Tag: True crime

The Marion Affair: Not all injuries are physical

Charles Marion spent 82 days chained up in a hole in the ground in Gould

I have long had an interest in the way violence impacts everyone. Not just the victim, but their family, friends, even their community. And the violence of what became known as the Marion Affair, the longest kidnapping in Canadian history, is no exception.

“For many people, the Marion Affair was a simple news item,” Pierre Marion, son of the kidnap victim, told Radio Canada recently. “But for those of us who lived through it, it upended our lives.”

                  In 1977 Charles Marion was a loan manager at the Caisse Populaire de Sherbrooke Est on King Street East. A longtime employee of the credit union, the 57-year-old lived a fairly typical, quiet life with his wife and kids. And sometimes for a break he would go to his cottage in Stoke, which he named “Mon Repos.”

                  On August 6, 1977, he was taking it easy at Mon Repos when several masked men broke in and grabbed him. They tied up his companion, a female coworker from the Caisse Pop, and locked her in a shed. Then they bundled Charles Marion into his van and left the scene.

                  At first no one knew anything was wrong. But Marion’s wife became suspicious when she couldn’t reach him, so she headed out to Stoke. She found his companion, who by this point had been tied up for 18 hours. The awkward conversation would have to wait. The police were called, and the manhunt began.

                  As for Charles Marion, he was blindfolded and taken to Gould. There his kidnappers had dug a hole in the ground, poured a thin pad of concrete, built some rough wooden walls and a ceiling, and then covered it all with dirt and branches. This would be his home for the next 82 days.

                  To say the man suffered is an understatement. He was chained to a steel rod set in the concrete, with the chains holding him by his arms, legs and neck. The kidnappers rarely fed him, other than gin and tranquilizers to keep him quiet. Most of the time he sat in the dark, fetid hole, with no idea of what lay ahead. Twice he tried to take his own life rather than continue his living hell.

                  Meanwhile the family received a ransom note from a group calling themselves “Les Sept Serpents,” demanding a $1 million ransom (the equivalent of about $5 million today). The local media, including Sherbrooke Record reporters Janet Cotton, Robert MacPherson and photographer Perry Beaton, covered the mayhem.

After the initial search involving some 200 Sûreté du Québec officers turned up nothing, the SQ changed tactics. They agreed to pay the ransom but tried to pass off pieced of cardboard for the cash. When two men tried to pick up the ransom at Belvidere Heights in Lennoxville, they were ambushed by game wardens out looking for poachers. Then the police started shooting. In the resulting confusion and gunfire, the men managed to escape. Meanwhile the game wardens went home to change their underwear.

                  With the Caisse Populaire refusing to pay the $1 million ransom, the family continued to plead with the kidnappers, often through the media. They even got radio station CHLT to broadcast coded messages as a part of the negotiations. Photos of Marion, holding a current issue of the La Tribune newspaper, were released as proof of life.

In the end the family managed to raise $50,000. Far short of the original objective, the kidnappers finally agreed to accept it.        On October 26, Pierre Marion, Charles’ son, accompanied by a police officer took the cash to Sand Hill in Cookshire. There, guided by CB radio, they dropped it off. The following evening Charles Marion, emaciated, bearded but alive, was found near the Sherbrooke Airport in East Angus. He had been delivered there on the back of a motorcycle wearing blacked out goggles.

If this was a movie, everything would wind up very neatly from this point. But real life is messy and doesn’t adhere to convenient timelines. In fact, it was eight months before Michel de Varennes, Claude Valence and his wife Jeanne were arrested. The ransom money had been marked with invisible ink, and the men were, naturally, trying to spend it.

Traumatized by the experience, Charles Marion tried to move on. But in the process the SQ had raised the possibility that Marion had been in on the kidnapping all along. Rumours can spread like wildfire, and soon the Marion family felt they could no longer trust their friends and neighbours.

In the end, Varennes was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Claude Valence to 6 years. Charges against Jeanne Valence were seemingly dropped, and the other people Marion said took part were never caught. Though the trial revealed Charles Marion was truly the victim, the SQ have never apologized. In 2022 Pierre Marion released a book, 82 jours: l’affaire Charles Marion.

“He wanted to turn the page, but deep down he never managed to turn it,” Pierre Marion said. “He lived with public opinion, which always thought that he was partly responsible for this.”

Charles Marion was never able to return to his old job, and struggled to pick up the pieces. Traumatized by his treatment during and after the kidnapping, alienated from his community, 22 years later he took his own life in 1999 at the cottage where it all began.

And a family continues to try to make sense of it all.

The Georgeville plane crash that left observers scratching their heads.

Why would Satan’s Choice be involved the marine salvage business?

Ed note: This originally appeared earlier this year in The Record’s Townships Weekend section

By Maurice Crossfield

Every now and then you come across an oddball story, one that doesn’t make sense and raises more questions than it answers. Like why, when a Royal Canadian Air Force transport plane crashed on Lake Memphremagog in 1968, did it end up being salvaged by a group of outlaw bikers a decade later?

                  On January 7, 1968 (I wasn’t even a month old yet), Flight Lieutenant J. D. Evans and navigator Flight Lieutenant J. F. Morrow of 401 Auxiliary Squadron, based out of St. Hubert, were practicing landings on Lake Memphremagog near Georgeville with a De Havilland Otter. The single engine Otter was used in the RCAF for light transport and search and rescue operations until 1980, and many of them are still in service today, primarily as bush planes serving remote communities. They can be kitted out with conventional landing gear, floats for open water landings, or skis for winter touchdowns.

                  On one of the practice landings the ill-fated aircraft broke through the ice. Then the fuselage sank into the water. The two men managed to scramble out of the downed aircraft, giving their wedding tackle a good chilly soaking in the process.

                  Fortunately, the crash had a witness in the form of 18-year-old Réal Bernais, who had been hanging out on the Georgeville wharf. He was probably watching the plane. Bernais jumped on his snowmobile and raced out to get the two men, bringing them back to Henry McGowan’s boarding house to warm up and dry out. As they sipped hot coffee, they heard an explosion as the airplane caught fire. Within minutes the fire was out, the plane having sunk into 280 feet of water.

                  Over the next decade the wreckage of the ill-fated Otter was the subject of several salvage attempts. Marine Industries of Montreal apparently spent $30,000 to locate and raise the aircraft, but with no success.

                  Then in 1976 Montreal-based Lafitte Salvage purchased the salvage rights for $1,000. Using cutting edge technology such as closed-circuit cameras, they located the plane and managed to haul the tail and fuselage back to the surface, taking the wreckage to dry land in Georgeville, and later Magog. The salvagers refused to comment on rumours that a safe was found on the plane.

                  Here’s where things start to get interesting: It turns out that Lafitte Salvage was never a registered company. But the names of the five-man crew were known to the authorities: Brian Powers, Robert Chou, Michael French, Michel Veillette and Jean-Paul St. Michel. All members of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. If you start digging around in old newspapers looking for organized crime in the 1970’s, these names come up over and over. There was a gang war that saw Satan’s Choice and the Outlaws shooting it out with the Popeyes and Hell’s Angels. It was a bloody conflict in a particularly bloody era of Quebec history.

                  Powers ended up shot at his home in Montreal’s West Island in 1979. French was gunned down by West End Gang enforcer and hitman Jackie McLaughlin in 1982, his body found near Kahnawake. Chou died in 2018 of liver failure. I’m not sure what became of the others, but as you can see, these weren’t classically trained salvage experts living good, clean lives.

                  There are quite a few aspects of this that don’t add up: Firstly, why did Evans and Morrow try to land on Lake Memphremagog when the ice wasn’t thick enough to support an aircraft of that size? What caused a downed, nearly drowned airplane to explode well after the men were rescued? And then, why was security around the crash site so lax? If a military aircraft goes down, wouldn’t the RCAF have sent its own people to secure the site, and maybe send military divers in to examine the wreckage? I am unsure of the rules back then, but these days there would have been a full Canada Transportation Safety Board or a military investigation, with experts going over every inch of the plane and reporting on their findings. Instead, the armed forces sold off the salvage rights to whoever, with no regard for things like security, crash causes, or who they were giving military property to.

                  And why were a bunch of outlaw bikers doing underwater salvage work? News reports from the time said the skis from the plane were worth a few thousand dollars. The engine still turned freely and the three-bladed propellor was intact. But these guys were more accustomed to making bigger money in other domains, like dealing drugs and pimping out strippers and prostitutes. Stripping crashed planes for parts seems like more actual work than they were used to. How come they managed to raise the plane when the experts at Marine Industries failed?

                  Add to that the rumors of a safe on board. Was there something valuable on the Otter? I doubt it. The 401 Squadron was air reserve. These were part time guys, weekend warriors, who seem to have been practicing landings. Why would they have been carrying anything of value?

                  These are all questions that will remain unanswered. In fact, this story would likely have been forgotten by all but a few people if the late John Allore hadn’t come across it. While John Allore died in an accident nearly a year ago, his website https://theresaallore.com/ lives on. It’s a fascinating archive of true crime in the Eastern Townships and beyond, dedicated to finding who murdered his sister Theresa, when she was a student at Champlain College in November 1978.

                  Hopefully that’s a story we can still find answers to.