What attracted you to the story of the last hangings in Canada? To my understanding, the double execution took place almost 50 years ago. Why write a book now, after all these years?

The story of Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas, the last two men to hang in Canada in 1962, is largely a forgotten one. In fact, many people don’t ever remember their names, often confusing them with members of the bank-robbing Boyd Gang, who died almost ten years to the day before they did, on the same scaffold at Toronto’s Don Jail.

I’ve been fascinated with true crime since childhood, and was fortunate enough to be raised by parents who encouraged me to read newspapers and magazines daily. One of my favourite writers was, and is, Max Haines, whose Crime Flashback columns appeared every Sunday in The Toronto Sun. I always admired Haines’s restraint when it came to gruesome details, as he focused more on the character of the individuals involved than blood and mayhem. You are what you do, but what makes people do bad things? Is it something from their childhood? Are men and women born to be criminals? That’s something I concentrate on in my book, The Last to Die. A good deal of it discusses the early lives of Turpin and Lucas, and I let the reader decide for him or her self how their childhoods affected their later lives.

There are many reasons why I wrote a book about the last hangings in Canada. Back in 2001, I was working at Maclean’s magazine, and while in the library, I stopped at the Canadian history section. Flipping through one of John Robert Colombo’s books, I caught an entry about the date of the last executions in Canada. Since the next year (2002) marked the fortieth anniversary, I thought it would make an interesting history piece, which was the kind of thing the magazine published at the time. When my article ran in December 2002, the magazine received letters about my piece, and I had all sorts of strange calls at work. Cryptic stuff, like “If you only know what really happened that night at the Don Jail,” and “the guards had to wear leather aprons to clean up all the blood.” While some people would find calls like this disturbing, I was intrigued.

There’s a lot of detail in the book. Where did it come from? How did you go about researching the book?

I tend to over-research, even when I’m working on a short article. I guess it’s my personality type, but when I’m interested in a subject, I want to know everything, not just the usual who, what, where, when and why, but how. People fascinate me, and why they do what they do – from saving lives to taking them – intrigues me. Like most writers, I started my research with information that was readily accessible, mainly old newspaper and magazine articles. This soon spread to many other sources, including the 3,000-plus pages of trial transcripts themselves, then material from the Library and Archives in Ottawa, the Archives of Ontario, and the city of Toronto archives. Unfortunately many people connected to the cases of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin are dead – in fact, most of them, including the cops who arrested them, the chaplain who was their spiritual advisor, the doctor at the Don Jail, and the hangman – are all long gone. I was fortunate enough to connect with others, including policemen, family members, friends, and lawyers, who were willing to talk.

Getting hold of other material was a long and sometimes frustrating process. In Canada and the United States, there are extremely strict rules in place for protecting privacy under the Freedom of Information Act and Access to Information. Even though these crimes took place over 40 years ago, the acts are designed to protect living individuals. After lots of letters and phone calls, I was able to obtain records on Turpin and Lucas, and other deceased persons connected to them. This included police records, rap sheets, jail log books, legal files, and more. Some of the information was censored, and every piece of paper had to be eyeballed by the authorities before it was released. I was fortunate to get materials, including photos, from family members of people connected to the cases, and also used radio transcripts and archival video from television stations. This material was useful for adding little details that make the book more colourful, like someone’s body language during a police or psychiatric interview, how they dressed, their tone of voice, and more.

Who will read this book?

True crime buffs will definitely be interested, but so will anyone keen on Canadian history, the judicial system, policing, the city of Toronto in the 1960s, and victim’s rights.

Victim’s rights?

Yes. The Last to Die is not just a retelling of what happened to these two men, but what happened to others involved, especially the family of the police officer killed by Ronald Turpin. One of the biggest criticisms of true crime books is the glamorization of the killers. This is true to a degree, and something I was determined to avoid. In my opinion, a lot of true crime books concentrate far too much on the perpetrators, and not nearly enough on the victims or their families. For the murder victim, their problems are over, they’re dead, but what about the family left behind? The wife or husband? The kids? How do they cope, not just emotionally, but financially? In the case of the murdered police officer, he left behind a housewife and four young girls ranging in age from 11 years to just two months. Some members of Toronto’s City Council did everything they could to prevent awarding her a pension, so she was left with limited resources. This is something not many people are aware of: there really was no pension plan in place at the time for the families of policemen killed in the line of duty, and this particular murder changed all that.

Did you change your mind about capital punishment after writing The Last to Die?

That’s the question I get asked most often, and the answer is yes. The issue can, and will be, argued pro and con for decades to come. It is unsolvable. A lot of people go about DNA and modern forensic techniques being used to solve crimes, but the great issue is, who deserves to die, and why? There is a huge discrepancy between some drunk who kills another man in a barroom fight, and a professional hitman seeking specific targets, or serial killers like Clifford Olson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Paul Bernardo preying on victims. The drunk in the bar didn’t wake up in the morning planning on committing murder; the others did. I hope my book reminds people that our country did have capital punishment, and fills a space in the history of criminal justice in Canada.