The theme of this podcast is “out of the ashes”. In the case of a murder in 1935 in the Moncton area, the ashes revealed evidence that resulted in two brothers being convicted of murder and hanging, along with their mother being charged with kidnapping – the first in New Brunswick to be charged with that. In the second fire, rising out of the ashes of the Covered Bridge Potato Chip factory in Hartland is a continuation of a great product with the promise of a new facility being built right on the same site.
[00:00:00] Welcome, Dan B Traveler, where we talk about New Brunswick stuff. Today I'm going to be talking about two fires that took place in New Brunswick.
[00:00:13] One of those fires occurred in 1935 in the Moncton, New Brunswick area and resulted in the first kidnap charges that were ever made in the province. A second fire occurred in Heartland, New Brunswick just this year on March 1st when the Covered Bridge Potato Chip Factory burned down.
[00:00:37] I'll start with the Potato Chip Factory fire and then follow that up with that tar paper shack near Moncton that burned in 1935. So get ready. Here they come.
[00:01:02] On December 13 I did a episode on Covered Bridges in New Brunswick and at that time I mentioned about the Covered Bridges Potato Chip Factory that was located in Heartland, where the longest covered bridge in the world is located. Tragically that factory burned to the ground on March 1st.
[00:01:22] But out of the ashes, only a month later, company president Ryan Albright announces that the company has produced its first product since the fire, using other facilities that have stepped up to run some of the production.
[00:01:39] He said that he was able to tap into his connections as a potato broker selling potatoes to chip companies across North America, to find a handful of facilities that could take on lines, a covered bridge chip production in the short term.
[00:01:56] A company is shipping all raw materials, everything from flavors, potatoes, bags and oil to those locations where he and his staff have trained workers to make the products.
[00:02:09] The company was back in production 27 days after the fire, since many of the raw materials were off-site in other area warehouses, which were untouched by the fire at the main facility.
[00:02:24] Covered bridge potato chips is one of those New Brunswick companies that's locally owned and interested in rebuilding and staying in the community. If you see any of their chips in your local store, buy some. You may just find that Grammy's recipe for chip making will be the earliking.
[00:02:45] Today I was reading a story about the first people that were ever charged with kidnapping in New Brunswick. It is one of numerous stories in the book Maritime Murder, Deadly Crimes from the Buried Past, written by Steve Vernon.
[00:03:06] The author dug up the dirt on 19 of the deadliest maritime crimes from 1770 to 1918. Six of those murders occurred in New Brunswick. Mae Bannister was the one that was charged with kidnapping, while her two sons, Arthur and Daniel, were additionally charged with murder.
[00:03:30] Mae's daughter Frances had also accompanied her two brothers when the murder occurred, but was not charged perhaps because of her youth. The whole crime occurred because Mae needed a baby. She had convinced Milton Trites that he was the father of her most recent baby.
[00:03:51] Milton owned the local general's store and Salvation Army Center, and it was easy to convince him that he was the father since he had slept with her many times. In fact, he was so convinced that he began providing food for Mae, her two sons, and her two daughters.
[00:04:12] She would show up at the store with the baby wrapped in several blankets and carried on her hip, refusing to let Milton see the baby, really since it was only a doll that she had bought, and she didn't want him to recognize that it wasn't real.
[00:04:33] One day, Milton said, you are not getting one red cent more from me until I hold that baby in my arms and see her face smiling up at me.
[00:04:47] Well, Mae had a problem that can most easily be solved by kidnapping the baby of Philip Lake and his wife Bertha, who lived in a tar paper shack a few miles from town. They had two children, a 20-month-old son, Jack, and a six-month-old daughter named Betty Ann.
[00:05:11] There wasn't many in the community that were surprised when the Bannister clan was charged with kidnapping and murder. Nearly everyone in Moncton knew or had heard of the Bannister family. They were thought to be a bad bunch, with her mother Mae being the worst of the lot.
[00:05:31] Some said she couldn't be blamed for her lifestyle, what would the way her husband had run out on her 13 years ago, leaving her on her own to bring up two boys as well as a young daughter.
[00:05:45] The family eaked out a meager living selling Mayflowers, snaring rabbits, tapping maple trees for syrup, packing blueberries after they had picked them, along with some blackberries and wild strawberries, cutting firewood, and selling Christmas wreaths. There was also talk of petty thievery and other types of things.
[00:06:14] The evidence will show that the lake's tar paper farmhouse caught on fire and that Philip was found dead laying next to the wrought iron cook stove, while Bertha and her son were found dead in the snow outside the house.
[00:06:32] At first it was thought that Philip might have died from hitting his head on the cook stove, but after the burned body was further examined a 22 caliber slug was discovered in him, so obviously he had been shot.
[00:06:50] Early in the investigation the main question was what had happened to the baby Betty Ann. Mae Bannister was now showing a baby that had been given the name Thira Milton Tripes. It was easy enough to see that the baby's hair had been recently cut,
[00:07:11] but only not well enough to conceal the fact that a portion of her fine black hair had been scorched as if the child had been rescued from a burning tar paper shack. It was only a little later that the child was positively identified as being Betty,
[00:07:31] when another neighbor mentioned about a birthmark that would be found on her. The trial was a spectacle in January 1936, with about 2,000 people trying to cram into the courthouse to see it first hand.
[00:07:49] They were all forced to wait outside on the street, but continued to try and view it by peeking in the windows. The trial finished in the following way. On Tuesday morning, January 29th, the court assembled. The Bannister family was led into the courtroom.
[00:08:10] The brothers smiled as if they were walking to a family picnic. Mae Bannister continued to scowl at those assembled about her. Young Francis looked nervously about the courtroom and fretted with her hair. By coincidence, the date of the final verdict happened on the same day
[00:08:33] at the funeral of King George V, who had died early that week. Francis Bannister had been listening to a radio upstairs in one of the courtroom's holding cells while the sentence was being read.
[00:08:48] She had left the radio turned up and playing loudly as the family walked slowly into the courtroom, seemingly accompanied by the distant crackling strains of Handel's funeral march. How appropriate! The one brother, Arthur, was sentenced to death by hanging in May,
[00:09:11] was sentenced to three and a half years in Kingston Prison for harboring a kidnapped infant. The defense attorney appealed the sentences and upon appeal a second tile was approved. In that one, both brothers were convicted of murder and both sentenced to death by hanging, which occurred on September 22, 1936.
[00:09:37] Three and a half years later, Mae Bannister left her prison cell and vanished into the soared and tawdry pages of history. Public hangings have been vanned in Canada since 1870,
[00:09:52] so only a handful of people were present when the execution of her two sons was done privately in the prison. The last hanging that happened at St. John Courthouse was in 1956 and the last one in New Brunswick was the following year.
[00:10:12] The last hanging in Canada took place in 1962 and capital punishment in all forms was outlawed as of 1976. One more British tradition that's no longer being done in the colonies or in Britain itself. It's been a real joy being with you today.
[00:10:42] I appreciate you taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you go to my website, mbtraveler.com, you can leave a comment, you can do a rating and I look forward to seeing you back here again next week.
[00:10:56] And oh by the way, you can also buy me a copy there on that website if you care to. Have a great day and a wonderful week.