Fifty Years from Riverview

By Sunday evening, the shocking news came out that the missing officers had been found in the forest, shot dead. Both suspects were behind bars. The murder trial took place in Moncton the following year, and my boss, despite his firm conviction of their guilt, was chosen for jury duty. He was later selected to be foreman. Ultimately the jury found both men guilty. They received death sentences, which were commuted to life imprisonment in 1976 when the laws changed.
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While revisiting these events, I learned of a significant byproduct of this tragedy. In the spring of 2023, a history professor named Amy Bell at Western University in London, where I now live, published a book called Life Sentence: How My Father Defended Two Murderers and Lost Himself. Amy was a baby at the time and knew nothing of the crime or the trial until her father disclosed a few morsels of information on his deathbed, decades later. Some members of the public were hostile towards the young defense lawyer, Ed Bell, who was simply doing his job. The threats and abusive behaviours destroyed his marriage, his career and his health.

Amy’s book dispels some misinformation, and also reveals a vast amount of detail about the case. Despite the fact I knew exactly where he lived, she propelled me right back to 1974 when I spotted the black-on-white words saying that Hutchison resided on Suffolk Street in Riverview. It feels appalling and eerie to have been connected, even in a peripheral and superficial way, to this horrendous crime.