PAUL ROBERT SOLES (1930-2021)
“Imagine sitting down to question someone wearing a terrifying black mask with slits cut out for eyeholes! That’s what happened to CBC reporter Paul Soles in a television interview with Canada’s last hangman just before capital punishment was abolished in 1976.”
Excerpt from Drop Dead: A Horrible History of Hanging in Canada
Looking like a deer caught in the headlights, Soles started by asking executioner John Ellis if he wore the mask for executions.
This was part of their conversation:
Paul Soles: Why are you wearing a black mask at this time?
John Ellis: This is just to keep my identity a secret.
Paul Soles: You don’t wear it at the time of an execution?
John Ellis: No. All I wear is a black suit, black bow, white shirt, and black shoes…. I’m not there to frighten him. I’m there to execute him.
Ellis made it clear that he was a firm believer in capital punishment. Asked about opponents of hanging, he told Soles: “they don’t realize just how humane it is. Unlike electrocution.… People want to die rather than spend life in prison.”
Later in the interview, Soles asked: “If the vote goes for abolition, and there’s no longer a need of a hangman, how do you think you personally will feel?” To which Ellis replied without hesitation, “Well, I’ll feel that I’ve served the country in the best way that I know how.… I have met the requirements that the country required. I’ve done my job and I’m retired.”
As I note in Drop Dead, the vote did go for abolition in 1976, putting an unceremonious end to Ellis’s professional life. According to one account, the retiree, then in his fifties, took to spending the winter months in Florida like thousands of other Canadian snowbirds; another report in 1984 had him living in the Bahamas. What is known for certain is that Ellis was not short of pocket money during his first few years of retirement. In November 1985, the Toronto Star reported that Ontario paid a “provincial executioner” $200 a month for a period of 8 years after the abolition of the death penalty, which, according to provincial auditor Douglas Archer, amounted to the tidy sum of $20,000.
Paul Soles, described in his Globe and Mail obit as “an actor, voice man, pioneering television broadcaster and twinkle-eyed adventurous soul with a hair-trigger wit,” died in Toronto on May 26, 2021. It is interesting to speculate whether Soles knew of this ironic turn of events in the life of Canada’s last executioner. And, if so, with his laser-sharp sense of humour, what he made of it.
