In 2003 I did a phone interview with Vital Lemire, a prisoner from the Port Cartier prison where he had been sentenced to stay indefinitely after being designated a dangerous offender in 2001.
I didn't see why he merited such a harsh treatment as his crimes didn't involve particularly nasty violence.
Lemire was a Duplessis Orphan and suffered serious abuse and neglect as a child.
Lemire was hit with 10 counts of sexual assault after customers, aged 13-45 reported him to police in 2000. His therapies included chest massages to help breasts grow, deep kissing to cure throat warts and injections of sperm into vaginas to cure Aids.
Lemire, who had spent five years in Cowansville prison for similar practices, claimed he had earned a special diploma from an institute in Brazil.
His cure for arthritis consisted of subjecting patients to near boiling hot baths, as well, he’d slide his “Magic Thumb” deep into vaginas to crush ovarian cysts.
He had lost all of the fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident, all but his purportedly magic thumb.
During our little chat he surprised me by mentioning that he had committed other serious crimes.
For some reason, I didn't encourage him to explain what he was referring to, possibly because I realized subconsciously that such information might wreck my angle that he was being punished too harshly.
However 10 years later Lemire confessed elsewhere that he had killed two men, including Roger Roy, a fisherman from Cap Chat in 1975. They went hunting together and Roy was never seen again. Police questioned Lemire about it but nothing came of it.
Lemire also killed Adjutor Lapointe in Chicoutimi in 1980. Lemire was moving some furniture with Lapointe, who was never seen again. Lemire drove around in the guy's car for a couple of weeks afterwards, claiming that Lapointed had given it to him.
Lemire died of natural causes in prison on March 5, 2019. He was 73.
Here's the article I wrote that was published in Saturday Night Magazine in 2003.
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Of Canada's 357 inmates now sitting indefinitely behind bars as dangerous offenders, none boasts a more famous digit than Quebec's Vital Lemire, a.k.a Le Pouce Magique [magic thumb].
In 1998 the 57-year-old father of eight from Lac St-Jean, already familiar with the sound of jail doors slamming, let it be known far and wide that his right thumb could do great things.
Lemire’s stubby oppositional stands out, well, like a sore thumb, as the other fingers on his hand were detached above the knuckle in an work accident he suffered after being forced into farm labour as an orphan at 13.
Somewhere along the line the digit allegedly developed the powers to heal a variety of illnesses, its touch could allegedly help breasts grow.
When pressed, it could crush female cysts in areas that the Chicoutimi sun has not been known to shine.
From a shack decorated with a diploma from a little-known Brazilian healing institute, Lemire diagnosed and promised to cure diseases from AIDS to cancer to throat warts, which he promised to heal through French kissing.
But this isn’t a tale of head-shakingly gullible women being taken by a nutty naturopath, according to Lemire’s lawyer Pierre Gagnon, who argues that the women operated under the principle that a thumb supremacist fool and his money are quickly parted.
“He told them he was rich and they believed it, they thought they would benefit from his supposed wealth.”
Lemire frequently flashed a notarized, but fake document boasting a $13 million fortune and constantly promised to buy gifts for his patients.
But even Lemire never fully believed in the magic of his thumb, says Gagnon, "it was just some sort of sexual fantasy he was pursuing."
A judge observed that Lemire had been convicted for what Gagnon describes as "just about everything in the criminal code," which led to the order to keep him in prison indefinitely.
Lemire gives thumb down to the verdict and says that he never claimed he could cure any ailments, "I deny it all," he says from his Port Cartier prison cell.
Lemire blames police enemies for his plight and says that his reclassification into dangerous offender status was the fruit of a broken-hearted Crown Prosecutor who he spurned in romance years before.
But Lemire admits other past crimes, which he says started after his father committed suicide and he became a ward of the state during the Duplessis era.
In those years parentless children were routinely sent to insane asylums and farm labour jobs. Lemire recently received a $11,000 government cheque to compensate for his ordeals as a Duplessis Orphan. He plans to appeal his conviction in April.