Shirley and Alfred: Love affair killed by murderous FLQ terrorists

   Shirley Turbee was eating dinner in downtown Montreal with a friend in June 1953 when she spotted a natty blonde man in a pinstriped suit at another table.
   "I thought my friend knew him. So I was looking straight at him. He started laughing. My friend turned around. She didn't know him. He came over and started chatting with me."
   Alfred Pinisch then met Shirley for their first date, coming to see her in the recreation room of the YWCA where she claimed a certain prowess at Chinese Checkers.
   Pinisch grew up in Germany of Polish-German extraction where he witnessed the war, a war which saw his father Peter jailed for opposing Hitler.
   Shirley came to Montreal alone in 1951 from an English sugar plantation family in Barbados where she was raised by her mom. Her father ran the luggage room at Grand Central Station in New York City.
   She landed work on the same day she arrived in Montreal and toiled as a Canadian Pacific Railway secretary in an office at the Board of Trade Building and rented a reasonably-priced apartment on Maplewood.
   Pinisch toiled on St. James, and lived on Dorchester and worked at a sporting goods store.

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    He was an avid outdoorsman, keen on cross country skiing and participated in various rifle shooting tournaments. The two frequently enjoyed dining out at the St. Moritz restaurant at the southwest corner of Stanley and St. Catherine (now a coffee shop).

See also: 50 years ago today -2 killed in FLQ robbery

   Shirley and Alfred wed six months after meeting and lived in a small shoebox-style home at 6540 Clanranald, attending dinners at friends homes and picnics and parties.
   Pinisch was quiet and hard-working but didn't much enjoy working at the International Firearms at 1007 Bleury, although he didn't mind working for them occasionally at their plant in St. Alban's.
  The couple had a son and then another nine years later but Shirley worried about her family during the political turmoil of the separatist movement.
   She called her husband at work after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. "I hope nothing ever happens like that here," she told him.

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  The young family's nightmare began on Aug. 29. 1964 when two heavily-armed FLQ terrorists burst into the store at 1040 Bleury to steal weapons.
   Officer Raymond Dufault, 22, was driving by, transporting a drunken vagrant to the police station, when the call came in.
    He parked near a gas station and joined two police colleagues. They had two suspects lying on the ground.
   The officers asked Dufault to go to the back of the store to watch the back door.

International Firearms closed in 1969 after being
attacked and looted during the police strike
Gerry Lamarche, a six year employee, was out of a job.
The store moved to Miami. (Don Dutton, Toronto Star)

  Meanwhile an employee in a white smock, Laureat "Bob" Gagné, flagged Dufault down near Viger and Bleury and brought him inside the store where he saw Manager Leslie McWilliams, also sporting a white employee smock, was rapidly dying after being shot by the terrorists.
    Gagné did not mention that there was another employee unaccounted for.
    Dufault heard noises from one of the two staircases to the basement and was suddenly face to face with Pinisch, who was not wearing the white uniform, wielding an M-16 in order to take on the terrorists.
   "My life depended on my reflexes," Dufault, now 75, told Coolopolis.
   Officer Dufault shot six times, hitting Alfred Pinisch twice.
   Pinisch identified himself as an employee only after he was on the ground. He died at the scene.
   "Judges and coroners have months to make their decisions but when you're in the action you have a fraction of a second," said Dufault.
    Dufault said he thinks about the event frequently with great remorse.
    He went on to work 33 years in the Montreal police department, retiring at the rank of Sergeant in 1994.
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   "I was waiting for him to come home for dinner when someone phoned me said there was an accident and your husband was involved. I asked "was he hurt?"
   The person was agitated and said "calm down!" over and over.
   "Why can't you tell me how he's hurt? He cant be dead!"
    Shirley, who just given birth to her second child, not only lost the  man she loved but also the family's main breadwinner.
    "At Al's funeral the priest asked (International Firearms store owner William) Sucher, 'what will you do for this family?'
   Sucher said 'we're going to set up a trust fund for the children,' Shirley Pinisch told Coolopolis.
   No such trust fund was ever set up.
   Pinisch noticed a distraught stranger at her husband's funeral.
   "He kept shouting at me, 'I'm sorry madam.'"
    It was Dufault, the officer who accidentally shot her husband.
    She said rumour had it that the officer went mad and died but she now knows that not to be the case.
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   Author Ronald Lee, best known for his Montreal-centric Godamn Gypsy (Tundra 1971) was a part-time clerk working at the store that day.

    I knew Alfred Pinisch and Leslie McWilliams, I worked part time on Saturdays and I had just left the store before the robbery an hour later. I was actually having a beer in the tavern up the street and I heard the sirens. Pinisch was in the basement working and he grabbed a rifle loaded it and was coming upstairs to confront the robbers when a cop saw him and shot him thinking he was one of the robbers. McWilliams was shot by one of the robbers. Bob who was in the back of the store escaped during the robbery and called the police. Pinisch was a big immigrant German guy, young about six foot or so, good natured and friendly and a good gunsmith. I describe the store in my novel. I used factual events and it gives a good idea of what it was like to work in the store in the early 1960s.*

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   Meanwhile Shirley Pinisch, in her grieving, started getting threatening phone calls suggested she leave Quebec with her children. She feared they might be kidnapped, so Sucher gave her money to go back to Barbados for four months until the pressure blew over.
  When she returned she brought back a housekeeper to watch her child.
  "I called Sucher to ask him about the trust fund. He said 'you're a healthy young woman and you can find a way to manage.'"
    She eventually took any work she could get, working as a secretary in the daytime and selling cosmetics at night, while helping with wedding photography on weekends.
   The schedule forced her to rarely see her own children, she now laments.
   Her maid, she later learned, had taken to beating her two sons.
   The trauma and stress had taken its toll on the two boys who had a tough time thereafter, with the older child suffering psychological trauma from the loss of his father and the subsequent family turmoil.
   Pinisch wishes things could have turned out otherwise but had no choice in the matter.
   "I was worn out. I worked myself to the bone," she said.
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   Pinisch did not attend the trial for two FLQ terrorists responsible for the murderous event, which also saw manager Leslie McWilliams shot dead by the thieves.
   Belgian immigrant Francois Schirm, 32, attempted to make a mockery of the proceedings by representing himself while wearing army fatigues. He was arrogant and unapologetic and grinned frequently, as the judge noted when sentencing him and his younger partner in crime Francois Guenette to death on May 22, 1965.
   Some pressured Prime Minister Trudeau to commute the death sentences. Schirm was eventually sent to life in prison. He was an old man when he was released and died soon after.
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   Pinisch remarried a man working at the St. Lawrence Seaway. She left with him to Toronto when he was transferred in 1974. Two years later he started having heart issues and then became ill-tempered and was diagnosed with brain cancer and died soon after.
    Pinisch, now in her 80s, has since remarried for a third time to a man now in his nineties.
   She fears for the fate of her two adult children when she's gone and their ability to cope.
   She received any compensation for the disaster still holds out hope that police, government or some other person will step up and set up a fund to her her sons.

*More from Albert Lee: If Alfred Pinisch didn't like somebody there it was probably William Sucher, the boss/owner.  Nobody enjoyed working there but times were hard in the early 60s especially for immigrants and people like me (Roma)  and you did what you could to survive. I didn't know Pinisch well. He worked down in the basement with firearm conversion and repair, I worked upstairs with the typewriter and business machinery section  with Bob Gagne selling and repairing office equipment for Crown Equipment which was the same company as International Firearms in the same location on Bleury Street .  We worked on a part-time basis punching cards and got no paid holidays or vacations I also did other work elsewhere so I could survive. McWilliams was not very sociable, he was the immediate boss of everybody, I didn't like him or dislike him I just really didn't know him. My only real friend there was Bob Gagne who later started his own business machinery business and got an early foot into the computer business .After my book was publishedi n 1971 I moved on into journalism and lost all contact with the Bleury sweatshop. Basically, Crown Equuipment got all its junk machinery from Crown Assets Disposal a federal government agency and International Firearmas got its weapons from arsenal sellouts in Europe and elsewhere, old WW 1 and WW 2 stuff like the Carcano 6.5 Italian  carbines one of which was sold to Lee Harvey Oswald through the Chicago mail order outlet , Incidentally, a marksman from the Van Doos examined these Carcanos after the assassination and said they were not very accurate and he doubted if anybody could have hit a moving target from the spot where Oswald is said to have fired at president Kennedy. They were short cavalry carbines from WW 1 and has seen a lot of use in the past. I have a nice Hindu talwar that I bought while working there. I had a narrow escape from oblivion while working there. There was a restaurant across the street, a real gulp and vomit place, with cheap meals and I used to cross over, but a take out dinner and eat it back in the business machinery workshop. One day a guy ahead of me was entering the restaurant when a big chunk of masonry fell from above the door and sent him into eternity. A few seconds later this would have been me.