by Lorna Poplak
According to the Flesherton Advance , the trial judge, Justice J.D. Armour, “charged very strongly against the prisoner but presented the facts clearly and fully.” It took the jury thirty minutes to come to their verdict: Guilty. Although there was a request for mercy, the judge told Teets that he held out no hope for the success of any appeal. He was proven correct. In spite of petitions for clemency, Teets was hanged at dawn on December 5, 1884, the first person to meet his death at the Owen Sound Gaol.
An open-and-shut case, you might think. But it was much more complicated than that.
Cook Teets was completely blind. He had lost the sight in one eye as a youth after being struck by a rock-filled snowball, and the other through inflammation some years later. Even though he and Leppard were newly married, he was still living with his mother, while his wife and her two children from a previous marriage stayed with hers. The couple had been together the day before she died, but had parted around 5:00 p.m. According to the evidence, Teets was nowhere near his wife for a period of twelve or more hours before her death.
Teets made a statement to his lawyer the day before he was hanged, repeating the position he had taken since the beginning of the case.
Yes, he had had strychnine in his possession. But he used it to kill foxes, not people: “I do not know where the poison was got, or who got it. Wherever it came from it never came out of my bottle. I had the poison for not quite two years. I got it in Lexington, Michigan, for to get furs. I used some of it, and got a few furs for a cape for my mother, which I tanned myself. I made no secret about having the poison.”
In spite of petitions from both residents of Grey County and members of the Ontario bar, an Orderin-Council dated December 4, 1884, directed that the hanging of Cook Teets should proceed the following day.
Yes, he took out an insurance policy on his wife’s life: “Shortly before our marriage, with the advice and consent of her father, I let her have money to insure her life.… It was at her own request that her life was insured. She wanted it in case anything happened to her that there would be something to support her children.”
He died insisting that he was an innocent man.
Which he may well have been.
Even if Teets had the weapon (poison) and the motive (insurance money) to commit murder, where was the opportunity? Strychnine is known to be a foul-tasting, quick-acting poison. Symptoms can begin within minutes, and the victim will die two or three hours after exposure. A blind man would have had difficulty in administering such a poison without arousing suspicion in the first place, and Teets was nowhere near his wife during those crucial early morning hours when she must have swallowed the poison. Perhaps someone else had taken advantage of the situation? As the Hanover Post hinted darkly in an editorial after Teets’s hanging: “We must admit that the fact of his having the strychnine and the policy were known to some person or persons, then how easy, with such a knowledge, for the person with malice and murderous intent to administer the strychnine and hang poor blind Cook Teets for the murder.”
Suspicion fell on Rosanna Leppard’s disreputable family and on her mother in particular. Roseanne O’Malley Leppard, a Catholic woman of Irish descent, consented to Rosanna and Teets’s marriage and then hounded Teets to get it done as quickly as possible — perhaps because Rosanna was pregnant? But, according to Teets, O’Malley Leppard was enraged when the couple ran off to Toronto to wed. In his last statement, Teets claimed that his wife had told him about an exchange between her and her mother:
“Who were you married by — a [Catholic] priest?” her mother had asked.
“No, by a Presbyterian minister.”
“Take him and go to hell with him, for that is where you will go any way.”
Did her mother decide to hasten Rosanna’s descent into hell? Teets also stated that his wife had said “her mother was illusing [sic ] her,” and that she wanted to move out of the parental home.
O’Malley Leppard certainly had the opportunity to murder her daughter. She was alone with Rosanna during her last meal and was with her when she died. She appeared at the coroner’s inquest with a black eye, which she claimed occurred when her daughter had lashed out randomly in her death throes. But was Rosanna in actual fact striking out at the person she knew was her murderer? During the trial, the older woman was accused of scolding her daughter about the cost and inconvenience of having to keep her and her children. Ominously, witnesses claimed, O’Malley Leppard had been brandishing a poker at the time.
O’Malley Leppard was hardly a stable individual — she spent time in jail for attempting to burn down a neighbour’s barn, and some years after Rosanna died, she was committed to the Toronto Asylum, possibly suffering from schizophrenia, and she remained institutionalized until her death in 1918.
Teets said unequivocally that his mother-in-law , who had testified both at the inquest and the trial, was a liar. She asked him for strychnine to poison dogs: “I never gave her any. I never suggested to her to put it in onions to poison people who were stealing her onions. That whole story is a fabrication.”
No one witnessed the murder; it was Teets’s word against the Leppard family’s. Even at the time, many in the community believed in Teets’s innocence. They claimed that he had been hanged on very flimsy circumstantial evidence.
As Chief Justice James Chalmers McRuer put it in his charge to the jury in the 1951 Rex v. Sullivan manslaughter case in Ottawa: “To find the accused guilty on circumstantial evidence, you must be convinced not only that the circumstances are consistent with the guilt of the accused, but that those circumstances are inconsistent with any other conclusion.”
Were the circumstances in Teets’s case consistent with his guilt and inconsistent with anyone else’s? Many thought not.
What the Montreal Gazette in July 1931 called “the ever perplexing problem of circumstantial evidence” was also a key factor in the case of Abraham Steinberg, which took place in Toronto but enthralled the whole country for more than a year. Steinberg was accused of murdering his nephew and business partner, Samuel Goldberg. After two trials, appeals to the Supreme Court of Ontario, to the Supreme Court of Canada, and finally to the Governor-General-in -Council, and despite multiple petitions signed by more than thirty thousand people pleading for clemency and a personal appeal to the prime minister by the mayor of Toronto, Steinberg was hanged at the Don Jail on the morning of July 14, 1931.
The case started in vintage film noir style, with a dead man, a bullet hole through his skull, slumped over a desk in a burning building in downtown Toronto. On March 5, 1930, Sam Goldberg had been shot in his office at Goldberg Monument Works, and his corpse was set on fire to mask the murder.
The police became very interested in Steinberg, especially after they found his .38 revolver hidden in the company’s yard the day after the shooting. As reported by The Globe , ballistics tests confirmed that the gun had fired what one expert called the “mortal bullet.” Steinberg was arrested and charged with murder. It came out at the inquest that the partners had been quarrelling for months, and the police were convinced that they had their man.
At Steinberg’s trial, the Crown focused on the ongoing clashes between Steinberg and Goldberg. They showed that the murder weapon belonged to Steinberg, although they couldn’t prove that he had actually fired it. There were only four keys to the office. A witness had seen a man in a grey overcoat and cap take a key out of his pocket and unlock the office door. The prosecution claimed that this was Steinberg. The most damning evidence was provided by the star witness for the prosecution, James Creighton. He had been held at the Don Jail at the same time as Steinberg, facing charges of procuring false evidence in a lawsuit. Creighton swore that Steinberg had made a confession to him while they were both in prison.
The problem was, as pointed out by Susan McNicoll in Toronto Murders: Mysteries, Crime, and Scandals , that Steinberg had a solid alibi. He had been visiting his friend Max Rotenberg at the time of the murder. Rotenberg a
nd four other witnesses stated that Steinberg was wearing a blue coat and hat that evening. The defence’s case was strong: the office door was always kept open when someone was inside, so why would anyone need to unlock it? And Creighton was totally unreliable, or, as counsel put it, “They could not hang a dog on the story told by that witness.” Steinberg had tears in his eyes when the jury couldn’t come to a verdict, and the judge ordered a new trial.
Blue coat, grey coat.
The difference between innocence and guilt can sometimes hang on such shreds of circumstantial evidence. And so it was with Steinberg. At his second trial, the prosecution produced a police witness who testified that Steinberg had been wearing a grey overcoat and cap when he was questioned at police headquarters on the night of the murder.
Friends and supporters were shocked that Steinberg’s life depended on such shaky evidence — and on Creighton’s testimony in particular. Steinberg spoke English with great difficulty and steadfastly denied his guilt even when subjected to gruelling police questioning — why would he confess to a total stranger? Further, the jury was totally unaware that Creighton had been a psychiatric patient and that the charges against him were dropped after he testified.
This time, Steinberg was found guilty. And early in the morning of July 15, 1931, a few curious bystanders gathered to read the notice posted on the door to the Don Jail: “Judgement of death was this day executed on Abraham Steinberg in the common jail of the County of York, at Toronto.”
Again to quote Justice McRuer in Rex v. Sullivan : “The onus of proof in this case, as in every criminal case, is upon the Crown from the beginning to the end, to prove the accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Reasonable doubt, passed along to Canada from English common law, is one of the underpinnings of the criminal justice system. It means that, based on reason and common sense, a person must be sure of the guilt of the accused.
In the case of both Teets and Steinberg, the Crown secured a guilty conviction and both men went to the gallows. But Teets could not have been the individual who fed quick-acting poison to his wife, and Steinberg had a rock-solid alibi for the time of his nephew’s slaying. So were both men guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Or were they actually found guilty of crimes they did not commit?
When the courts convict an innocent person today, the State can simply say sorry and award the wrongfully convicted both freedom and compensation for long years spent in prison. Or, as Crown prosecutor Michal Fairburn put it somewhat more elegantly in the Ontario Court of Appeal on October 15, 2007, when the court acquitted William Mullins-Johnson: “I wish to extend our sincere, profound and deepest apology to Mr. Mullins-Johnson and to his family for the miscarriage of justice that occurred.” Mullins-Johnson had spent more than twelve years in prison for the rape and murder of his four-year-old niece, Valin. His conviction was partly based on a pathology report, which concluded that the child had been sexually molested and murdered. (One of the pathologists, Charles Smith, has since been completely discredited.) An investigation in 2005 by Chief Forensic Pathologist Michael Pollanen indicated that the signs that damned Mullins-Johnson were normal post-mortem occurrences, and that the child died of natural causes.
But once a person has been hanged, it’s game over. Neither apologies nor restitution can ever make up for a gross miscarriage of justice. One of the most disturbing cases of this kind in the annals of Canadian criminal justice was that of Wilbert Coffin, prospector and woodsman, hanged in the beautiful and remote Gaspé Region of Quebec in 1956 for the murder of an American bear hunter.
Chapter 11
The Troubling Case of Wilbert Coffin
M rs . Eugene Hunter Lindsey was wearing a trim grey suit and red hat when she took the stand in court that day. Her task was a grim one: to identify the personal effects of her husband and son at the murder trial of the Quebec native accused of killing her boy.
The Gaspé Peninsula or Gaspésie, in the southeast of the province of Quebec, juts out like a clenched fist into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Nestled between the sea and the mountains, this vast region offers a multitude of year-round activities in stunningly beautiful natural settings. Dive into this unique experience, the travel guides tell you. And don’t forget your camera.
But when Eugene Lindsey, a railroad steam fitter from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, his seventeen-year-old son, Richard, and twenty-year-old family friend Frederick Claar packed up Lindsey’s green 1947 pickup truck and set out for Gaspésie late on June 5, 1953, they did not have photo ops in mind. They were out to shoot them some bears — the bigger and blacker the better. Back then, this remote and rugged area was wildly popular with hunters from the States. Lindsey was familiar with the region and had indulged his passion for bear hunting in the Gaspé before. This brief visit was to celebrate Richard’s high school graduation.
Mrs. Lindsey received a couple of postcards from her son. The second one, sent from the village of Gaspé and dated June 8, 1953, read in part: “Hi Mama.… We are ready to go into the woods tomorrow.”
That was the last she ever heard from him.
On July 5, a month after the trio left home, Fred Claar’s father became worried. The hunters had been due back by mid-June. Claar’s concerned telephone calls touched off a search by the Quebec Provincial Police (QPP). The first thing the police located was Lindsey’s truck, ominously abandoned in the bush about sixty miles from Gaspé village. On July 14 came an even more sinister discovery: the headless body of Eugene Lindsey, mangled and partially consumed, presumably by bears.
“Skeletal Parts Are Identified As the Remains of Elder Lindsey,” announced the Montreal Gazette on July 23, 1953. According to the report, one official was convinced that Lindsey had been beaten with a rifle. He said that “bits of hair found on the rifle sight had minute pieces of skin attached, indicating Lindsey was clubbed over the head.”
On that same day came another gruesome find: the bodies of Richard and Fred.
The grim discoveries continued to pile up. Near where the bodies were located, personal items belonging to the hunters were found strewn along a bush trail, some of them hanging from branches as if tossed from a moving vehicle. Eugene Lindsey was known to carry large sums of money. According to his widow, he had taken around $700 in cash on this trip. His empty wallet was found near the remains of his body.
Dr. Roussel, Quebec’s medico-legal pathologist, couldn’t determine the precise date each of them had perished or Eugene’s exact cause of death, but he had no doubt that the two younger men had been shot. Richard Lindsey seemed to have been struck in the torso from behind. None of the three had fired a single bullet, but somebody else certainly had. Deep in the bush, the hunters had become the hunted.
This was murder.
And that was when thirty-eight-year -old Wilbert Coffin, outdoorsman, prospector, and resident of the small Quebec town of York Centre, stepped into the frame. He had offered his services when the call went out for volunteers to help find the three missing Americans. He told the police that he had met the hunters on June 10 and had even generously offered to assist them when their truck broke down. He was flagged as the last person to see the victims alive. Coffin’s status as material witness quickly moved to that of prime suspect, and on August 27, he was charged with murdering the two boys. He was eventually tried for one of the slayings — that of Richard Lindsey. The motive, according to the police, was robbery of cash and items such as a suitcase, a fuel pump, binoculars, towels, and trousers.
Wilbert Coffin at the time of his arrest in 1953. Coffin, a prospector and woodsman, was hanged in the beautiful Gaspé Region of Quebec in 1956 for the murder of an American bear hunter.
Coffin complained bitterly of his treatment at the hands of the QPP, led by Captain Alphonse Matte. He claimed to have been “railroaded” in an attempt to coerce him into confession. On one occasion, he was grilled for eighteen consecutive hours, and denied water and cigarettes. Marion Petrie, his common-law wife and the mother of his five-yea
r-old son, was also treated harshly by the police. She was detained and questioned for eighteen hours. And as Coffin and Petrie were not legally married, she was forced to testify as a Crown witness at his trial, which spouses are normally exempt from doing.
Coffin’s trial began on July 15, 1954 — almost exactly one year after the crime — at Percé, Quebec. On the prosecution side was the A-team of Paul Miquelon and Noel Dorion. They were two of Quebec’s best-known prosecutors, with an impressive number of convictions under their respective belts. On the defence side was Raymond Maher, who introduced himself to Coffin’s father as the best of the best. He would put a hundred witnesses on the stand, he said, to prove Coffin’s innocence.
Eugene Lindsey’s widow testified on the fourth day of the trial. She identified a stove and kerosene container as the equipment of the hunting party, as well as a watch, ring, belt, cap, a treasured knife, two torn undershirts, and a grey sweatshirt bearing the logo “Hollidaysburg Tigers,” all of which had belonged to her son Richard. The sweatshirt, though, had not had a small, round hole in the logo when she’d packed it into her son’s suitcase. That had been caused more recently, as the pathologist claimed, by the bullet that passed through his body.
Her voice faltered only once during the hour she spent on the witness stand. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, when she was asked if she recognized the handwriting on that postcard dated June 8, she replied with a sob: “I certainly do.”
As the trial progressed, the prosecution’s case became clear. They argued that Coffin had killed, then robbed, the trio. He’d spent substantial sums of money and had items belonging to the hunters in his possession at the time of his arrest. The evidence was all circumstantial. The murder weapon, for example, was never found. But the lawyers for the prosecution were very persuasive. They skilfully planted the perception that Coffin had borrowed a gun and called a witness who stated that he saw what looked like the barrel of a rifle sticking out of Coffin’s truck. (Many months later, the witness recanted his trial testimony.)