Manslaughter Mayfair Ave. affair: what an NDG teen did when he got tired of his stepmom

   Louis Di Benga, 15, shot his stepmother Adrienne Frenette, 36, dead at 4544 Mayfair on Oct 3, 1935.
  Here is his confession.

 My father remarried November 1932 and since then things did not go well. My sisters had to move out. I was sick of it so just before supper I went into my father's room and took his gun and put seven bullets inside and went downstairs to set the table. After supper I went to lie down. A little after 10 pm when my stepmother went up to her room I shot a bullet in the back of her head.

   Louis' brother Michael and father Felix heard the shot and ran upstairs.
  "What did you do?" asked dad.
 "I killed her," said son Louis.
  Michael ran to alert neighbour Tom Carveth at 4530 Mayfair. Dr. Murray arrived but it was too late to save Frenette.
   Felix Di Benga had moved into the home with his Irish-Canadian wife and their children seven years earlier. He was an engineer-mechanic between jobs after working at Dominion Bridge and Peter Lyall.
   His second wife Adrienne was French Canadian from Bathurst, New Brunswick.
   Louis Di Benga was described as tall and dark. He had few friends and read a lot. He going to be late to school nearby that morning so he chose instead to skip the day and go to a movie downtown. In the afternoon he returned a magazine to a neighbour that he had borrowed.
    A coroner's jury needed only one hour to find Louis Di Benga criminally responsible for the death and he was charged with murder on Oct. 7, 1935. The charge was later dropped to manslaughter.
   He told the court how his stepmom made life "a hell on earth."
   Louis was sentenced to just 20 months in March 1936, (backdated to the previous October, so it meant just 15 months.)
   His father Felix appears to have lived until at least 1981 in Ste. Rose Laval when his name pops up in a couple of bankruptcy notices.
   Just days earlier, a pair of teenage boys had killed a merchant in a high-profile downtown event described in the retail chapter of Montreal 375 Tales, available now on Amazon, Indigo and Paragraphe. 

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Stories like this fill the must-read Montreal: 375 Tales of Eating, Drinking, Living and Loving, order your paper copy here now or buy it at Indigo or Paragraph.

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