Albert Guay

Joseph-Albert Guay was born on 23 September 1918, in Charny, Quebec, and was the youngest of five children. His father had been killed in a rail accident when he was five.

Guay married Rita Morel and moved to Quebec City, where he worked in the jewellery and watch industries. Here he met Marguerite Ruest, and through her, her brother Généreux Ruest. In 1945 the Morels moved to Seven Islands where they had a daughter.[2]

During his marriage to Rita, he became enamoured with 17-year-old waitress Marie-Ange Robitaille, and the two began a clandestine affair. In 1948 the gossip caught up to them and Rita found out about Marie-Ange, who was promptly thrown out by her parents. Guay had Marguerite Ruest take in the homeless young woman. The following year, however, Marie-Ange broke off with Guay and moved back home while Rita took the couple's baby and moved in with her mother.

Guay, now with neither woman in his life, approached a family friend, offering to pay him to use poison to murder Mrs Guay. The friend flatly refused.

Instead Guay decided on the airplane bombing, believing it would be harder for the authorities to link him to that method. The New Yorker speculates an airplane bombing in the Philippines that did see some coverage by North American press[3] might have come to Guay's attention.

The day of the flight, Guay purchased a CAD$10,000 insurance policy (roughly equivalent to $112,000 in 2020[4]) on his wife, which he attempted to collect three days later. There was also a prior $5,000 policy (roughly $56,000[4]) dating from 1942.

Guay had asked clockmaker Généreux Ruest to manufacture a bomb using dynamite, batteries and an alarm clock. The dynamite had been purchased at a hardware store by Ruest's sister, Marguerite Pitre (also known as Ruest-Pitre, wife of Arthur Pitre).[5] At the time, sales of explosives to civilians in Canada were recorded but not strictly regulated. Pitre also delivered the package containing the bomb to the plane, for mail delivery. She had also helped arrange liaisons between Guay and Robitaille.

As they were plotting, Pitre proposed an alternative plan. They could enlist the help of a taxi driver, who she was on good terms with, who lived in an apartment above hers. Pitre said the driver could take the Guays for a ride in the country in his taxi with a time bomb in the trunk. At a certain point, the driver would pretend that something had gone wrong with the engine, and he and Guay would get out and look for help, leaving Guay's wife by herself. After a few minutes, the bomb would explode, killing her. Guay and Ruest encouraged Pitre to go ahead with her plan, and she invited the taxi driver to her apartment. She gave basic details of the plan while Guay listened from behind a curtain. The taxi driver said he was unwilling to destroy his cab and left. Fearing that she'd been too revealing, Pitre followed him and said she'd been only joking.[2]

The airplane was a Douglas DC-3 operated by Canadian Pacific Air Lines (registry CF-CUA S/N: 4518) flying from Montreal to Baie-Comeau with a stopover at Quebec City. The airline involved is sometimes stated as "Quebec Airways", but this was simply a name used for some Canadian Pacific Airlines flights in Quebec. The flight number was 108 departing L'Ancienne-Lorette Airport on a stopover flight onward to Baie-Comeau Airport. It was there that Guay's wife Rita boarded the plane.

The bomb detonated and killed Guay's wife. The plan was ruined when the flight was delayed five minutes at takeoff. Guay had calculated the explosion to take place over the Saint Lawrence River, which would have made forensic examination of the crash impossible with the technology then available to forensic scientists. The delay at takeoff meant that the bomb detonated five minutes earlier in the flight than planned, causing the plane to crash-land before the river, over Cap Tourmente, near a small locality named Sault-au-Cochon (sometimes incorrectly given as "Sault-aux-Cochons"), in the Charlevoix region of Quebec. The explosion and subsequent crash killed all four crew members and 19 passengers aboard. Apart from Guay's wife, Rita Morel Guay, the victims included four children and three American executives from the Kennecott Utah Copper company, including the retiring president, E. T. Stannard; his designated successor, Arthur D. Storke; and Russell Johnston Parker, a vice-president and father of typographer and type designer Mike Parker, as well as Edward J. Calnan and William B. Scoular, both St. Catharines residents, and both senior engineers with the Ontario Paper Company, returning from a business trip to Baie Comeau.

While the bombing was not the first proven instance of sabotaging a passenger flight for criminal purposes, it was the first to be solved and received wide news media coverage locally and abroad.

On 1 November 1955, six years after the bombing, a later copycat airplane bombing was apparently inspired by the Guay affair, just like how Guay was apparently inspired by the Philippines woman using an airplane bomb to kill off her husband.[1][3] The bombing of United Airlines Flight 629 by Jack Gilbert Graham killed 44 people, all aboard the flight including his mother. Graham's reported motive was his mother's alleged mistreatment of him as a small child, but featured similarities to the earlier bombings including placing a dynamite time-bomb in the target's suitcase, and just like Guay Graham had purchased life insurance on his victim shortly before the flight departure.

The incident, subsequent trials and execution of Guay and his accomplices was notorious in Quebec and was inspiration for the fictional The Crime of Ovide Plouffe (Le Crime d'Ovide Plouffe, a 1982 novel by Roger Lemelin and 1984 film of the same name by Denys Arcand.[10] In 1949, Lemelin had been a friend and neighbour of Guay, as well as being the Quebec correspondent for Time magazine. The novel Cape Torment by Richard Donovan is based on the case.[1]

• Aviation safety
• Capital punishment in Canada
• List of firsts in aviation

• Causes célèbres du Québec, Dollard Dansereau, Editions Leméac, Montréal, 1974
• Jeffrey David Simon The terrorist trap: America's experience with terrorism, Indiana University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-253-21477-7, pages 47–49

• Timeline of the bombing
• Biography of Albert Guay
• Description of accident
• Aviation Safety Network data on accident
• List of sabotage bombing incidents on airplanes
• A 1947 photo of the airplane involved
• MULTIPLY Group of discussion in French & English. Many rare pictures.
• An article on the case in The New Yorker by E. J. Kahn Jr. (14 Nov. 1953)