Ol' man Alderic Brodeur was murdered on the first floor at 6649 D'Iberville.
He was 83 and lived at the above abode with his wife, a daughter and a 16-year-old granddaughter Liane.
On the evening of 15 November 1945 Brodeur was sitting around listening to the radio, Theatre Chez Nous.
Liane Labelle, 16, asked Brodeur to change a light bulb in the shed out back.
The old man waited for the program to end and then brought his dog out back.
He apparently fell and died.
But the cops were suspicious and a coroner determined that the massive head wound was too severe to be from a fall from a ladder.
Dead man Bordeur's wife pointed out that it was odd that the dog didn't bark through any of this.
Cops started to think it must be a family member, because the dog would surely have barked at a stranger.
Well Liane had a 19 year old boyfriend who had recently moved here from Detroit.
His dad died when he was four and his mother returned here to her French Canadian homeland.
Edsel Harris had been laid off from Continental Can two weeks prior to the old man's demise.
He was spending most of his time as a pool shark.
Liane had told him that her grandpa sometimes pinned up to $200 to his underwear. So Harris unscrewed lightbulb, and Liane sent the old man in.
Harris hit him with undue force and grabbed $140 cash and bought a new suit. Liane got three years in prison, her mom got 5 years for perjury.The jury took 10 minutes to find Harris guilty.
In spite of pleas to have the teen's sentence reduced to manslaughter (manslaughter is man's laughter, as the anarchists used to say).
Judge Wilfred Lazure ordered Harris hanged 23 August 1946, two weeks after he turned 20. Harris told the hangman,
"It's okay, I'd rather hang than spend the rest of my days in a jail cell."
Harris, who lived at 6649 des Ecorces, didn't testify and was charged with contempt.
Talk of an appeal led to nothing, alas.
After all this, the home was inhabited by a guy named Romain Bertrand and then by the late 50s some nobody named Henri Legault lived there and stayed for quite a long time.
This man, Alderic Brodeur, was the grand-father of my mother. We know this story, but the mother never go to jail, just the teen girl, and she was in jail for 5 years.
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