by Steve Vernon
“Goodbye, old fellow,” Jim said. “Bear it up.”
“Take care of yourself up there,” Buck replied.
At half past nine, Buck walked out to the gallows, accompanied by the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, the warden, the jailer, the jail physician, and last but not least, Detective Peachy Carroll.
It was a foggy morning. John Radcliffe placed a black silken hood over Buck’s head. He asked him if he was comfortable; Buck only grunted. Father Cormier recited the Lord’s Prayer and asked the Lord for forgiveness for this poor, misguided soul.
“God have mercy on my soul,” Buck repeated. “And forgive me my sins.”
Then Radcliffe strapped Buck’s legs together to ensure a clean drop. He tightened a noose of brand new manila rope, which was three-quarters of an inch thick, and of a length calculated to allow the proper drop for a man of Buck’s height and weight. He snugged the noose directly beneath Buck’s left ear.
“Go to heaven, Buck,” Radcliffe said.
“Thanks,” Buck said. “Let her go!”
Radcliffe pulled the trip cord, and Buck’s body shot toward heaven for about four or five feet, before dropping the length of the rope and dangling. A brief shudder ran through Buck’s body. After fourteen minutes, the jail physician pronounced Buck Olsen dead. Father Cormier broke down and sobbed.
In the post-mortem, the bullet in Buck’s leg was finally removed. It proved to be a .38 fired from Jim Christie’s own revolver.
As for Christie, he did not live to survive his sentence in prison. At first, he was a model prisoner in Dorchester Penitentiary. He played the organ every Sunday and even preached a time or two at the layman’s pulpit. Then one morning while Jim was working at the bucket-making shop, he saw his chance. A guard had removed his jacket and hat to keep cool. Christie quietly put the jacket and hat on, and walked boldly toward the front gate. However, he did not know the proper procedure and was caught at the gate.
Shortly afterwards, he was transferred to Kingston Penitentiary. A second escape attempt resulted in a beating that left him hospitalized in the prison hospital ward and totally bereft of his senses. He was transferred to a ward for the criminally insane and subsequently died of his injuries. Justice was finally served.
“Oh, don’t kill me anymore”
John Sullivan
Meadow Brook, New Brunswick
1896
Jane Green was lying in bed beside her husband, James, when she heard the sound of a wagon crossing a nearby bridge. It didn’t help that the darned dog kept on barking. “Bad enough I’m lying here worrying about tramps stealing our chickens,” Jane thought to herself. Now she was wondering just what a wagon was doing out at this time of the night. She told herself that she might as well go to the window and have a look for herself. Lord knows she was not going to sleep tonight.
She looked out the window and the night was ablaze with light.
“FIRE!” Jane screamed. She ran to the door and unbarred it while James was still falling out of bed, trying to simultaneously untangle himself from his nightshirt and put his bare feet into his boots.
“Fire!” Jane called again, running out the door and across the Painsec Road, a short distance from the railroad station in the little town of Meadow Brook, nearly thirteen kilometres from Moncton. She could see what was burning and the knowledge gave her feet wings. It was her sister-in-law’s house. “Fire!” Jane kept on calling. James came hopping after her, still trying to jam his left foot into his right boot.
By now, the second floor of the house was lit up by rapidly climbing flames. It would be nothing more than minutes before the whole house was ablaze—and there were people still inside. Eliza Dutcher and her eight-year-old daughter Marguerite—known as Maggie—as well as her seven-year-old son, Harris, were most likely trapped in the upperfloor bedroom.
Jane wasn’t the least bit surprised by what she saw. She knew how her sister-in-law made her money—serving liquor and lord knows what else to the railroad workers who passed through this region. Heaven knows it wasn’t Eliza’s fault that her husband, Bill Dutcher, had gone and died in his sleep three years before. And Jane certainly knew that a body had to make ends meet somehow, but serving illegal liquor to railroad men hardly seemed like the proper way to raise a family. Those were hard-working men, but a rough bunch of characters, and deep down in her heart, Jane had always known that sooner or later something bad was going to happen to her sister-in-law.
Hugh Green, James’s brother and next-door neighbour, arrived at the Dutcher house at the same time as Jane. He ran up to the front door and tried it, but it was locked tight.
“For God’s sake, woman,” Hugh shouted, trying to kick down the door. “Fetch me an axe.” Jane flew to the woodpile and fetched up the axe. Within another two minutes, Hugh smashed the door down and dove into the flames and smoke inside. James caught his wife just before she ran in after Hugh. He had to work some to hold her back.
“There’s nothing can be done now,” he told her. “It’s in the hands of the deliverer Himself.”
Meanwhile, Hugh staggered up the staircase which was swaying like it might collapse beneath its own weight at any moment. He could hear the little girl, Maggie, calling out, “Mamma! Mamma!”
Hugh aimed himself for the sound of that screaming, found Maggie, and wrapped her in his coat as he made for the front door. By now, the front yard was full of people, some with buckets, some with blankets, and some just with prayers on their lips. Hugh emerged from the fire, threw Maggie at the first open set of arms he saw, and had turned to charge back into the inferno when James caught him by the arm.
“I can’t hold both of you back,” James said, still struggling with his wife. “But if you go back in there I don’t think you’ll be coming back out alive.”
It was touch and go. For a moment, it seemed as if Hugh was going to charge back into the flames regardless of the warning. And then Hugh relented. “They’re all gone,” James said.
Hugh consoled himself by looking after Maggie. She was in rough shape. Her left ear was completely severed and there was a nasty bleeding gouge in her scalp. “The fire sure didn’t do that to her,” Hugh wondered to himself. “What has happened here?”
“Oh, don’t kill me anymore,” young Maggie pleaded as the doctor arrived to examine her. “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, don’t kill me anymore.” Shortly afterwards, Maggie fell into a state of semi-consciousness, and was taken to a nearby home to rest under the care and supervision of two sisters with experience in nursing, Anna and Muriel Croasdale.
Within an hour of Jane Green first seeing the terrible flames, the house of Eliza Dutcher had burned completely to the ground, leaving behind nothing but a scorched heap of ashes and ruin. This was a mystery that definitely demanded looking into.
A Culprit is Found
A hasty inquest revealed that the fire was the result of arson. The ashes were raked and sifted, and they found the scorched torso of what they assumed was Eliza. Her head and legs were completely burned off. Close by, the searchers unearthed the skull and blackened bones of what they assumed to be the remains of seven-year-old Harris Dutcher.
In addition, the searchers discovered an iron railway-coupling pin that could have easily been used as a weapon. Forty-five dollars in gold coins were also discovered among the ashes. The coins were a bit of a mystery. They showed no trace of discolouration or any sign of fire damage whatsoever.
Shortly following the fire, Eliza’s second-oldest son, Harry Dutcher, arrived from Nova Scotia, and had this to say about the mysterious fire: “My mother didn’t believe in banks. She spent her money as she earned it, but you could always count on her having several hundred dollars tucked away in the false bottom of a railroad trunk that she kept in her bedroom.
“The last time I spoke with my mother,” Harry continued, “she told me that she had been having some trouble
with a Moncton man by the name of John Sullivan.”
That made a lot of sense to an awful lot of people. John Sullivan was quite well-known in the Meadow Brook area. He was a loud man with a crude but flashy style of carrying himself in front of a crowd. He could have been an actor or a prize fighter if his circumstances had played out differently. He often bragged of the time he had spent serving in the Second Cavalry in Arizona.
“I fought the Apaches,” Sullivan would loudly boast. “And I have witnessed a great deal of brutality and genuine butchery.”
Both Hugh and James could corroborate Eliza Dutcher’s uneasy relationship with John Sullivan. “He often came to her house,” Hugh Green confirmed. “He would sit and drink, and dare anyone to have the nerve to attempt to say otherwise. He was a bounder, and a thumper, and a bad customer in a fight, and I would not have cared to stand in front of him in a brawl.”
The whole town knew that John Sullivan had also helped to have Eliza arrested and jailed for selling liquor on the Sabbath. “And that from him, what drinks like a thirsty fish,” James said. “He cared not for the Sabbath. He only wanted to get even with Eliza for throwing him out of her house on the Saturday before. I know that. You know that. The whole town knows that.”
To make matters worse, Anna and Muriel Croasdale had told a reporter from the Moncton Daily Times that young Maggie would often cry out in the night from her muddled state of semi-coma delirium, “Stay away from me, John Sullivan.”
“At times, Maggie is very much agitated and terrified,” the Croasdale sisters were quoted as stating.
Another article quoted Moses Steeves, a brakeman of the Intercolonial Railway, as stating that “he had seen John Sullivan paying for a drink at the Brunswick Hotel in Moncton the day after the fire, peeling money from a roll of bills that looked to be about two hundred dollars.”
Based on the rumours and the result of the inquest, a warrant was issued for the arrest of John Sullivan. However, Sullivan’s family had already realized that John was the number-one suspect for the crime and paid for a ticket across the border. Before authorities could act, Sullivan was safely across the Maine border, hiding out in the home of his uncle, James Macdonald. Sullivan had escaped.
The manhunt
Once he’d reached Maine, Sullivan wrote to his sister and asked her to forward all of his mail to his uncle’s residence. However, Sullivan’s sister did not love him nearly as much as he thought she did. Before the day was out she turned that evidence over to the Moncton police.
The well-known Pictou detective Peter “Peachy” Owen Carroll was dispatched with instructions to return John Sullivan to Moncton. Before setting off, Peachy Carroll wired a description of John Sullivan to the Calais chief of police, with a request that they keep an eye on whoever might happen to collect James Macdonald’s mail from the local post office.
Peachy then had Saint John Police Chief Clarke meet him the very next morning and drive him the rest of the way to Calais by wagon, through one of the worst downpours of the season. When Peachy Carroll reached Calais, he received word that the Calais police force had already seized John Sullivan. They had followed the young servant girl who had picked up James Macdonald’s mail and trailed her home. Following that, a policeman disguised as a delivery man knocked on the door and announced that they had a package from New Brunswick for John Sullivan. When Sullivan came to the door, they grabbed him.
Word quickly reached Moncton, and Sullivan’s father hired a good New Brunswick lawyer, R. B. Smith, who wrote to John Sullivan in Calais and advised him to return without protest to Moncton. “It will not help your case to fight an extradition,” R. B. Smith counseled John Sullivan. “You should do your utmost to cooperate with authorities. We will work at it from this end and things will turn out fine.”
So, on the advice of his lawyer, John Sullivan reluctantly returned to New Brunswick. When he got off the train in Moncton he waved cheerfully at the hundreds of onlookers who were waiting to witness his arrival. “He looked like a politician running for office,” one witness was heard to say. “The whole thing felt like a darned celebration.”
“They didn’t even have him handcuffed,” another onlooker stated.
Sullivan said very little at the inquest, refusing to testify. While they were waiting for the trial to be arranged, Sullivan’s family was caught trying to kidnap Maggie Dutcher, as well as attempting to bribe some of the key witnesses for the prosecution. Fortunately, none of the family’s underhanded efforts met with any sort of success. All they finally managed to accomplish was to buy a little time for their son, when they launched a successful complaint against the conditions of the Moncton jailhouse. “The stench in the lock-up is almost unbearable,” the Moncton Daily Times reported.
The building is unfit for occupation by either man or beast and the most ill-kept stable would be a rose garden in comparison with the lock-up. It is an outright shame to put even the most debased of criminals in the lock-up in its present condition. The health of the magistrate and court attendants must also be seriously imperilled by the atmosphere of the upstairs courtroom. This reporter believes that the city fathers should be confined for at least a quarter of an hour within the precincts of the Duke Street edifice.
This bought Sullivan an extra day or two as he was transferred to the county jail in Dorchester. Not that any such delay was truly necessary. The inquest itself took nearly two weeks, as more than sixty witnesses were called to testify, filling more than 128 sheets of full-sized foolscap in testimony—a record for New Brunswick coroner’s inquests.
What was really holding up the proceedings was the fact that Maggie Dutcher still remained incapable of testifying. Her condition was reported as grievous and possibly even fatal. The prosecutor asked that the case be postponed until the following January, when John Sullivan would stand before the Supreme Court of New Brunswick. By then, the prosecutor argued, Maggie would certainly have had time enough to heal from her trauma.
Sullivan’s lawyer didn’t like the sound of that at all. He did not believe that a postponement would bring any kind of good news for his client. In fact, he believed that the more time they had to wait, the longer public opinion and the vicious gossip that was flying wildly about the countryside would have a chance to poison any jury’s verdict.
“There are more lies to the square inch being told about John Sullivan than about any person living,” R. B. Smith stated. “I will ask the court for a postponement of eight days, and eight days only. If the girl is able to testify then, we will call her to the stand. If she is not fit, then we simply won’t call her.”
Smith also demanded that someone else besides the Crown doctor should examine Maggie. Smith’s requests were refused. There would be no bail, either. John Sullivan would stand trial for his life on January 12, 1897.
The Trial
It turned out that Maggie was actually able to testify that day, but not until she had been carefully examined by the members of the court.
“Do you know that it is a wicked thing to tell a lie?” the Solictor General asked Maggie.
“Yes, I do,” Maggie replied.
“And have you gone to school?”
“Yes, I have,” Maggie said.
“And do you know where good little girls go?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “Good little girls go directly to heaven.”
“And do you know that you must tell the truth when you are so sworn?” asked the judge.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “I know.”
And so she was allowed to testify. “I saw a man in our room,” Maggie testified. “Mamma said, ‘John, don’t hit me,’ but the man had hold of Mamma, and he struck her two times with the big iron bolt. Mamma laid back on the bed and was still. Then the man hit Harry. He hit me too, and I cried, and he hit me again.”
A. S. White, Solicitor General for New Brunswick, was representing the Crown
in this case. Judge Hanington sat at the bench.
“Did you recognize this man?” White asked Maggie. “Do you see him in the courtroom?”
“Yes,” Maggie said, pointing directly at John Sullivan. “John Sullivan. That is the man.”
Defence lawyer Smith cross-examined Maggie thoroughly.
“I know John Sullivan well,” Maggie testified. “He was often at our house. I thought I liked him, but I didn’t. Not really. He used to take care of me often when my mother was busy. That night he hit me on the head. I cried, and he hit me again. I don’t know what money Mamma had. I did not see John Sullivan take any.”
Judge Hanington had Maggie’s nurse take her away following her testimony. And then he further turned a deaf ear to any of R. B. Smith’s allegations that the Crown lawyer had coached Maggie’s testimony. Smith then brought forward Sullivan’s parents, as well as two surprise witnesses. All four of the witnesses testified that John Sullivan was at home on the night that the Dutcher family was murdered. However, under A. S. White’s brutal cross-examination the surprise witnesses crumpled and admitted that not only were they lying, but their testimony had been purchased by the Sullivan family.
“They paid us forty dollars apiece,” one of the witnesses stated. “And I am right sorry that I ever took it from them.”
Sullivan stood up to testify next. He seemed unbothered by the revelation that his family had purposely attempted to manufacture perjury.
“That night—September 10, 1896—I was in the town of Memramcook,” Sullivan testified. “I took the train to Moncton, and arrived at about 8:15 that evening. I spent some time down at the docks with two girls. Nothing improper happened. Then I felt queasy sick from too much drink. I didn’t trust myself to travel, so I went to my parents’ home, just like they told you.”