Women team up for mayhem: Top female scofflaw duos from Montreal

Wong and Clark

  Lucienne Wong, 26, and Penny Clark, 29, escaped the Fullum Protestant Womens Prison in April 1949. Both had been sentenced for heroin selling. Wong was sentenced to three one-year sentences

   It wasn't Wong's first run with the law. At the tender age of 18, in 1940. she was married to a Chinese-Montrealer and had two kids with him when she was caught with burglary equipment.

   "It's untrue. I never saw those tools. It's a story the dicks (cops) made up. They don't like my husband and so they busted me. What would I be doing with such tools in the street? is it my fault my husband is a thief?," said Wong. She dodged jail time that time, as a judge sentenced Wong to time served in September 1940.   

Perp walk after Wong and Clark captured

   Wong was sentenced to a year in Fullum Jail on 29 March 1949 for processing and selling heroin in a St. Catherine Street. restaurant. Clark was also sent to Fullum Jail for drugs. 

  The two inmates were washing windows in the prison kitchen at 9 p.m. when they used chairs and tables to climb 20 feet up to a vent in the old greystone building and then got over a 12 foot fence outside. 

   They were found a few days later in a rooming house on Beaver Hall Hill. Provincial police celebrated their capture with an evening perp walk for the cameras.  

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Servant, Tremblay and Servant again after capture

Gertrude Servant

   On 23 July 1954 Gertrude Servant and Georgette Tremblay escaped the Fullum Jail late on a Tuesday evening 23 July 1954. 

   Servant had become known as a sort of femme fatal film noir-type celebrity criminal following her role in the death of owner Bert McAbbie at her gang's robbery of the Au Lutin Qui Bouffe restaurant in January 1953.

   She was in jail awaiting trial on those charges when she escaped.

   Tremblay, who stood 5'5" and weighed 204 lbs, and was considerably less glamourous, had been sentenced to two years for being in a gang that defrauded unemployment insurance.

    They were rounded up fur days later at Lac Desert, north of Mount Tremblant. Tremblay said that she escaped because she found her two year sentence too long. 

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Eleanor Cook

  Eleanor Cook, 30, of 1565 St .Urbain and Marcelle Lalonde, 30, 1550 Mackay, stole a pair of prison keys and left the Fullum Jail out the back door before climbing over a fence on 9 September 1945.

   Cook, who had been behind bars for six weeks in jail for drug possession, was captured about 10 days later in Toronto. A judge added one year to her initial sentence for the escape. 

  Cook, undeterred, escaped once again the next month, this time with Claire Pomerleau, 22, who was serving 18 months. The duo climbed through an 18-inch sunroof on a glassed-in verandah and then got out down from third floor on construction scaffolding.

   This time Cook managed to stay in five months away, before getting rounded up in Quebec City in April 1946 for vagrancy. She gave police a fake name but her fingerprints betrayed her real identity.

  She asked for - and received - a relatively hefty a two year sentence, which meant that she'd get to stay at Kingston Penitentiary rather than return to Fullum.

   "I didn't break out. The doo was open and I just walked out," Cook told the judge. 

     Provincial police captured Pomerleau a day after Cook and a judge sentenced her to an extra year behind bars for the escape attempt. 

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Fullum Jail

   Needless to say the Fullum Jail was not much fun. 

   The John Howard Society denounced it as filthy and its matron admitted that it needed a major rethink because howling, poop-tossing women who belonged in insane asylums were placed next to young girls awaiting trial and hardened criminals. 

   The facility was designated at the time for Protestant women but overcrowding at other facilities forced it to be overcrowded and inmates were forced to sleep on bunkbeds rather than cots. 
       Inmates frequently rioted and routinely set the Fullum Jail ablaze. There was even a hunger strike in 1945 when young girls were put in the facility. 

   The women were transferred to Tanguay Prison, next to Bordeaux Prison, in November 1963. 

  The Fullum building was finally torn down in July 1964 and replaced by the Parthenais Provincial Police tower, which also contains jail cells. See also: Margaret Stone's Montreal prison diary

   Sylvia Duffy, 28, of 6420 Somerled #401 and Lilian Hercovitch, 30, (aka Lillian Hearn) of 5300 Walkley #203, were arrested after committing several armed robberies of local motels in August 1963. 

   The gun-toting women were finally busted after taking $90 from the cash of the Cadillac Motel at 5800 Sherbrooke East. 

  They had also robbed the Cavalier Motel at 6951 S. James at 3:25 a.m. on August 10.  They also robbed the Laurier Motel in Brossard of $50. 

   Their modus operandi was to ask to rent a room and then whip out the gun. 

    The Samedi tabloid also described another robbery in Repentigy that did not appear in other articles.   At the Pax Motel in Repentigny, the duo supposedly tied up the cashier. Their 17-year-old getaway driver failed to evade police chasing his Chevrolet on the road to Quebec City. 

   The women, who reports implied were a lesbian couple, ran a delicatessen restaurant on Somerled and ran up a hefty debt on lavish vacations. 

   Their sentence or subsequent fates remain unknown.