Police remember Const. John Frederick Nash who was shot three times from point blank range on February 12, 1962.
Toronto Police officers are remembering a fellow officer who was killed at point blank range 62 years ago.
The killer of Const. John Frederick Nash, who was shot to death on February 12, 1962, was the last person hanged in Canada.
Nash on that fatal day had pulled over a motorist sought for robbing a Red Rooster restaurant in Scarborough of $632, according to reports.
The heavily-armed robber Ronald Turpin got out and shot Nash as he approached the vehicle, causing him to fall to the ground. He then stood over the officer and fired three more shots at him.
Cop killer Ronald Turpin (left) and U.S. gangster Arthur Lucas were the last to be hanged in Canada.
Nash managed to remove his service revolver and fired twice, hitting Turpin in the arms and neck. Responding officers arrested Turpin as he tried to flee in his car. Nash was dead on arrival at hospital.
Turpin, 29, was described as a small-time hood who was known to police.
He was sentenced to death by hanging, in the last hanging death in Canada which took place in December 1962.
He was hanged at Toronto’s Don Jail with Arthur Lucas, 54, described as an American hoodlum from Detroit, who had travelled to Toronto in 1961, to execute and slash the throat of fellow gangster Therland Crater, who was to testify at the trial of a drug trafficker in the U.S.
Therland and his girlfriend were found in a rooming house shot and with their throats slashed.
Toronto residents protesting the hangings of the two convicted killers in December 1962. Photo by Toronto Star.
More than 100 demonstrators marched outside the Don Jail with signs to protest the deaths of the two convicted killers on the night of the hangings.
But the protestors couldn’t stop the hangings of Turpin and Lucas, who it is reported dropped back to back through the gallows trap door in the execution chamber of the Don Jail.
The condemned men’s legs, it was reported, were tied at the ankles and the knees. Standing back-to-back, a noose was fitted around each of their necks and white hoods were placed over their heads. They were buried in unmarked graves in Prospect Cemetery
The double hangings, would be the last in Canada, although it would take another 14 years for the death penalty to be abolished for civil, as opposed to military, crimes.
It just so happened that the government of the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of today’s PM Justin Trudeau, proposed then in Bill C-84 the abolition of the death penalty in Canada which became law in 1976.