← 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

7. Guay Discovers He Was Not as Clever a Criminal as He Had Imagined

Joseph-Albert Guay in custody. Montreal Gazette

After Flight 108 was blown up, Joseph Albert-Guay made it easy for investigators to ID him as the culprit. On the same day his wife boarded the plane, Guay had taken out a $10,000 insurance policy on her life, which he tried to cash in just three days after the plane crash. Investigators also tracked down Marguerite Pitre, who had brought a parcel for delivery by Flight 108.

Pitre admitted that Guay had instructed her to place the parcel in the plane, and eventually confessed that he had told her the package contained a bomb. Guay, Pitre, and her brother the bomb maker Genereaux Ruest, were all arrested, tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. Guay was hanged in 1951, Ruest in 1952, and Pitre in 1953.

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.