A city worker and family man, Leo Binette lived on James Street in Centretown and walked each week to nearby Christ the King Church for Sunday mass.
Sixty years ago, Binette took his familiar place in the small Catholic church on Argyle Street beside his wife, Valéda. It was Dec, 22, 1963, the final Sunday of Advent, the four-week period during which Christians remember and celebrate the arrival of Jesus.
More than 300 members of Centretown’s francophone community were gathered for the noon mass, including federal Justice Minister Lionel Chevrier.
At the front of the church, one of Chevrier’s distant relatives, Rev. Guillame Chevrier, finished distributing Holy Communion. He was winding toward the end of the service when he was interrupted by insistent pounding on the door of the sacristy, a vestments room next to the altar. It was 12:45 p.m.
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A startled Rev. Chevrier opened the side door and huddled with the distraught woman who presented herself: Agathe Jensen was a tenant in the rectory building next door.
Binette and the other parishioners could not hear what was being said, but Jensen’s message galvanized Chevrier into action. The priest put on his hat and coat, rushed down the church aisle, and called out for help. He said there was trouble at the rectory.
In fact, what was already unfolding was one of the worst mass killings in Ottawa’s history, an event that would become known as the Christmas Massacre. It would leave dead two men and two women, and in its wake, a mystery: What happened to the fresh-faced Ottawa teenager convicted of murder in the case?
Four parishioners joined Chevrier as he hurried from the church. Leo Binette was one of them.
The three-storey rectory was immediately east of the church; it housed the priest on the ground floor and tenants on the two upper floors.
Parishioners John Horner and Paul Mercier were the first ones to reach the rectory. As they mounted an inside staircase, the men came face-to-face with a young gunman at the top of the stairs. They heard another man yell in French, “We have no choice. Shoot them!”
Horner and Mercier raised their hands. For a moment, the gunman just stared at them.
“He looked at me for a second or two, and a shot came out,” the 38-year-old Horner would later testify. “I was stunned. I fell to the floor at another shot, and so did Mercier.”
A motionless Horner played dead on the floor beside Mercier, 22, scoutmaster of the parish’s troop, who was fatally wounded with a bullet in his chest. The gunman retreated upstairs. Horner fled.
Rev. Chevrier, meanwhile, escaped out the back door of his ground-floor apartment and ran for help. Leo Binette was in the front hall when the shots thundered on the staircase: He raced down Argyle Street in search of the police.
The fourth parishioner retreated to the church and organized a contingent of men to surround the rectory to prevent the gunmen from escaping. Police arrived by the carload minutes later, surrounded the rectory, and trained their guns on its exits.
Det. Tom Flanagan, an officer who would later serve as Ottawa police chief, was among the first to enter the building. He called up the stairs: “Come down! The house is surrounded!” Flanagan warned the gunmen that if he came up the stairs, he would shoot to kill.
Moments later, Flanagan heard one of the gunmen announce, “I’m coming down. Don’t shoot. I’m not armed.”
A slim, jug-eared teenager walked down the stairs with his hands in the air. Flanagan handcuffed the clean-shaven suspect and led him outside, where a large crowd remained gathered on Argyle Street.
Leo Binette was in the crowd. He would later tell an Ottawa Journal reporter that his blood ran cold and his body burned when he saw the suspect emerge: It was his 17-year-old son, Réginald. Until that moment, Binette didn’t know his youngest son was back in Ottawa since Réginald had left in July for Vancouver in search of work.
Binette approached his son, who was surrounded by police: “What have you done? My God, what have you done?” he said.
His son turned. “Roger did it all,” Réginald said. “It was all Roger!”
When they entered the rectory, detectives found 22-year-old Roger Binette dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. They also found a tenant, Doralice Béchard, 65, fatally wounded with gunshots to her abdomen and chest (she would die later that day in hospital), and the body of Alberte Guindon, 45, a tenant and rectory housekeeper, who had been shot in the back.
Officers recovered four handguns, knives, ammunition, chains, locks, blindfolds, adhesive tape and bandages. The guns had been stolen in an earlier break-in.
Detectives told reporters they believed the crime was a robbery gone wrong. But the 10-day murder trial of Réginald Binette would unfold a much stranger story.
Leo Binette was the first defence witness called in the capital murder trial of his son, Réginald, in April 1964.
At the time, capital murder carried with it the possibility of a death sentence, at least in theory. One year earlier, the federal government had started to routinely commute all death sentences in Canada.
In any event, Réginald was 17 at the time of his arrest – he turned 18 one day later – which protected him from the possibility of capital punishment. The law said only those 18 and over could be hanged for capital murder.
A father of five, Leo Binette told Ontario Supreme Court Justice Sam Hughes that Réginald was dominated by his older brother, Roger. “The older boy had a hold on him,” Binette testified. “Anything we asked him, he had to look to Roger. If Roger made the sign, then OK.”
Binette’s testimony fit squarely into the strategy of lawyer Louis Assaly, who was mounting an insanity defence on behalf of his client, Réginald.
Court had heard that Réginald and Roger Binette had entered the rectory and first confronted Alberte Guindon, the housekeeper. They marched the distraught woman upstairs and ordered her to be quiet.
Roger shot her in the back when she continued screaming. Witnesses said that triggered mayhem. Both men began shooting wildly. A bullet from Roger’s gun killed Doralice Béchard, and another bullet wounded her sister, Henedine, in the hand. Both women had emerged to investigate the commotion.
A third-floor tenant, Agathe Jensen, peeked out a door, caught a glimpse of the mayhem, and fled down the fire escape to the church, where she alerted Rev. Chevrier.
In her testimony, Henedine Béchard identified Réginald Binette as the gunman who told her, “Shut up or I’ll kill you.” She told court Réginald twice put a gun to his own head after watching his brother shoot himself, but never pulled the trigger.
John Horner identified Réginald as the man who fired shots at him and Paul Mercier from the top of the stairs. In all, court heard, eleven shots were fired by the Binette brothers.
As part of his defence in the case, Assaly called to the witness stand four psychiatrists, all of whom testified that Réginald Binette was delusional, suffered from schizophrenia, and was unable to appreciate the consequences of his actions at the time of the incident.
Réginald told the psychiatrists that Roger came up with a plan to kidnap Rev. Chevrier, and have the priest take them to the homes of rich men so they could rob and extort them. Court heard the brothers wanted to amass $1 million and use the money to build a spaceship and turn people into compliant robots.
Jurors also heard about the possibility that Réginald and Roger Binette suffered from a rarely diagnosed psychiatric disorder, folie à deux, and fed off each other’s delusions.
Assaly argued that an armed, daylight attack on a church rectory had to be the product of an unsound mind, one open to manipulation. “He believed that everybody but his brother was against him,” Assaly told the jury. “Roger completely dominated his life.”
Crown attorney John Cassels argued that Réginald Binette’s actions – and his careful preparation – were not those of someone who had lost touch with reality. What’s more, he said, the idea that Réginald was under a delusion so powerful that he would kill or die in pursuit of it didn’t hold water.
“Why didn’t he go downstairs and shoot it out with the police if he was under this delusion?” Cassels asked the all-male jury.
The jury retired early on the afternoon of May 1, 1964, and four hours later, returned a verdict: Guilty as charged.
In imposing a sentence of life in prison, Justice Hughes told Réginald he had been convicted of “one of the most savage and atrocious crimes in the history of this or any other Canadian community.”
Leo Binette and his wife, Valéda, were in the courtroom, sitting behind their son, as the verdict and sentence were pronounced. The newspapers reported that they showed no sign of emotion.
Later, the Binettes would encounter their son in an elevator as he was being led to jail. “I’m sorry,” Leo Binette told him.
The buildings where the Christmas Massacre unfolded 60 years ago still stand.
The former Argyle Street church rectory where four people died is now host to a custom builder of dream homes in Ottawa. The church next door has been renamed. In 2001, Christ the King parish became Holy Korean Martyrs, which serves Ottawa’s Korean-Catholic community.
As for Réginald Binette, he disappeared from the headlines after his sentencing, and his fate was unknown to Ottawa readers – until now. This newspaper has discovered that his life had a surprising second act.
At the time of Binette’s trial, anyone sentenced to life in prison for capital murder was eligible for parole after 10 years. Today, someone convicted of first-degree murder – the rough equivalent of capital murder – does not become eligible for parole for 25 years.
The Correctional Service of Canada said it could not release information about when Binette was released.
What is known is that Binette was released from prison in time to fall in love with and marry an Ottawa-born woman named Lynn Davis, settle in Toronto and raise two children into adulthood. It means Binette likely spent 10 to 15 years in prison.
He was a grandfather when he died in North York General Hospital on April 5, 2003 at the age of 57. It’s believed he died from ALS.
His obituary in the Toronto Star noted that everyone called him Reg.
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