Rampage (10 page)

By the time he reached Central Police Station, Bilodeau had calmed enough to offer a full confession to his crimes. Having notified the interrogator that he had shot five members of his family in the St. Therese de Beauport woods, he was immediately taken to the area to help the police locate the victims. They found the three murdered women soon enough, but the encroaching darkness complicated the search for Gaston and Fernand. Their lifeless bodies were finally retrieved the following evening by a joint provincial- and city-police taskforce.

Held criminally responsible for all six deaths, Bilodeau was tried only for the murder of Octave Fiset. Following a brief trial from January 24 to 29, 1935, he was found guilty of murder by a jury in the Court of King’s Bench and sentenced to death by Chief Justice Albert Sevigny. The date of the execution was set for April 12, 1935. Bilodeau’s defence counsel appealed the verdict on the grounds that he had been temporarily insane. Though the appeal was unsuccessful, their attempts bought their client an extra two months of life. Rosaire Bilodeau died at the end of a hangman’s rope on June 14, 1935.

Going Postal

Preceded only by the Australian James Hanivan, Bilodeau was an early pioneer in a phenomenon that would come to baffle Western society: going postal. In fact, the plethora of workplace killings committed by post office employees throughout the 1980s and 1990s became so unignorable that the term “going postal” actually came into widespread colloquial use to describe anyone who embarked on a rampage murder. Fox and Levin address this in
Extreme Killing
, explaining that “between 1983 and 1993, eleven separate murderous incidents occurred in postal facilities, claiming a total of thirty-four lives.”
[28]
In her
Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers
, Ramsland gives a figure of thirty such incidents “over a ten-year period resulting in fifty-four deaths.”
[29]
Moe Biller, president of the American Postal Workers Union, publicly attributed the phenomenon to the postal service’s “quasi-military structure and culture.” Complaints levied by postal workers around the country included joyless authoritarian managers, the burden of delivering everything on time regardless of weather conditions, a disdainful public attitude toward their profession, and unstable job security.

Kay Feely      

Robert Poulin

The St. Pius X School Shooter

“I don’t want to die before I have had the pleasure of fucking some girl.”

Victims:
2 killed/6 injured/committed suicide

Duration of rampage:
October 27, 1975 (difficult to classify)

Location:
Ottawa, Ontario

Weapons:
Knife; 2200 Winchester shotgun

The Monster in the Basement

Once upon a time, in the sleepy city of Ottawa, Ontario, there lived a young boy named Robert Poulin. Robert had two older sisters, one of whom still lived at home. His father, Stuart, was an elementary school teacher; while his mother, Mary, worked as a nurse. The Poulins inhabited a Tudor-style home in Old Ottawa South. Until fire trucks arrived at the two-and-a-half-storey residence on Warrington Drive on October 27, 1975, they lived an idyllic family existence. Outwardly, Robert seemed normal and well-adjusted: a reliable newspaper delivery boy who attended Catholic church every Sunday. He possessed a keen intellect which he sharpened war-gaming with friends, either in person or over the telephone. Another favourite hobby was assembling model airplanes. The military held a place of reverence in the Poulin home. Before middle age, Stuart had been a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force — a path that Robert wished to follow. Unlike his father, however, he was flabby, near-sighted, and pigeon-chested — incapable of fulfilling the traditional masculine roles championed by his society. While other males in similar situations learned to compensate with wit or charm, Robert was crippled by shyness. In truth, other than a stable and loving family, Robert’s mind was all he had going for him. And like a sapling sprouting in inhospitable terrain, it would grow to be warped and misshapen, hunching over itself in a self-imposed prison of masturbation.

When Robert was twelve years old, Mary gave birth to a third daughter. With this new addition to the household, the Poulins decided to move Robert into the basement, where he would have more privacy. There, behind the thin curtain concealing his “room” from the rest of the cellar, the bespectacled child slowly transformed into a monster. Despite experiencing a delayed puberty, Robert obsessed over sex and developed an unhealthy addiction to pornography. He adorned his walls with Playboy centrefolds; kept photographs and ads of naked and semi-nude men and women in a scrapbook; and using a P.O. box, slowly accumulated 250 pornographic books and magazines — all of which he meticulously indexed. In a loose-leaf binder he filled eleven pages with almost a thousand “ratings” of images. Eventually, his tastes veered into the sadomasochistic, particularly pictures of women handcuffed to bedposts. “There are some girls at school that I would love to be good friends with but I know that I am still too shy to go up and talk to any of them,” Robert confessed in his diary in September 1972. “I wish I could overcome this fear of women.” In grade ten, at his parents’ urging, Robert invited an attractive and vivacious girl named Kimberly Rabot over to his house. The two teens passed the time playing Risk, and unsurprisingly, little transpired from the encounter. Over the next three years, Kim would linger in the young man’s fantasies like an erotic thorn.

Seemingly, Robert’s solution to his girl problems was to resort to violent coercion. In his diary he described his plans to take a woman by force, masking his identity with a balaclava. Around this time, he purchased an ivory-handled knife and a .38 snub-nosed revolver. “I have a half hatched idea about other illegal acts besides rape … about using the gun to rob people at night,” he scrawled. On April 7, 1975, Robert wrote that he was suicidal but that he didn’t “want to die before [he] had the pleasure of fucking some girl.” Fortunately, he had discovered a blow-up doll, retailing for $29.95 through a California mailing house, which he believed would solve all of his existential problems. “Now I no longer think that I will have to rape a girl, and am unsure as to whether or not I will commit suicide.” Unsurprisingly, Robert’s new inflatable bed buddy failed to satisfy his needs, and his thoughts soon returned to sexual violence. Though we cannot confirm his involvement, around this time a number of women filed complaints about indecent assaults and attempted rapes in his neighbourhood. The perpetrator reportedly fit Robert’s description, and on some occasions was naked save for a balaclava.

While Robert’s pornography obsession is reminiscent of the spree killer
Peter John Peters
’s, he also shared mass murderer
Marc Lépine
’s deluded military aspirations. He applied for an officer training program, lying that he was an active participant in team sports. When his deception was uncovered, he was denied admission for being “immature.” Like Lépine, he did not take the rejection well. In the summer of 1975, he enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders militia as a private, receiving both militia and commando training. Though he seemed to enjoy the experience, other members recalled a wallflower who “sat alone in the camp lunch room staring into space, and … only … talked to anyone … when they talked to him.” Where they laughed, he merely smiled shyly. Moreover, Robert avoided discussing his family like the plague. Privately, his suicidal fantasies had incorporated a decidedly sadistic twist, directed at his mother and father. Rambling in ink, Robert expressed his desire to burn down the Warrington Drive home before he offed himself, without ever explaining why. “I was going to make sure, though, that I burned the place down soon after payday so that they would lose the largest possible amount of money,” he wrote. “I was also planning on having all my earthly possessions with me so that they won’t gain one red cent from me.” Amazingly, after the violence to come, his parents would remember him as “never hostile and not the kind of person who held a grudge.”

Yanking the Thorn

At 8:00 a.m. on Monday, October 27, 1975, Robert Poulin left his home on Warrington Drive in search of his number one crush: Kimberly Rabot. Fifteen minutes later, he returned with the beautiful seventeen-year-old. How the awkward Robert managed to lure her into his trap is anyone’s guess, but once they had entered the basement through the garage door, he took control of her. Handcuffing her to his bed, he raped her before fatally stabbing her fourteen times with a knife. At some point preceding or following the murder, Robert placed a plastic bag over her head. If Kim was still alive at the time, Robert could have used the bag as a crude torture device — depriving and providing oxygen at his own behest.

Mary Poulin had heard her son’s coming and goings that morning but taken little interest. At 10:00 a.m., she entered the basement and asked Robert if she could speak with him.

“Yeah,” Robert’s voice replied through the closed curtain. “But don’t come in.”

Not wishing to invade her son’s privacy, Mary explained that she had scheduled an appointment at the optometrist’s for him, and returned upstairs. Robert entered the kitchen an hour later, and Mary made him a peanut butter sandwich, which he ate while blankly watching a television game show. Mary left to run some errands at 11:30, only to return two hours later to find smoke billowing from an upstairs window.

It was 2:00 p.m., and four kilometres away at St. Pius X Catholic high school, Father Robert Bedard was commencing his grade thirteen religious studies class. Just when he thought the last of his students had arrived, the door burst open to reveal Robert Poulin grinning wickedly with a 2200 Winchester shotgun in his hands. He began firing as seventy-eight students scrambled for cover. The shots ripped through their flesh, the air filling with buckshot, bellowing, and blood. Frantic, some of the students tossed chairs through the windows, clambering to safety past the broken remnants of glass. The classroom floor strewn with groaning bodies, Robert stepped back into the hallway and blew his own brains out.

When the carnage had ended, only one other student succumbed to what Robert had described as the “true bliss” of death. Shot in the neck and head, eighteen-year-old Mark Hough would later die from his wounds. Six other students suffered injuries, three of which were serious. The shotgun that had been used to maim them had been bought four days earlier at Giant Tiger for $109. Eventually, Kimberly Rabot’s body was recovered from the fire; the knife that had been used to kill her taped to Robert’s convex chest. His mission had been accomplished: he had died smiling.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police      

David Shearing

The Wells Gray Gunman

“I guess I won’t be as hated as Olson is. I know a lot of people who wanted to kill him.”

Victims:
6 killed, 1 separate incident of vehicular homicide

Duration of rampage:
Between August 6–13 and August 17, 1982 (difficult to classify)

Location:
Wells Gray Provincial Park, British Columbia

Weapon:
.22 Remington pump-action rifle

The Watcher in the Woods

On a warm August night in 1982, a dark stranger stalked through the pines of Wells Gray Provincial Park toward the sound of voices. He was owl-like in appearance, hook-nosed, with round powerful shoulders hunched over the stock of his .22 Remington rifle. He had first laid eyes on the girls a day before, when they were laughing and skipping around the old prison site in their bathing suits. They were the perfect age — like firm little peaches before ripening. Earlier, he had seated himself on a hilltop above their campground, masturbating as he fantasized about what he would do once their parents were out of the way. When the girls retired to their tent, he descended onto the main road and crept toward the camp. The clouds were hanging heavy over Bear Lake, smothering the stars. He took up position behind the camper. In the fire’s golden glow, he could make out the silhouettes of three people seated, and another standing. One of the women spotted him and stood up. He stepped into the clearing brandishing the rifle.