Guy and Dorch features a red cross on the corner to signify death.
It has been there since 1737.
It ain't there for nothing.
Some of the deaths near that corner include:
Many of these stories are in my upcoming Montreal: 375 Tales of Eating, Drink, Living and Loving.
But here's one you haven't heard:
A crazed, love-stricken gunman named J.S. Moll, a 30-year-old father of six from Alexandria, Ontario* broke into the building where now stands the Canadian Centre for Architecture, on 2 Sept. 1962.
The Sisters of Service occupied the site until 1973 and 70 young women lived there in '62.
Lorraine Therese Kenney, 29, from North Sydney Nova Scotia, was one of those inhabitants.
Two months earlier she moved to Montreal from Toronto to be closer to her family in the Maritimes.
Moll climbed up a fire escape, at 1 a.m. Sunday morning, pried off a metal grille to get inside and spotted Kenney, who he mistook for his intended victim.
Most of the women had taken off for the weekend but the insane Moll figured that if she was sporting a blue skirt, white shirt and blonde hair, it must be the woman he sought revenge upon.
So from five feet away he squeezed the trigger on his .303 British war rifle and blasted away, hitting Kenney in the head, killing her immediately.
The innocent Kenney had zero to do with the insane man's issues.
Moll fled but a witness recognized the shoes that he left at the scene and he was soon after arrested.
*The Gazette article, written the day after the killing, offers a different version from the Petit Journal account from a week later. The Gazette reports that the gun man was from Cornwall and had two kids, not six and that he was apprehended after his father-in-law alerted police that he was dangerous. The Gazette reports that Kenney was 32, not 29.
It has been there since 1737.
It ain't there for nothing.
Some of the deaths near that corner include:
- Guido Pucci, murdered at the hotel on the northeast corner in 1984.
- Eugene Desjardins, lovable restaurant owner was run over by a car in the rain around 1945.
- 31 kids burned to death at the Grey Nuns place in 1918.
- Wayne "The Vampire Killer" Boden, of 1831 Dorch, killed a neighbour in 1969.
- 16 died in a 1958 fire on Oldfield, then at the foot of St. Matthew, in 1958.
- Elaine Reade, killed by a speeding car in Feb. 1985.
- Michael Kibbe attempted to flee the cops on Guy and fell to his death in 2001.
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| Lorraine Kenney |
But here's one you haven't heard:
A crazed, love-stricken gunman named J.S. Moll, a 30-year-old father of six from Alexandria, Ontario* broke into the building where now stands the Canadian Centre for Architecture, on 2 Sept. 1962.
The Sisters of Service occupied the site until 1973 and 70 young women lived there in '62.
Lorraine Therese Kenney, 29, from North Sydney Nova Scotia, was one of those inhabitants.
Two months earlier she moved to Montreal from Toronto to be closer to her family in the Maritimes.
Moll climbed up a fire escape, at 1 a.m. Sunday morning, pried off a metal grille to get inside and spotted Kenney, who he mistook for his intended victim.
Most of the women had taken off for the weekend but the insane Moll figured that if she was sporting a blue skirt, white shirt and blonde hair, it must be the woman he sought revenge upon.
So from five feet away he squeezed the trigger on his .303 British war rifle and blasted away, hitting Kenney in the head, killing her immediately.
The innocent Kenney had zero to do with the insane man's issues.
Moll fled but a witness recognized the shoes that he left at the scene and he was soon after arrested.
*The Gazette article, written the day after the killing, offers a different version from the Petit Journal account from a week later. The Gazette reports that the gun man was from Cornwall and had two kids, not six and that he was apprehended after his father-in-law alerted police that he was dangerous. The Gazette reports that Kenney was 32, not 29.