Flight to Baie Comeau

At the funeral of Rita Guay in Quebec three weeks ago, no one mourned more demonstratively than her husband Albert. Rita had died in the Quebec Airways plane crash on Sept. 9 which killed 23 people, including three top executives of the Kennecott Copper Corp.

After the crash, Albert Guay, a jeweler and onetime munitions worker, had urged investigators to "get to the bottom of this." He bought a great cross of flowers to be placed on Rita's coffin. To a priest he said: "If God wanted it, I accept."

One day last week in a Quebec City courtroom, a prisoner looked straight ahead, his face expressionless. The prisoner: Albert Guay. The charge: "Having Sept. 9 at Sault au Cochon killed and assassinated . . . your wife."

A Heavy Package. It had been a sharp and speedy investigation that brought Albert Guay before the bar. Five days after the crash a coroner's jury, which had studied reports on the broken wreckage of the unburned plane, blamed the disaster on a "mysterious explosion in a forward luggage compartment." Company investigators and local police were already on the job. The Mounties moved in. An airport clerk had reported that all packages but one aboard the DC-3 had been shipped by well-known shippers. The exception was checked.

Just before the plane took off from Quebec City, an excited woman had arrived at the field by taxi. She had a package which was suspiciously overweight for its size, but with the plane already warming up, the clerk rushed it aboard. The package was addressed to a Mr. Larouche at Baie Comeau. Mr. Larouche, it turned out, did not exist.

Inquiry then turned to the unidentified shipper. The taxi driver who had brought her to the airport recalled that she had asked him to drive carefully, saying: "These aren't eggs I'm carrying." Investigators soon discovered that she was Mrs. Marie Pitre, a 41-year-old Quebec City housewife who had had notes endorsed by Albert Guay. One day last week Mrs. Pitre, told by Guay that the police were shadowing her, took an overdose of sleeping tablets, was rushed to the hospital. There, as she began to recover, she admitted that she had shipped the mysterious package for Guay, but insisted that she did not know its contents.

A Series of Quarrels. Guay told police nothing. A slight, boyish-looking man with wavy hair, he had met Rita Morel, in a Quebec arsenal during the war. Their marriage became a long series of quarrels. Last spring Guay began going with a pretty young nightclub waitress named Marie-Ange Robitaille. Rita and her five-year-old daughter moved to her mother's home.

Last month, Rita came back. When her husband asked her if she would like to fly to Baie Comeau to pick up a box of jewelry she trustingly agreed. Albert bought her ticket, took her to the airport, where he paid 50-c- for a $10,000 air-travel insurance policy, naming himself as beneficiary. Meanwhile, according to the Mounties, Mrs. Pitre, who admitted she had bought two sticks of dynamite for Guay, arrived with the package.

Sixteen minutes later the plane exploded and crashed at Sault au Cochon, 90 minutes before its arrival at Baie Comeau, where the package would have been taken off.

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