Amy Bell is a professor of history at Huron University College and the author of Life Sentence: How My Father Defended Two Murderers and Lost Himself.
In 2016, my father, Ed Bell, lay dying in the Moncton Hospital. A secretive man, he had reluctantly asked me to go into his home office to look for some papers. As I was rummaging around in the filing cabinet, I found a set of six Polaroids lying at the bottom of a drawer. In two of the photos, a man with long, shaggy hair and an open shirt looks straight at the camera, his face and chest bruised. In another, he holds up a flared pant leg to show his swollen, bare foot. Was this a cousin I didn’t remember? I took the photographs to the hospital to ask.
My dad’s reply was terse. “That’s Richard Ambrose,” he told me. “I defended him for murdering a police officer here in Moncton 40 years ago.”
I was speechless. I knew my father had been a lawyer for 10 years in the 1970s, but I had no idea he had defended murderers, let alone a cop killer.
His best friend Claude chimed in: “Didn’t you know? That was one of the most famous cases in New Brunswick!”
But growing up in rural isolation, in a preinternet era, I had never heard of Richard Ambrose.
After I gathered myself, I asked, “Why did you take his picture?”
My dad answered: “Because the police were beating him so badly, I thought they were going to kill him. I took the photos as proof.” He refused to say any more.
After he died, as part of my grieving I decided to look deeper into the Ambrose story. As an academic historian, tracking down the court transcripts, newspaper articles and radio broadcasts about the case was easy. But understanding why my father had kept the secret of his lost career, and why my brother and I had grown up in poverty and isolation as a result, was much harder.
My dad had been drawn into the case almost by accident. In December, 1974, the teenage son of a local restaurateur in Moncton was kidnapped. His father paid the ransom and the son was returned safely, but during the drop-off, two Moncton City policemen, Constable Michael O’Leary and Corporal Aurèle Bourgeois, went missing. It took two hours for their fellow policemen to notice they were gone.
The next morning, Richard Ambrose was stopped by police. He had some of the ransom money in his pocket, and was arrested for kidnapping. My father had a small general law practice in St. George, N.B., two hours away, but he sometimes did criminal cases for legal aid in Moncton. Through a friend of a friend, he was called in to see Ambrose in jail.
When he got there, Ambrose was being interrogated and beaten in various offices of the Moncton Police, whose station was downstairs from the jail where he was being held. The policemen were desperate for information about their colleagues, who by then had been missing for two nights in bitterly cold weather. Most of the local police and RCMP were out looking for them, as well as hundreds of civilian volunteer searchers.
My father stepped in to defend Ambrose, both from the beatings and from the abuse of his legal rights: Ambrose had been detained but not charged within the 24-hour limit for a lawful arrest. Even as a small-town lawyer, the one thing my father cared most passionately about was the rights of the citizen. In a democratic country, he never tired of saying, everyone deserves a legal defence, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
Emotions were running high in Moncton, as people reacted with shock and fear to the news of the missing policemen. When two police radios turned up in a river outside Moncton a day later, the desperate hope that the men were still alive began to fade. On Sunday afternoon, Michael O’Leary and Aurèle Bourgeois were found buried in shallow graves in the woods, and the public mood turned to grief and anger. A second suspect, James Hutchison, turned himself in that night on the condition that his parole officer be present at his arrest to prevent any violence. My father, who hadn’t left the jail, agreed to defend Hutchison as well, in what was now a case of double murder. In an era of capital punishment, the defence of their lives was in his hands. It was a decision he would regret for the rest of his life.
Before formal legal aid programs were legislated in the 1960s, Canadian lawyers were expected to take on a proportion of important, usually capital, cases for poor clients, without pay. These pro bono cases, literally meaning “for the public good,” were often argued by the region’s most prestigious lawyers. Nova Scotia lawyer Vincent Pottier was already a member of Parliament when he unsuccessfully defended African Canadian Everett Farmer for murder in 1937. In New Brunswick, Joseph Pierre Richard was defended by Joseph Henry Wilfred Sénéchal, a decorated Dieppe Raid veteran, in 1957. Sénéchal left the legal profession in 1967 for a career in provincial politics, where he was made deputy speaker of the 46th New Brunswick Legislative Assembly.
The same spirit of altruism motivated the Toronto lawyers who defended the infamous Boyd Gang killers, Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan, in 1952. Suchan had shot and killed Detective Sergeant Edmund Tong during a traffic stop, and both he and Jackson were charged with murder. Suchan’s mother, an office cleaner for prominent lawyer J.J. Robinette, begged him to help her son, and Arthur Maloney, an up-and-coming young barrister, agreed to defend Lennie Jackson. Despite their best efforts, Robinette and Maloney lost the cases, and Suchan and Jackson were hanged back-to-back in the Don Jail. Both lawyers were profoundly affected by their clients’ deaths, and both left the practice of criminal law. All was not lost though: Robinette became a well-known constitutional lawyer, and Maloney became a member of Parliament, making the abolition of capital punishment his personal crusade. He founded the Canadian Society for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, and was the first Ombudsman of Ontario. Like Pottier and Sénéchal, Maloney and Robinette’s professional reputations survived, and their social prestige insulated them from the negative public opinion surrounding murderers, especially those who kill policemen.
My father was not so lucky. He was an outsider in Moncton, with no social standing in the community. He had no experience with murder cases, and little time to prepare. And yet he put forward an excellent defence. During the two-week trial, he pointed out the most flagrant legal abuses of evidence collection against his clients: The judge allowed Hutchison’s brother-in-law to give unsupported hearsay testimony about Hutchison’s plans to kidnap the patriarch of the billionaire Irving family, J.D. Irving (despite the fact that he had died more than four decades earlier, in 1933). Missing evidence was also mysteriously found in a policeman’s car trunk months later, and the Moncton Police dragged drunks from outside the Main Street liquor store into the station to take part in identification parades with the accused. My father fought to uphold not just the rights of the accused to a good defence, but the principles of the law.
And yet he was hated, publicly and privately. A drunk policeman held a loaded gun to his head in the Moncton Jail. He received death threats. He was socially ostracized during the trial and for years afterward. He would be asked to leave parties if people found out he was the lawyer who defended the killers of Bourgeois and O’Leary. His other clients left him in droves.
And he lost the case. Ambrose and Hutchison were found guilty and their executions were scheduled. But two days after their final appeal to the Supreme Court failed, Parliament passed Bill C-84 (1976), abolishing the death penalty. Ambrose and Hutchison’s sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, with a minimum of 25 years each.
My father’s legal career was over. With no remaining clients, and broke from months of subsisting only on legal-aid fees, he had to close his practice in St. George. After the long separation, his marriage failed, and he moved into a tiny rural trailer in Lepreau, N.B. He sank into a deep depression and began drinking heavily. Two years later, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died at the age of 36. My brother and I went to live with my father deep in the woods. It was not a happy home. He didn’t work, barely spoke, and no one ever came to visit us, except for people looking for free legal advice. We both left home as soon as we could.
When he turned 60, my father decided to move to Moncton. He had a happier and more social life there, but he told people that he was a retired paramedic and hoped no one would recognize his name. Even though Ambrose and Hutchison had not escaped justice, even though all he had done was to give them the best defence that they were entitled to under the law, he was still paying the price in the court of public opinion. He would always be guilty by association.
From his bed at Moncton Hospital, my father told me he wished he had never taken the case, that it had ruined his life. “Did you think the men were innocent?” I asked him. “No,” he answered, after a long pause. “I knew they were guilty.” But he hurriedly added, “Never tell anyone that I told you that. If you can’t trust your lawyer, who can you trust?” When it came to the legal process, it wasn’t the guilt or innocence that mattered most to him – it was equal access. To the end of his life, my father still believed that lawyers who choose to defend poor clients are always acting for the public good.
The Ambrose and Hutchison case cost my father almost everything, and its effects still reverberate in my life 50 years later. But I can’t bring myself to wish that he hadn’t done it. A man who stands up to defend another person’s life, at whatever cost to himself, is a man I will always respect and admire. The price was high, but the ideals still stand.
A photo taken by Bell shows Ambrose’s swollen, bare foot, an injury from being beaten by Moncton Police. Ambrose and Hutchison were found guilty of murder and their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.Handout