Act of Injustice

by Argyle, Ray

  Cook remembered how excited and happy he’d been. He’d never expected Rosannah to marry him, yet there they were, walking down the street in Toronto arm in arm, husband and wife. “Every man will envy me,” he’d said to her. Cook had felt important, a successful man; life was going to give him everything he wanted.

  At the Rossin House Hotel, Rosannah booked their room. She’d shown their wedding certificate and had explained their situation. Cook remembered her words: “My husband’s blind and he’d like to rent a room, we’re just married.”

  “That room cost me a dollar and a half,’ Cook said. “That’s because the hotel had an elevator, the only one in Canada. We took the train back the next day and walked to my house from Flesherton Station. It was a beautiful September evening, everything smelled so sweet.

  “Mother was none too happy when we told her what we’d done. She said she didn’t want Rosannah in the house and that even if we were married, our wedding certificate didn’t mean a thing. She said there are no seats for Catholics at the Methodist church. I tried to tell her Rosannah was a Methodist now but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  Cook remembered they began the long walk back down the Beaver Valley Road and took the footpath across the river to the Leppard place. It was dark when they got there.

  “I waited at the fence while Rosannah went inside. When she came back she was really upset. She said her mother was angry and she didn’t think I should come in. I was sorry I hadn’t gotten a place for us before we were married. So we decided Rosannah would stay with her mother, and I went back home.

  “While I was looking around for a place I decided we should make a trip to Michigan to see my relatives in Grand Rapids. They all made furniture there. We stayed a week, had a nice time. When we got back I ran into Joseph Pedlar at the post office and he said he was moving in with his daughter and he’d rent us his house. It was near Eugenia Falls, not far from Rosannah’s place.”

  Tired of pacing his cell, Cook sat down on his cot. The springs squeaked as he shifted his weight.

  “The last time I saw Rosie alive, I asked her to go with me to Eugenia to see our new home. She didn’t feel up to it, so we sat on that big rock by the fence and talked. It was starting to rain. I gave Rosannah some tobacco and she lit a pipe and smoked it. I could tell by the smell that she was still smoking when she got up to go back inside. It was the last time I saw her alive.”

  Leonard asked Cook if Rosannah had ever told him about bring raped by a priest.

  “She told me when we were in Michigan. I would have killed the asshole but by then, nobody knew where he was.”

  “I understand your feelings,” Leonard said. “But you still haven’t told me if you gave Rosannah strychnine.”

  “You know I didn’t,” Cook answered.

  “But you had some. What did you do with it?”

  “I scattered some in the bush, to kill the foxes that were raiding our chicken pen. I used their pelts to make a cape for my mother. I never got to give it to her. I never let anyone else have any strychnine.”

  Before Leonard could ask another question, the door to the corridor opened and the guard brought in James Masson.

  “Now your lawyer’s here I may as well tell you,” Cook heard Leonard say. “That piece I wrote about you. It wasn’t entirely fair. I’m sorry. I’m going to publish a clarification.” Cook thought, What good will that do me now?

  The guard rattled his keys against the bars of Cook’s cell. “Time to go back to court, Cook, visiting hour’s done.”

  Chapter 17

  A QUESTION OF INSURANCE

  Afternoon, November 4, 1884

  Outside the Grey County Court Buidling, people were going about the essential acts of daily life -- activities of little importance on their own, but when tallied up become the glue that binds a community together. At the Toronto, Bruce and Grey Railway station, caretaker Josiah Ralston swept cigarette butts from the floor of the waiting room. Instead of depositing them in a trash can as usual, he swept them out a door and into the alley, perhaps because he was feeling rankled by a breakfast time argument with his wife. At the Owen Sound High School, vice principal Emma Cartwright finished her lunch of salad and a sausage, put on a sweater, and went outside to ring the bell that called students back to classes. At John Fry’s butcher shop on Front Street, Adele Ross, who lived in the largest house in Owen Sound on the town’s West Hill, was buying a fat turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. At Damnation Corners, a few stragglers huddled against a chill breeze as they headed into the Bucket of Blood, the most popular tavern at that intersection. On the hill behind the Grey County Court Building, the early snowfall had attracted a few adventurous tobaggoners.

  The mayor of Owen Sound, Duncan Morrison, sat in the study of his home and made notes for a speech he would give that night to the Grand Lodge of the Masonic Order: “There are no more firm believers in a bright and prosperous future for our own magnificent Dominion, this Canada of ours, than among those whose names are enrolled in the register of the Grand Lodge of Canada.”

  The Owen Sound harbour was emptied of shipping when the Canadian Pacific steamer Algoma became the last ship to depart for the season. It set out in early afternoon for Port Arthur, with a crew of nine and thirty-seven passengers. It would encounter a blinding snowstorm and run aground on an islet in Lake Superior. Most aboard would be lost.

  When Leonard Babington returned to his seat after the lunchtime adjournment, he found the courtroom warm and stuffy and filled with the scent of damp scarves and sweaty parkas. On his way to his seat at the newspaper table, he encountered James Masson. “We’ll see the last of Mr. Frost’s witnesses today,” Masson told Leonard. “Then I’ll put Cook Teets’s sister and mother on the stand.” Leonard thought Masson was showing a friendlier tone since hearing his apology.

  In the few minutes Leonard had with Masson, he gained considerable insight into the probems the lawyer was having in building Cook’s defence. Masson recounted how he and Cook had argued vigorously about their legal strategy. The lawyer had told Cook that he must have shared his strychnine with somone – Molly Leppard, Scarth Tackaberry or maybe even his brother, Nelson Teets. Cook denied it. Masson said he’d told Cook bluntly: “How can I defend you if you won’t cooperate? You’ll end up swinging if we can’t shift suspicion away from you.”

  The lawyer hooked his thumbs in his vest as he leaned over Leonard. He spoke barely above a whisper. “Cook insisted they couldn’t convict him for something that happened when he wasn’t there. He told me that if I thought differently, he’d have to get another lawyer.” Masson added that when he threatened to quit, Cook backed down. “It would have been impossible for him to find another lawyer and the judge wouldn’t have allowed an adjournment.”

  The two continued to whisper while the guards brought Cook in through the door opposite the jury. In a moment, Judge Armour entered and Alfred Frost called his first witness of the afternoon. He was Roger Purdy, an emaciated-looking man who ran the post office and general store in Eugenia. He’d spent years cultivating his political connections and the postmaster job was his reward, along with his appointment to issue marriage licenses. Between those jobs and the commissions he earned as an agent for the Canadian Mutual Life Association, he’d been able to put up a handsome brick house on a choice property upstream on the Beaver River.

  Alfred Frost ambled to the witness box, folded his arms on his chest, and brushed a loose lock of hair from his forehead. The questioning began.

  “Did the prisoner apply to you for a marriage license?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Is he able to write his name?”

  “He just signed with an X.”

  “Did he make an application for life insurance on Rosannah Leppard?”

  “He came to me for such – he and her together. I sent them to Meaford for her medical examination. When they got back I wrote a policy for four thousand and four hundred dollars on Rosannah’s life. Teets spoke of
getting some insurance on himself, in her favour. But he never did. I’ve always wondered why not.”

  Leonard underlined his notes about the insurance. The fact there was a witness to Cook having taken out a policy on Rosannah’s life was important. He was not surprised when James Masson began his cross-examination on that very point.

  “Mr. Purdy,” Masson started, “you will recall Cook told you he was in poor health, and the doctor in Meaford had said he should go to the company’s chief surgeon in Toronto for an examination.”

  “I don’t remember anything of that kind,” Purdy declared.

  “But you knew him as being blind a great many years?”

  “I know he had the appearance of it.”

  Judge Armour interrupted to ask a question. “Has the witness ever seen the prisoner without his guide dog?”

  Purdy seemed to be embarrassed for having questioned Cook’s blindness. He didn’t answer the question but instead talked about how Cook learned to use other skills.

  “I know boys used to put things in front of him to tell the colour. He said he could tell between light and dark. He would tell the colour of their clothing and caps partly by feeling.”

  James Masson took four steps, putting him less than an arm’s length from Purdy. Hands on his hips, he resumed his cross-examination.

  “So Cook Teets can do his own business and go about the country? He’s a pretty smart man in doing his own business?”

  “I believe he is so,” the witness answered.

  The exchange seemed to Leonard to have ended in a standoff. But there was hard evidence now about the insurance, and that could be taken to implicate Cook.

  The next two witnesses were neighbours of the Leppards. They were sure to have known something about what had gone on during Rosannah’s last day.

  Moses Sherwood testified to having seen Rosannah and Cook together outside the Leppard house between four and five o’clock that afternoon.

  “What were they doing?” Alfred Frost asked.

  “They were sitting on a stone together, talking. Rosannah had a piece of paper in her hand and she looked very steady at it. She looked up into his face and whispered and he made an answer. I cannot say what was said.”

  “What was in the paper?”

  “I couldn’t tell, looked like some kind of a powder, maybe medicine. She was folding it over and over, as if she was trying to get what was in it into a heap. I walked past lightly. I did not want to disturb them, I did not want to get into a conversation with Cook, he’s none too friendly. I just wanted to go on about my business.”

  “And after that she went home?”

  “Yes, and he went toward his mother’s house.”

  James Masson told Judge Armour he had no questions for Sherwood.

  The next witness was Scarth Tackaberry. He strode to the witness box, all legs and arms, and sat down with a flourish. Leonard thought he had an impudent look that showed contempt for Cook Teets and disdain for everyone else in the courtroom. On second thought, perhaps he was being unfair.

  “You live opposite the prisoner, I believe,” Alfred Frost began. Tackaberrry said he’d been born right there, in the house on the Beaver Valley Road. He said it boastfully, as if the act of birthing had made him a real son of Vandeleur.

  “As a neighbour, were you aware at any time of the prisoner having strychnine in his possession?”

  “I was. He showed it to me one day in July of last year, 1883, on a visit to his house.”

  “Where was he keeping it?”

  “He took it out of his trunk. He showed me a revolver, too. The strychnine was in a small bottle, something like the one we’ve seen in evidence. That looks like the bottle.”

  Leonard watched as Scarth Tackaberry pointed to the bottle on the evidence table.

  “And Mr. Tackaberry, can you say, at the time you saw the bottle, how much strychnine there was in it?”

  “I think it was pretty nearly full when he showed it to me. I asked him where he got it and he told me first in Canada. I told him he could not get it here and then he said he got it in the United States.”

  “And is there as much in the bottle now as when you saw it?”

  “There was more then than there is now. Yes, I am quite satisfied as to that.”

  James Masson was up immediately to face Scarth Tackaberry. He put his hands behind his back, looked from the witness to the jury, and then back at the witness. Leonard thought he was signaling that he had a critical point to make.

  “Mr. Tackaberry, I put it to you that you were a suitor for the hand of Rosannah Leppard.”

  “I never was!”

  “But you wanted her to marry you?”

  “I never did. Never a word of that kind was said between us.”

  “Did not you and the prisoner have words about your relationship with Rosannah?”

  “He told me Rosannah said I wanted to marry her. I told him he lied, that I knew Rosannah couldn’t have said any such thing.”

  “Admit it now, you had some hot words with each other, didn’t you?”

  “We had some hot words.”

  Before James Masson could pursue this admission, His Lordship broke in with a question.

  “How long was this before her death?”

  “It was before her marriage,” Tackaberry said. “I guess it would be a month before.”

  It looked to Leonard as if Scarth was getting a bit frazzled. He kept running his hand through his hair and making as if he was brushing lint off his jacket.

  “Now Mr. Tackaberry, were you in the habit of visiting Rosannah?”

  “I saw her at her house two or three times.”

  “And did you call on the Leppards the night before Rosannah’s death?”

  “I stopped by there for a bit. I was on my way back from Flesherton. I heard Cook had offered Mrs. Leppard some strychnine to control varmints. I’d been having trouble with raccoons and rabbits and I calculated I might get some from her.”

  “And did you?”

  “As a fact, no. She said it was too late and I should come back another time.”

  Leonard thought it sounded rehearsed, the way Tackaberry had answered that question. So, apparently, did James Masson.

  “I put it to you,” Cook’s lawyer argued, “that you’d gotten some strychnine from Cook Teets, and you’d gone to Rosannah’s house because you wanted revenge for her having spurned you. You went there to kill her.”

  “If I did, I didn’t succeed. She was still alive when I left. Ask Mrs. Leppard.”

  “But for how long, Mr. Tackaberry?”

  Judge Armour cleared his throat. “Where is counsel going with this line of questioning?”

  “I’m trying to point out, Your Lordship, that Cook Teets was not the only person who may have had the means to carry out this crime. There were other people in the house that night. We should not forget that. The defence has no further questions.”

  When Alfred Frost told Judge Armour he was finished presenting the Crown’s case, the judge called on James Masson to began the case for the defence. Masson’s first witness was Cook’s sister Sarah Ann Clark. Leonard wondered how Cook felt about her being dragged into this mess. No matter what she said, everyone would think it a lie, a cover-up for her brother.

  “When did you first see your brother on the morning of Rosannah’s death?” Masson asked.

  “It was when Mrs. Tackaberry and Bridget stopped at my house. They’d gone to mother’s place to get him. He’d been there all night.”

  “Bridget has testified you drove her and Cook to the Leppard place that morning. Can you tell the jury what you found when you got there?”

  “One of the girls, I think it was Mrs. Leppard’s daughter-in-law, was scrubbing the floor. She rose up to let us pass. I led Cook by the arm. The place is very small, just room to walk between the stove and the table. We passed through that space and Cook went and knelt by the head of the bed. He said to me, ‘Sarah, is she dead?’ I said she
was. He said, ‘Poor Rosannah, just speak one word so I will know you are not dead.’ I said she will never speak any more. I turned around and Mrs. Leppard came and shook hands with Cook. I said, ‘How in the world has this happened, what is the cause of this sudden death?’”

  Masson asked the witness if anyone had sent for a doctor.

  “Nobody had,” Sarah Ann Clark replied. “I said to Mrs. Leppard, ‘When you first saw Rosannah was ill, didn’t you send for a doctor?’ She said no.”

  Alfred Frost declined to cross-examine.

  James Masson called Margaret Teets to the stand. Leonard considered it cruel to force such an old lady to testify in court. She’d raised her family and lived through a great piece of history, all the way from the War of 1812 to the Civil War and the Confederation of Canada in 1867. A woman her age, around ninety, deserved to finish out her life unmolested, Leonard thought.

  Margaret Teets rose slowly from her seat and leaning on a cane, made her way forward. Leonard looked at Cook and saw he was dabbing both eyes with his handkerchief. At least he hasn’t had to watch his mother age, Leonard thought. He probably still thinks of her as she looked when he last had his sight, when he was a boy of twelve. Mrs. Teets was old now, her face wrinkled and worn. The one good thing about Cook being blind, Leonard thought, was that he didn’t have to watch his mother grow old.

  Cook’s lawyer led Margaret Teets through Scarth Tackaberry’s visit to her home, the time he claimed Cook had shown him a bottle of strychnine.

  “Do your recollect your son showing Mr. Tackaberry the bottle?”

  “Mr. Tackaberry never saw that bottle to my knowledge,” Margaret Teets said. She spoke in a high-pitched but clear voice, and showed no hesitation in her answer. She waved her hand to one side, as if to dismiss both Tackaberry and the question.

  “Did you ever give Cook the keys to the trunk to show the bottle to Mr. Tackaberry?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Do you remember him having a little wooden box about the colour of that box?” He pointed to the one on the evidence table.