Late one winter night in a remote fishing cabin on Île-aux-Chiens, part of the French archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, two drunken fishermen—Auguste Neel and Louis Ollivier—attacked and killed 61-year-old François Coupard in a savage brawl. The victim’s body was mutilated and hidden, setting off one of the most notorious criminal cases in the territory’s history. Authorities shipped in a guillotine from Martinique, the only execution device on the shelves of France’s overseas holdings, and in August of 1889 Neel was executed in what became the only guillotine execution ever carried out in North America. The affair lingers in local memory as a raw example of frontier justice, colonial law, and the ruthless consequences of violence even in the furthest reaches of empire.