Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  In her opinion, if Shannon had accidentally injured, or even killed, Thomson in a fight, he should have confessed immediately and perhaps nothing at all would have come of it if Thomson had recovered. If he had died, the worst scenario would have been a manslaughter charge, but in the circumstances—in a tight-knit, isolated community, with a powerful park superintendent determined not to cause any trouble for his bosses in the provincial capital—it might not even have come to that.

  Daphne repeated her tale about Annie helping to set up the canoe to fake a drowning, She said Annie told her that Fraser then towed the canoe out into deeper water and dumped it.

  “Annie thought he was dead,” she said. “She only found out later he was not dead yet.”

  This, of course, would be a reference to the argument put forward by Blodwen Davies and taken up by William Little that Thomson could not just have “drowned” as his lungs were filled with air and blood was flowing from one ear. Daphne believed, as many others do, that Thomson was alive, even if unconscious, when he slipped below the surface of Canoe Lake.

  In Daphne’s opinion, Annie Fraser was “a little country girl—honest and kind,” who got caught up in something she would otherwise never have had anything to do with. Daphne said her memories of her times at Canoe Lake were “all so vivid in my mind—I was just married” and that those memories were not only clear but accurate. She swore to me that she was speaking “only of things that I’m absolutely terribly sure of” and considered the “official” interpretation of Thomson’s death by accidental drowning nothing but a cover-up of the truth.

  “Such an utter lie,” she said, dismissing everything from accidental drowning to suicide.

  Yet if the argument between Tom Thomson and Shannon Fraser did occur, as she said, following the much-mentioned drinking party at the guides’ cabin, then what about Mark Robinson’s tale that he had seen Tom trying to catch that big trout below the Joe Lake dam the following morning?

  Daphne Crombie had an answer for that.

  “I don’t believe that Mark Robinson saw him.”

  The Canadian Magazine’s publication of my interview with Daphne Crombie begat a whole new round of speculation and claims concerning the tragic death of Tom Thomson. It had long been whispered about Canoe Lake that the cause of death had been murder, and it had long been suggested that several locals knew the culprit but had formed some sort of secret agreement to stay quiet. Ann Prewitt, who spent more than a quarter century running Camp Northway on nearby Cache Lake, wrote to me in late 1980 to suggest that the cover-up had involved one of the park’s most respected figures. She told me that she had tried her own hand at a play about Thomson’s death—“my no-good play,” she jokingly referred to it. She also said that after she had spoken about the experience to a gathering of summer camp directors at Toronto’s exclusive Rosedale Golf Club, another longtime director of an Algonquin Park camp, whom she identified in her letter, came up to her afterwards and said, “You know, of course, who killed him, don’t you?”

  Prewitt went on:

  I answered that I didn’t know that. I understood the truth couldn’t come out yet because some relatives that might be affected are still alive.

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed. Then I added that the Thomsons would soon all be dead.

  ‘It’s not the Thomsons,’ he said.

  ‘Who then?’ I asked.

  ‘The Stattens,’ the man answered. He then proceeded to detail how Thomson and Taylor Statten had fallen out, fought and Taylor had killed him.

  I was dumbfounded.

  ‘Everyone knows around Canoe Lake,’ he said.

  Prewitt was more than dumbfounded. She was shocked, particularly because this had all been said to her loudly enough that others at the club dinner might have heard, including Dr. Harry Ebbs and his wife, Adele Statten Ebbs, Taylor Statten’s sister. If they did hear, they gave no reaction. Perhaps they were simply used to speculation and knew the facts: that Taylor and Ethel Statten had not even been in the country when Tom Thomson died, but at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where Taylor was taking an extended YMCA course.

  How such confusion could reign might be explained by euphemism. It had often been said around Canoe Lake that the suspected murderer was a well-known and respected figure, and in later years no one was better known or more respected than Taylor Statten, who had built a summer cabin on Little Wapomeo Island in Thomson’s time—Thomson had even hauled gravel for the building of the large stone fireplace. But Taylor did not open his first camp on Canoe Lake until 1920, three years after Thomson’s death. Statten’s Camp Tuxis ceased operations after two summers, and Camp Ahmek became the boys’ division of Taylor Statten Camps, with Camp Wapomeo for girls beginning in 1924. In the years since, it had become perhaps the best-known summer camp in the country, with graduates including the likes of Pierre Trudeau, who had been sent there by his parents to improve his English as well as develop his now legendary love of canoeing.

  The suspected well-known lake figure from the summer of 1917 had to have been someone else. Dr. Philip Hall, the forensic specialist at the University of Manitoba who had long been studying the mystery, wrote to me after the Canadian Magazine article to argue that Little had fingered the wrong man in Blecher. Hall’s familiarity with a number of longtime Canoe Lake residents, including contemporaries from 1917, had convinced him—as I also came to believe—that Little had relied too much on Mark Robinson’s recollections.

  “Apparently,” Hall wrote, “Mr. Bletcher [sic] was well known for his obnoxious personality, had few close friends, and a number of people despised him. It was suggested that he was implicated by character assassination, but in fact had nothing to do with the murder other than finding Thomson’s canoe, and hosting the impromptu inquest. No one has come forward to defend him because of his lack of support, and because all of the Bletchers are dead.

  “The story I was told was that Thomson was having an affair with the wife of his murderer, and that he was killed by a man who was perhaps ‘the most respected person in the community.’ My sources claim that the facts were known to several people, but that everything was hushed up due to the status of and esteem for the murderer.”

  If this sounds like Taylor Statten, it is not. If it is anyone, it is Shannon Fraser. Fraser’s credentials certainly described a well-respected and powerful local figure—lodge owner, postmaster, telegraph operator—even if he had his disparagers.

  “It does not take a great deal of insight into the Mowat community,” Hall went on, “to identify the implicated couple as the Frasers.”

  In Hall’s interpretation, Annie Fraser, whom he described as “somewhat flighty,” was the only steady female inhabitant of the lodge, and Thomson was well known as a philanderer. “Shannon Fraser was well thought of and respected,” Hall wrote, “except for episodic ‘binges.’ Also, the people I talked with felt that Thomson was likely shot in the head, but that this was covered up by the chaps who found him [when the original grave was dug up in 1956] to avoid publicity and scandal-sheeting in the Toronto papers, and identification ultimately of the murderer. They believe most strongly that Thomson is still interred at the Canoe Lake site.…”

  For three decades, Dr. Hall gathered material for a book he intended to write, which he told his friends would detail, for the first time, exactly what had happened. In the meantime, he produced his own talk on the topic, which he tried out on a Winnipeg audience not long before his death.

  “Beginning in later 1917,” Hall wrote in notes that were graciously offered to me by Judith Hall, his wife, “there were rumours separate to those made up by the Frasers, that Tom’s death was over, or had something to do with a woman. One interpretation was that the woman was Winnie Trainor. But there is another. In early fall 1977, I spoke with a respected Algonquin Park citizen, three years old when Tom died and still alive, alert and vibrant today, who told me who that woman was. He told me as well that Thomson’s family and closest friends kn
ew what had happened, but decided to cover up the truth to avoid scandal for the families concerned and probable prosecution and conviction if the truth became known. Considering all of the evidence, it is not hard to make the correct guess as to who provoked Shakespeare’s ‘green-ey’d monster’, and caused blood to ‘Burn like the mines of sulphur’. Although others came to and left the Lodge and their cottages, there were only two continuous female residents in Mowat in summer 1917, Winnie Trainor and Annie Fraser. Jealousy can enrage a spouse, as Shakespeare wrote about in Othello. Guilt can cause people to reveal truths or partial truths. Respect for others can make people hide the truth and accept and believe that some acts, even criminal acts, are better left secret.

  “Sometime in early July 1917,” Hall continued in his highly descriptive re-creation of what he believed had happened, “perhaps on Saturday July 7, Annie Fraser admitted to her husband, or gave him reason to believe that she had been having an affair with Tom Thomson. There may have been an argument that night after much drinking, but there was no fight resulting in Tom being injured. The following day, Mark Robinson saw Tom with Shannon Fraser at Joe Lake Dam around midday. Tom collected bread and bacon from Mowat Lodge soon thereafter and stowed it in his canoe in a rainsheet. That food was found untouched in Tom’s canoe when the latter was recovered later that day. He was apparently seen by at least three witnesses including Shannon Fraser paddling off in the direction of the portage to Gill Lake, where he was headed to fish, with his ankles most likely in good shape. Tom was using his favourite ash paddle, which had it dropped into the lake, would have floated ashore somewhere near his canoe, and very likely been found in the ensuing months of repeated searches for it.

  “As an extremely adept woodsman and canoeist, he did nothing stupid, such as standing up in his canoe to urinate less than 15 minutes from the portage, or pulling himself ashore while standing. But he came ashore somewhere, because an assault from one canoe to another is implausible, and noises travel a long way across water. Shannon Fraser had followed him, and wherever Tom landed, probably at the portage to Gill Lake, sometime between 1:45 and 2:45 p.m. based on when Tom was last seen, Fraser either confronted or ambushed him, and knocked him out or killed him with a violent blow to his right temple, possibly using Tom’s paddle as a club.

  “Whether he killed Tom outright or not, Fraser had a body, gear and a canoe to dispose of because if any of those had been found on land murder would have been suspected rather than accidental drowning. By about 20 minutes the blood in Thomson’s right ear would have formed a firm clot and as more time elapsed become progressively more resistant to being washed out. Fraser wrapped Tom’s ankle with his own fishing line weighted perhaps with Tom’s axe, took the body out onto Canoe Lake and sank it along with most of Tom’s gear. Fraser then upended Tom’s canoe to make it look as if he had tipped and drowned, and released it on the lake, disposing of the bloodstained somewhat less recognizable paddle later, possibly by burning it in his own fireplace.

  “Whether he felt that the corpse would have remained underwater is moot, but perhaps he did. He returned to Mowat Lodge and was central to the events of the subsequent two weeks. As local Postmaster, Fraser had easy access to telegraph and mail notification, but it is striking that he telegraphed John Thomson and Dr. MacCallum so promptly that the artist, who frequently disappeared for days to paint, was missing. Sometime between then and November he admitted to Annie what he had done. Beset by guilt over what had happened and her role in its causation, Annie made up contrasting stories of need for a suit, need for a wedding, demand for repayment of money, and the fight that really occurred elsewhere the following day. In the process she told part of the truth to her good friend Daphne Crombie exposing her husband to potential embarrassment and criminal proceedings while he lived, and his reputation to being destroyed after he was dead. Annie felt guilty until the day she died.”

  Dr. Hall’s conjecture is certainly that Shannon Fraser struck the blow—in whatever fashion—that led to Thomson’s death. But the reason given for that blow is quite different from the previous theory, based on Daphne Crombie’s statements, that Thomson, under pressure to marry Winnie Trainor, whether she was pregnant with his child or not, had demanded that Fraser pay him back and the two had fought. Daphne Crombie completely dismissed any suggestion that Thomson had any interest whatsoever in the plain, short Annie Fraser apart from benefiting from her homecooked meals and a clean room at the lodge. “Never!” she told me.

  There is another theory—never before made public—concerning how and why Shannon Fraser might have struck the fatal blow. It comes from a man who grew up in a house at 5 Minerva Street in Huntsville, next door to the Trainors. Brad McLellan, who was born May 31, 1937, and died at age sixty-nine on November 22, 2006, spent much of his retirement working on his memoirs of growing up in Huntsville during the 1940s and 1950s. Winnie Trainor often babysat him. And following the death of her husband in 1946, Annie Fraser, in a remarkable coincidence, came to live on the same short street, taking up residence with the family of her daughter, now Mildred Briggs. Annie also babysat Brad.

  Many of McLellan’s reminiscences had to do with school and his part-time job as bellhop at the nearby Empire Hotel, as well as local characters such as Art Eastman, who owned the nearby stables on Centre Street, and Preston Gerhart, who also lived on Minerva and had a blacksmith shop near the public school. His memories of Winnie, then well into her seventies, were of a good, dependable neighbour. “I always had a soft spot in my heart for her,” he wrote to me in a 2003 email. “She was always kind to me and got along well with my folks.”

  He said that he and his family had seen the Thomson sketches that Winnie owned several times. They were kept wrapped in old newspaper and packed away in a six-quart basket. Addie Sylvester, the daughter of the photo-studio owner on Centre Street, to whom Winnie had been like an “older sister,” also remembered seeing the sketches stored in this way. McLellan was unsure of the number but believed some of the sketches had been sold to an art dealer in Toronto. “She told my Dad,” McLellan said, “that [the proceeds from] some of them were used to put in a furnace and also to put a roof on her house.”

  McLellan was brought up to believe that his neighbour, always referred to as “Miss Trainor” to her face but as “Winnie” in mention, suffered from some mysterious “delicate condition” and was not to be upset, if at all possible. He said the murder of Thomson—“and I have no doubt about that”—had a bearing on Winnifred Trainor’s state of mind. In an early email, he hinted at knowing something deeper. “I can’t say why,” he wrote to me, “but I think it was Mrs. Fraser that I overheard speaking with my dad and mom … My folks always kept tight lipped about what they heard, but I overheard some of these things and they stuck in the back of my head.” But he would not say what “these things” were, even though I pressed him for months.

  McLellan stewed about this for some time, eventually writing to me again on April 28, 2003, stating: “… I mentioned Mrs. Fraser’s comments that I overheard as a kid … these staying in my mind all these years. Have never discussed them with anyone and I don’t think my folks ever did either. They frequently discussed the possibilities with themselves but never made public their thoughts.”

  This was proving most frustrating. I had shared with McLellan my own theories as to what had happened, including my belief that Shannon Fraser had killed Thomson and that Annie Fraser had been involved, probably against her will, in a cover-up. I had told him what Daphne Crombie had said and speculated with him about where Daphne was very likely right and where she was also very possibly wrong.

  “Your views have a soundness to them,” he eventually responded, “and I am inclined to agree.” And then, finally, he told me what he had kept secret for nearly half a century: the conversation he overheard as a young boy between his parents and Annie Fraser.

  “What was related to my folks,” he wrote, “was that Winnie’s family were extremely upset about h
er pregnancy and had put ‘someone’ up to teaching Tom a lesson. Mrs. Fraser did not say that a murder was the intent, just a ‘lesson’….”

  I was thunderstruck to hear this secret that Brad McLellan had kept all his life. That it was a childhood memory was not to be ignored, but much of it did parallel Daphne Crombie’s account. Both had Shannon and Tom getting into a fight and Shannon hitting Tom but not intending to kill him. Both had Annie involved in the cover-up. Both implied that Winnie had been pregnant and pressing for marriage. The source of both accounts was Annie Fraser, who would have been unlikely to implicate her husband twice to different people if she was not telling the truth. Where they differed—Daphne having them fight over money; the McLellan version involving a “lesson” being taught Thomson—is obvious, but either interpretation is plausible. In Daphne’s version, Tom was seeking money to carry through with a promise, or an obligation he felt, to marry Winnie; in Brad McLellan’s version, frontier justice was being meted out—very much in keeping with the rough-hewn world of Canoe Lake and Huntsville in 1917.

  It is also entirely plausible that Tom was trying to get out of marrying Winnie, whether or not a pregnancy was involved. Despite the convictions of the Trainor family and the McCormicks (Winnie’s sister, Marie, and her family) that Tom and Winnie had been engaged, and despite the belief, never documented, that Tom had reserved the honeymoon cabin at Billie Bear Lodge on Bella Lake, near Huntsville, there was no actual date set and no church or minister booked.

  “We think the Billie Bear story is probably true,” says Valerie Kremer, who chairs a small historical committee for the rustic lodge that still operates on Bella Lake, just beyond the western boundary of Algonquin Park, “but we can’t prove it.” Booking records have survived only from the 1940s on. One longtime visitor, John Vanduzer of Toronto, says that his aunt, Mabel Gavin, began going to Billie Bear in 1912 and always claimed that Thomson had made the booking, even if no paper trail could ever be found.