Canada: QUEBEC: Freedom Is Big

In Montreal last week, grey-haired Michael Gordon Fulker, 41, sat at a three-minute hearing in the Court of King’s Bench, heard the Crown say it had no evidence to offer, listened attentively as Justice Wilfrid Lazure solemnly added: “You have suffered enough.”

Then Michael Fulker walked out to smell the sweet air of freedom for the first time in 20 years.

His was a strange story. He was born of American parents on a Quebec farm near the New York border, abandoned when four, and taken in by a man named Fulker. Six unhappy years later, he took his foster father’s horse & buggy and ran away. He was caught and sent to the Laurentians Shawbridge Boys Farm, was 15 before he was released.

Michael Fulker worked in Quebec’s Chateau Frontenac kitchen, grew to manhood among the shanties of Ontario’s towns. Then in 1925 he and Alexander Kahn, whom he had met in the detention home, were charged with a murder. Kahn turned King’s evidence, was freed, disappeared after pinning the murder on Fulker. Michael Fulker was found mentally unbalanced, was finally locked up in the mental wing of Bordeaux Jail. There for 20 years he was a model inmate, worked as a guard’s helper. Only once did he get a brief glimpse of Montreal, when a friendly guard let him peep through a telescope.

Last November Fulker was found sane and fit to face trial, but by then all the witnesses had disappeared, and all the evidence against him, if any had ever existed, was gone.

In the fullness of his first day of freedom, the sights of a new-found world fascinated him. Anxious not to fritter away the $10 Lawyer John Crankshaw had given him, he lunched in a “nice little restaurant.” He walked and walked, stopped to listen whenever he heard a radio, but feared police would make him move on. Said he, apprehensively: “I’ve had enough trouble so I didn’t stay listening too long.”

He walked until dark, marveling at the brilliant neon lights, the talking pictures, found “everything’s so wide open.” He spent the night in a cheap hotel.

Next morning he walked up to a policeman, asked: “How do you get to Bordeaux Jail?” There he picked up his few possessions, said goodbye to friends. He phoned the Protestant jail chaplain, the Rev. Gordon Phillips, who had helped free him, and the kindly chaplain took him to his home.

There reporters asked 41-year-old Michael Fulker what he thought of his new freedom. Said the man from Bordeaux Jail: “It’s big.”