Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  He stopped working completely. “Why should I work?” he asked his family. “I have all of this money.”

  “Yes,” said his wife. “And soon it will be gone.”

  “Only if the witches take it,” Gallant replied mysteriously. “And I can fool them too.”

  A Witch Must Die

  A short time after that argument, Gallant began to sleep out of doors in the woods. “It is safer out there,” he would tell anyone who asked. “God can come and look down and see me more clearly.”

  Gallant’s condition grew even stranger. When his farm dog followed him out into the woods at night, Gallant grew suspicious. “That dog is a witch,” he swore, making the sign of the evil eye. “I can see in its eyes that it has laid a curse on me. No doubt it wants my money.”

  No amount of arguing could convince Gallant otherwise. He became obsessed with the old mongrel, going to great measures to walk around the poor beast. Finally, early one morning, he took the dog out back to the wood pile, took a short-handled broadaxe, and cut the dog’s head off.

  He walked into the house and dropped the dog’s head on the breakfast table. “The sorcerer is dead,” he declared. “He has laid his last curse.” Everyone’s appetite was promptly spoiled.

  Gallant wasn’t bothered by it at all. He sat down and began to eat as if nothing odd had happened.

  Then, one month later, on June 11, 1812, Gallant did something even worse.

  Just a Quiet Walk in the Woods

  It was a Thursday morning. Gallant had been arguing with Madelaine. He swore that she was not his wife at all. He claimed that she was actually married to his son, Fidèle.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do to convince you of the truth?” Madelaine pleaded.

  “Let us go,” Xavier Gallant told his wife, taking her by the hand. “I want to take a quiet walk with you in the woods.”

  What could she do? He was her husband, even if he didn’t know it. So she went with him, quietly.

  He took her out into the woods and cut her throat open with the same broadaxe he had used on the family dog. “That fixes that,” he said to his dead wife, as he buried her remains under a heap of leaves. He stood up and smiled to himself. He felt at peace.

  Three days later, on the morning of Sunday, June 14, 1812, Xavier Gallant calmly led a group of searchers to the spot where he had placed her body. “There she is,” he said. “Right where I put her.” He was calm throughout the entire proceeding.

  On the way to the Charlottetown jailhouse, he spotted two full-grown geese. “Do you see those geese?” he asked the constable. “Those geese are the angels of St. John and St. Paul. You can tell by their wings. They have forgiven my sins and they have told me I would go to heaven if I sent the witch there first. I’ve been delivered. I can do no wrong.” He was still smiling calmly as the jail cell door slammed shut.

  The Trial

  On July 3, 1812, Xavier Gallant was brought to the Supreme Court of Prince Edward Island to stand before Chief Justice Caesar Colclough and his assistant judges Robert Gray and James Curtis. Twelve English-speaking men were called to serve as Gallant’s jury. They were William McEwen, Richard Chappel, James Wilson, Peter Hewitt, Joseph Dingwell, Donald McDonald, George Mackey, John McGregor, David Higgins , Nathan Davis, Joseph Avaard, and George Aitkin.

  “That is a lot of English to try one Acadian,” Gallant joked dryly. “Don’t you feel a little outnumbered?”

  John Frederick Holland, the adjutant general of militia as well as a local justice of the peace, was called upon to act as translator for the defendant, as well as for the eleven witnesses who were summoned to court, the bulk of whom could not speak a word of English.

  James Bardin Palmer, judicial counsellor for the Crown, was appointed to stand in Gallant’s defence. Six of the witnesses were called for the Crown: Victor and Fidèle Gallant, sons of the accused; Jean-Baptiste Gallant, Xavier’s cousin; Prosper Poirier; Daniel Campbell; and Colonel Harry Compton. There were five witnesses for the defence: Placide Arsenault; William Clark; George Blood; Samuel Cameron, Xavier’s closest neighbour; and Lange Gallant, Xavier’s oldest son.

  The trial lasted only a day. The bulk of the witnesses agreed upon one thing: Xavier Gallant was as crazy as a man who jumps into a river to get out of the rain.

  Fidèle Gallant swore that his father had been driven mad by money. “It was the money that did it,” Fidèle said. “If you hang anybody, you ought to hang the banker.”

  Prosper Poirier, a close neighbour, agreed. “On my word, it was one too many dollars that caused Xavier to kill his wife Madelaine,” Prosper declared. “When Xavier was poor, he was a loving husband to his wife, and a very hard worker.”

  The jury adjourned at six o’clock. An hour and a half later, the jury found Xavier Gallant guilty of murder, but they asked that the court show mercy to a man who had so obviously taken leave of his senses. However, Chief Justice Colclough was not moved by the jury’s plea for clemency.

  “Xavier Gallant, I do find you guilty, and I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until dead. Following that, your body will be delivered into the keeping of a medical college, where it will be cut into pieces and anatomized so that we might find the root of your dark madness. May God have pity upon your mortal soul.”

  Gallant’s lawyer, James Palmer, rose to his feet at these words and begged the court for a stay of execution, which was granted. Xavier Gallant was kept in the Charlottetown jailhouse for a total of fifteen months.

  The conditions were not kind. The jailer was provided with a meagre allowance for food and firewood. The prisoners slept upon dirt floors, dressed in whatever rags they were arrested in, and lay in their own natural filth.

  It was even worse for Xavier Gallant. The jailer, Caleb Sentner, was ordered to feed Gallant and see to his needs. He was promised a payment of fifteen shillings per week, which would have been more than adequate. The sum was to have come from the liquidation of the prisoner’s property, which was to have been arranged by the coroner, Charles Serani.

  For whatever reason, this payment did not materialize. Sentner went to Gallant’s friends and family to ask that they supply bedding and fresh clothing for the prisoner. However, they informed Sentner that the coroner had sold all that off. The sheriff sent two old blankets, but they wound up being used to help tie Gallant to the floor to prevent him from injuring himself. A straitjacket was recommended, but like the bedding and clothes, the straitjacket did not materialize.

  Time moved on. Gallant’s condition worsened. Charles Serani, the coroner, seemed to have developed a case of amnesia when it came to the matter of the disposal of Gallant’s property. Finally, the court ordered that the jailer must bathe the prisoner in an infusion of strong tobacco and peppermint, to kill off any vermin. The sheriff, in turn, was ordered to provide proper clothing. But it was too little, too late. On November 6, 1813, Xavier Gallant died on the dirt floor of the Charlottetown jailhouse. A coroner’s inquest, performed by Serani’s replacement, Fade Goff, declared that Xavier Gallant had died “from a visitation from God, and in a natural way.”

  Pretty words, but they did not change the undeniable fact that Xavier Gallant had died from lack of food, poor living conditions, and the bone-chilling cold of a brutal Prince Edward Island November. Something needed to be done.

  But what?

  The Final Result

  On the day of Xavier Gallant’s unfortunate death, the Island Council held a special emergency meeting. It was resolved that the deputy clerk of the council would demand a proper and honest accounting of the disposal of Gallant’s property from the old coroner, Charles Serani. The jailer, Caleb Sentner, related in great detail how badly the jailhouse was in need of a proper allowance for adequate food and bedding. It was resolved that this matter would be dealt with. A motion was made, and a policy set into action. At least some good had come from these terrible h
appenings.

  Thirty years later, an English court passed the McNaughton Rules, after deciding that Charles McNaughton—the man who had attempted to assassinate British Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1843—was not guilty by reason of insanity. By 1858, the McNaughton Rules were accepted in Prince Edward Island, forty-five years too late for Xavier Gallant.

  Gallant is said to have been buried under a crossroads along the Malpeque Road, a fate usually reserved for suicides and lost souls. The ghost of his beheaded wife, Madelaine, is still said to haunt this area on certain hot June nights. I am not quite certain how her ghost grew from being simply the victim of a casual throat-slashing into an actual decapitation, but perhaps the legends suggest that “Pingouin” Gallant cut a little more deeply than history would have you believe. In either case, I hope that the two of them have found some sort of peace upon the other side of the grave.

  “hang me and be done with it”

  Minnie McGee

  St. Mary’s Road, Prince Edward Island

  1912

  Minnie McGee

  Put matches in tea

  And poisoned all of her family

  Now she’s in the penitentiary

  One, two, three!

  —pei children’s skipping rhyme

  Appearances can often be deceiving. Nearly everyone who lived on St. Mary’s Road, eight kilometres north of Murray River, would have sworn on a church full of Bibles that Minnie McGee was a totally devoted mother to her eight wonderful children. “She watches those children like a nesting hawk,” one neighbour swore. “She never takes her eyes off of them.”

  Minnie’s father, Thomas Cassidy, a local mailman and part-time constable, would have completely agreed with that verdict. As a child, Minnie had cheerfully raised an entire houseful of younger brothers and sisters, after her mother had mysteriously passed away following a long battle with a fever.

  “My little Minnie never complained,” her father said. “She was a regular saint.”

  Saint Minnie. Now there was a name to conjure with.

  It was true that Minnie didn’t complain as she took care of her brothers and sisters. She didn’t complain when her father met and married another woman. And she didn’t complain when she met and married Patrick McGee. She was twenty-one years old and Patrick was twenty-five. He really didn’t seem to have much of a future, but he loved Minnie and treated her as best as he could manage.

  Oh sure, she was a little odd at times. There was no denying how fascinated she was with fire, but all that talk of her burning down a boat shed and a haystack and a henhouse was nothing but idle gossip. Wasn’t it?

  After all, Minnie was a dutiful wife and a natural mother who promptly gave birth to nine children—although one of the children died a few days after birth, which left her with eight. Now, eight children was still a very large family, even for that day and age. However, none of these children would live to see adulthood.

  And Then There Were Six

  In late January 1912, an epidemic of whooping cough ravaged the St. Mary’s Road area. Two of Minnie’s children, the two youngest, died in a fevered paroxysm of agonizing, uncontrollable coughing. After Minnie watched her two youngest children being buried, she began to look at her husband, Patrick, with a strange and sad expression on her face.

  “They’re better off now, aren’t they?” she said. Something had definitely changed.

  After their deaths, Minnie grew increasingly anti-social. She stayed in her house for days on end. Even when she did go out, it was only into the yard. She would not venture into the town at all. She brooded for hours on end over the slightest little problem, only to lash out in fits of uncontrollable rage.

  “I remember being surprised when she tore a page out of a perfectly good book to scribble a note on,” Patrick would later testify. “When I mentioned it to her, she flew into a fit of anger and tore the entire book to shreds before my eyes.”

  That was Minnie’s way. She would never actually hit anyone. She would take her anger out on an inanimate object—a mug, or a picture frame, or a mop. She would throw or kick or smash anything that got in her way. Kitchen utensils were often found broken, snapped, or useless in the McGee household.

  The tantrums sure didn’t help the household budget. Patrick worked just as hard as he could, but the only work he could find was often far away. He laboured as a factory hand or on fishing boats or as a field hand, only returning home occasionally to give Minnie a bit more money. Eventually, Patrick decided that it would be best if he stayed away from home permanently. The word “divorce” was never mentioned, but it was understood that Minnie and her six remaining children were on their own.

  Times were very hard. There was never enough money and Minnie’s anger didn’t help one bit, but whenever the subject was raised it was just as quickly dismissed. She was a mother who had lost her two youngest children. Of course it would take her time to work her anger out.

  Minnie’s father, perhaps knowing her better, was not so sure about that. “There’s something not quite right about Minnie,” Thomas would tell anyone who listened. “She gets her temper from her mother.” He spoke often of the possibility of committing his daughter Minnie to an insane asylum, but as far as most people saw it these tantrums were quite understandable. Small towns are like that, I guess. People will cut you an awful lot of slack just so long as you live there.

  However, small town or not, that perception drastically changed when five of Minnie’s six remaining children turned up stone cold dead.

  Five Dead Children

  It was Thursday, April 11, 1912. Minnie and five of her children—thirteen-year-old Louis, twelve-year-old Penzie, eight-year-old George, six-year-old Bridget, and five-year-old Thomas—sat down to a splendid feast of herring, cornmeal bread, and sweet tea. The only child missing was young Johnny, who was spending the night at his uncle’s farmhouse.

  “Johnny should be here,” Minnie kept saying, over and over. “It isn’t right that he is missing out on all of this.”

  Shortly after supper, all five children became violently ill. They were suffering from pounding headaches and near-crippling stomach cramps, and were vomiting profusely. Minnie placed cold compresses upon their foreheads and sent them to bed. In the morning she called for the doctor, but by the time Dr. Roy Fraser of St. Mary’s Road arrived on the next day, three of the children were dead. By the time that Friday, April 12, was over, the other two had passed away as well.

  That night, Patrick McGee rushed home to his family. Provincial Health Officer Dr. W. J. MacMillan arrived later that night to witness the horrifying tableau of five dead children laid out with neat, almost military precision, side by side in Minnie’s parlour.

  It did not take long for MacMillan and Fraser to decide that the cause of death was poisoning. At first they blamed it on the herring, because the symptoms described matched those of ptomaine poisoning. However, following a more careful investigation and autopsy that Saturday, it was determined that the five children had perished from something far more sinister than a pot of bad fish. Phosphorous poisoning—a condition usually found in long-time match-factory workers—was determined the most likely cause of death.

  “You know children,” Minnie first argued. “They’ll chew on anything they get their hands on. It wouldn’t surprise me none to find out that the whole lot of them have all been chewing on matches.” Next, she blamed the candy they ate. “Or maybe it was that fish. It smelled awfully funny,” she claimed.

  Local police constable Thomas McCarron was certain that Minnie was a murderess. There were far too many inconsistencies and contradictions in her testimony for his liking.

  However, Dr. Roy Fraser felt any inconsistencies could be blamed on the stress of a mother having to face such a tragedy. Basically, the doctor could not believe that the children’s deaths had been anything more than a tragic accident. Perhaps a box of m
atches had accidentally been dropped into the cooking pot.

  McCarron was not convinced. “I did not like the way that Minnie kept looking balefully at her surviving son, Johnny, as if he had done something wrong,” McCarron later testified. “I knew then that she had killed her children, and I knew that she was going to kill Johnny next.”

  Unfortunately, it was not McCarron’s decision to make. No murder could be proven, and upon the testimony of Dr. Fraser, the authorities decided to set Minnie free.

  Dr. MacMillan had certain vital organs removed from the children’s bodies and sent to Montreal as a precaution. It was also decided that the two children who had died of whooping cough should be exhumed and examined.

  McCarron went to Johnny’s uncle Ambroise Cassidy, Minnie’s brother. He told him of his fears and begged that Johnny should be released into McCarron’s protective care. Ambroise listened to McCarron’s plea, but in the end he would not go against his sister’s decision.

  On Saturday morning, April 13, Minnie picked up young Johnny McGee from his uncle’s farmhouse. Johnny’s uncle argued that he would be more than happy to keep care of him, but Minnie would not be denied.

  “The boy needs to be home for the funeral,” she declared. “It’s a mother’s right to want that for her child.” No one would argue with her.

  The five children were buried on Sunday, April 14. On Monday morning, April 15, Patrick McGee returned to his latest job at a lobster processing plant in Sturgeon. “It was Minnie’s idea,” Patrick explained. “She was always the boss. She said we needed the money, what with the funeral expenses and everything. She said go, so I went.”