19. Blowing Up an Airliner With Wife in it to Collect on Life Insurance
Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108, a DC-3 airplane, took off from Quebec on September 9th, 1949. Headed to Seven Islands, a fishing village three hundred miles from Quebec, the flight route roughly paralleled the Saint Lawrence River. There were four crew members and nineteen passengers, including three children. En route, Flight 108 was to land at Baie Comeau, but it never got there. At 10:45AM, about forty miles northeast of Quebec, there was an explosion. The plane plummeted straight into a wooded hillside called Cap Tourmente, and all aboard perished. They included Rita Guay (nee Morel), the 29-year-old wife of a Quebec jewelry salesman named Joseph Albert Guay, who seemed devastated by his loss. In reality, Guay had blown up the plane to get rid of his wife and cash in on her life insurance, as a prelude to marrying his mistress.
French Canadian Guay, a slim and handsome small man, met and married Rita Morrel during WWII. The marriage soured when the couple had a baby, and Rita’s attentions turned from Guay to the child. Simultaneously, Guay’s jewelry and watch sales business began to fail, and he piled up debts. At the same time, Guay met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old waitress named Marie-Ange Robitaille, and under the false name Roger Angers, began a torrid affair with her. Although drowning in debt, Guay bought Marie-Ange an apartment near his house, and asked her to marry him. When Rita, who was carrying on her own extramarital affairs, found out, she confronted the duo. Divorces back then in Catholic Quebec were next to impossible. So when Marie-Ange found out that her lover was a married father, she dumped him.
