Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108
His father was killed in a railroad accident when he was aged 5 and the family moved to a suburb of Quebec City.
In August 1941, he married Rita Morel and moved to Quebec City, where he worked at the Arsenal and sold jewelry and watches on the side.
Towards the end of the war, Guay started selling jewelry fulltime, offering engagement rings, crucifixes, and watches.
[1] In November 1948, Guay's wife learned about the affair and told Robitaille's parents, who then kicked their daughter out of their house.
Pitre owned a boarding house near where Guay and Robitaille met, and had helped arrange some of their meetings.
Afraid of her parents causing trouble if they found out where she was, Robitaille pretended that she was living in Montreal.
Robitaille borrowed $50 from the owner of the restaurant where she worked and bought a railroad ticket to Montreal.
Guay then warned Robitaille against escaping by burning her gloves and going to bed wearing her coat.
[1] In April 1949, Guay offered a family friend, 21-year-old Lucien Carreau, $500 to kill his wife.
[1] As Robitaille was walking to work one day in June, Guay confronted her, pulled out a gun, and threatened that if she didn't return to him, he'd shoot himself, and maybe her as well.
Guay offered Ruest money and a discount on a ring that he wanted to buy for a woman.
[1] Pitre went to a hardware store and found it was impossible to buy dynamite in Canada without signing for it, so she gave a false name.
She told the clerk that she was buying on behalf of a woman who wanted to destroy some tree stumps.
To convince his wife to board the plane, he gave her two suitcases of jewelry which he had in storage since early August.
[1] Flight 108 was a Douglas DC-3 operated by Canadian Pacific Air Lines flying from Montreal to Baie-Comeau with a stopover at Quebec City.
Guay calculated that the explosion would send the plane into the Saint Lawrence River which would have made any forensic investigation very difficult with the technology of the time.
A five-minute takeoff delay caused the plane to crash instead at Cap Tourmente, near Sault-au-Cochon in the Charlevoix region of Quebec, killing all 23 persons on board – four crew members and 19 passengers including four children.
The bombing was the second attack against civil aviation in North America and received wide news coverage locally and abroad.
One officer told a reporter about the case, who wrote, without mentioning names, that the police were searching for a woman who delivered an unusual package to the airport.
Guay said Pitre should kill herself and leave a note admitting sole responsibility for the explosion.
Pitre concealed her own complicity, claiming Guay had told her that the package contained a statue.
His only display of emotion throughout the entire trial happened when Robitaille took the stand and said she did not love him anymore.
[1] Before he was executed, however, Guay did send an extremely detailed 40-page confession directly to the Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis.
[2][14] The bombing of United Air Lines Flight 629 by Jack Gilbert Graham killed all 44 people aboard, including his mother.
Graham's motive was his mother's mistreatment of him as a small child, and 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.
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).
