You can blame Gregory McMaster for a lot of bad things. He is a multiple murderer who targeted innocent people offering and taking lifts. He has been in the news recently as he repeatedly sues his jailers.He has reportedly never shown remorse for his four murders. I suspect he'll eventually live out his years behind bars.
Everybody likes bikes and electrical buses and windmill-powered solar proton beams but nobody embraces hitchhiking. Thumbing a lift should be an ideologically embreacable method to reduce global warming and smogalicious air. It could demonstrate how strangers can work together and share resources as dictated in otherwise flawless anarchist theory.
But it only takes a few complete assholes to ruin a good thing and one of these was Gregory McMaster, 21, from New Haven Connecticut. He came through here in 1978 with his girlfriend Lori-Ann Sidbury in a $25 Toyota.
The two were from New Haven and had been arrested and charged with burglary in Norfolk Virginia in February.
So when they came up to Canada they were likely fleeing those charges.
He was summering near St. Leonard de Aston near Drummondville. 27
McMaster sold his car for $10 27 after his arrival.
On July 27 McMaster went alone to highway 20 to hitch a ride somewhere.
Louis Bertrand, 17, of Drummondville gave McMaster a lift.
Bertrand stoood 6 foot 4 and worked in a highway restaurant. The two went for a few drinks at the Mezzanine bar in Drummondville.
Eight days after their drinking session Bertrand's body was found rotting near a roadside not far from where the two had been drinking.
McMaster had killed Bertrand and stolen his truck.
Not only had McMaster shot the young Bertrand 11 times in the head to steal his red truck, but on the way west he also killed a hitchhiker named Marcel Girard, 19, who was on his way from Quebec to his home in Pickering, Ontario. The motive for the killing was unclear.
McMaster also confessed to killing a French tourist, Marc Darvogne, 24, in Braintree, Manitoba.
According to reports from the local crime press in August 1978, McMaster's girlfriend was also missing, its unclear whether he killed her.
A cop stopped McMaster after his border crossing stunt and McMaster killed him.
Officer Richard Magnuson, 20, of Roseau, Minnesota was felled with 10 bullets from his 22 caliber pistol.****
Other Quebecers believed to have been killed hitchiking up until June 1977 include Aline Travers, 18, Suzanne Mercier, 18, Jocelyne Beaudoin, 20, Renee Lessard, 23, Lizzie Blacksmith, 15, Bella Brian, Marie-Claire Bouchard, Nicole Demers, 18, and Margaret Coleman, 19.
The province passed a law around then ordering $20 fines for anybody picking up a hitchhiker.
Coolopolis would love to see someone put their mind to developing a new GPS, or cell-phone type of technology to make hitchhiking safe.
In what law is this $20 fine?
ReplyDeleteI still pick p hitch-hikers when I see them (rarely these days.)
My mother, naive as she was, hitchhiked from Montreal to Denver and New Orleans in the late 1940s.She met my father on one of these trips.
I have hitched in many parts of Canada, in lots of Europe.
Yes, there are some bad apples, and my neighborus won't let their kids play in the lane un supervised.
For the record, Lori Ann Sidbury was not killed by McMasters. She moved to California, had a child with a man she met while she was hitch-hiking. He abused her and she moved to Hawaii, where she committed suicide at the age of 26. RIP Aunt Lori.
ReplyDeleteI am cousin to her son
Margaret Jones was not killed, only her traveling companion, Margaret Coleman died. Jones survived and return to Encino, California. :) .
ReplyDeletehttps://soundcloud.com/john-allore/confines-of-memory-the-murder-of-margaret-peggy-coleman-wkt3-8