Two constables to be remembered
DRESSED AS SANTA, a bank robber killed the pair when they pulled up outside a St-Laurent crime scene Dec. 14, 1962
“It was quite a horrific event at Christmastime, and still stands out to a lot of people”
ST-LAURENT MAYOR ALAN DESOUSA
Fifty years ago, thousands of people packed into Église de St-Laurent to mourn two police constables killed during a bank robbery that made news across North America for many reasons, including the fact the murderer was dressed as Santa Claus.
On Friday, a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the deaths of constables Claude Marineau and Denis Brabant — members of what was then the StLaurent police — will be held in the same church on Ste-Croix Ave.
Friday’s mass was arranged by Marineau and Brabant’s children, who ranged in age from three to 14 at the time of the tragedy.
Marineau and Brabant were killed in late morning on Dec. 14, 1962. The two constables arrived at a bank robbery in progress at a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce branch on Côte de Liesse Rd. just as three men were walking out with more than $6,500 in cash and $133,000 in bonds and travellers’ cheques.
The man who planned the robbery, Georges Marcotte, was dressed in a Santa suit. His two accomplices were not in costume.
Marcotte opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle as one constable was exiting the patrol car and the other was still in the passenger seat.
As the two men lay injured on the ground, witnesses watched in horror as Marcotte shot them over and over to make sure both were dead. One was struck by 17 bullets.
Marineau, 35, a married father of three, was not supposed to be on duty that day, but had agreed to fill in for a colleague. The night before, he and his wife had put up their Christmas tree together.
Brabant, 32, also a married father of three, was the head of the St-Laurent police brotherhood when he was killed.
“It was quite a horrific event at Christmastime, and still stands out to a lot of people who were around back then, ” said St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa. A moment of silence was observed for Marineau and Brabant at the borough’s public meeting last week, he said.
DeSousa said the borough consulted the surviving relatives of both victims in order to commemorate the anniversary “in an appropriate way.”
A street in the borough’s industrial sector — intersecting HenriBourassa Blvd., near Highway 13 — is already named after both men.
Four days after they were killed, the two men were buried with full civic honours, with more than 4,000 people in attendance for the funeral procession. The mass was celebrated by Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger.
Marcotte, who was 34 at the time, was arrested five days after the double slaying, having fired a gun during an argument with a man he had found with his girlfriend.
He was tried in the two constables’ deaths and found guilty of murder by a jury on March 2, 1963. The case went on for years as Marcotte became one of the last criminals to receive a death sentence in Canada before the country began a lengthy debate before eventually abolishing the death penalty in 1976. Marcotte’s sentence was commuted to a life sentence, and he was granted parole in 1981.
He changed his legal name to Albert Georges Duvivier and continued re-offending through relatively minor crimes, for which he returned behind bars several times, most notably for plotting the armed robbery of a trust company in Toronto in 1989.
Marcotte later told the Parole Board of Canada that his notoriety from the 1962 holdup drew other criminals to him when he was released and contributed to his re-offending.
According to Parole Board of Canada records, he spent 10 years on day parole, from 1993 to 2002, because his parole officers were convinced he would reoffend again if he didn’t have to report to a halfway house at least twice a week.
He was eventually granted full parole again in November 2002.
One of Marcotte’s accomplices, Jean-Paul Fournel, who was 39 at the time of the robbery, became a witness for the prosecution after he was arrested in 1962. Fournel later admitted to having fired off a few shots on his own while exiting the bank but testified Marcotte boasted, “I killed them” when they met hours later. He also testified that while riding in a stolen car before the robbery, Marcotte drank from a bottle of rye and “was making Santa Claus ho-ho-ho sounds all the way to the bank.”
On June 8, 1964, Fournel pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence.
The other accomplice, Jules Reeves, suffered a stroke a week after the robbery and was arrested after hospital staff found a large amount of cash in his pants pocket and called police. Some of the cash was traced to the heist.
Reeves suffered brain damage from the stroke and was declared unfit to stand trial in 1964 and again in 1973. He suffered a heart attack while at the Pinel Institute, and died, at age 41, in a hospital on Oct. 23, 1974.