← Back to the front page

Lesser Known But Intriguing Historic Criminals

Khalid Elhassan October 17, 2019 32 min

U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History - Crime

9. Murder As An Answer

A Canadian Pacific airliner. The New Yorker

Unhappy husband and father Joseph-Albert Guay wanted to win back his 17-year-old lover Marie-Ange Robitaille, but with divorce not being much of an option, he decided to end the marriage by murdering his wife, Rita. He tried poison at first, and offered somebody $500 to do it, but he was turned down. So Guay decided to blow up his wife in a plane.

He got an associate named Genereaux Ruest to make him a time bomb out of 20 dynamite sticks, some batteries, and an alarm clock. He then got Ruest’s sister, Marguerite Pitre, to deliver a parcel containing the bomb, for placement in the cargo hold of the September 9^th, 1949, Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108 – a DC-3 that flew from Quebec City to Seven Islands, a fishing village about 300 miles away. Guay bought his wife a ticket on that plane, telling Rita that he needed her to retrieve some jewels for him.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.