Bitter Pathology of Vengeance

"That's all her life was worth. She had only nine years in this world. And nobody cared. It's haunted me all my life."
"You've sentenced me to life and I sent them to death!"
Alfred GuyVuozzo, 46, Montague, Prince Edward Island

"I pray to God every day for strength. I will never be the same. ... A part of me died with them that night."
Marie McGuigan, Brent McGuigan's widow, Brendon McGuigan's mother, Montague, PEI

inmemorium.ca   Brent McGuigan Jr. and his son Brendon McGuigan were murdered in Montague, Prince Edward Island home on Aug. 20, 2014 by Alfred Vuozzo in an act of revenge.

"I feel so much anger and hatred that it scares me."
"I hate that they died this way and it haunts me."
Donna McGuigan, Brent McGuidan's daughter, Montague, PEI

"People are really in shock. It's a tight-knit community."
"We know everybody in each of the parishes [Montague and nearby Sturgeon]. I visited with both families and I'm telling you it was very difficult to go and be with them."
Father Gerard Chaisson, St. Mary's parish, Montague

The beautiful green island of Prince Edward Island renowned even in far-off Japan as the place where Anne of Green Gables lived in the novels that depicted life in small-town Canada in the early 20th Century, is more than a serene and lovely tourist draw. It is a place where people live their everyday lives, go about their business, give birth and die, raise children and become a part of their close communities, attend church and experience sorrow.

Alfred Guy Vuozzo was only two when his nine-year-old sister Cathy died when the panel van her father Alfred was driving in 1970, taking his family home to Montague was involved in a crash. They had taken a country road where a half-hidden intersection was surely partially responsible for the truck driven by Herbert McGuigan hitting the family vehicle and killing the girl instantly.

In the forty years that followed the little boy became a "cold hearted and calculated individual", according to the description at his murder trial voiced by a Crown attorney.

Herbert McGuigan has long since died. A year ago the dead girl's brother now 46, took a handgun to the McGuigan home a mere five kilometres' distance from the old crash site. There he executed the son of the driver, and the driver's grandson, taking his vengeance on the now-dead man. Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold, and this emotional catharsis would certainly qualify as a cold dish, long in the coming, but an example of the very worst kind of human emotions.

Alfred Guy Vuozzo pleaded guilty to first- and second-degree murder charges in killing 68-year-old Brent McGuigan and his 39-year-old son Brendon, a father of three children. The two murdered men were just incidental to the tragedy that had taken the life of the young girl in 1970, but they served as a proxy for Alfred Guy Vuozzo to wreak his psychopathic revenge, killing two innocent men to make his own demons claw less savagely at his viscera.

For his pains and his having deprived an extended family of two well loved heads of households, Alfred Guy Vuozzo was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for a 35-year period. Before sentencing, he addressed the court, claiming he had lived a life of torment ever since Brent McGuigan's father's formal punishment had been a nine-month sentence for the accident that took his sister's life.

After the sentencing was read aloud, Alfred Guy Vuozzo screamed curses and physically resisted being taken from the courtroom. The court had heard testimony during the trial that he had suffered from depression for years. He will now continue to suffer from depression while he spends the rest of his life in prison.

It's possible that the satisfaction of killing two innocent men may even lift the burden of anger from time to time, that has tarnished his life.

That burden has been passed, like a tormenting virus of misery to others grieving an unjust fate that they too were unable to deflect. But it's beyond doubtful that the two women whose life will now be a survival of anguished mourning for husband and father will seek to alleviate their pain by murdering anyone else.