Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  John Cullen was a sailor out of Liverpool, England, and was as much an admirer of women as George Dowey professed to be. Cullen had already approached Flora several times throughout the run of the evening with lewd suggestions that the two of them might ditch George and run off together for a mutual bedroom frolic.

  Being that Flora was as much a “worldly spirit” as either John Cullen or George Dowey, this suggestion was not as outlandish as it might sound. Indeed, she had spent a lot of indiscrete and intimate moments with the good Mr. Cullen while Dowey was safely away to sea. But tonight she was with George Dowey, and she did not take kindly to John Cullen’s continued insistence that she had somehow chosen the wrong man to partner with that night.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” Flora said, “and I’m resting them on George Dowey tonight.”

  “You can just wait your turn,” Dowey jeered. “And you might want to find yourself a comfortable spot to wait in. Somewhere far away from here.”

  George Dowey took umbrage to Cullen’s persistent advances, and John Cullen, for his part, took deep umbrage to Flora’s reluctance to join him that evening—which is a fancy way of telling you that John Cullen took a wild, bare-knuckled swing at Dowey’s chin. George Dowey, in turn, pulled a long fishing knife from the beaded leather sheath dangling at his belt, and drove that well-honed knife blade deep into John Cullen’s heart.

  In the crowded streets of Charlottetown, directly outside the jailhouse, it did not take much time for the long arm of the law to arrive.

  “Is he dead?” Flora asked.

  “I think he is,” Dowey replied, drawing the knife from out of Cullen’s chest. “For the knife went into him up to the handle.” Dowey calmly wiped the blood off the knife blade before handing the weapon, hilt first, over to the Charlottetown police officer.

  “I’m done with this for now,” he told the officer. “I’ll have it back when the court has its say.” It turns out George Dowey would have himself an awfully long wait in the Charlottetown jail.

  The Trial

  In March of the next year, George Dowey was brought to trial. Solicitor General Edward Palmer, Dowey’s lawyer, believed that he could get the murder charge knocked down to manslaughter, based on the fact that Cullen had made the first hostile move. This would still earn Dowey some time in jail, but it would definitely remove the possibility of an execution.

  However, the tactic backfired. The delay allowed time for Flora to discover the truth about Dowey’s wife and children living in Dublin. Flora did not take kindly to Dowey concealing this small bit of information from her while he was courting her. Worldly woman or not, her heart was hurt at the notion that she wasn’t George’s only love.

  “I should have been very sorry indeed to keep his company if I had known that George Dowey was a married man,” Flora testified in court. “The dog should have told me he was in the first place.”

  “I thought you loved me,” Dowey shouted from his seat. “You told me you did when you came to visit me in the jailhouse.”

  “I only told you that to shut you up from your constant crying and going on,” Flora retorted. “Love doesn’t have a single thing to do with the way I feel about you right now.”

  She further went on to testify that Dowey had instructed her to conceal the facts of the murder from the judge and jury. “But I will do nothing of the kind,” Flora swore. “The truth is, George Dowey started carrying that fishing knife two weeks before he used it on John Cullen.”

  “And why did he begin carrying a knife at that time?” the prosecutor asked.

  “He was manhandled by a drunk nearly half his size,” Flora said. “The great milksop. So he started carrying that knife, and he told me that the very first man who stepped in his way was going to get the business end of it, right sharp and sudden-like.”

  “And did the victim, John Cullen, provoke the defendant in any way?”

  “Provoke?” Flora laughed bitterly. “All that John Cullen did was tip his hat my way and that rogue and scoundrel George Dowey stuck his knife into John Cullen’s heart and twisted it—and he was grinning when he did it.”

  There was little that could be offered in the way of a defence after hearing a testimony such as that. On Thursday, March 25, 1869, Chief Justice James H. Peters pronounced the sentence of death upon George Dowey.

  “I sentence that you, George Dowey, should be taken hence to the jail from which you came, and from thence you must be taken to Pownal Square, in Charlottetown, on Tuesday the thirtieth day of March next, between the hours of six o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the afternoon, when you are to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God almighty have mercy upon your soul.”

  Dowey fell upon his knees, raising his manacled hands towards the judge’s bench. “Mercy,” he cried out. “I must have time to prepare.”

  “And I must have time to hunt marsh geese,” Chief Justice Peters replied. “Very well. The court will be pleased to grant you a stay of execution in which you may make your peace with God. And may God help you, sir, for on April 9, 1869, you shall be hanged by the neck until you are good and dead.”

  It came down to this: twenty-three-year-old George Dowey had only fifteen days left to live. Fifteen days before he would face one of the most horrifying executions performed in Canada.

  Waiting for the Noose

  Dowey spent those fifteen days as productively as possible. He wrote an eight-page essay, scrawled in tight, fine handwriting, detailing the events of his life and what he felt had brought him to this situation. He wrote letters to his wife in Dublin, as well as to his aged mother. He also composed a seventeen-stanza poem that later evolved into a popular folk song entitled “Dowey to his Mother,” as well as a shorter poem, “The Prisoner in his Cell, on the Morning of his Execution,” which was published in the Prince Edward Island newspaper The Islander.

  This essay and all of Dowey’s poems were later collected and privately published by a group of literary and liturgically inclined Protestant ministers in the short chapbook A Voice From the Scaffold.

  While Dowey was giving play to his literary muse, his lawyer, Edward Palmer, kept himself busy as well. Palmer appealed to the colonial office for a royal pardon, based upon the fact that after the trial, Flora MacQuarrie openly admitted that she had outright lied upon the stand.

  “For spite’s sake,” Flora admitted. “He oughtn’t to have lied to me about having a wife and children, now should he?”

  However, Chief Justice Robert Hodgeson, who was serving as administrator for the court while James Peters hunted his marsh geese, felt differently. “After consultation, I see no ground for interfering with the ordinary course of the law,” Hodgeson stated. “His sentence shall stand.”

  Appeal or not, lies or not, poems or not, George Dowey would surely hang. Three times.

  The Hangings

  It was Friday, April 9, 1869. At half-past noon, George Dowey was escorted from his jail cell by the right and noble Reverend Fitzgerald of St. Paul’s, and twenty militia volunteers who were armed with loaded rifles and bayonets. The authorities were taking no chances on the crowd staging some sort of impulsive attempt to rescue Dowey. They had good reason to fear this. There had been far too much written of Flora’s lying ways for the crowd to see this hanging as anything more than a miscarriage of justice.

  Dowey reached the gallows and nodded at the crowd that numbered nearly 1,500 souls. A ragged cheer went up. Some drunken wag shouted, “Rescue the man!” The militiamen brought their bayonets to the ready, and all thoughts of revolution and rescue flew to the four winds.

  George Dowey walked up the steps to the gallows, taking them two at a time. The executioner was waiting for him. The executioner was new at this job, and overdressed for the role, wearing a large, flaxen wig under a black hood, a large black-rubber fishing coat, and heavy-top boots. John Ross, publis
her of the North Star, noted, “The disguise of the hired hangman was most inappropriate for the occasion and perhaps better suited for a masquerade ball.”

  Along with the overdressed hangman were the Reverends Pope and Perkins of the Wesleyan Church, the sheriff, the prison doctor, and the jailer. The clergymen had arranged for a heavy oak armchair to be placed over the trap door. Dowey sat upon the armchair, made himself comfortable, and then read his essay and poems to the crowd for a half an hour. During his public reading, he readily confessed his past sins and indiscretions, and he pledged his belief in the workings of Christ. He warned others to shun “drink, vicious inclinations, evil habits, and dens of iniquity.” He wore two photographs—one of his wife in Dublin, pinned to his sleeve, and another, of his mother, pinned over his heart. He touched these pictures constantly. He thanked the clergy for praying over him. He thanked his lawyers for their hard work. He even took a moment to tell the executioner that there were no hard feelings between the two of them.

  “You’ve a job to do,” Dowey said. “And you may as well be about it now.”

  Dowey calmly stood and faced the noose. The executioner pulled the chair away and Dowey allowed his legs to be bound. Next, the executioner eased the rope over George Dowey’s neck. He drew the noose tight. He stepped away, and cleared his throat noisily as if he too were about to make a speech. And then he threw the switch that opened the trap door.

  At that point the rope broke, and George Dowey fell sixteen feet to the dirt below. He hit hard, sprawling like a rag doll. Unsure of what to do, the authorities carried Dowey back to his jail cell. An hour later they carried George Dowey back up to the gallows, where a brand new rope was waiting for him.

  The crowd was enraged by now. Some were screaming that by rights Dowey ought to be freed. Again and again the militia was compelled to force the crowd back at bayonet point.

  Hastily the executioner slipped the rope over Dowey’s neck. The trap door opened. This time, the cleat that secured the rope pulled free and for a second time George Dowey crashed sixteen feet to the dirt below. He lay there, barely moving, stunned by the second unfortunate impact.

  Determined to finish the execution, the hangman, his two assistants, and three volunteers from the crowd took hold of the rope and hoisted Dowey’s twisting and still-noosed body hand over hand—dangling him from off of the side of the scaffold—holding him there until his kicking finally stopped, thereby hanging George Dowey for the third and final time.

  The crowd had grown quiet by now. No one shouted, no one cheered. There was no talk of rescue attempts. At this point it was as if the entire group of witnesses had been possessed by a desire to simply see this dark deed done and over with.

  Dowey hung there for over a half an hour. The hangman, his assistants, the volunteers, and several of the soldiers took turns grimly holding onto the straining rope. At forty minutes, they lowered him down to the ground and declared him dead. He was hastily carried away in a horse cart, and buried in what is now known as the historic Old Protestant Burying Grounds on the edge of University Avenue in Charlottetown, pei. A stone was erected for a short time, but was later taken down, as if people did not want to remember the murder and the badly botched execution.

  This was not the last execution in the province, but it was the last public execution. The hangings that followed, until as late as 1911, took place away from the public eye. As far as the Prince Edward Island government was concerned, the notion of public execution had come to the end of its rope.

  two muddy boot tracks to the gallows

  Burlington, Prince Edward Island

  1887

  The last time John Tuplin saw his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary Pickering Tuplin, alive was in the quiet dusk of Tuesday evening, June 28, 1887—the same day that the Tuplin family had buried one of her brothers, who had died following a long and bitter battle with consumption.

  Mary was busy tending to a baby girl, her niece from her married sister Josephine. Her father remembered looking at his daughter and wondering to himself how long it would be before she would be tending a baby of her own. She was about six months pregnant, and her father knew it, but he also knew that she was certain that he didn’t know. For the time, he would keep it that way. If it made the burden easier for his daughter, then he would bear the strain. Mary had admitted the fact of her pregnancy to her sister not more than two weeks before, and had told her that she believed the father of her unborn child was William Millman.

  Of course, the young man denied being the child’s father. They always do, don’t they? Mind you, there was the possibility that John Tuplin would get the law involved in the matter. Seducing girls that young was a jailing offence accountable under the Seduction Act, which could result in a jail term of several years. But John Tuplin was certain he could convince young Millman of the error in his ways. He would reason with the boy—if necessary, at the point of a loaded shotgun.

  John Tuplin smiled at that thought—a sad smile, because he had just come from his son’s funeral, but a smile nonetheless. It was the last smile that John Tuplin would smile for a very long time.

  He was still wearing that smile as Mary handed the baby back to her mother, and changed from her funeral clothes to a tired housedress and a comfortably battered pair of farm boots.

  “I am going for a walk,” she told her parents.

  “You’re going to see that Millman boy, aren’t you?” her mother, Margaret, asked. “I know you are.”

  “I said it was a walk,” Mary pointed out. “I am hardly dressed for courting.”

  “Love needs no tailor,” her father dryly observed, still trying to remain stubbornly optimistic. “Now does it?”

  “I said it was a walk,” Mary repeated. And then she was gone.

  The Missing Girl

  Half an hour later, Margaret went out to find her, fearing that her daughter had somehow lost her way. An hour after that, she returned to her home alone. There was no sign of her daughter.

  “I can’t find her,” she told her husband. “It’s not like her to stay out this late. I’m worried for the girl.”

  John Tuplin pulled on his own boots and walked out to check with the neighbours, the Profit family. Mary wasn’t there. He checked the barn, and he wandered the field, calling out her name. Finally, he decided there was nothing left to do. She was young, after all, and young often means impulsive. Perhaps she had met up with her man Millman and the two of them were spending the evening in some quiet and secret spot.

  Tuplin continued to tell himself that as he went to bed that night. He slept fitfully, and arose before the sun had swum over the horizon. He ate a quick breakfast and resumed his search. All that Wednesday he went from house to house, neighbour to neighbour, with no result. It seemed that no one had seen Mary that night.

  Midday found John Tuplin knocking on the Millmans’ very door. John Millman and his wife had seen no sign of their son William that night either.

  “Perhaps they’ve run away together,” Mrs. Millman suggested. “Young people are apt to do that sort of thing.”

  “Trust that boy to run off when there’s chores to be done,” John Millman agreed.

  But John Tuplin was not as certain. He continued his search for the rest of the day, with no result.

  On Thursday morning, he saddled his horse and rode to Summerside, where he met with his lawyer to get an arrest warrant written up for young William Millman.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” the lawyer asked.

  “As sure as sin,” Tuplin replied. “That boy has got to pay.” He presented the warrant to the local authorities, and rode home. On a hunch, he borrowed a wooden scow from his friend Archibald Bryenton.

  “She’s in the river,” Tuplin said. “It’s all I can imagine.” The search began that Friday, June 1, 1887, and it continued throughout the weekend.

  They finall
y found her body on Monday, June 4, 1887, submerged near a spring hole in the Southwest River, beneath about four feet of water. A rope was tied about her waist and secured to a killick, a large, crude anchor of red sandstone of about eighty pounds in weight, originally used for ballast. She was shot twice through the skull. The only other sign of human presence was a pair of overly large footprints sunk into the muddy bank of the river.

  The Investigation Begins

  The newspapers seized upon the story. “An Atrocious Murder” read the headline in The Patriot, “Evidence Looking Dark for Millman.”

  The papers spoke the truth. Investigation proved that Millman was a very likely suspect. On the morning the body was found, William Millman rode out to Charlottetown for the first time in his life, to talk to a lawyer about the charges that were being laid against him. This, in itself, would have been an innocent and sensible enough action for any young man in this situation, but it was complicated by the fact that Millman had both motive and opportunity.

  The preliminary hearing took place on July 7, 1887. During his testimony, William Millman’s father told the court that he and his wife had been with their son the entirety of the night that Mary Tuplin was slain. In the middle of the testimony, Millman’s father collapsed in the witness box. After a glass of water was brought, he sipped it carefully. He rose up slowly, cleared his throat, and confessed that everything he had told the court was a blatant lie.

  “My wife and I were away at a church meeting that night,” John Millman sadly admitted. “Of my son’s whereabouts, we have no idea.”

  This, along with the other testimonies, was enough for the judge. A trial was set. Justice would be done.