Drop Dead

by Lorna Poplak

  The public, too, became invested in the spiritual well-being of prison­ers on death row. The burning questions were: Would those doomed to die be redeemed? Would they in some way repent for the error of their ways? In religious terms, what society wanted more than anything was for evildoers to be saved from sin.

  What society also desperately wanted was for evildoers to confess. As noted by Leyton-Brown, this would remove any last lingering doubt about whether justice had been done, or whether police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and sheriffs had been complicit in sending an innocent person to the grave.

  Best of all was repentance and confession together. Robert Neil, hanged in Toronto for the stabbing death of a prison guard, as reported in the Toronto Daily Mail on February 29, 1888, stood beneath the crossbeam of the gallows and said in a firm, clear voice, “Now I am here I would like to say I did not mean to kill that man.… I forgive everyone and hope to be forgiven.” A rough arrow scratched on a wall at the Don Jail marked his grave.

  Of course, things didn’t always end as neatly as the public would have liked. Michael Farrell, the Quebecer found guilty of killing his neighbour in 1878 for using a right-of-way through his property, made a confession in court when sentence was passed: “That man had liberty as well as any other to pass by that road, as long as he fastened up the gap after him.… If he had put up the fence after him he would have been alive today, and I would not have been here.” In reporting his words, the Quebec Saturday Budget commented with horror and sadness on Farrell’s “apparent unconcern and vindictiveness.”

  Government officials also had an essential role to play in deciding who should go to the gallows and who should be spared.

  When someone was convicted of a capital crime, the presiding judge was required to submit a detailed report to the minister of justice in Ottawa. The federal Cabinet and officials of the Department of Justice would review the case. At the end of this sometimes lengthy process, Cabinet would make the ultimate decision on what sentence to impose. If they resolved that the law “be allowed to take its course,” an Orderin-Council was issued instructing the local authorities to proceed with the execution.

  According to author and historian Carolyn Strange, “condemned persons’ chances of commutation were clearly linked to assumptions about the dangerousness of certain criminals and the culpability of various categories of offenders, as well as to public anxieties about changing rates of criminal violence.” And what swayed the Cabinet’s opinions at one time could have the opposite effect at another, tilting the balance for, or against, the condemned person. Indigenous peoples (that is, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples), for example, were initially treated leniently, but as time passed, racial paternalism evaporated, especially if white people were in the gunsights.

  Take the case of the Copper Inuit living on the shores of Coronation Gulf in the Arctic. In 1916, two Inuit men named Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were arrested for the murder of two French missionaries. They were in­itially tried in Edmonton in 1917 and acquitted, then retried in Calgary and convicted of murder. Their sentences were immediately commuted to life imprisonment. In 1919, the men were released and returned to the Arctic. This leniency was aimed to teach the Inuit people about Canadian law and to “Canadianize” them. If the Inuit were to kill again, they would have to suffer the consequences.

  And the consequences proved to be harsh. In 1922, a young Inuit named Alikomiak, arrested with his uncle Tatamigana for the killing of an Inuit man and a baby, shot a Royal Canadian Mounted Police corporal whom he believed had insulted him. Later the same day, he shot a Hudson’s Bay Company man.

  Killing whites? Strategically acceptable to the Canadian authorities in 1917, but no longer tolerated in the 1920s. “As kindness has failed in the past I strongly recommend that the law should take its course and those Eskimos found guilty of murder should be hanged in a place where the natives will see and recognize the outcome of taking another life,” thundered T.L. Cory, commissioner of the Northwest Territories.

  In 1923, Alikomiak and Tatamigana were tried at Herschel Island in the Yukon Territory. Since trial court officials brought along with them an executioner and lumber to build a scaffold, it was fairly clear what the outcome of the case would be. Public controversy about the case spread across the country, with some arguing that it was a travesty of justice to try sixteen-year-old Alikomiak in a language he could not understand and others insisting that Canada’s sovereignty should be maintained and respected. But despite this, the government was determined to make an example of the two Inuit men, and they were hanged in February 1924.

  Not everyone convicted of murder went to the gallows, though. Just over half the 1,533 people listed in the official inventory of Department of Justice capital case files as having received the death penalty escaped the noose. In some cases, their sentence was commuted or quashed; in others, they were given a new trial leading to a reduced sentence or acquittal. Some prisoners awaiting execution died in jail. Chillingly, some unfortunates committed suicide.

  So who was most likely to be executed? Statistics show us that certain groups of people, such as young working-class males and men from ethnic and racial minorities, were particularly vulnerable. The poor were often targeted. Women were generally treated leniently, as were Indigenous people in the early stages of their association with whites. However, racist thinking among the ruling classes would sometimes evoke pity for “lesser” peoples but at other times reflect fear and hatred of “the other.” In short, there were never any guarantees, consistent application of the law, or immutable rules or principles in what Strange calls “the lottery of death” — capital punishment in Canada.

  The main players are all assembled. Let’s not forget the second-stringers, important in the action, too: police officers, homicide detectives, doctors, court officials, Crown prosecutors crossing swords with lawyers for the defence, jailers, and families of the victims and accused.

  And standing by on the sidelines, waiting for his turn, is the most contentious participant of them all: the hangman.

  The game is on.

  Chapter 3

  The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery

  T homas D’Arcy McGee may have had a premonition that his brains would be blown out by an assassin’s bullet. A few days before his death, he had a terrifying dream of tumbling into a powerful river and being swept helplessly toward a waterfall.

  It was April 1868 and things had not been going well for McGee. Once a rising star among Irish Canadians, he had won a seat in parliament in the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) in the general election of 1857 and had been instrumental in persuading Irish Canadians to support Confederation. But now his political career was in tatters. After playing a prominent role in the first two conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec that had led to Confederation, he was omitted from the third in London. He had been expelled from the St. Patrick’s Society in Montreal and denounced as a traitor to Ireland. In spite of his waning political fortunes, however, he was elected by a slim majority to the first House of Commons in the Dominion of Canada in 1867. But the Cabinet position he had expected as a prominent member of the ruling Conservative Party did not materialize. His clashes with the Irish community made him a liability rather than an asset, and the proposal was withdrawn. Instead, he was offered a job in the civil service as a consolation prize.

  But at 2:00 a.m. on April 7, 1868, all of this faded into the background. In the House of Commons in Ottawa, parliamentarians were on their feet, giving McGee a standing ovation for his last passionate speech on the spirit of Confederation.

  Then McGee put on his overcoat, gloves, and new white top hat and left the newly built centre block of parliament. As he started his slow walk back to his boarding house a short distance away, a full moon beamed down on him.

  “Good night, Mr. McGee,” called John Buckley, a House of Commons employee, as McGee turned onto Sparks Street.

  “Good
morning,” joked McGee. “It’s morning now.”

  Those were his last words.

  His landlady, Mrs. Trotter, heard the drumming of feet and what sounded like a firecracker outside her front door. When she went to investigate, she found a figure slumped against the blood-speckled doorway. It was her lodger, shot to death. The bullet had entered the back of his head, passed through his skull, and exited through his mouth. The gun had been fired at such close range that some of McGee’s teeth were found embedded in the doorpost.

  McGee was a close friend and drinking buddy of John A. Macdonald, also a Father of Confederation and now prime minister of Canada. Sir John A., as he was called, was devastated when wakened with the news that his companion had just been shot. He rushed at once to the scene of the murder and helped carry his dead friend into the house. He returned home, covered in blood and, as Macdonald’s wife Agnes described him, “much agitated,” with a face “ghostly white.”

  A massive manhunt was launched, with more than two hundred people arrested in the police sweep. That afternoon, Sir John A. delivered a sombre tribute in the House of Commons to the “foully murdered” McGee. Flags flew at half-mast in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. The mayor of Ottawa posted a reward of $2,000 for information leading to the capture of the killer, and the federal government and provinces of Ontario and Quebec between them offered another $10,000.

  The nation was in shock.

  McGee, a short, chunky man with shaggy black hair, was nothing remarkable to look at. But he was an inspired public speaker with a magnetic personality. On the day he died, The Globe described him as “marvellously eloquent.… His wit — his power of sarcasm — his readiness in reply — his aptness in quotation — his pathos which melted to tears, and his broad humour which convulsed with laughter — were all undoubtedly of a very high order.”

  In the period leading up to Confederation, McGee had fired up audiences with his enthusiasm and his vision of a free, tolerant, and united Canada. As noted by Fennings Taylor in a 1868 sketch of McGee’s life and death, McGee presented this ideal to fellow provincial parliamentarians in 1860. “I see in the not remote distance,” he said, “one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean. I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions.… I see within the round of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.”

  Thomas D’Arcy McGee, statesman, journalist, public speaker, and poet. This portrait is dated 1868, the year that McGee was felled by an assassin’s bullet, becoming the only Canadian federal politician ever to be assassinated.

  McGee was a man of action as well as a visionary. Between 1864 and 1866, his key role in the negotiations with Britain that led to the founding of the Dominion of Canada prompted many to describe him as the (rather than a ) Father of Confederation.

  But McGee wasn’t always a Canadian nationalist, loyal to the British Crown. Ironically, he started off as a fiery revolutionary. In Ireland, where he was born in Carlingford in 1825 and raised as a Roman Catholic, and in the United States, where he landed as a seventeen-year-old in 1842 to work as a newspaperman, he was strongly in favour of armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland. On his return to his native country in 1845, he became so politically active that the British issued a warrant for his arrest, and he had to flee back to the States, disguised as a priest.

  McGee became increasingly disenchanted with what he regarded as the discrimination and exploitation experienced by Irish immigrants in the United States. And once he moved to Canada in 1857 on the invitation of a group of Irish Catholics to start up the New Era newspaper in Montreal, he expressed his opinions even more forcefully, declaring that minorities, including Catholics, were much better off in Canada than in the United States.

  McGee was dirt poor in spite of his multiple professional activities as a charismatic politician, public speaker, journalist, and poet. Fortunately, he had powerful friends who were happy to help out. He owned a home on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters, Frasa and Peggy. The house, decorated with shamrocks, the symbol of Ireland, had been a gift from supporters.

  But violence and danger stalked McGee throughout his life, and he made many enemies.

  His sharp tongue and acid wit wounded his political opponents. Much more seriously, he became a harsh critic of an Irish separatist movement and secret society called the Fenian Brotherhood.

  The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in the United States in 1858 with the aim of violently overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The Fenians had a large number of followers in the States, with fewer in Canada. In 1866, the U.S. branch, for the most part Irish-American veterans of the American Civil War, launched two raids — or invasions, depending on who you spoke to — into Canada. The first one into New Brunswick was a complete failure. The other incursion from Buffalo, New York, over the Niagara River and into Ontario was a great success; but the inexperience of the commanding officer led to the withdrawal of the Fenian forces.

  McGee went on the offensive, fearing that Fenian activities would lead to a violent backlash against the Irish in Canada.

  “Secret Societies are like what the farmers in Ireland used to say of scotch grass,” he wrote in the Montreal Gazette . “The only way to destroy it is to cut it out by the roots and burn it into powder.” He threatened to publish “documents which would put in their proper position the Fenians of Montreal.”

  And that, according to historian David A. Wilson in his bio­graphy of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was when the death threats began. One anonymous letter writer warned that McGee would be assassinated if he revealed any information about the Fenians in Montreal. Another letter, wrapped up in a Fenian newspaper, contained a drawing of a gallows and a coffin.

  So when McGee was assassinated, suspicion immediately fell on the Fenians. Within twenty-four hours, police arrested Patrick James Whelan, a twenty-eight-year -old Irish immigrant with strong Fenian associations. They found a fully loaded .32 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver in his coat pocket. He was charged with the murder of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

  Easter Monday, 1868: on what would have been his forty-third birthday, McGee was given a state funeral — Canada’s first — in Montreal. The turnout was enormous, partly because the new Grand Trunk Railway, which had been strongly championed by McGee, offered cheap fares to attendees from all around the country. Some 80,000 people (the population of Montreal at that time was 105,000) silently lined the streets, many hanging out of windows or standing on the rooftops, as the procession passed by. The coffin was carried in a sixteen-foot-long , sixteen-foot-high funeral carriage drawn by six grey horses with black ostrich plumes on their heads. Guns were fired every minute, and military bands along the way played George Frideric Handel’s “Dead March.” McGee was buried in his family mausoleum at the Notre-Dame-des -Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.

  Patrick James Whelan was an Irish immigrant associated with the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society that aimed to violently overthrow British rule in Ireland. Whelan’s execution for the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee still stirs up controversy today.

  And what of Patrick Whelan?

  His trial began in Ottawa in September 1868. Newspapers of the day called him “the tailor with the sandy whiskers.” The Ottawa Times reported that “as point after point of evidence was brought out during his trial, his uncontrollable restlessness of body, his constant turning of the head, his knitted brows, his staring eyes and twitching mouth, gave evident marks of his anxiety.” On the eighth (and last) day of his trial, he wore plain black. He probably knew what was coming. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

  Whelan swore that he was innocent. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” he told the court, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God … that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart
and soul.”

  His lawyers launched two appeals against his sentence: both failed. In the interim, he languished on death row at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa.

  Letter dated February 9, 1869, from the Department of the Secretary of State in Ottawa to sheriff W.F. Powell of the County of Carleton, advising him that the execution of Patrick James Whelan should proceed as planned.

  The year 1869 was known as the Year of the Big Snow in the Ottawa Valley. It began with a bone-chilling blizzard on February 11, and it continued to snow without let-up until St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Impenetrable six-and-a -half-foot-high drifts covered fields and villages, roads disappeared, farms and communities were totally isolated, and cattle perished in their stalls.

  Patrick Whelan was hanged at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa on the first morning of the snowstorm. In spite of the evil weather, more than five thousand people showed up for his execution. He went to his death with the words “God save Ireland! And God save my soul!” on his lips. It took seven long minutes for Whelan to die.

  Executed individuals were usually buried in the cemetery of the prison where their hanging took place. Whelan was no exception: he was interred in an unmarked grave in the courtyard of the jail. But in 2002, following petitions from his family, a box of earth was dug up from the jail yard and taken to Montreal to be symbolically reburied beside Whelan’s widow’s remains in the Notre-Dame-Des -Neiges Cemetery.

  How ironic that memorials to the two men — one murdered, the other hanged for his murder — now stand in such close proximity.

  But was Whelan actually guilty of the crime?

  Many say yes. Whelan, like McGee, lived in Montreal. As noted by Wilson, Whelan was either a Fenian or a Fenian sympathizer, and he hated McGee. He had been stalking McGee for months, following him to Ottawa when McGee went there on parliamentary business. He was in the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons on the morning of the murder. He left the House at the same time as McGee and had no alibi for the time between 2:10 and 2:30 a.m. When the police arrested him, they found his Smith & Wesson revolver, which looked as though it had recently been fired. During Whelan’s trial, Joseph Faulkner, a tailor who worked with him in Montreal, testified that Whelan had said that McGee “was a traitor and deserved to be shot.” Another witness from Montreal, Alexander J. Turner, told the court that after McGee was elected to parliament, Whelan had threatened to “blow his bloody brains out before the session is over.”