New Book available for free at Manitoba Law Journal- Volume 47 #7.
Also available on Amazon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS VI
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VII
INTRODUCTION 1
JOHN RADCLIVE: “RIDING HIGH” DURING FIRST DECADE, 1890-1900 17
JOHN RADCLIVE: “DESCENT INTO HELL” 1900-1911 55
JOHN RADCLIVE: HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND BIOGRAPHY AS DANIEL JAMES RATLEY 79
ARTHUR ELLIS: HIS CANADIAN HANGING CAREER 97 ARTHUR ELLIS: MERCENARY MOTIVES AND PUBLIC SCANDALS 125
ARTHUR ELLIS: HIS TRUE IDENTITY 141
JOHN HOLMES: IDENTITY UNKOWN 167
SAM EDWARDS: SAMUEL SMITH 179
JOHN ELLIS: HIS HANGING CAREER 195
JOHN ELLIS: HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND BIOGRAPHY AS JOHN BERNARD MOORE 213
CAMILLE BRANCHAUD: IDENTITY UNKNOWN 225
JOHN ELLIS #2 – THE LAST HANGMAN: IDENTITY UNKNOWN 239
CONCLUSION 261
Also available on Amazon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS VI
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VII
INTRODUCTION 1
JOHN RADCLIVE: “RIDING HIGH” DURING FIRST DECADE, 1890-1900 17
JOHN RADCLIVE: “DESCENT INTO HELL” 1900-1911 55
JOHN RADCLIVE: HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND BIOGRAPHY AS DANIEL JAMES RATLEY 79
ARTHUR ELLIS: HIS CANADIAN HANGING CAREER 97 ARTHUR ELLIS: MERCENARY MOTIVES AND PUBLIC SCANDALS 125
ARTHUR ELLIS: HIS TRUE IDENTITY 141
JOHN HOLMES: IDENTITY UNKOWN 167
SAM EDWARDS: SAMUEL SMITH 179
JOHN ELLIS: HIS HANGING CAREER 195
JOHN ELLIS: HIS TRUE IDENTITY AND BIOGRAPHY AS JOHN BERNARD MOORE 213
CAMILLE BRANCHAUD: IDENTITY UNKNOWN 225
JOHN ELLIS #2 – THE LAST HANGMAN: IDENTITY UNKNOWN 239
CONCLUSION 261
External Review: Alvin A. J. Esau’s The Hangmen of Canada is a methodologically robust and historiographically significant work of Canadian legal history... The manuscript brings together decades of scholarly experience with a rare archival depth, shedding new light on the institutional, procedural, and cultural dimensions of capital punishment in Canada through a biographical focus on the country’s principal executioners.
The strength of the work lies in its meticulous use of archival evidence, including government correspondence, coroner’s records, court documents, military files, and press materials, often triangulated to correct for distortion or myth. Esau’s training as a legal scholar is evident throughout: he is attentive not only to narrative reconstruction but also to institutional context, legal procedure, and the evolution of discretionary authority. The book exemplifies how legal and historical methodologies can be brought into conversation to illuminate areas of the justice system that have often been ignored or misunderstood.
What sets this study apart from earlier treatments of capital punishment in Canada is its sustained focus on the executioners themselves—not as curiosities or footnotes, but as agents within a larger legal and bureaucratic structure. These individuals are treated not as aberrations but as embedded participants in a broader apparatus of state power—one in which law and custom, formality and improvisation, often existed in tension.
Esau’s methodology is particularly commendable in dealing with fragmented or unreliable sources. In chapters covering Branchaud and Ellis No. 2, for example, he demonstrates careful restraint in distinguishing between verifiable fact, plausible inference, and popular mythology. His archival approach is rigorous and conservative in the best sense, always alert to the risks of overstatement or narrative convenience.
Equally noteworthy is the author’s treatment of institutional dynamics—especially the informal relationships between provincial sheriffs, federal authorities, and the hangmen themselves. Esau does not rely solely on formal statutes or judgments to reconstruct the legal landscape; rather, he foregrounds the extra-legal and quasi-legal practices that often governed how capital punishment was arranged and implemented across jurisdictions. This is a contribution not only to criminal law history but also to studies of federalism, administrative law, and professionalization in the Canadian context.
As a whole, The Hangmen of Canada is a valuable scholarly contribution that blends legal history, biography, and institutional analysis. It brings archival richness to bear on a subject too often consigned to the margins of legal scholarship, and it does so with clarity, rigor, and a healthy degree of interpretive caution. The work is not only historically important but also timely, given renewed discussions around state power, historical reckoning, and the role of discretion in the administration of justice.
The work demonstrates scholarly merit, methodological soundness, and originality.
Internal Reviews:
Dr. Bryan Schwartz:
About forty years ago, as a newly minted faculty member, I attended a “strategic planning” meeting with my colleagues. One of them, Alvin, who had been hired a few years earlier, made a remark that has stayed with me. He observed that dedicating twenty or thirty years to teaching in a field could transform someone into a true scholar. His words resonated because they reflected deep respect for the discipline and commitment required to seek, uncover, and communicate truth with skill and integrity.
Today, the academy often seems trapped in an ideological phase where scholarship begins and ends with political dogma. Arguments, evidence, and rhetoric are frequently marshaled to serve predetermined causes rather than the pursuit of truth. In stark contrast, Alvin’s vision of scholarship— rigorous, open-minded, and truth-seeking—is brilliantly exemplified in this study on Canada’s state-authorized executioners.
The book explores profound questions: Can we generalize about the character of executioners? Are they ordinary people performing a necessary job, or do those who volunteer for such roles tend toward psychological disorders like psychopathy? With meticulous care, the study profiles each of Canada’s executioners, drawing on extensive research, including sifting through aging archival documents. It uncovers the real identities of many, while candidly noting that some identifications remain probabilistic or speculative. The result is a wealth of original discoveries, each grounded in judiciously assessed evidence.
The study approaches its sources with appropriate skepticism, particularly when evaluating executioners’ self-characterizations. Some are exposed as liars, and the book consistently weighs evidence with dispassionate precision, clearly delineating the limits of what can be known. The profiles themselves are gripping, offering fascinating stories of individuals who chose to become state-sanctioned killers-for-hire. These narratives will engage readers quite apart from the study’s broader conclusions.
The book’s central finding reveals a jarring disconnect between the majesty of the law—its claim to wield the ultimate power over life and death—and the often tawdry character of those who carried out its final act. Many executioners are portrayed as mercenary, dishonest in their personal lives and motives, and, in some cases, psychopathologically detached from the emotions that typically accompany taking a life, even when justified. This conclusion challenges the law’s moral authority and invites reflection on the human cost of such roles.
In Modern Canada, there are other contexts, such as soldiering or providing medical assistance in dying, in which a professional employed by the state may have a role in ending human life. These roles are fundamentally different, of course, than that of serving as an instrument of state-mandated retribution, and each carries its own purposes, moral dilemmas, and impact on the personnel involved. Notwithstanding these differences, studies such as this may offer insight or warnings as we select, train, and support members of our society for these tasks. We at the Manitoba Law Journal are honoured to publish this monograph as a peer-reviewed contribution to public understanding of issues fraught with importance and complexity. It offers profound insight into the moral and human dimensions of state-sanctioned death. This study, with its industry, rigor, precision, and originality, stands as a model of scholarship. Readers will find no more reliable guide than this author and this author and this book.
................................................................................
John Burchill
President
Winnipeg Police Museum & Historical Society
The sentence of the court is that you be taken to the place from whence you came, and that you be there confined until Friday, the thirteenth day of January 1928, and upon that day between the hours of 6 o’clock in the forenoon and 8 o’clock in the forenoon, you be taken from the place of confinement to the place of execution, and that you be then and there hanged by the neck until you are dead.
And with that pronouncement, Mr. Justice Andrew Knox Dysart put into motion the process of summonsing the hangman to carry out the execution of Earle Nelson, Canada’s first serial killer, at Winnipeg’s provincial gaol.
Building on his exposé of Earle Nelson, Alvin Esau’s The Hangmen of Canada is a rigorous and historically valuable study of capital punishment in Canada. Through rich archival research—drawing on court records, government files, and media accounts—Esau explores the legal and institutional dimensions of hangings, focusing on the lives of Canada’s public executioners. Rather than simply footnotes in the broader discussion of capital punishment, Esau examines Canada’s hangmen as an essential figure within the criminal justice system.
Esau’s legal and scholarly background informs his detailed analysis of how capital punishment was carried out in Canada between Confederation and the last hanging in 1962. Through both formal criminal law and the informal relationships of the hangmen, judicial officers, and government officials, Esau’s work contributes to the broader discussion of Canada’s legal history, the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, and the administrative state.
While descriptively and archivally rich, Esau does not engage in the moral and political debate of capital punishment. Although the biographies do not challenge the ethical foundations of state violence, he does question the personality type of the individual who willingly carries out these “judicial killings”. Nevertheless, with recent opinion polls suggesting a majority of Canadians would support reinstating the death penalty, who of them would want the role executioner?
The strength of the work lies in its meticulous use of archival evidence, including government correspondence, coroner’s records, court documents, military files, and press materials, often triangulated to correct for distortion or myth. Esau’s training as a legal scholar is evident throughout: he is attentive not only to narrative reconstruction but also to institutional context, legal procedure, and the evolution of discretionary authority. The book exemplifies how legal and historical methodologies can be brought into conversation to illuminate areas of the justice system that have often been ignored or misunderstood.
What sets this study apart from earlier treatments of capital punishment in Canada is its sustained focus on the executioners themselves—not as curiosities or footnotes, but as agents within a larger legal and bureaucratic structure. These individuals are treated not as aberrations but as embedded participants in a broader apparatus of state power—one in which law and custom, formality and improvisation, often existed in tension.
Esau’s methodology is particularly commendable in dealing with fragmented or unreliable sources. In chapters covering Branchaud and Ellis No. 2, for example, he demonstrates careful restraint in distinguishing between verifiable fact, plausible inference, and popular mythology. His archival approach is rigorous and conservative in the best sense, always alert to the risks of overstatement or narrative convenience.
Equally noteworthy is the author’s treatment of institutional dynamics—especially the informal relationships between provincial sheriffs, federal authorities, and the hangmen themselves. Esau does not rely solely on formal statutes or judgments to reconstruct the legal landscape; rather, he foregrounds the extra-legal and quasi-legal practices that often governed how capital punishment was arranged and implemented across jurisdictions. This is a contribution not only to criminal law history but also to studies of federalism, administrative law, and professionalization in the Canadian context.
As a whole, The Hangmen of Canada is a valuable scholarly contribution that blends legal history, biography, and institutional analysis. It brings archival richness to bear on a subject too often consigned to the margins of legal scholarship, and it does so with clarity, rigor, and a healthy degree of interpretive caution. The work is not only historically important but also timely, given renewed discussions around state power, historical reckoning, and the role of discretion in the administration of justice.
The work demonstrates scholarly merit, methodological soundness, and originality.
Internal Reviews:
Dr. Bryan Schwartz:
About forty years ago, as a newly minted faculty member, I attended a “strategic planning” meeting with my colleagues. One of them, Alvin, who had been hired a few years earlier, made a remark that has stayed with me. He observed that dedicating twenty or thirty years to teaching in a field could transform someone into a true scholar. His words resonated because they reflected deep respect for the discipline and commitment required to seek, uncover, and communicate truth with skill and integrity.
Today, the academy often seems trapped in an ideological phase where scholarship begins and ends with political dogma. Arguments, evidence, and rhetoric are frequently marshaled to serve predetermined causes rather than the pursuit of truth. In stark contrast, Alvin’s vision of scholarship— rigorous, open-minded, and truth-seeking—is brilliantly exemplified in this study on Canada’s state-authorized executioners.
The book explores profound questions: Can we generalize about the character of executioners? Are they ordinary people performing a necessary job, or do those who volunteer for such roles tend toward psychological disorders like psychopathy? With meticulous care, the study profiles each of Canada’s executioners, drawing on extensive research, including sifting through aging archival documents. It uncovers the real identities of many, while candidly noting that some identifications remain probabilistic or speculative. The result is a wealth of original discoveries, each grounded in judiciously assessed evidence.
The study approaches its sources with appropriate skepticism, particularly when evaluating executioners’ self-characterizations. Some are exposed as liars, and the book consistently weighs evidence with dispassionate precision, clearly delineating the limits of what can be known. The profiles themselves are gripping, offering fascinating stories of individuals who chose to become state-sanctioned killers-for-hire. These narratives will engage readers quite apart from the study’s broader conclusions.
The book’s central finding reveals a jarring disconnect between the majesty of the law—its claim to wield the ultimate power over life and death—and the often tawdry character of those who carried out its final act. Many executioners are portrayed as mercenary, dishonest in their personal lives and motives, and, in some cases, psychopathologically detached from the emotions that typically accompany taking a life, even when justified. This conclusion challenges the law’s moral authority and invites reflection on the human cost of such roles.
In Modern Canada, there are other contexts, such as soldiering or providing medical assistance in dying, in which a professional employed by the state may have a role in ending human life. These roles are fundamentally different, of course, than that of serving as an instrument of state-mandated retribution, and each carries its own purposes, moral dilemmas, and impact on the personnel involved. Notwithstanding these differences, studies such as this may offer insight or warnings as we select, train, and support members of our society for these tasks. We at the Manitoba Law Journal are honoured to publish this monograph as a peer-reviewed contribution to public understanding of issues fraught with importance and complexity. It offers profound insight into the moral and human dimensions of state-sanctioned death. This study, with its industry, rigor, precision, and originality, stands as a model of scholarship. Readers will find no more reliable guide than this author and this author and this book.
................................................................................
John Burchill
President
Winnipeg Police Museum & Historical Society
The sentence of the court is that you be taken to the place from whence you came, and that you be there confined until Friday, the thirteenth day of January 1928, and upon that day between the hours of 6 o’clock in the forenoon and 8 o’clock in the forenoon, you be taken from the place of confinement to the place of execution, and that you be then and there hanged by the neck until you are dead.
And with that pronouncement, Mr. Justice Andrew Knox Dysart put into motion the process of summonsing the hangman to carry out the execution of Earle Nelson, Canada’s first serial killer, at Winnipeg’s provincial gaol.
Building on his exposé of Earle Nelson, Alvin Esau’s The Hangmen of Canada is a rigorous and historically valuable study of capital punishment in Canada. Through rich archival research—drawing on court records, government files, and media accounts—Esau explores the legal and institutional dimensions of hangings, focusing on the lives of Canada’s public executioners. Rather than simply footnotes in the broader discussion of capital punishment, Esau examines Canada’s hangmen as an essential figure within the criminal justice system.
Esau’s legal and scholarly background informs his detailed analysis of how capital punishment was carried out in Canada between Confederation and the last hanging in 1962. Through both formal criminal law and the informal relationships of the hangmen, judicial officers, and government officials, Esau’s work contributes to the broader discussion of Canada’s legal history, the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, and the administrative state.
While descriptively and archivally rich, Esau does not engage in the moral and political debate of capital punishment. Although the biographies do not challenge the ethical foundations of state violence, he does question the personality type of the individual who willingly carries out these “judicial killings”. Nevertheless, with recent opinion polls suggesting a majority of Canadians would support reinstating the death penalty, who of them would want the role executioner?
