BC’s Last Man Hanged — The Tale of Leo Mantha

On the night of September 6, 1958, Aaron “Bud’ Jenkins was stabbed to death as he slept in his barracks at the Naval base in Esquimalt on Vancouver Island here in British Columbia. A man named Leo Mantha confessed to the crime, was tried, found guilty of 1st-degree murder, and executed in 1959. He was the last person ever to be executed in British Columbia and the 3rd last to be executed in Canada. At the time, executions were rare, and most Canadian death penalty verdicts were commuted to life in prison. After revisiting the crime, the consensus among experts today is that anyone else would have been charged with manslaughter or 2nd-degree murder, and not 1st-degree murder. So why do Leo Mantha hang? The fact that Leo Mantha was gay was the only factor that made him stand out at the time of the crime. Was his a hanging by homophobia?

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