by Argyle, Ray
There, one reporter whispered to another, “Babington’s at it again. Mixing with the crazies.”
Leonard reflected on how John Ross Robertson might react to the news. He was sure he would understand his City Editor’s satisfaction at finally publishing the truth of the mystery they had discussed in their first meeting so many years ago. It would likely be weeks before today’s paper would reach Robertson and Leonard considered clipping the article and sending it by special dispatch. He decided that would be boastful and dropped the idea. Around him, the low hum of voices told Leonard that his reporters were busy dissecting the hints of evidence yet to come that he had worked into his story.
Remembering the tears that had been shed in the making of today’s headline, Leonard was filled with contentment over having at last laid responsibility for Rosannah’s death. It was like after finishing any long and difficult job. Sometimes, you didn’t want to start but you persevered, and when you were finished, you were pleased you had done the work and done it well. It was hard to compare everyday tasks to something that had drained his emotions for two decades. He’d lived so long with his guilt over Rosannah’s fate and his complicity in Cook’s hanging that it felt strange to have these feelings banished. His satisfacton would bring back neither of them but now he felt entitled to get on with his own life.
And what about Kathleen, who was so perfect and so deserving? She’d been uncomfortable when he first told her of Molly’s confession. The fact he’d had corroboration from Jennie Wonch wouldn’t have meant much to her. He’d be a better husband to Kathleen now that he could put away the ghosts of his Vandeleur past. He’d get that house he’d promised her; he’d see Mr. Robertson about a loan as soon as the proprietor got back. It was time to think about children. They had never talked seriously of having babies and he was a little surprised Kathleen had never gotten pregnant. They’d have to do something about that.
Later, walking toward St. Lawrence Hall and the Market, Leonard enjoyed the warmth of the spring sun on his face. The unseasonable snowfall that came with the fire was beginning to melt and the air was filled with the sounds of birds and the voices of children playing in the park. How wonderful it was to be alive and free. How good to have someone to love and be loved in return. How he had reproached himself for his past failings and how those failings now seemed unimportant. All he was sure of was that he had been given a new lease on life. Tears welled up in his eyes and he had to brush his cheeks with his coat cuff.
It was after three o’clock when Leonard returned to the Evening Telegram. He had been at his desk only a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Kathleen, who was calling from the Asylum. She had been worried about Molly and would be seeing her in a few minutes. Had his story been published?
“It went in the one-o’clock edition and the paper’s a sell-out all over town,” Leonard told her. “You don’t have to tell Molly about it. There’s really no need for her to know.” He promised Kathleen he would be home by six o’clock.
Leonard declined offers to join his staff for after-work drinks. He didn’t want to gloat about his story and there were a few tasks he needed to clean up, things he’d neglected since the fire. He half expected a telephone call from the police. He was relieved when the phone didn’t ring again.
A little before six o’clock, Leonard made his way up the stairs to their rooms. He found Kathleen in the parlour, a look of distress on her face. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look all pale and worried.”
Kathleen dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I won’t be going to the Asylum anymore, Leonard. It just won’t be the same without Molly. She died this afternoon. They said she was content at the end.”
Leonard felt an overwhelming sadness. He’d not forgiven Molly for what she’d done but neither was he prepared for her death. The strain of having confessed to him must have been too much. Or was he just looking once more for a way to put guilt on himself? He wondered if there really was a purgatory or a heaven and hell and whether Molly and Rosannah would be in one of those places together and would they get along better than they had on earth? “May both their souls rest in peace,” he said.
“Poor Leonard, you’ve been through so much. Saving the Telegram from the fire, taking Molly’s confession and writing about it, then having me tell you Molly’s dead. All those sad memories from Vandeleur. Would you like to hear some good news for a change? At least, I hope you’ll think it’s good news.” Leonard saw her lips tremble as she waited for his answer.
“That depends on what it is,” Leonard replied.
“I may as well tell you right out. I’m pregnant. You’re going to be a father.”
“I knew it, I was sure of it!” Leonard answered, in triumph. “Why was I thinking that very thing a second ago?”
“Do you really want a baby, Leonard?”
“Of course I do. You know it’s what we’ve both wanted. We’ll have to make sure we get that house, now. Oh Kate, you make me so proud.” He pulled her toward him and kissed her full on the lips.
The thought of again becoming a father – and this time, being able to acknowledge it – filled Leonard with exultation. He understood now that none of the events that had marred his life – the shooting of George Brown, the accident to his father, the death of Rosannah and the hanging of Cook Teets – were cause for him to bear guilt. He had nothing to gain by blaming himself. His discovery of the facts of Rosannah’s death had served the truth, he knew. But it also came to him that truth could more often be found in the power of love and forgiveness, than in the possession of mere facts.
Kathleen put her hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “Perhaps we should go home – home to Vandeleur,” she said. “It will be quiet – you could write in peace there. You’d be able to finish Rosannah’s Story, now that you know the ending. And perhaps you’d get to know your daughter.”
Leonard thought about the turmoil and trauma that Rosannah and Cook and he and Kathleen had lived through. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. They put their coats on, went downstairs and out through the big front garden and onto Parliament Street. All the shops were closed now and the streetlights were on. The last of the melting snow was making rivulets at the edge of the street The footprints they left in the slush became indistinct and blurred, and in a little while there was no trace of their passage.
THE END
Afterword
AN ACT OF INJUSTICE is a novel inspired by the lives of Rosannah Leppard and Cook Teets – real people who lived and loved. Vandeleur is a real place, although Leonard Babington and Kathleen Fitzgerald bear no resemblance to any actual persons, and there never was a Vandeleur Chronicle.
I became aware of the tragic fates of Rosanah and Cook while researching wrongful hangings in Canada. An astonishing story turned up in the October 12, 1908, issue of the Toronto Evening Telegram. A single paragraph buried below the fold of an inside page, it bore the headline, HANGED AN INNOCENT MAN. The story carried neither attribution nor byline, but suggested a plot far deeper than the modest space it occupied might indicate. The actual murderer had confessed, leaving no doubt that Cook Teets was innocent of the crime for which he had been hanged.
As I delved into the lives of Rosannah and Cook, a missing link persisted – someone who might have been the source of that report in the Telegram. It was to fill this need that Leonard Babington, his Chronicle, and Kathleen Fiztgerald came into being. Their presence enabled me to set the story of Rosannah and Cook against the broader panorama of frontier Ontario and Victorian Canada at the approach of the twentieth century. I have jockeyed names, dates and places to fit the plot.
I was fortunate to find a descendant of Rosannah Leppard. April Bell lives in British Columbia and I thank her for giving me a connection to her great-great aunt. My historical sources include the Ontario Archives, the Grey Roots Museum, the South Grey Museum, and staff of the Owen Sound Provincial Jail (since closed). At Library and Archives Canada I found the official transcript
of the trial. Public libraries in Owen Sound and Flesherton also held valuable information. I borrowed stories from the Flesherton Advance for the fictional Vandeleur Chronicle, and some pieces I have attributed to Leonard while at the Evening Telegram come from the files of that paper. The notice on the appointment of Leonard Babington as City Editor has been adapted from a memo by John Ross Robertson, cited in Ron Poulton’s book, The Paper Tyrant.
Rosannah Leppard’s mother was also named Rosannah, but to avoid confusion I have called her Molly, the Irish pet form of Mary. The Teets family, disgraced by the murder trial, sold up and left Vandeleur shortly after Cook was hanged.
The real Vandeleur thrived as a small community in Grey County well into the 1890s, when it began to decline in the face of a great migration of Grey and Bruce County settlers to the more fertile plains of Western Canada. Vandeleur’s only remaining structures are an Orange Hall and the former Public School No. 11, a brick building erected in 1892 on the site of the original one-room school in which Leonard Babington would have taught.
Besides Rosannah and Cook, many historical characters have roles in this book. Mr. Justice John Douglas Armour returned to his home, Calcutt, in Cobourg, Ontario after the trial. He later served as Chief Justice of Ontario and, in the year before his death in 1903, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. His portrait hangs in the Old Bailey-style courtroom of Victoria Hall in Cobourg. James Masson, who defended Cook Teets, represented Grey North in the House of Commons from 1887 to 1896. Dr. Thomas Sproule served in Parliament until 1915, the last four years as Speaker of the House under Prime Minister Robert Borden. Goldwin Smith produced a prodigious number of articles and books and died in Toronto in 1910. A well-known anti-Semite, he nevertheless coined a phrase, “Above all nations is humanity,” that has been adopted as the motto of several universities around the world. Prosecutor Alfred Frost became mayor of Owen Sound and died from pneumonia after an ice fishing accident. His large house was converted into an orphanage. The County Court Building, erected in 1853, no longer serves that purpose and despite its historical and architectural significance, faces an uncertain future.
Dr. Daniel Clark headed the Toronto Asylum for the Insane until 1905, gaining a reputation as a free-thinking if quirky caretaker of the mentally ill. According to The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Clark participated in the debates of his time, notably on the relationship between insanity and masturbation, on the connection between gynecological problems and insanity in women, and on the use of physical restraint, which he claimed to have ended at Toronto in 1883.” He testified at the trial of Louis Riel in 1885, declaring that he thought Riel was insane “for thinking he could come into the Saskatchewan and gather a force that would make him a monarch.”
John Ross Robertson led a legendary life as proprietor of the Evening Telegram, dying in 1918. Owen Staples was an outstanding painter and an illustrator for Robertson’s newspaper. He died in 1949. I had the privilege of knowing his daughter Madge Staples when we both worked at the Telegram before its demise in 1971.
I had the support of many people in writing this book. James Lockyer, founder of Innocence Canada -formerly the Association in Aid of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), encouraged me from the beginning. Genni Gunn and Jeanette Lynes read early drafts and gave me valuable suggestions. Barbara Kyle and Tom Taylor offered helpful advice. I appreciated the assistance of medical and legal experts: Dr. Margaret Thompson, Medical Director of the Ontario Poison Centre; Dr. Peter Kopplin of Toronto; and Judge Robert J. Sharpe of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. My Sherlockian friend, Hartley Nathan, gave me an expert’s view of author Conan Doyle’s approach to crime solving. I am grateful to my daughter, Sharon Argyle, for having created the map of Victorian Ontario at the front of the book.
My thanks go to Matthew Goody and his entire team at Mosaic Press who have so enthusiastically supported the publication of this book.
I also thank my partner Deborah Windsor for her everlasting support.
Postcript: Another Thought
Cook Teets was the first but not the last man to be hanged in Owen Sound. That dubious honour goes to Frederick Bussey, who was executed in 1948. From Confederation in 1867 to the last hanging in Canada in 1962, some seven hundred men and thirteen women died on the gallows. Capital punishment was abolished by Parliament in 1976.
We have no idea how many Canadians may have been unjustly hanged. Since the abolition of hanging, numerous persons convicted of murder have later been found innocent. They range from David Milgaard who served twenty-three years in prison and won $10 million in compensation, to Guy Paul Morin who spent eighteen months behind bars and was awarded $1.25 million for his wrongful incarceration.
The fact innocent people continue to be convicted of serious offences does not, however, seem to have blunted Canadians’ support for capital punishment. An Angus Reid survey in 2012 showed 62 per cent in favour of capital punishment for murder, although this figure drops to 50 per cent when life imprisonment is offered as an alternative. A 2016 Abacus Data survey reported 58 per cent of Canadians regard capital punishment as “morally right.”
Approval of the death penalty had stood at a low of 44 per cent in 2005. The rise since then may be partially a consequence of the Stephen Harper government’s insistent drum beating between 2006 and 2015 for harsher penalties against lawbreakers. Fortunately, there appears to be no political will in Canada to reopen the question of capital punishment.
A compliant media may also bear some responsibility. It is cheap and convenient to play up crime – even petty crime – creating an impression that wrongdoing is more prevalent than is actually the case. Violent crime in Canada has been on the decline for several decades. Statistics Canada reported that in 2014, the violent crime rate was five per cent lower than in 2013 and twenty-six per cent lower than a decade earlier.
On any given day there is an average of 36,845 adults housed in Canada’s provincial or federal jails. This cost Canadian taxpayers $4.6 billion in 2013/14. About one in three have been convicted of no crime; they are on remand, awaiting trial. Most are younger adults, and one in four of those in provincial institutions is of aboriginal descent, a rate far in excess of their proportion of the population. Canada’s federal penitentiaries, where offenders serve sentences of longer than two years, house some 15,000 prisoners.
But there are more grim conclusions. According to federal Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers in his 2013 report, changes that saw inmates serve longer sentences, together with cuts in prison pay and imposition of austere conditions did little to improve public safety; instead, he says it made it more difficult to rehabilitate and reintegrate prisoners back into society upon their release. The Supreme Court has set aside some of these laws as unconstitutional, and it is likely the federal government will repeal or amend others.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in November, 2015, he issued a series of mandate letters to his cabinet ministers, setting out his expectations for each of them. The Justice Minister was mandated to reform use of solitary confinement and review changes made by the Harper government. The letter, however, was silent on whether we should continue to jail people who have not committed violent crimes. More than three-quarters of all criminal charges (360,000 in 2013/14) are for non-violent offences. About one-third of those found guilty end up serving jail terms. With so many alternatives to prison available – including fines, probation, and conditional sentences – is there really any reason so many of these non-violent offenders need to be behind bars, each at a cost to taxpayers of more than $100,000 per year? This warrants the urgent attention of Ottawa’s committee of experts on justice reform.
Conditional sentences, allowing terms to be seved in the community rather than in jail, came into effect in 1996. They offer a process that many consider the best alternative to imprisonment. Judges cannot apply conditional sentences in cases requiring mandatory minimum sentences. As a result, their latitude was greatly reduced by
the sixty new mandatory minimum prison terms enacted between 2006 and 2015 for drugs, guns, sex offences and many non-violent crimes. In most situations, these minimums are a barrier to the principle of making the penalty fit the circumstances of the individual offender. They should be repealed.
Governments can take these steps while recognizing the harm done to victims and the need to keep society safe. In fact, the best way of encouraging released prisoners to lead useful lives is not by extending their periods in jail or otherwise penalizing them, but through education, treatment of mental illness, and by offering assistance in their reintegration into society.
Some judges have declined to comply with minimum sentences, asserting they constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” In one case, a judge refused to apply the mninimum six months for possession of between six and two hundred marijuana plants for the purpose of trafficking. With legalization of marijuana in Canada, the high number of arrests on related charges – 75,000 in 2013 – will no longer occur.
If people are not sent to jail, will they not simply be encouraged to repeat their crimes? Unfortunately this is what is happening now, as seen in the statistics for rearrests of people for repeat offences. Nothing has been achieved by imprisoning them. The John Howard Society warns that prisoners are facing longer periods of incarceration and are receiving less support and supervision through parole as they return to their communities. “This approach,” it concludes, “makes communities less safe.”
The cost of providing counselling and moral and educational support to keep people out of jail need be no greater – probably less – than what is now spent to keep them in jail. The return to society in the form of rebuilt lives and reduced crime will be immeasurably greater.
Excerpt Markdale Standard (November 2, 1883)