May 2, 1923: Man and woman hanged for murder of southern Alberta constable
Although they went to the gallows declaring their innocence, Prohibition-era bootlegger Emilio (Mr. Pick) Picariello and his accomplice, Florence Lassandro, were hanged at the Fort Saskatchewan Jail for the murder of a police officer.
The previous September, 42-year-old Const. Stephen Oldacres Lawson had fired a shot that left Picariello’s son Steve, a rum-runner, with minor wounds. But Picariello and Lassandro heard the injury was more serious and went to see Lawson outside the Alberta Provincial Police barracks in Coleman, a community in southwest Alberta. Lawson was shot during a scuffle, becoming the third police officer in as many years to die while trying to halt the bootlegging trade.
At intervals throughout the night before the executions, heavy rains nearly blurred the lights of the jail as seen from town. In their cells, lights burned all night as Father Fidelis, book in hand and beads at his waist, sought to prepare the doomed man and woman to meet their maker.
Both prisoners appeared calm.
“I’ll go to the scaffold like a soldier,” said Lassandro, 23, who was the first and only woman to be hanged in Alberta and only the fifth in Canada.
Picariello, 47, was called first to the gallows. At 5:15 a.m., the fatal bolt was drawn and 20 minutes later, Dr. R.B. Mooney, the jail physician, pronounced Picariello dead from a broken neck.
Before Lassandro’s execution, an appeal went to prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, but it was not successful.
A white and shaken Lassandro was summoned to the scaffold at 5:51 a.m. Eleven minutes later, her body was cut down.
Both were interred in an unmarked grave in a north Edmonton cemetery.
On Feb. 1, 2003, Canadian composer John Estacio and librettist John Murrell premièred the opera Filumena, based on Lassandro’s life and death. The opera was the opening work of the 2005-06 season of the Edmonton Opera. The Picariello-Lassandro case also was featured on the OLN series Creepy Canada.