The Evangeline Woods Murders: The 1974 Moncton Police Executions and the Executioner's Shadow

The December 1974 Moncton police murders remain one of the most agonizing chapters in the history of Canadian law enforcement, a case born of an amateurish ransom plot that rapidly spiraled into cold-blooded execution. The tragedy began on the bitterly cold night of Friday, December 13, 1974, in Moncton, New Brunswick. Two masked men, later identified as 26-year-old Richard Ambrose and 45-year-old James Hutchinson, broke into the suburban home of Cy Stein, a prominent local restaurant owner. Finding only Stein’s elderly mother and his 14-year-old son, Raymond, the intruders bound the grandmother to a staircase railing and abducted the teenager, pulling a balaclava backward over his head to blindfold him (Ambrose v. The Queen, 1977).

The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $15,000 in ten-dollar bills, a sum Cy Stein hastily assembled and dropped in a canvas bag near the Riverview Mall as instructed. Although Raymond Stein was released physically unharmed, the city was instantly plunged into a state of high alert. By the early hours of Saturday, December 14, the Moncton Police Department had launched a massive dragnet to locate the extortionists.

Corporal Aurele Bourgeois, an 18-year veteran of the force, and Constable Michael O’Leary, a 32-year-old father of three, were patrolling the snow-slicked streets in an unmarked cruiser when they spotted a suspicious Cadillac. They radioed dispatch to report they were tailing the vehicle, marking the final transmission anyone would ever hear from the officers (CBC News, 2023).

What followed was a harrowing sequence of events reconstructed through subsequent interrogation and forensic evidence. Ambrose and Hutchinson realized they were being followed and managed to ambush and disarm the officers at gunpoint. The criminals forced Bourgeois and O’Leary into the Cadillac and drove them to a remote, heavily wooded area near Evangeline, New Brunswick. As they were matched into the deep snow under the threat of death, the two officers exhibited extraordinary presence of mind, desperately trying to leave a trail for their colleagues. Corporal Bourgeois secretly tore his driver’s license into tiny fragments, dropping them into the snow, while Constable O’Leary slipped off his inscribed wedding ring and let it fall along the path (Bell, 2020).

Upon reaching a clearing, the kidnappers handcuffed the officers to a tree. Finding the December ground frozen too solid to dig, Ambrose and Hutchinson actually drove back into Moncton to purchase picks and shovels, leaving the officers captive in the freezing wilderness. Two hours later, the men returned, forced the officers into shallow graves, and executed them using the officers’ own service pistols (Global News, 2024).

The breakthrough in the investigation came later that morning when police spotted the Cadillac back on Mountain Road in Moncton. Ambrose was at the wheel and was immediately arrested. A search of the vehicle yielded $5,500 of the ransom cash and the keys to the missing officer’s cruiser. Driven by desperation to find their colleagues, investigators subjected Ambrose to a brutal interrogation, which later resulted in allegations of police brutality during the trial. Shortly thereafter, Hutchinson was also apprehended. On Sunday, December 15, search teams following the physical tracks and the tragic trail of dropped items discovered the freshly disturbed earth on Evangeline Road, unearthing the bodies of Bourgeois and O’Leary (Bell, 2023).

The 1975 trial of Richard Ambrose and James Hutchinson became a national sensation, defended by a prominent local lawyer named Ed Bell, whose daughter, historian Amy Bell, later documented how the immense community backlash and psychological toll of defending the despised cop-killers ultimately destroyed her father’s career and health. The Crown presented an airtight case, utilizing the recovered ransom money, the vehicle keys, and ballistics matching the stolen service weapons. The jury found both men guilty of capital murder, and following the statute of the era, the trial judge sentenced both Ambrose and Hutchinson to death by hanging (Bell, 2023).

The case immediately became a political lightning rod across Canada. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government was actively pushing to abolish the death penalty, while police associations and retentionists use the brutal Moncton murders as their primary argument for keeping capital punishment as a deterrent to protect law enforcement. Ambrose appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada, citing the hostile pretrial publicity and his mistreatment in custody. In the landmark July 1976 decision Ambrose v. The Queen, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, ruling that despite minor errors in the trial proceedings, the evidence was so overwhelming that no reasonable jury could have reached any other verdict (Ambrose v. The Queen, 1977).

Before the execution could be carried out, Canada officially passed Bill C-84 in July 1976, abolishing the death penalty entirely. Consequently, the death sentences for both Ambrose and Hutchinson were automatically commuted to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years. James Hutchinson remained incarcerated until his death behind bars in 2011. Richard Ambrose legally changed his name to Richard Bergeron while in federal custody and has spent over half a century in prison, making him one of the longest-serving inmates in Canadian history. Over the decades, Bergeron has repeatedly applied for both unescorted temporary absences and full parole, but due to the cold-blooded nature of the executions and the enduring trauma inflicted upon the Moncton community, the parole board has consistently denied his release, ensuring he remains behind bars to this day (CBC News, 2023; Global News, 2024).

References

• Ambrose v. The Queen, [1977] 2 S.C.R. 717. Supreme Court of Canada.

• Bell, A. (2020). Cop-Killers, Emotion, and Capital Punishment in Moncton, New Brunswick: The Ambrose and Hutchinson Case, 1974-5. The Canadian Historical Review, 101(4), 541-565.

• Bell, A. (2023). Life Sentence: How My Father Defended Two Murderers and Lost Himself. Goose Lane Editions.

• CBC News. (2023, December 14). Five decades later, Moncton remembers the tragic loss of Cpl. Bourgeois and Const. O’Leary. CBC Archives.

• Global News. (2024, December 13). Moncton marks the 50th anniversary of the line-of-duty murders that shook a nation. Global Atlantic.