When Richard Blass burned 13 to death at the Gargantua Bar

The second-most evil act ever committed in Montreal happened behind this door at 1369 Beaubien East three decades ago.
   William Duckworth was born in 1865 in Bolton England and at age 26 he married Maria Louisa Smith, born in the same year in the same town and the two moved to Montreal lived at this address from at least 1930 until he died in 1945, Maria remained here until her death in 1949.
   The next year the abode became Hanna Lingerie, by 1954 Kay Anna Lingerie and 1959 Gay Town Sportswear Company took over the spot.

• Related: The faces of the Gargantua victims
• Montreal's Top 10 gangland murders: #3 Richard Blass

   By 1961 it had become a pool hall called the Salle Rodiers, which was right across from Brasserie Moderne.

   Soon after a former police officer named Rejean Fortin took it over and soon he and many others would be dead in two acts of unspeakable cruelty at this address.
   This was indeed the Gargantua bar where Richard "The Cat" Blass came one week after escaping prison October 23 1974 - he smashed the glass that divided prisoners from visitors - and hopped over to this bar to murder Raymond Laurin and Roger Levesque, who he believed should also have gone to prison for the robbery the three committed ensemble.

   He returned January 21, 1975 with buddy Fernand Beaudet and killed everybody inside the place for fear they'd be witnesses in the prior crime.
   Ten men and three women were locked in a room and the door was blocked by a jukebox and torched. The 13 murders was the city's worst mass murder until Marc Lepine came along and killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique. Cops found Blass three days later and shot him dead.
   After the catastrophe, the unit became The Twentieth Century Dance Registered in 1980 and by 1996 became something called Solidarite Psychiatre.