On a hot August day in 1955, Ronald Reid, then 17, decided it was a good idea to rob local dry goods merchant Bennie Spellerman.
Reid had heard Spellerman had a cool $20,000 stashed in his store.
The Cardinal, Ont. teen proceeded to unleash a bloodbath. Spellerman was shot in the mouth, the back and the thigh, stabbed 10 times, and the back of his skull was pulverized with a broom handle.
Reid was arrested by OPP detectives and, following a quick trial, was sentenced to hang that November. That didn’t happen. When I wrote about him in 1997, 42 years later, he was still in Kingston Pen.
Cops recommended that he be spared because of his age, and in the language of the time was “slightly retarded.”
Reid’s long prison journey came to mind on Friday morning as I read about the death of Eugene Raymond Benoit.
Benoit, 69, pegged out at the Regional Treatment Centre at the Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, B.C. on July 13 of what officials called “apparent natural causes.”
He had been in the joint since Feb. 23, 1987, and was serving that rarity in Canadian corrections, an “indeterminate sentence.”
Of course, the only way you get hammered with that kind of time is if you’re a serial pedophile or a killer. Too often, not even then.
Benoit fits into the latter category.
Still, it was surprising to discover he’d been in the slammer for 37 years. No one in this country gets fitted up with that kind of sentence anymore.
Poor Ronald Reid, even though his life was spared, what he had left was all but worthless.
Benoit forfeited his life — at least figuratively — for the brutal May 1986 murder of Canadian National Railways dispatcher Henry Stanley Pylypiak, 50.
On May 9, 1986, Pylypiak and CN co-worker Gordon Stanley Miller embarked on a two-day booze-a-ramma in Port Moody, B.C.
The pair — earlier kicked out of the victim’s daughter’s home — ended up at Benoit’s house where they continued to drink away the day with Charles Stewart McLetchie and the killer’s gal pal, Brenda Norrish.
From there, the party came off the rails in a haze of alcohol and stupidity. Words were exchanged.
Miller and Benoit pummelled Pylypiak with a baseball bat, but it was Benoit who delivered the fatal blows that caused the railroader’s death, one witness testified. For a day, Pylypiak’s body was stashed in the backyard before it was moved around the Lower Mainland, covered in lyme and then buried.
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Benoit was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years. That decade of ineligibility turned into the rest of his life.
He appealed his sentence in 1991, claiming that it was “unreasonable.”
Here’s a sliver of the hearing: “Miller then began hitting Pylypiak with it (the bat). He was poking him with it. He was hitting him in the lower body. He was ramming it into him. Benoit then reached over and took the bat from Miller saying that’s not the way to do it. He put the bat over his head and brought it down on Pylypiak’s head. Pylypiak was still sitting on the ground. Blood went flying everywhere. McLetchie said that he panicked and ran out of the house.”
The appeal was torpedoed.
As we know, in most cases, the system bends over backwards for men like Eugene Benoit. Not this time.
Benoit never faced the possibility of hanging. As it turned out, it might have been a happier option.
@HunterTOSun