Louis-Philippe Pelletier
The judge in the case
of the King versus Marie-Anne Houde. A lawyer by training, he was born on February 2, 1857, in Trois-Pistoles. The son of
the Honourable Thomas-Philippe Pelletier, a legislative councilor, and Caroline Casault. In 1882, he married Adèle
Lelièvre.
He pursued his studies at Laval University and was admitted to the Bar in 1888.
He was elected as a Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly (1888-1890) and was elected in Dorchester to the Legislative
Assembly (1890-1904). From 1891 to 1896, he was the Secretary and Registrar of the province of Quebec in the cabinet of Charles-Eugène
Boucher of Boucherville and of Louis-Olivier Taillon.
He was then Attorney General of the
province of Quebec in the cabinet of Edmund James Flynn (1896-1897). From 1911 to 1914, he was the Conservative Member of
Parliament for the county of Québec and Minister in charge of the postal service in Ottawa in the cabinet of Robert
Laird Borden.
He was then appointed to the Court of King's Bench, in Quebec City (1915-1921).
He resided for many years in the Neo Classical town home on rue desJardins built on a site owned by the Ursulines and constructed
during the erection of the Palace of Justice. He died in Quebec City on February 8, 1921.
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“In
April 1920, before the Court of King’s Bench in the judicial district of Quebec, two criminal trials were held. Télesphore
Gagnon and his wife, Marie-Anne Houde, stood accused of the suspected abuse and negligence that had caused the death of Aurore
Gagnon two months earlier. Through the testimony of members of the Gagnon family, neighbors from Fortierville, and medical
examiners, we can learned the details of the violence inflicted upon Aurore by her parents.
Who was guilty in the Gagnon affair? The father? The stepmother?
The extended family? The neighboring community, because they did nothing? And why did this family become so "dysfunctional"
— to use a modern term – to the point that one family member was the victim of blows, burns, and other scandalous
abuse, the full nature and extent of which were revealed in court in April 1920?
The trial of Marie-Anne Houde took place from April 13 to 21, 1920 with
Judge Louis-Philippe Pelletier presiding. Marie-Anne Houde, like her husband, was tried on the charge of murder. The trial
of her husband, Télesphore Gagnon, was held from April 23 to 29 of the same year.
The mistreatment inflicted on Aurore Gagnon remains etched in the collective
memory of Quebecers. Also remembered, to a certain point, is Marie-Anne Houde’s trial and her death sentence. However,
there is little recollection of her husband’s trial or of the Gagnon couple’s fate in the months and years that
followed.
Télesphore
Gagnon was sent to St. Vincent de Paul prison in Laval to serve a life sentence for manslaughter in the death of his daughter.
He seems to have been a good prisoner, for he was released in 1925 for good behavior. Some versions also have it that he was
stricken with throat cancer. He returned to live in Ste. Philomène de Fortierville, his home town and the place where
Aurore Gagnon had died.
Marie-Anne
Houde spent the summer of 1920 confined in the Quebec City prison. The judge allowed several months between the date of her
sentencing and the date of her hanging, so that she could give birth to the child she was carrying and could nurse it for
the first months of its life. On July 8, 1920, Marie-Anne Houde gave birth in prison to not one but two babies: a boy and
a girl (Roch-Jean and Jeanne d’Arc). They were immediately baptized, with the prison guard and the prison matron acting
as their godfather and godmother.
The birth of the twins awakened in the public a feeling of pity for Marie-Anne Houde, or at least for her newborn babies.
This was one of the factors behind the emergence, in the summer of 1920, of a campaign for clemency in her case, organized
by the Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association. This campaign bore fruit at the very last moment. On September 29, 1920,
two days before the date she was scheduled to hang in the Quebec City prison, the federal Minister of Justice decided to commute
the death sentence of Marie-Anne Houde to one of life imprisonment. She was then transferred to the Kingston Penitentiary,
where she spent most of the rest of her days.”
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For more information
about Judge Louis-Philippe Pelletier and the “Gagnon Affair”, visit http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/gagnon/indexen.html
