My father defended two killers, and it ruined his life
Life Sentence: How My Father Defended Two Murderers and Lost HimselfIn 2016, my father, Ed Bell, lay dying in the Moncton Hospital. A secretive man, he had reluctantly asked me to go into his home office to look for some papers. As I was rummaging around in the filing cabinet, I found a set of six Polaroids lying at the bottom of a drawer. In two of the photos, a man with long, shaggy hair and an open shirt looks straight at the camera, his face and chest bruised.
My dad answered: “Because the police were beating him so badly, I thought they were going to kill him. I took the photos as proof.” He refused to say any more. When he got there, Ambrose was being interrogated and beaten in various offices of the Moncton Police, whose station was downstairs from the jail where he was being held. The policemen were desperate for information about their colleagues, who by then had been missing for two nights in bitterly cold weather. Most of the local police and RCMP were out looking for them, as well as hundreds of civilian volunteer searchers.
The same spirit of altruism motivated the Toronto lawyers who defended the infamous Boyd Gang killers, Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan, in 1952. Suchan had shot and killed Detective Sergeant Edmund Tong during a traffic stop, and both he and Jackson were charged with murder. Suchan’s mother, an office cleaner for prominent lawyer J.J. Robinette, begged him to help her son, and Arthur Maloney, an up-and-coming young barrister, agreed to defend Lennie Jackson.
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