A Night's Work for Mr. Ellis

A hunched little man in a dark suit walked into Munro's hardware store in Edmonton last week and asked for 80 feet of seven-eighths inch sisal rope. The woman clerk who waited on him paid scant attention to the $11 sale. So far as she knew, the wispy customer was just another farmer, in town for the day, buying rope to break a balky horse or fix a hay lift in the barn.

The rope served a more somber purpose. By nightfall it had been expertly cut and knotted into two nooses that swayed from the main beam of a double gallows in Fort Saskatchewan Jail, 20 miles away. Shortly after midnight, while a small group of witnesses looked on, the nooses were slipped over the black-hooded heads of two convicted murderers. The dark-suited little man, known professionally as Mr. Ellis, checked to make sure that the slipknots fitted snugly behind each man's left ear. Then he sprang the trap door and the prisoners plunged downward to die.

Skilled Hand. Mr. Ellis is Canada's closest approach to an official executioner. Legally, when a death sentence has been passed, the execution is the job of the county sheriff, but most sheriffs prefer the help of a skilled hand. They telegraph to the sheriff of York County, Ont., one of the few Canadians who knows Ellis' real name. A reservation is made for his services and Hangman Ellis slips quietly into the appointed town a day before the hanging is to take place.

From the prison records, Ellis gets the condemned man's height and weight, then computes the distance the victim must drop to meet the legal requirement that three cervical vertebrae be fractured or dislocated to snap the spinal cord and bring quick death. Ellis does not see the prisoner until a few minutes before the hanging when he steps into the death cell, quietly says "good morning" and straps the man's arms behind his back.

Efficiency Check. Canada's present unofficial hangman learned his trade and adopted his name from an earlier Hangman Ellis* who died in 1938. The earlier Ellis worked in a frock coat and striped trousers and sometimes sported a gardenia in his lapel. Occasionally he handed a stop watch to a newsman attending a hanging, so as to check on his own efficiency. His successor, an Ontario farmer, goes in for no such display.

After his assignment in Edmonton, Ellis stayed overnight in the jail, collected his fee (usually $100 a subject), then caught a train for Vancouver where two more convicted murderers are to be hanged this week.

*Who took the name from John Ellis, a British hangman from 1901 to 1924. The British Ellis hanged 203 criminals before he cut his own throat.

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