“I’m not saying Phillip was an angel which I knew he wasn’t, but he was the type of guy that wouldn’t hurt anyone. His threats were just that, threats. He never physically touched anyone, and in the local area everyone threat[en]s people…” (anonymous letter)
“It’s not about stealing lobster. It’s about a problem that continues and doesn’t stop. People said ‘murder for lobster.’ I said, Look, if that guy had of come in my shed and took a screwdriver, okay, would you have said ‘murder for screwdrivers’? Because it’s not about the value of what he stole, it’s about having someone that constantly is disrupting people’s lives.”
* * *
—
He’s Ulysse, his wife is Yvonne, their daughter is Sara. Those are not their true names, but this is a true story. It started with a call from the guidance counsellor at the high school, who needed to talk with Ulysse and Yvonne about Sara.
“I thought my daughter probably told a teacher to go to hell or something like that,” said Ulysse. “I never thought it was about anything like this.” But it turned out that Sara had been walking near a convenience store with three or four other girls when Phillip—high on some drug or other, Ulysse thought—emerged from the shadows, grabbed Sara, put a knife to her throat, and tried to drag her off behind the store. Sara twisted out of his grasp and Phillip scampered away. Sara wanted to forget the whole thing, but the other girls insisted on telling the guidance counsellor. The counsellor in turn had a duty to call the police and the parents when anything serious—like attempted rape—came to his attention. It’s unclear what the police did, if anything—but the police were the least of Phillip’s worries.
“I had bought a new Civic,” Ulysse told me. “Only three days old. Dark green. When I come back from the school that night, I said to Yvonne, ‘I want to tell you one thing: if we meet Phillip you either buckle up or go for a walk because,’ I said, ‘when I get him, he’s fucked.’ And I went looking for him for four or five days, four or five nights, whatever. I’d travel at night just looking around for him. But he had kind of disappeared from the picture.
“So this one night I said, ‘I’m going to look for Phillip. Come on for a drive.’ She said, ‘Let’s go to Cape Auget.’ We went to Cape Auget, and when we got back, I saw Phillip and some others. Anyway I went by, and I stopped. Yvonne said, ‘Don’t bother with him, leave him alone.’ ”
But Ulysse was in no mood to listen. He turned the car around and drove back, taking his time, to where Phillip was standing with a bicycle.
“I said to Yvonne, ‘Buckle up,’ ” Ulysse continued. “She said, ‘Just go around him, don’t get into it with him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you one more time, you buckle up.’ The car was just crawling along, right slow. When I got probably twenty feet from him, I tramped ’er. I hit the bike, demolished my grille, my windshield. He went over my car.”
Ulysse stopped and got out of the car, and Phillip came running at him with a big rock in his hand. Ulysse punched him.
“I knocked him out first shot. He still had the rock in his hand, fumbling with the rock there when I hit him. And I grabbed him—they were pouring an abutment there—I walked with him in my arms. Walked with him in my arms. He was out. And I lifted him as far as I could and I tried to break his back on the abutment, on the cement wall that was there. And I walked away.”
But Phillip came to, ran after Ulysse, and hit him from behind with a rock.
“I put my hand like this where you can feel the hot blood—like the blood was running down my back,” Ulysse said. “Phillip went running across the road, and I opened the trunk of my car. I had a 12-gauge shotgun there. I put three shells in the pump and I just waited for Phillip to come across the road. He was probably disoriented too but he came running back. I thought he had a gun, but it wasn’t a gun he come with, it was an axe.
“Anyway he was running, hollering like a fool across the road. He hadn’t seen me sitting on the trunk. I got up and I was about from here to you. I said, ‘Ahh, you’re just a fuckin’ coward. Go ahead and lift the axe.’ And if he’d have lifted the axe, I would have blew ’is fuckin’ head off. He’d of died right there.”
ISLAND VOICES
“Phillip wouldn’t have died if the RCMP and the Fisheries officers had been doing their job. I heard there were fifty-two complaints called in about Phillip.”
“We were on the beach with our golden Lab puppy and an outboard skiff came roaring in and slid up on the shore. The fellow driving it said he wanted to see who we were—he thought we were game wardens. He said, ‘Holy fuck, that’s a nice little dog. I could steal that dog. I bet I could get a hundred dollars for that dog.’ He really spooked my wife. She didn’t let that puppy out of her sight for about a month.”
“It’s something that had to be done. It’s just a pity that it was those guys that had to do it.”
“Whatever James and Dwayne get, the last three RCMPs and the last three Fisheries officers should get the same, because it’s just as much their fault.”
* * *
—
In 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, my colleague Charlie Doucet and I produced a film for Vision TV called The Crimson Flower of Battle: A Small Island at War. The film explores the wartime experiences of Isle Madame, which, like many small communities, sent an astonishing number of its people into battle. Many of them were just teenagers. They landed on the beaches of Sicily and Normandy, drove tanks, dodged torpedoes while sailing merchant ships in convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic, delivered lend-lease battleships to India and fighter planes to China, enjoyed torrid romances in London and Amsterdam, were captured behind German lines, built with their bare hands the airfield of Hong Kong as prisoners of the Japanese. An epic story from a tiny island, The Crimson Flower is still played every November on Telile, the island’s community TV station.
One of those veterans was Ralph Britten, an ace pilot who had shot down six German aircraft. After the liberation of Paris, just for a lark, Ralph flew his Mosquito fighter-bomber under the Eiffel Tower; a photo of that moment hung on his living room wall. Another vet was Arthur Terrio, who’d been an Irish Guard and then a military policeman. He met Mimi Connor, a fluently bilingual English nurse raised in Brussels and Paris, when the two were working as translators in a British military hospital full of wounded French soldiers after the evacuation of Dunkirk. They married, had two sons, and moved back to Isle Madame when the war ended. Ultimately they had ten children. In 1980 I married their oldest daughter, Lulu, who died in 1996.
After the war, veterans were given preference in competitions for federal jobs. When I arrived in Isle Madame, Arthur and Ralph were the Fisheries officers. Fearless, incorruptible, and devoted to public service, they were towering figures in the community. After facing the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, they were not easily daunted by slippery poachers and surly fishermen. And the next generation was just about as tough. Peter Boudreau—Pierre la Moustache, Omer’s brother, so named for training his luxuriant beard to cover his balding head—once demonstrated his strength by tying a rope to the front bumper of a delivery truck, taking the other end in his teeth and towing the truck down the wharf.
“Oh, yeah,” says a respectful fisherman, “Pierre would take a flying leap off the wharf and land on the deck of a fishing boat eight feet out, and just take charge. You didn’t fuck around with Pierre.”
Compare that with the Fisheries officer who watched Phillip Boudreau approach a wharf in Petit de Grat with a boat full of poached lobsters.
“Aren’t you going to do anything?” asked a fisherman, who later told Nash Brogan he was prepared to tell this story at Dwayne Samson’s trial if need be.
“Do anything?” said the officer. “Do anything? I don’t want my house burned down.”
Early in James Landry’s trial I met Fisheries Field Supervisor Norman Foug�
�re in a restaurant parking lot in Port Hawkesbury. He knew everyone in the case very well; he’d played baseball against James and had been Phillip’s coach. He felt sorry for Phillip when the boy was growing up, and had given him work doing things like cutting lawns, even when the lawns didn’t need cutting.
He was well aware that he and his colleagues were widely blamed for failing to stop Phillip, but he wanted me to understand that there was a limit to what the local Fisheries officers could do. Their big patrol boat had been burned at the wharf—possibly by Phillip, nobody ever really knew—and it had never been replaced. Even filling up the gas tanks for their current Zodiac inflatable cost $500. If they burned that much fuel and got no results, they’d have to answer to upper management. They had no budget for overtime either. So you could take action only if you were pretty well certain of making an arrest within business hours. One time they staked out a boat, knowing that Phillip was aboard it; they watched it all night, and Phillip stayed aboard all night—but when they got back to the office there was a complaint that he’d been out in the night cutting traps. For Phillip, that was just fine; getting blamed for what he hadn’t done simply enhanced his reputation.
Also, said Fougère, the lobstermen themselves protected Phillip. A guy would call up saying that Phillip had stolen his lobsters. In one typical instance, when Fougère checked, Phillip said, “No, so-and-so gave them to me”; when Fougère asked so-and-so, he said, “Yep, I gave them.” “How many?” “Oh, I don’t know, I just gave him a bunch of them.” Furthermore, Phillip’s brother Gerard owned a lobster pound and sold lobsters to the public, which meant he could give receipts. On one occasion when Norman was questioning him, Phillip pulled a receipt out of his pocket and said, “See what I got here, just in case you catch me?”
I had heard that Phillip had once called a Fisheries officer and threatened to burn his house down. “Aw,” said the officer, “I know you, you wouldn’t do that.” Phillip said, “Look outside your door, on the porch”—and there was a pan of gasoline sitting there.
Norman didn’t comment on that story, but he did say that sometimes during questioning Phillip would pull out his lighter and started flicking it on and off.
“Are you threatening me?” Norman once demanded.
“No, no,” said Phillip, smiling serenely. “I’m just…flickin’ my Bic.”
When Pierre la Moustache was a Fisheries officer, he refused to carry a sidearm even though it was supposed to be compulsory—and even though, as Pierre tells me, he was “attacked many times on the job, a couple of times with oars and twice with a knife, you know.
“But my mouth calmed them down and I got away with it. If I’d have been a Fishery officer in 2013, then Phillip’d be in jail—or I’d be in jail—because I wouldn’t have let him get away with what he was doing there. I’d have been there with a patrol boat, and I’d have went after Phillip. I’d have got him arrested, took him, seized his boat and everything, called the RCMP, ’cause what he was doing comes under the Criminal Code. And the RCMP would have come there and arrested him. It would’ve stopped the shooting.”
Even in his mid-eighties, long retired, master only of a pleasure boat, Pierre was more than a match for Phillip. One evening he came in from a little cruise, tied up his boat—and later found Phillip cutting his fenders and mooring lines, setting his boat adrift. He collared Phillip.
“I says, ‘Now I got you,’ ” Pierre remembers. “ ‘You’re not going to get away with it this time, mister, you’re going to go back in the pen where you belong. How come you do that to me? I didn’t do anything wrong to you.’ ”
Phillip replied that someone had told him that Pierre didn’t like him. But, said Phillip, “ ‘don’t you worry. I’m going to fix that fellow. I gotta go see where that fellow parks his car. I’m going to give him four flat tires. I’m going to slash his four tires.’
“He told me that outright,” Pierre says. “Oh my God, the man was unreal.”
In the end, Phillip promised that if Pierre didn’t call the cops, he’d replace all the gear he’d damaged. Pierre agreed.
“The next day I got up and drove down the wharf,” Pierre says. “I had brand-new lines, brand-new balloons. The boat was never geared that nice—and well tied, too. In the afternoon I went back. Somebody was there scratching his head and looking at my boat. He said, ‘Where did you get those balloons and where did you get those lines?’ Phillip went and stole that gear from somebody else and put it in my boat.”
Pierre and his partner, Irene—who calls him Peter—live across the road from Craig Landry. Craig has been a very good neighbour to them, even when he was under house arrest.
“That winter Craig wasn’t allowed to cross the road, Peter was outside shovelling,” Irene tells me. “Craig took a chance to come over, and he shovelled for Peter. Then he went to the RCMP and said, ‘Look, I went across the road. I did something I wasn’t supposed to. I’m probably going to get in shit because a lot of the people around here don’t like me and don’t talk to me. But this man, who’s a friend, is eighty-seven years old and he was shovelling outside’—and the cop said, ‘That’s fine. If that man needs help, you go help him at any time.’ That’s what the RCMP told him.
“About Phillip,” Irene continues. “We went sailing one day and I never got such a fright in my life. We were going mackerel fishing, and I said to Peter, ‘What are all those things over there?’ He said, ‘Those are all Phillip’s traps that he steals from everybody and sets them after the season.’
“So I take the binoculars and I look—and when I looked I froze. There he is, Phillip, with his gun pointed right to our fucking boat. I guess he must’ve thought Peter was going to go over there. I got so scared I started to cry. I said to Peter, ‘Get the fuck out of here, he’s going to shoot us!’ I don’t think I went in the boat after that.”
“Now I knew that was his traps, see?” says Pierre. “But anybody that would go there after the season and cut his traps, he wouldn’t keep living in Petit de Grat. Phillip’d clean him. And he’d tell him to his face.”
Guy Landry tells a similar story. He was coming into Petit de Grat one day in his fishing boat and saw five illegal traps that he knew were Phillip’s. Someone aboard wanted to take some action—lift the traps, cut the buoys, something like that—and Guy said “No, you never know where Phillip is. Leave them be.” Phillip came up to Guy afterwards and said, “Good thing you didn’t fuck with my traps just then. If you had, I’d have shot you. I had a .22 loaded in the bow of the boat.”
ISLAND VOICES
“The thing about Phillip is, you never knew where he’d strike next.”
“If you can look at a guy you shot at, someone you know, that’s begging for his life, and then go ahead and kill him, I say you got no heart, you got no soul.”
“I don’t care what anybody says, those guys were not murderers. They’re not murderers, that’s my opinion. I cried, I actually cried when they sent James to jail ’cause that is one of the nicest men I have ever met.”
* * *
—
Nicole Gionet belongs to a very large family in Isle Madame, and has survived—by her account—an abusive marriage and a tempestuous range of family relationships. She started a blog called Nikky’s Corner: To Stop the Cycle of Domestic Abuse and Violence, in which she slashed and skewered a wide range of neighbours and family members, generally under pseudonyms: Rambo, NoBalls, Feather Duster, Garbage Man. Members of the family were angry, hurt, and embarrassed—and sufficiently troubled that they called in Nova Scotia’s CyberScan unit to see whether they could invoke the province’s new anti-cyberbullying law to make her stop.
In the meantime, Nikky continued blogging, releasing more than two hundred posts by the end of 2018. One of the names she didn’t disguise was Phillip Boudreau. She wrote a disturbing blog post about being attacked by a companion of Phillip’s and then
being raped by Phillip himself. There are people in her family who say she misconstrued the whole incident, that it didn’t happen this way at all. But in a chilling post called “Another Night from Hell,” she gives a graphic account of the event.
“I have the right to say no,” she wrote. “I did say no in French as Buster shoved me down my hallway to my bedroom. I tried to say no, I tried to push him off. He kept telling me ‘come on’ as he held my shoulders down on my mattress and forced my legs apart with his. I remember that he couldn’t cum and when he rolled over I jumped up and grabbed something to cover myself.”
She went out to her living room, where she found Phillip going through her photo albums.
“When he sees me, he whips me around like a dishcloth and before I know it he has me down the hall, in my bedroom. Phillip talked a lot while he raped me.” She vividly remembered “those evil eyes of Phillip looking back at me,” and also “their scent, that smell of sweat. The sound of Phillip’s voice, the pitch in his laugh when he’d make fun of how I was getting what I deserved.”
Eventually, a taxi picked up the two men, and Nikky waited until it drove away. Then she came out to the kitchen “and found a note on the table thanking me for the best night he ever had. All I want at that moment is to die. Please oh please god, take me!” She desperately wanted to make sure her family didn’t find out, “but as fast as they whipped out of my driveway, Midnight Ryder had to go brag about his latest catch.
“Phillip is dead now,” she concluded. “I didn’t want him to die the way he did, but he did make a lot of people hate him.
“And this is Nikky’s Corner.”
* * *
—
Nikky and Sara weren’t the only ones Phillip attacked. “Sylvia Breau” is a false name, but everything else in her story is true.
Blood in the Water Page 22
