The recent release of informer Stéphane Gagné revives painful memories among Quebec prison guards who would have preferred that the man who killed one of their colleagues in addition to injuring another during the biker war remained imprisoned for a long time.
“Won, as long as he was inside, I had a kind of justice. But now he can start a new life, when he has bullied many and even ended the lives of certain people, it is unacceptable. »
Nataly, first name not given because she does not want to be identified for security reasons, was one of the first young female prison guards in the provincial system when she began her career in 1989.
She worked for a few years with Diane Lavigne at the Montreal Detention Facility (Bordeaux) before the latter was shot dead, on June 26, 1997, by Stéphane Gagné, who was complying with a request from the former warrior leader of the Hells Angels Nomads Maurice Boucher, died in 2022.
But subsequently, Gagné collaborated with the police and had Boucher convicted, thus becoming one of the best-known informers in the criminal history of Quebec and Canada.
Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Mme Lavigne and an attempted murder against another prison guard, Robert Corriveau, Gagné went to the Superior Court and managed to bring forward his eligibility date for release.
Gagné was released on full parole last January, after spending 25 years behind bars.
Angry
On June 25, 1997, the day before Diane Lavigne’s murder, Nataly gave him a book that she had borrowed from him. They agreed to talk about it again. They were never able to do it.
The following month, suffering from post-traumatic shock, Nataly found herself off work. She never returned and retired in the early 2000s.
” I’m mad. I never thought Gagné would have come out. We think that with life in prison, he would never get out, but we have reached this point,” she said.
“I don’t consider the services he has rendered to society. They were interested services. He went to the highest bidder and chose the least bad. We know that the environment does not forgive,” adds the woman who says she is “always imprisoned in fear” while Gagné is free.
For years, Nataly made an annual pilgrimage to a memorial where there is a plaque in memory of Diane Lavigne, in Ottawa.
Each time Gagné appeared before the Parole Board, federal employees contacted her to warn her, inviting her to write letters that she believes were read to the inmate.
She asked Gagné to write to her, expressing sincere remorse, but he did not do so.
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While she was still active, Nataly was the subject of a contract from a biker.
She deplores the misdeeds which targeted the personal vehicles of prison guards, recently at the Saint-Jérôme Detention Center.
” It does not make sense. This already happened to me in the C wing [Bordeaux] to have an altercation with an inmate and I know they have long hands. One of them already told me: “You have such and such a tank.” It had the brand, color, etc. They have outside contacts, but we just do our job. Society needs prison guards,” she says.
“I spoke to officers who were on duty at the time of the murders of the prison guards and it is certain that this brings back memories and these sad events, just as the recent acts of vandalism in Saint-Jérôme have revived these memories among the officers,” adds Mathieu Lavoie, president of the Union of Peace Officers in Correctional Services of Quebec.
He and his members would also have preferred that Gagné remained detained.
“We understand that the system is like this, but on the other hand, it disappoints us when an individual directly attacked officers of the law and despite that, he can be released. I have agents in the service who are still experiencing these events and who will experience them until the end of their careers. We still have people in prison who remind us of these events and who use them to still threaten us today,” concludes the union leader.
To contact Daniel Renaud, dial 514 285-7000, ext. 4918, write to [email protected] or to the postal address of The Press.