Montreal's Top 10 gangland murders: #4 The Lennoxville Massacre

Victims Jean Pierre Mathieu, 35, Laurent Viau, 33, Guy Louis Adam, 31, Michel Mayrand, 29 and Jean-Guy Geoffion, 40

The Lennoxville Hells clubhouse

   The Hells Angels have three rules. No swindles, no shooting (intravenous drugs) and no rape. Technically Yves Apache Trudeau's Laval chapter might not have been violating those rules when they snorted tons of the cocaine they were meant to be distributing.
   But they also surely know that there had been about seven others who had been summarily executed by their own guys for being drugged-out lunatics (including Charlie Hachez and Dennis Kennedy).
   The Sorel Hells adamantly opposed cocaine so on March 24, 1985 the Laval chapter was lured to a party in Lennoxville and summarily shot dead by colleagues.
   Usually these radical purges require a unanimous vote but it's unclear whether these guys got a fair hearing or if they were ambushed.
   The five, Jean-Pierre Mathieu, Laurent Viau, Guy Louis Adam, Michel Mayrand and Jean-Guy Geoffrion were killed on the spot. Their bodies were wrapped in chains and dumped into sleeping bags with concrete inside and dumped into the St. Lawrence River.
   Their corpses were recovered two weeks later.
   About 35 Sorel Hells Angels were on hand for the occasion as were about six affiliates from Halifax.
   To finish the job, Claude Roy, aka Coco Roy was beaten to death two weeks later after a drug deal in room 103 of the Hotel Ideal on April 7 or 8 in St. Basile le Grand by Michel Genest, 26, and Normand (Biff) Hamel. He was considered to be overly loquacious. Genest was sentenced to life for the crime after Linda Lord, 26, Roy's stripper girlfriend gave the address of the blood-soaked crime scene.

 Laval's Yves "Apache" Trudeau was the first Quebec Hells to earn a Filthy Few status by killing someone after the Hells gang came to Quebec in 1977. He survived the executions because he was in rehab at the time. Regis Asselin was also slated to be killed, but he too missed the meeting.
   It should be noted that the gang was also unhappy with Trudeau for organizing a contract bombing to avenge the killing of Dunie Ryan. (See image)
   Trudeau was later asked to kill a fellow Laval biker, declined and was given another person to kill, which he did.

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   When Trudeau subsequently heard that the Hells had a contract out on his head, he turned informant, which led to the arrest and convictions of bikers connected to this massacre: Jacques Pelletier, Luc "Sam" Michaud, and Réjean "Zig-Zag" Lessard, who served as the sort of master-of-ceremonies for the grisly executions.
   Detective Louis De Francisco testified in the trial on August 1985 that others were also "behind the trigger" in the murders, and they included
   Charles (Cash) Filteau, Yvon (Ro) Rodrigue, Robert (Snake) Tremblay and Georges (Bo Boy) Beaulieu.
   Yvon Rodridgue was sentenced to four years in prison and was involved in the subsequent biker war but remains at large and is on Canada's most wanted list.
   Four Halifax bikers tried in Montreal in the spring of 1987 were also acquitted in a separate trial in1987 after a 100 day trial that required a week of jury deliberations: David Carroll, 37, Bernard Hebert, 36, and Michael Christiansen, 37, as was Randall Mersereau, 36, who faced other charges as well.
   Robert Richard, the only one of the four to be acquitted from the original four, picked the Halifax men up in a shiny new Jaguar following the trial. The obese Richard died of a heart attack at home in February 1996.



   Four were convicted of the Lennoxville murders, Lessard, Pelletier, Michaud, and later Tremblay were found guilty on Dec. 3, 1986 after a two months trial and 16 days of jury deliberations. The decision was made by 11 jurors, as one juror, Mario Hamel, confessed near the end that he had taken a $25,000 bribe with more promised for an acquittal. He was kicked off the jury and confessed to the crime. Defense lawyers cried for mistrial.
   Tremblay fled to Europe and was living in England before he was brought back and convicted. He was paroled in 2003 after 17 years behind bars.
   Although the four were sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years, all were released well before those 25 years elapsed.
   Luc Michaud was let out after 17 years. He was originally an independent biker from the Saguenay who ran a strippers' agency before joining the gang. He was to blame for blowing Geoffrion's head off. He quarreled with his fellow-Hells in prison and quit the group early into his incarceration. He was paroled in Nov. 2004 at age 53, so he could work and be with his daughters, even though he was divorced.
   Jacques Pelletier was released on parole in 2008, aged 53. He was re-imprisoned for four months for parole violations in late 2011.
   Lessard, the former Montreal president chapter, who came from a wealthy family, turned into a Buddhist and was paroled a couple of weeks after Pelletier, in October 2008.
   Lessard told a parole board that, "My role was that of a leader. It was me (who ordered the deaths)." He said he didn't pull the trigger however. "With the values we had at the time, it was the only solution."
   The killing brought a lot of heat on the Hells, as cops arrested 80 bikers in about 100 arrests in the months following the murders.
   The gang sold their Lennoxville clubhouse, or made it appear that they did anyway, as they apparently still own it today.
   As a result of the barbaric behaviour, rising biker talent Salvatore Cazzetta refused to join the Hells and started up a rival gang that turned into the Rock Machine, with whom the Hells would later wage a costly war.
   Maurice Boucher would join the Hells soon after this however in spite of the fact that he had already been convicted of sexual assault, which might otherwise have been interpreted to be a violation of one of the three cardinal Hells rules.