found.

Hébert’s book caused such a scandal that a commission of inquiry was held, chaired by judge Roger Brossard, in which all the jurors came to testify. Everything has been reviewed in detail. Hébert had a bad time and had to admit that he had not attended the trial nor read the stenographic notes, in addition to publishing several errors. Conclusion: Coffin’s guilt was not in question, whatever one thinks of the trial, and of course of the death penalty.

Some of those who had come to his defense, like Claude Ryan in The dutychanged their shoulder rifle and shot Hébert down in flames like a journalist without rigor.

Hébert was therefore accused of contempt of court (by Attorney General Claude Wagner, father of the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court). Then fined $6,000 by the court, 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 then acquitted Hébert, concluding that his excesses of language were such that the public guessed the exaggeration and could sort things out.

Since this “triumph” on appeal, everything has quickly happened as if the false truth of this book full of errors and extrapolations had imposed itself. The film which was made from it 20 years later took up the same thesis: Coffin had perhaps stolen, but not killed.

The Coffin affair, ultimately, is less judicial than media. How does a “truth” become embedded in opinion, then in collective memory, disregarding the facts?

Proulx is careful not to conclude with absolute certainty that Coffin is guilty: we still periodically see new theses emerge about the “real” assassin.

But Coffin’s defenders are almost all guilty of the same offense: few have read the entire trial. Above all, no one has read the report of the Brossard commission, now largely forgotten…

1. I accuse the defenders of CoffinGlobal Art.