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Next time you're going down that eerie, industrial section of Church Street just south of St. Patrick, ruminate on the plight of Betty Liddell.
Betty Liddell, 20, reported to police that she had been kidnapped from near her home at 2048 (or 2148) Roberval Street in Cote St. Paul on Wednesday 14 September 1949 at 6:20 a.m.
Liddell walking on her way to work on a foggy morning when she was approached near her home, at Roberval and Church next to a parking lot and a pair of large-sized billboards.
A young man in his twenties clad in a blue blazer and grey slacks forced her into a Studebaker with Ontario plates.
A young man about the same age and a girl, aged about 16, were sitting in the front seats.
Liddel later told police:
I was forced to sit next to the other man on the back seat. I protested but he pushed an object into my side that I believed to be a gun. The girl in the front seat said she liked my diamond ring and asked her friend to give it to her. He did it over my protestations. I only got the ring on 30 August and had hoped to keep it more than anything else in the world. They also took my lunch and cigarettes and shared them without offering me any. The man next to me kept hiding his face from me.
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| Betty Liddell, 20 |
The car drove west towards Toronto but Liddell wasn't sure exactly where, as they dumped her out at about 11 pm. at a deserted area near a train tracks in the rain. She waited 90 minutes in the rain until an older woman, who worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital, picked her up to bring her back to Montreal.
The woman dropped Liddell off at the corner of Notre Dame and Atwater and Liddell immediately went to the nearest police station to report her kidnapping. She had not been assaulted in any serious way.
On 16 September police announced they would conduct an investigation. After the ordeal she was informed that she was fired from her job. And then her new husband Joseph Arthur Winsorlow Brisebois, (yes that's how he spelled it), an employee of the weather office of Dorval Airport, filed for a bill of divorce on the basis of adultery.
On 6 October Canadian Parliament in Ottawa
approved his divorce petition along with 21 others, as they were satisfied that the requirements had been complied with to dissolve the marriage.
Betty Liddell's name did not appear again in the news, so there it might be assumed that police never solved her kidnapping or - perhaps more likely - she made the story up as an excuse for her partying with pals.
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Not all divorces were as dramatic. Some were more dramatic.
Edith Harriet Black Hambly of Hampstead was with four kids to accountant Frank Yates Hambly, 52,
5589 Queen Mary Rd. The wealthy couple announced to their family in early 1949 that they planned to divorce.
Frank traveled to his hometown of Sydney, Nova Scotia as part of his regular work as an accountant auditor for Price Waterhouse. He signed into a hotel in Sydney under a false name.
His son Fred, meanwhile, told his mom that he was going to Sherbrooke, Quebec but instead met up with his father at his hotel in Sydney.
Fred, 20, was a labourer and one of Edith and Frank's four kids, Bill, 8, (who became a radio executive who
died in 2020), Jim, 16, and Barbara, 21.
Fred went to his father's hotel room on 16 March, 1949 and the two argued.
Frank suddenly emerged in the hallway screaming "don't let him get out!"
Frank then fell into a pool of blood in the hallway with stab wounds to his stomach.
Police entered his room and found his son Fred dead with a seven inch knife shoved four or five times into his chest. He died a few minutes later.
Fred's death was deemed as a suicide, as he was apparently distraught by his parents' impending divorce. He had left a note but its contents were not made public.
Frank Hambly was brought to hospital and recovered.
Frank and Ediths' divorce was approved in Parliament on the same date as that of Liddell's divorce, on 6 October 1949.
