Blood in the Water

by Silver Donald Cameron

  “When justice is not seen to be done by the public,” she reads, “confidence in the bail system and more generally the entire justice system may falter. When the public’s confidence has reasonably been called into question, dangers such as public unrest and vigilantism may emerge.” For her, the heart of the matter is the preservation of public confidence in the administration of justice.

  Justice MacDonald is not prepared to decide on the spot. He adjourns the hearing.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, on July 29, Justice MacDonald reveals his decision.

  He carefully reviews the law and the Crown’s case, starting with the police testimony—the discovery of Phillip’s ruined boat, the paint and scuff marks on the Twin Maggies, the identities of the crew, the first interrogations of the crew members, Craig’s subsequent revised statement and video re-enactment of the events. He notes that Carla had told police she was not aboard the boat that day, but that Phillip had been aggressive with her crew and their fishing gear and had threatened to destroy their gear, burn down their houses, and kill her crew. He describes the enigmatic phone call between James Landry and Gerard Boudreau, the phone call the next morning between Gerard and Phillip, and Gerard’s observation of the collision of the two boats. He discusses in chilling detail Firth’s account of James Landry’s long and confusing statement to the police, during which James declared that he should have taken action against Phillip ten years earlier, and that he hoped the body would never be found: “Let the crabs eat him.”

  Corporal Firth, says the judge, “stated that the victim was disliked by many people in the community who expressed the opinion that he got what he deserved. Another portion of the community felt the matter went too far, and a small number of those people are thought to pose a risk to the accused if provided with the opportunity.” He dismisses Ronnie LeBlanc’s petition, remarking acerbically that “the court is not to decide the granting of the interim release on the results of a poll or popularity contest.”

  The key issue is whether there’s a substantial likelihood that Dwayne Samson will interfere with witnesses or otherwise throw sand in the gears of justice. Justice MacDonald notes that the evidence of Dwayne’s prior attempts to frustrate the investigation comes from Craig Landry via Corporal Firth—but none of that is confirmed by the testimony of James Landry, who says simply that after Twin Maggies rammed Midnight Slider, “the only thing they saw come up was the boat and they never saw—or as he said, they never seen—Mr. Boudreau after that. Two different stories from two different co-accuseds.”

  He then cites an influential opinion by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin declaring that “At the heart of a free and democratic society is the liberty of its subjects. Liberty lost is never regained, and can never be fully compensated for.” McLachlin further noted the fundamental imbalance between the two sides in criminal law, “where the vast resources of the state and very often the weight of public opinion are stacked against the individual accused.”

  So Justice MacDonald doesn’t think it wise to allow Dwayne to return to Isle Madame, but he’s impressed with Ramona Boudreau’s willingness to post bail and to supervise her brother’s activities in Halifax, and he is “also impressed with the material supplied by the applicant with respect to his stature and reputation in the community.”

  In the end, Justice MacDonald’s only real misgivings about granting bail are that he is “not satisfied with the proposal put forward for his release, and therefore he is denied bail at this time. If the applicant comes up with a better supervisory plan I would be prepared to re-entertain the matter. Mr. Brogan, any questions?”

  “No,” says Brogan. “Thank you very much, My Lord.” And Dwayne Samson is remanded back to jail.

  Later, Nash Brogan will say that he was very disappointed with this decision. Right now, though, he seems quite satisfied. He has known from the outset that the court wouldn’t discharge Dwayne back into his own community. By asking for that, however, he has been able to get into the record the remarkable evidence attesting to Dwayne’s character—the petition, the job offers, the friends and relatives willing to risk big money on him. Brogan has clearly shown that Dwayne Samson is not, in a general way, a criminal. The only crime he ever committed—probably the only crime he and his co-accused ever would commit—was killing Phillip Boudreau.

  It’s all about Phillip Boudreau. So who was Phillip Boudreau?

  3

  A RUSTIC ROBIN HOOD

  ISLAND VOICES

  “Look, I know Phillip since he was five years old—and even then you’d have thought he was six foot four and bulletproof, he was that mouthy. And bad? My Jesus Christ. But bad as he was, he never hurt nobody. He never deserved what happened to him.”

  “Phillip would steal the beads off Christ’s moccasins. But then if you needed them, he’d turn around and give them to you.”

  “My uncle Remy was dying of cancer, and Phillip came to see him. ‘I’m sorry you’re sick,’ he said. ‘You like ducks?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Remy. ‘Yeah, I like ducks.’ Next day here’s Phillip with a pair of plump ducks. ‘That’s a nice thing for you to do,’ said Remy, ‘thank you kindly.’ Few days later, Remy meets his friend Paul. ‘You know a funny thing,’ says Paul, ‘I’m raising ducks but they seem to be disappearing.’ ‘Uh-oh,’ says Remy. ‘I think maybe I ate a couple of your ducks.’ (PAUSE) ‘They were some good.’ ”

  “Yeah, that’s Phillip. He’d steal it, but if you needed it, he’d give it to you. I used to call him Robin Hood.”

  * * *

  —

  Lots of people are happy to talk about Phillip, but few want their names used. Isle Madame is a small place. More importantly, it’s an Acadian community, originally settled by ten French families after the fall of Louisbourg in 1759 erased the French colony of Île Royale and created a British colony of Cape Breton Island. “We’re all a family here,” a friend of mine once said. That’s almost literally true, and like most families, islanders will be very frank among themselves—Henri’s a hopeless drunk, Henrietta is thick as a brick—but if an outsider notes that Henri reeks of rum and Henrietta generally seems to miss the punchline, the whole family will fiercely deny it.

  So I will tell you things that were said within the family. I heard them. But telling you who said them? Sometimes, yeah. But mostly not.

  ISLAND VOICES

  “Phillip didn’t mind jail, you know. Oh, no. Sometimes in the fall of the year he’d call some poor person and say, ‘I’m gonna do a break and enter at such-and-such a place. You call the cops on me, and you’ll get a $500 reward and I’ll go to jail for the winter.’ And then he’d send a thank-you card to the cop who arrested him.”

  “He didn’t send me a card. But he did thank me for it the next time I saw him.”

  “I talked to Phillip once at his office—you know, at the store where he hung out. He said to me, ‘What’s not to like about prison? Three square meals a day, you’re warm, you’re dry, and you get all the sex and drugs you want.’ For Phillip it was a vacation.”

  “One year he slept all winter in Hubert David’s travel trailer. He was hiding from the cops. Hubert never knew till Phillip came around in the spring to thank him. True story. Go ask Hubert—he’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  —

  So I went to see Hubert, who lives at Alderney Point. Phillip was his neighbour.

  The section of road entering the village of Petit de Grat is called “the Stretch.” It passes the baseball field, the cemetery, the public library, the Acadian cultural centre, and the Petit de Grat campus of Université Sainte-Anne. After rising over a low hill the road slopes down to the rocky shore of Petit de Grat Inlet, which separates Isle Madame proper from Petit de Grat Island. The inlet is the village’s harbour.

  Most of the homes and buildings of Petit de Grat lie strewn along the two banks
of the inlet. The settlement is laid out like a capital letter H, with a bridge over the inlet forming the crossbar of the H. The core of the village is at the bridge, on both sides of the inlet. If you continue down the Isle Madame side you pass St. Joseph’s Credit Union, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, the fishermen’s wharves, the Samson Enterprises shipyard, and the community hall. Farther down that shore of the inlet—the lower left leg of the H—is a district known as Boudreauville. Beyond Boudreauville is a lovely seaside hike, the Cape Auget Eco Trail, and some distance beyond the end of that trail, inaccessible by road, is Mackerel Cove, where the Twin Maggies caught up with Phillip Boudreau.

  Across the bridge, on the opposite shore, is the Corner Bridge Store and Bakery, which also serves as the post office. This is where Phillip Boudreau hung out, with Midnight Slider at a little dock nearby. If you turn right after the store, past the crab-processing plant, and drive two and a half kilometres to the end of the road—the tip of the lower right leg of the H—you arrive in Alderney Point, often referred to by locals as just “the Point.” If you look across the inlet from the Point, you’re looking at Mackerel Cove.

  The cramped little house where Phillip Boudreau grew up is the very last home on that shore. It stands at the end of a spur road called the Joshua Road. It belongs to his parents, Gerald and Marie-Louise Joshua Boudreau.

  You might say that Alderney Point is Phillip’s home, but it would be more accurate to call it his habitat. This is moorland, rock and swamp and water. It’s dotted with ponds and covered in low bushes. The few trees that persist in this naked, wind-scoured landscape are tough little black spruce.

  A dirt track off the Joshua Road is called David’s Lane. And here, a stone’s throw from Phillip’s home, lives Hubert David. Hubert is a short, bright, genial man—a description that would fit many of the Acadians of Isle Madame. He is a busy and well-regarded building contractor. When you ask him about Phillip and the trailer, he laughs and shakes his head and looks at his wife, Betty.

  One spring, Betty tells me, she came back in after opening up the trailer and said, “Hubert, why did you take the covers off my cushions in the camper?”

  “She blasted me!” Hubert grins. “I said, ‘Betty, I didn’t even go to your camper!’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘all the covers are off of the cushions.’ So a couple of weeks later we’re going for a walk down here by the lake, and the cops are looking for Phillip. The cop goes up that way, and then he comes back going the other way, and that’s when Phillip hollered to us. He was hiding in the bushes.”

  “Phillip said, ‘I just want to say thank you very much,’ ” Betty remembers. “He said, ‘I slept in your trailer the last three months, it’s the only safe place for me, but I leave at 6:00 in the morning, so nobody ever seen me leave. It’s me that took the covers off the cushions.’ I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you open the cupboards? There’s pillows, there’s blankets, there’s everything to keep you warm instead of taking the covers off the cushions. The blankets and pillows were there all winter.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, I don’t touch the cupboards.’ ”

  Phillip had his own code of conduct, his own loyalties, his own eccentric sense of morality. Hubert was on his good side. But even a cordial relationship with Phillip had its complexities, says Hubert, because if you mentioned something that you’d like, “he would go steal it and give it to you. I don’t think he had the learning ability to think that he was doing anything wrong.”

  But he wouldn’t steal from Hubert. Or so he said. But Hubert wondered.

  “He always said to me, ‘Hubert, I will never ever steal from you,’ ” says Hubert reflectively. “So one day the cops were looking for him, and my dog barked.” Hubert went to the window. Phillip was walking past the back of the house. He didn’t see Hubert watching.

  “There was a piece of rubber at my shed,” Hubert recalls. “He looked at the rubber, and I said to myself, ‘Today I’m gonna find out if he’s telling me the truth, that he’ll never steal from me.’ He stood the rubber up beside the shed there and took off. A little later, my phone rang.

  “He said, ‘Hey, Hubert, I just came from behind your house there. Could I buy that piece of rubber that’s beside your shed? I wanna make a flap door so that when my father and mother lock me out of the house, me and my dog can stay in the shed.’ That’s what he wanted the rubber for. You see that shed over there, the little rotten shed, the one that’s falling apart? That’s where he used to sleep, him and the dog.”

  Which brings us to “the Bowsers,” the local nickname for Phillip’s family. The original Bowser is Phillip’s father, Gerald Boudreau, now in his nineties, who displays what BuzzFeed reporter Peter Smith described as “unrelenting wiliness.” Gerard, the oldest son, is sometimes called “Big Bowser.” Phillip was “Little Bowser” or “Phillip à Bowser.” A daughter, Margaret Rose, or “Maggie,” lives with her parents. A third brother, Kenneth, lives in a basement nearby. A basement? Yes: the big banks have traditionally been sniffy about lending in small Maritime communities like Isle Madame; that’s why Petit de Grat people bank mainly at their own credit union. And one clever solution to the absence of mortgages has been to pour a concrete basement, put a waterproof deck over it, finish it, and then live in the basement while you save the money to build a house on top of it.

  Families are complex organisms, with their own characteristics and identities. It would be startling, for example, if someone in the Pink family chose to be a poet or a plumber rather than a lawyer. Thus Gerard told BuzzFeed’s Peter Smith that “Bowsers were always in mischief. They had nothing. They poach year-round to get what they want to live to eat, and we grew up still doing the same thing.”

  Families also have bitter quarrels. Phillip in particular was often isolated within his family, more like an appendage than an integral part of it. At the time of his death he was enjoying the relative luxury of a mattress on his parents’ kitchen floor. Things might have been worse; in 1990, he was under a one-year probation order to “refrain from contacting or attempting to contact, at any time with your parents for any reason, whether directly or indirectly, unless specifically authorized in writing by your probation officer or the court.” Why? A neighbour says, “Phillip threatened to burn their house down or some other crazy thing like that. They got freaked and called the cops.”

  “That kid, when he was young,” says Hubert David, “you could ask him to pack five cords of wood. If he was all alone, he’d pack every bit of it, and you’d pay him after he was finished. But if Kenneth came up, his brother, they couldn’t get along. I couldn’t hire both of them. I could only hire one. And him and Gerard, they had more than one fight too.”

  One of Phillip’s teachers remembers that Phillip struggled in school right from the beginning. Other incoming pupils sometimes could read a bit, or at least knew a few letters of the alphabet. Not Phillip. She gave him a little extra help when she could. He treated her with warmth and respect all the rest of his life.

  His frustrations, she says, tended to emerge as aggression.

  “He had a hard time working with other children. He was very frustrated a lot of the time, and the frustration came out in, you know, the elbow, or the teasing or the pulling of the hair—because he was that kind of child way back then.

  “So at one point I did contact the parents for a meeting fairly early on in the school year. A couple of times they couldn’t make it, but finally they arrived at the school. The principal was there, and Phillip’s other teachers were there. We talked about his behaviour and his discipline, and we talked about his lack of a lot of the skills and abilities that he should have had. And I remember the father turning to me and saying, ‘We’re going to talk to him when we get home. Wait till I get home. He’s going to get punished, and if you ever have any more problems with him, you call me. I have a nice two-by-four in the shed…’

  “Those words still ring in my head, because I never call
ed the parents after that. Never once—and I told the principal, ‘You can call them, all of you can—but I will never call them again.’ ”

  Teachers remember Phillip coming to school with cuts and bruises on his face. One bitter winter day he kept falling asleep at his desk. A teacher asked if he wasn’t feeling well. Phillip explained that it had been his turn to stoke the wood stove the previous night, so he hadn’t had much sleep. He was about eight years old.

  ISLAND VOICES

  “They used to beat Phillip with sticks when he was little. Oh yeah. Oh, that was known. They treated him a little bit worse than the family dog.”

  “He could be comical. There’s a woman here used to be a nun. Her and Phillip liked each other. Not long before he died he went in front of her car and sprinkled ‘holy water’ over it, on the hood, just like a priest would do at Mass.”

  “He took my four-wheeler one time, went for a joyride, left it with $350 of damage. No point going after him, and no point calling the cops. I just got it fixed; I was glad to have it back. Two years later he meets my daughter-in-law in the store. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘who’s your father-in-law?’ She told him. ‘I thought so,’ says Phillip. ‘That’s a nice man. I gotta bring him a feed of lobsters.’ He never did, though.”

  “Well, certainly he’d hunt out of season. Are you kidding me? I do it too, me. I never go hunting during the season. Oh no, never. The woods are full of fools. It’s way too dangerous.”

  * * *

  —

  Tony Veinot is an offshore crab-fishing captain who lives in Halifax but spends three months of the year fishing out of Petit de Grat. After twenty summers in Isle Madame he knows the place intimately, and loves it. If he had to move from Halifax, he says, he would move to Isle Madame. He and his crew are at sea for a week or so, and then back into Petit de Grat to land their catch at the crab-processing plant, which usually takes three or four days. The crew, who are often from nearby Mi’kmaw communities, aren’t needed when the boat is at the wharf and generally opt to go home.