Richard Rutherford was 87 and ailing when he was killed in the Smyth Road home he shared with his male spouse on Friday.
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The former principal dancer of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet — a man who helped establish the human rights monument in Ottawa — is the victim of this city’s latest homicide.
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Richard Rutherford was 87 and ailing when he was killed in the Smyth Road home he shared with his male spouse on Friday.
Police responded to the scene on Smyth Road, between Haig and Saunderson drives, at about 3 p.m.
An Ottawa man, Philippe Hebert, 69, of Ottawa, has been charged with second-degree murder. He appeared in court Saturday morning and was remanded in custody.
Born in the southern United States, Richard Rutherford was with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for two decades, starting in the corps de ballet in 1957 and rising to the rank of soloist and principal dancer. He retired from the stage in 1970 and was made associate artistic director of the ballet company.
Rutherford moved to Ottawa in 1977 and joined the staff of the Canada Council for the Arts, where he was responsible for making individual grants to promising Canadian dancers.
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Neighbours were stunned to learn of his death.
“Richard was a very helpful, joyous person,” longtime neighbour Charles Wendt said. “This is all so tragic.”
Rutherford was a gifted and devoted gardener, he said, and spring was his favourite time of year. “Whenever we had friends in town, we’d take them and show them Richard’s back garden because it was always so beautiful,” Wendt said.
In recent years, he said, Rutherford’s health had started to fail and he had trouble getting up and down the stairs of his two-storey home.
Wendt said he was cared for by his partner, a former employee of The Ottawa Hospital’s Rehabilitation Centre. “They were a beautiful couple who were always helping each other,” he said.
Wendt came home Friday afternoon to find police cars in his neighbour’s driveway and police tape surrounding the house, which was liberally decorated with Easter eggs. An Easter rabbit was still visible in the window Saturday.
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Wendt said he found it hard to believe that a homicide had taken place next door.
“It has been a shock, a total shock,” he said.
After he retired from the Canada Council for the Arts, Rutherford served as president of the board of directors of the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights. The human rights monument is now located at the corner of Lisgar and Elgin streets.
In a December 2010 letter to the Ottawa Citizen, Rutherford defended the controversial design of the red granite and concrete monument and said it was created to remind Canadians of the desire that all people have to live in freedom and dignity.
“The lack of human rights is as hard as cement and as cold as a slab of granite,” he wrote. “The monument is not meant to lull you into complacency and good feelings, but to remind you of the atrocities we have committed and the need to correct our behaviours.”
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In an interview after his retirement at the age of 71, Rutherford said his interest in dance began when he was in the third grade with a teacher who regularly asked students to improvise movements to music. “I seemed to take to it and my teacher encouraged me so I enjoyed it more and more,” he recalled.
He began to study dance while in high school in Raleigh, N.C., and pursued further studies at New York’s School of American Ballet.
Rutherford said he had no idea where Winnipeg was “and didn’t really care” when he was offered a job as a professional dancer by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s director in 1957.
“I just knew I was going to dance and that was all that mattered at the time,” he said. Rutherford was promoted to principal dancer two years later.
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The job was physically demanding, with 90 minutes of instruction every morning and six hours of rehearsals each day. Rutherford said he also did 200 push-ups a day to build his chest and arms.
He travelled from Flin Flon, Man., to Moscow with the ballet company, and during the summers he performed in theatre companies and on television. His favourite roles, he said, were ones that required acting.
“I liked being a character rather than just pure dance,” he told an interviewer from Ballet Connections. “I committed suicide twice and stabbed a man in his back on his wedding day and did a lot of silly things, but, when the curtain came down, I didn’t have to pay the consequences.”
Rutherford said he had to give up his dance career because of unrelenting pain in his feet and back.
“My career as a dancer was not a long one, but very fulfilling, and I am very grateful to have been a dancer,” he said.
In a published review in August 1967, the Globe and Mail’s Ralph Hicklin called Rutherford a “durable star” of the Canadian stage.
“In street clothes,” Hicklin wrote, “Rutherford looks deceptively slight and young — he won’t discuss the question of his age — but he is in fact one of the strongest technically and most durable premiers danseurs on the Canadian stage. He dances everything from the classical roles to the most modern works.”
Man killed at his Smyth Road home was former acclaimed principal dancer of Winnipeg ballet, human rights advocate - Ottawa Citizen
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