Gérald Gallant

Gérald Gallant (born 5 May 1950) is a Canadian contract killer who admitted to committing 28 murders and 12 attempted murders between 1978 and 2003.

Gallant typically killed in public by gunshots to the head, neck or chest, which became his trademark.

His victims were mostly members of Quebec-based criminal gangs.

Gallant was reportedly one of Canada's most prolific known killers.

The fourth of five children, Gallant was born in the Chicoutimi borough of Saguenay, Quebec and dropped out of school with a fifth-grade education.

His father was a meek man who worked as a foreman at the Alcan aluminum smelter in Arvida, and his mother was a domineering woman who physically and psychologically abused Gallant.

Gallant's mother was unfaithful to his father and, as a child, Gallant witnessed her infidelities with other men.

He later described her as the person he "respects the least in (his) life."

Gallant struggled with a stutter, which made him the object of mockery from his family, and suffered from a heart condition and rheumatism in one leg.

Gallant was given his first custodial sentence on 27 October 1969, when he was sentenced to serve a 23-month term at Chicoutimi prison for a series of thefts.

At the suggestion of other prisoners, he joined a gang of bank robbers after his release from custody in June 1970.

59 days after his release, Gallant was arrested for the robbery of the Credit Union of Chicoutimi-Nord with an accomplice, for which he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

On 24 October 1973, he took part in a failed armed robbery of a jewelry store in Chicoutimi.

Acting as the getaway driver, Gallant fled the scene after one of two accomplices, Gilles "Balloune" Côté, began shooting at police.

Côté was arrested and incriminated Gallant, who later surrendered to police.

He and Côté were housed in the same detention wing at Orsainville jail while awaiting trial.

Fearing that Gallant would in turn inform on him, Côté attempted to kill Gallant, but succeeded only in choking him unconscious.

In retaliation, Gallant circulated copies of statements that Côté had made to the police, exposing him as an informer to other inmates.

Gallant pleaded guilty to the attempted robbery and was sentenced to eight years in prison on 14 June 1974.

In 1975, Gallant began working for senior West End Gang member Raymond Desfossés, who he first met while they were incarcerated together at the Cowansville penitentiary.

He smuggled narcotics at Cowansville for Desfossés, who controlled the prison's drug trade.

Other gangsters who Gallant met at the penitentiary and who he later worked for or with were Denis Corriveau, who he described as a "great friend", Jean-Claude Gagné, and Raymond Bouchard, the West End Gang's lieutenant in the Quebec City area.

According to tests he was given while in custody at the Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines penitentiary in 1978, Gallant's intelligence quotient was estimated at 88; the prison's orienteer Jean Olczyk wrote that he "has an intellectual potential below average".

Other tests that Gallant underwent in detention showed that he possessed "above-average dexterity and digital coordination" in addition to being "accurate, focused and meticulous".

An insecure and withdrawn teenager, Gallant became involved in petty crime in order to "feel accepted" by others.

He joined a local gang, the Cossacks, with whom he began breaking and entering at grocery and convenience stores in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region, stealing cigarettes and selling them onto a contact.

Gallant also held various jobs, at a hotel in Chicoutimi, a Steinberg supermarket and as a peat installer.

Although the minimum age for drivers' licenses in Quebec was 21 at the time, Gallant forged the birth date on his baptistery and fraudulently gained a driving licence at 18.

He was paroled in September 1978 and lived in a mobile home in Port-Cartier with his wife Grassette and son, earning $260 per week as a tyre fitter.

Gallant later admitted that he "pretended to be in love" with Grassette and stayed with her in order to avoid suspicion from probation authorities, although she described him as a "very good father" who "provided a lot of care and affection" according to a parole report.

On 28 December 1978, Gallant committed his first murder when he helped a fellow former inmate, with whom he had served time at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul penitentiary, kill dancers' bar employee Gilles Legris, who had allegedly assaulted a female, in Port-Cartier.

Legris was beaten to death with iron bars and his body was thrown from a dam in Sept-Îles.

Gallant was taken under the wing of Desfossés, for whom he led a hashish trafficking ring and performed his first contract killing on 30 January 1980.

His victim in this case was Louis Desjardins, a drug dealer in significant debt to the West End Gang who Desfossés suspected of cooperating with police.

Desjardins was lured to a tyre garage owned by Gallant in Port-Cartier, where he was shot in the head.

With the help of his brother-in-law Denis Gaudreault, Gallant transported Desjardins' body in the trunk of Desjardins' Ford Thunderbird to a precipice near Baie-Comeau, where it was disposed of.

Desjardins' corpse was discovered in a ravine weeks later.

On 28 August 1980, Gallant and two accomplices robbed the Credit Union of Sainte-Marguerite in Trois-Rivières of $169,000.

He was arrested for the crime shortly afterwards, and was sentenced to six years' imprisonment on 5 December 1980.

When asked during a Sûreté du Québec polygraph test on 6 December 2008 what the most traumatic experience of his life was, Gallant responded: "My childhood".