New Brunswick's First

Last week New Brunswick wrote the final sentence in a murder case rarely matched for rustic deviltry.

The backwoods Bannisters, for all their advantages of fresh air and beautiful scenery, lived in a condition of squalor equal to that of any city slum. Heavy, truculent Mother Bannister was the township's "fast woman." In peaked caps and corduroy breeches, her sons, pinheaded Daniel and grinning Arthur, snared rabbits in the woods. So irredeemably relaxed were the Bannister morals that a Salvation Army officer assigned to improve their lot ended by undoing 13-year-old daughter Marie. At about that time the Bannisters got their bright idea.

Mother spread consternation through the backwoods by announcing that she was about to have a baby. Stumped by the legal difficulties of adopting one, she bought a life-sized doll, swaddled it heavily, paraded it along the roads. She convinced a railway worker named Milton Trites that it was his. After that he bought the Bannisters groceries, the doll a crib. Mrs. Bannister told the Salvation Army worker that it was his by her daughter Marie, but he declined to contribute. This boom-time for the Bannisters ended sharply when the railway worker expressed a desire for a long, close look at his child, whom he thought of by now as Thyra Milton Trites.

One night last January, the Bannister boys and their 15-year-old sister Frances tramped seven miles through the snow-muffled forest to the Pacific Junction cabin of one Phillip Lake who-lived with another man's wife and his two children by her. He had a baby daughter who might be kidnapped and palmed off as Mrs. Bannister's. The boys shot and killed Lake, chased his naked woman into the snow, clubbed her to death, left her 20-month-old son Jackie floundering in the snow beside her, set fire to the cabin. Jackie shortly froze to death. The Bannister boys kidnapped Lake's six-month-old daughter Betty Ann. Arthur's idea of destroying the evidence was to break his .22 rifle over the railway track and throw it into the snow. The boys' tracks led over the river and through the woods to the Bannister house near Moncton. There police soon found Betty and the doll, as well as the mate to a mitten dropped beside the dead woman's body.

Son Arthur Bannister's trial for murder in Dorchester was enlivened by tall, red-coated Royal Mounted Police Sergeant Bedford Peters' fainting in the witness box, as he examined the late Phillip Lake's gold teeth. Arthur was summarily convicted of murder.

Mother Bannister enlivened her trial, the first for kidnapping in New Brunswick, by howling so industriously in her wooden cage that the lawyers had to shout back & forth. The jury acquitted Mrs. Bannister of kidnapping, found her guilty of extortion and of "harboring" Betty Ann, a crime involving a maximum penalty of three and a half years in jail.

Last week pinheaded Daniel Bannister was convicted of murder, the jury recommending clemency. The judge called up the two youths and, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, muttered, "I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead and may Almighty God have mercy on your souls."

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