After 50 years in prison, killer gets day parole

A 74-year-old convicted killer from Manitoba, who is among Canada’s longest-serving prisoners, is getting a chance at freedom after more than 50 years.

Jack Wayne Bender received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 20 years in 1974 after he was found guilty of a fatal axe attack near Lockport in 1973.

“I don’t have the exact figures… but I can say without hesitation, it’s pretty rare. It would be just a handful of people,” said Michael Weinrath, a criminal justice professor at University of Winnipeg, about the 50-year stint behind bars.

The Parole Board of Canada granted him six months of day parole as of last month. He’s been moved to a halfway house run by federal corrections officials and granted leave privileges on certain conditions, the ruling indicates.

Bender and his accomplice, Dwight Douglas Lucas, were seen stealing from Michael Raymond Hurd’s parked van in West Kildonan on Nov. 21, 1973. Bender was on parole from a federal sentence at the time.

After the 26-year-old victim and his 20-year-old brother found the pair a short distance away, Lucas held the men at gunpoint and forced one of them to drive to a deserted area near Lockport, while Bender held the other at knifepoint in the back of the van.

Once they arrived at the snow-covered field, the brothers were forced from the van, onto their stomachs, and their hands were tied behind their backs, the parole decision said.

Bender got out an axe and hit both of them repeatedly. He and Lucas left in the van.

Hurd died, while his brother, who was critically injured, managed to make it to a farmhouse to call for help. The victim’s body was found around 11 p.m.

Bender later said he was drunk and on pills and claimed to have blacked out on the intoxicants at the time.

The men were arrested two days later and were convicted of non-capital murder — so-called because it did not merit capital punishment — by a jury in June 1974.

“People who are capable of such senseless, brutal, blood-thirsty butchery should, one way or other, be removed from society for good.”

“People who are capable of such senseless, brutal, blood-thirsty butchery should, one way or other, be removed from society for good,” Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench Justice John Hunt told Bender, 22, and Lucas, 19, as he sentenced them.

The men laughed as their sentence was read out in court, the Free Press reported.

This year, federal corrections officials supported Bender’s application for day parole but believe full parole would be “premature,” said the decision.

In the past, he was granted escorted and unescorted temporary absences. The decision suggests he was never granted any form of parole on his life sentence.

If his time away from prison is successful, Bender may apply for further time on day parole or for full parole.

Three escape attempts, one successful

Weinrath, who has studied Canada’s corrections systems, said federal prisoners tend to either qualify for parole as they age or die of natural causes behind bars. Research indicates most people eventually age out of criminality, he said.

Most recently, Bender was held in a prison in Quebec. It’s unclear where his halfway house is located.

His time in prison included three attempts to escape, including one that was successful.

In 1977, Bender, Lucas and another prisoner in Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ont., were caught scaling the prison wall after they cut their way from a second-floor cell in the super-maximum unit, a press report at the time said.

In 2004, Bender was convicted of assault with a weapon, assault with intent to resist arrest and possession of a weapon for an incident during an escape attempt from a minimum-security prison.

As corrections officers were escorting him, Bender assumed they were going to take him to segregation, so he hit one of the officers in the head, ran off and grabbed an ice-chipping tool, which he used to assault the officer. The corrections officer wasn’t seriously hurt.

In October 2019, Bender managed to escape from the Federal Training Centre institution in Laval, Que., but was quickly apprehended by police.

The parole decision said he was found not criminally responsible for his escape the following year because he was mentally unwell.

Bender has been diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder and delusional disorder with unspecified psychosis, for which he is receiving treatment, the parole decision said.

He’s been ordered to continue taking medication as a condition of parole.

Bender, who is Métis, has in recent years connected with his culture and traditional healing, which has resulted in a transformation, the parole decision said.

The status of Bender’s accomplice, Lucas, is uncertain. It’s not known if he was granted parole or whether he’s still alive.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca