[ISL] "P.E.I. gunman given life sentence for deadly act of revenge over sister’s death in 1970"

[rfmcdonald]

A month after my last visit to Prince Edward Island, a father and son were gunned down in the southeast of that province. That was a surprise, as gun crime is rare on the Island. As Jake Edmiston and Aly Thomson's Canadian Press article, hosted at the National Post, describes, this murder turns out to have been a senseless blood vendetta.

Alfred Vuozzo was driving his family home to Montague, P.E.I. on a Thursday night in 1970. Less than halfway along the sparse country road from Murray River to Montague, there is an intersection partially hidden behind a patch of trees.

At that intersection on Nov. 19, 1970, a truck collided with Vuozzo’s panel van, sending his nine-year-old daughter Cathy through the windshield. She died instantly, according to newspaper clippings stored on microfilm in the University of Prince Edward Island archives.

They buried Cathy on the following Sunday in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church in Montague. Her father spent time in hospital for cuts and shock. Her infant brother, Alfred Jr., was shaken by the crash, but not injured.

Over the next four decades, however, the little boy grew into a “cold-hearted and calculated individual” bent on avenging his sister’s death, a Crown attorney said Monday.

The man who drove the truck that collided with the Vuozzo family, Herbert McGuigan, has since died, the Eastern Graphic P.E.I. media outlet reported. So last year — more than four decades after his sister’s death — Alfred Guy Vuozzo, 46, went to the McGuigan household less than five kilometres away from the old crash site with a handgun and shot the driver’s son and grandson “execution-style” instead.