Free Practically Perfect by Dale Brawn Page B

adjourned to give investigators more time to gather evidence. Before it adjourned, however, jurors heard from the two provincial medico-legal experts assigned to the Genest case. They testified that Rita died from two skull fractures, inflicted by a blunt instrument with a narrow edge, and that she was dead when her bedroom was set on fire. Their conclusion was based on both the extent of her head injuries, and the fact there was no trace of carbon dioxide in her blood. The last anyone heard about the investigation was a brief report published a few days after the murder. According to the newspaper article, Montreal homicide detectives had absolutely no clue who murdered Rita. For the next twenty-one months her file lay untouched.
    That changed on February 19, 1953, when the nude body of a woman was discovered lying in a farmer’s field on Île Bizard, a small island now a suburb of greater Montreal. The woman was found about one hundred feet from a much travelled road, and had been badly beaten about the head. She had also been stabbed numerous times. A near total absence of blood at the scene suggested to investigators that the victim was murdered elsewhere, and her body transported to the field. As one detective noted, “There was hardly any blood around the body, which leads us to believe she was carried there in a blanket after being knifed and hammered to death.” [2]
    Although the body of the woman lay in their morgue, the police had no clue who she was. They ran her fingerprints through their own database and that of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the searches produced no leads. They decided to publish a photo of the woman’s face in local newspapers and invite Montrealers to visit the city morgue. Their appeal attracted an assortment of the morbidly curious, and those desperate to know whether the corpse was that of a missing loved one. For two days and nights hundreds of men, and a few women, slowly walked by the gurney on which the body lay. The detective leading the investigation made no apologies for what his team of investigators did. “Some of these people were just curious” he said. “But they claimed the victim’s description fitted that of someone they knew. We can’t take chances, because our only chance of learning who the woman is lies with somebody that knew her.” [3] Ultimately, that somebody was her mother. Two hours after she and two sisters of the victim identified the missing woman as Marie Paule Langlais, the police took Roland Genest into custody as a material witness. Forty-eight hours later he confessed to the murder, although there is considerable doubt he did so voluntarily.
    According to Genest, after the police picked him up on a Montreal street they took him to a police station, where he was put in a cell. The next morning officers read him his rights, and began questioning him about what he knew of the murder of Langlais. All he admitted was that he saw her the day before her body was found, and that the two had a disagreement. Langlais accused him of flirting with another woman. And that was that, at least according to the detectives who interviewed Genest. They said that when they returned to his cell the following day, they again read him his rights, but this time he wanted to get something off his chest, and he began talking. By the time they were done Genest confessed not only to killing Langlais, but to taking part in the murder of his wife as well. At least that was the official version of events. Genest saw it differently.
    He said after he was picked up one of the investigating officers came into his cell alone. The detective took off his rings and watch, rolled up his sleeves, and began hitting him. For fifteen minutes the officer punched him in the face and body, and he smashed Genest’s head on a table. By the time the policeman tired, Genest said he was ready to confess. The detective then stopped hitting him, took out a statement already written on a piece