The Flying Dutchman Series: Nanaimo’s Last Hanging (Content Warning)

Dave Flawse

A turkey vulture soars in a thermal updraft at the upper edge of the troposphere in 1913. Below, the temperate rainforest of Vancouver Island appears much as it has for millennia, an upbroken swath of ruffled green clamoring for sunlight.

The vulture glimpses a shape uncommon in its world—straight lines. Roads lay across a hill and resemble the spokes of a wagon wheel. The spokes converge near the sea where ships spew black smoke.

The scavenger knows Nanaimo well. Even now it smells the blood behind the slaughterhouse draining down the gutter where the stray dogs and rats gorge themselves, and the vultures fight over what remains.

Black wings thwomp and claws wrap around a telegraph wire. The bird spreads its great wings to gather heat in the August morning.

Nearby in a high-walled courtyard, forty people stand subdued and sombre. The vulture recognizes the smell of fresh-milled wood and the shape of the gallows in front of them.

A door thrusts open. Sandwiched between a salvation army officer and the sheriff, a handcuffed man stumbles into the sunlight. The Flying Dutchman’s feet kick up dust. None of the onlookers could guess by looking at his sedated slouch, untamed hair, and scruffy beard that he was a killer.

Convicted of murder only once, but the prime suspect in many more cases, the Flying Dutchman shot and killed a police officer 60 miles north in Union Bay during an attempted robbery.

He claims to be a member of Butch Cassidy’s wild bunch. The old-west, train-robbing gang in the U.S. whose members were notorious for never be taken by the law alive. Unlike the others, however, the Flying Dutchman will not fulfill this promise—but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

During the four months of his incarceration he attempted suicide three times. In the first, before the guards took away his razor and the scruff grew thick on his face, he slashed his wrists while shaving.

In the second, a guard heard a gurgling sound coming from the Flying Dutchman’s cell. The guard rushed in to find him underneath his blanket choking himself with a bedsheet.

In the third savage attempt the desperate man repeatedly smashed his head against the bars of his cell until he fell unconscious onto the floor. After that, a doctor kept him heavily sedated with opium.

As the Flying Dutchman hobbles up the ramps to the waiting noose, the gathered crowd lift their hats, not out of respect for the convicted murderer, but because it’s the law.

The Dominion of Canada’s executioner, Arthur Ellis, grips a black cloth sack and a leather leg strap. He’s crouched, ready to spring into action.

He is attempting a new record for the world’s fastest hanging and has left the bottom of the gallows unscreened so the timekeeper can see the moment the condemned man’s toes hit the gravel.

Arthur Ellis can judge a man’s weight just by looking at him—a crucial skill for an executioner. He apprenticed under his father in England for 12 years to gain the necessary skills.

If dropped from too high, the fall could decapitate his prisoner. Too low and the fall will fail to break the vertebrae and the unlucky soul will slowly choke to death.

His grandfather was an executioner and his father before him. For over 300 years, Arthur Ellis’s ancestors have been executing people. Untold numbers have met their end by his kin, and Ellis alone has hanged hundreds.

As soon as the murderer reaches the trap on the gallows, Ellis yanks the black sack over the head, pinions the legs with the strap, and expertly jerks a waiting noose tight behind the ears.

Before the salvation army officer can say four words of the lord’s prayer, the trap is sprung. The Flying Dutchman’s toes graze the gravel below the scaffolding. Death meets him instantly with a snapped third vertebra.

“Time!” yells Arthur Ellis. His hand thrust into the air.

A constable from the BC Provincial Police has been tasked with timing the event. He started timing when the man was brought through the door, and now he taps the stop button on his stopwatch and calls out: “Forty-seven seconds.”

“Gentlemen, Gentlemen.” The executioner rubs his hands. “You have been privileged to witness 11 seconds clipped from the record set by my uncle. You have seen a new world’s record in hanging.”

Ellis departs Nanaimo via one of the steamships that connect the Island to the rest of Canada. He will never return to Nanaimo to put a prisoner to death; the province’s executions after 1919 all took place at the Oakalla Penitentiary in Burnaby.

Ellis will continue to hang criminals until a career-ending mistake in 1935 when he will miscalculate Tommasina Teolis’s weight and decapitates her. After public outcry, he will lose his job and after three years of living in poverty die in Montreal in 1938.

(Until 2021 Arthur Ellis’s name lived on in an annual award—a wooden statuette, featuring a hanged man—given to Canadian crime writers. Now, dubbed with a new, and flavourless, name, the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Excellence has broken ties with the controversial figure.)

From its perch on the telegraph wire, the turkey vulture continues to keep its brown eyes and wrinkled head fixed to the high-walled courtyard. The stench of released bowels and urine rises to its nose. While other turkey vultures now swoop down into the alley to feast on what’s left of pig entrails, this bird has another idea.

With a thrusting flap, it follows the wagon loaded with the body to the cemetery on Bowen Road. Past the marked head stones and monuments, a deep hole waits beside an unmarked grave. Two men roll the body in, and shovel dirt overtop.

Its meal now unreachable under six feet of soil, the vulture takes to the skies. The scent of elk blood drifts in from beyond the spoke-shaped roads where the forest thrusts up like a wall.

The bird swoops between the trees and wraps its talons around a cedar branch. From its perch, in the dim light of the forest canopy, it peers down at the scene below.

A dozen Vancouver Island grey wolves lay spread among sprawling sword ferns. Blood stains their jowls and they groom one another with soft tongues. A puppy teases an adult with nips to its paws. The elk carcass lays nearby, and the vulture waits for its chance to feast.

*Featured image credit fractalx

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