17. A Desperate Scheme to Lose a Wife and Win Back a Mistress
Guay figured he could win Marie-Ange back, but first he had to get out of the marriage. Divorce not being an option, he decided on murder. It would free him to remarry, and Rita’s life insurance would alleviate his debts. Guay tried poison at first, and offered somebody $500 to do the deed. That was rejected, so he decided on murder by plane. Guay enlisted the help of an associate named Genereaux Ruest to make a time bomb. Ruest in turn enlisted the help of his sister, Marguerite Pitre, who bought dynamite, fuses, and detonation caps at a hardware store – explosives were easily obtained back then. Ruest, who was owed money by Guay, made the bomb out of twenty sticks of dynamite, batteries, and an alarm clock. Guay then sent his wife off on Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108, to run an errand for him in Baie Comeau.
The scheme hit a last minute hitch. Guay and Rita argued at the airport, because she did not want to board the plane. He ultimately convinced her that it was necessary that she fly to Baie Comeau to retrieve some jewels he had purchased there. He had already paid for the ticket, and his business – and the family’s finances – would suffer otherwise. Reluctantly, Rita got on the plane. She should have listened to her instincts. At roughly 10:45AM, people on the ground near the small village of Sault au Cochon, forty miles northeast of Quebec, heard an explosion in the sky. Looking up, they saw an airplane, trailing smoke from its left wing root. The plane made a sharp turn to the north, then dove straight down into nearby Cap Tourmente, a tree-covered hill.
