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Poor Betty Liddell, loses job and husband after being kidnapped in Montreal
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...
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Women team up for mayhem: Top female scofflaw duos from Montreal
Wong and Clark Lucienne Wong, 26, and Penny Clark, 29, escaped the Fullum Protestant Womens Prison in April 1949. Both had been sentenced for heroin selling. Wong was sentenced to three one-year...
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Lillian Adler, Baroness of Huszar: How she landed in Montreal jail
Lillian Maria Adler Baroness of Huszar busted in Montreal Lillian Maria Adler, 40, the widowed former Baroness Huszar of Hungary, came to Montreal in September 1954 and her visit was not short on...
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René Vaillaint - rapist taxi driver led gang that preyed on women
René Vaillant and Ovila Vaillant René Vaillant was a 28-year-old taxi driver living on De Courcelles near Notre Dame in St. Henry in 1950 when he recruited his brother and two minors to kidnap and...
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Head race - the Montreal canal forgotten to time
Montreal's head race was a narrow waterway south of the Lachine Canal that ran east of Cabot Street and flowed to way to St. Remy St. The head race not only disappeared from the map but became...
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New old photos from St. Lawrence, Montreal's gritty, grimy, sleazy Lower Main
Well over 100 nowhereians, mostly men, overflowed the sidewalk in front of Cafe Canasta - now Cafe Cleopatra - on St. Lawrence a couple of doors south of St. Catherine in September 1960. Martel The...
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Molson family long inhabited bizarre mansion with tunnels at St. Lawrence and...
Folly on the Main The gas station at the corner of the Main and Sherbrooke was once home to an eccentric mansion nicknamed Torrance's Folly, a title critics devised to mock its unreasonably remote...
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Francis William Desmond - Polygraph test exonerated Montreal black who spent...
William Francis Desmond Police arrested William Francis Desmond on 27 October 1962 and charged him breaking into a fourth floor home on Dorchester Boulevard W. Desmond had a job and lived with...
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Montreal 375 Tales excerpt: French Mary, 1880s barkeeper poured drinks and...
French MaryFrench Mary's: De la Commune E. & St Gabriel (c. 1879-1906) Sailors emptied glasses aplenty at French Mary's waterfront music hall, named for owner Thomas Burdette's wife, Sorel-born...
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Vic "Pretty Boy" Levesque: Heartless, psychotic gang leader wasn't even handsome
...and beardedVic Levesque shaved Vic "Pretty Boy" Levesque (1941-1970) was indulged, pampered and spoiled as a child in Cornwall, Ontario - according to his rueful mom - before he organized one of...
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3 rapes and a murder: Kahnawake Mohawk Johnny Montour exonerated after 1957...
Generic hitchiking photo The tragic drowning death of nurse Mireille Levesque, 20, led authorities to charge Kahanawake Mohawk Johnny Montour, 28, with three counts of rape and one murder, even though...
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Man of a thousand scams: Fraudster Wilfrid Rene Morin was the undisputed...
Morin in 1944, aged 40 If a stranger came to your door handing you a box and asking for Cash On Delivery...or told you he was a watch repairman there to collect your husband's watch... or told you he...
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John Wilkes Booth, in Montreal, boasted that he'd kill Abe Lincoln - Montreal...
St. Lawrence Hall 139 St. James (1851-1910) At a time when food was dirt cheap, Montreal's top hotel insisted all guests sample fish, steak, chops, ham, chicken, turkey, rissoles, and 10 other dishes,...
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Did Canada goose step into the opening ceremony at the 1972 Munich Olympics?
Canadian weightlifter Maurice Allan, (1927-1990), the chef-de-mission for the Canadian Olympic team in the 1972 Munich Olympics, vigorously led Canada's Olympians in West Germany, striding with...
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Downtown venue saw 1800s crowd-surfing, a racism dispute and a sexy Egyptian...
Academy of Music 9 Victoria (1875-1910) Crowd-surfing, a blind piano prodigy and an early anti-racism lawsuit coloured the history of this 2,000-seat venue, which made the mistake of being built on...
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'Maybe the best damned actor in the world': The rise and lull of Montreal...
Michael Sarrazin entered the world in 1940, the son of Enid Scott and Bernard Sarrazin, a prosecuting attorney who became a Montreal city councillor and later a corporate executive in Toronto....
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Donald Matticks suffers major health setback
Sad news from the world of old time West End Gang circles as Donald Matticks, 57, has reportedly suffered a stroke that has currently left him paralyzed on one side of his body. His long-term...
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The NDG that got disappeared - photos of Notre Dame de Grace demolished and...
Around 1073 Prudhomme. Houses were demolished in the mid-1960s for the Decarie Expressway The Pulcini family in front of 941 Minto, a home - and street - demolished in 1964 for the Decarie...
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Triple murder at Haddon Hall - was bloody revenge behind an unsolved downtown...
Ill-fated Donna Andrade and Teddy Thompson in court, 1975 Donna Maureen Andrade, 26, and her boyfriend Robert Theodore Thompson, 28, were living the downtown Montreal life in 1974 when things...
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Slitkin & Slotkin: Postwar Dorchester Blvd bar was home to the nuttiest of...
Slitkins grips bubbly, Slotkins adds up cash: 1947 Slitkin & Slotkin 1235 Dorchester W. Boxing promoters Lou "Slitkin" Wyman and Jack "Slotkin" Rogers punched above their mythological weight,...
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