by Steve Vernon
“Oh Lord, have mercy on us,” a woman’s voice called out from the other room. Hussey hurried there to find Elizabeth Pipes lying on her bed with a fearsome wound upon her forehead. She had her hand splayed across her abdomen; several of her ribs had been stove in. Her daughter, Jane, lay beside her with a broken jaw agape and likewise broken teeth, her small, delicate head glued to the pillow with a crust of drying blood. A halo of greedily buzzing flies circled the pair of them. “Nightmare,” Elizabeth murmured. “It was a nightmare.”
Clearly, whoever had attacked John Clem so fiercely had then snuck into the back room where Elizabeth and her daughter lay sleeping and attacked them with an axe. They could not identify who their attacker was, however, as the whole thing had happened far too fast.
As Hussey stared at the horrifying scene around him, John Winsby, a local miller, arrived with a bag of barley lumped over one shoulder.
“Oh my Lord!” Winsby exclaimed. “I just saw John Clem yesterday. He’d walked in from Pugwash with this bag of barley over his shoulders. He looked beat to death, and I told him so. I made him leave the barley at my place. Told him he could come back and get it, but I got up this morning and decided to bring it to him to save him the walk.”
“Well, he’s not walking too far now,” Hussey dryly noted.
Twenty minutes later, John Clem died without speaking so much as a word of what had happened. Hussey, Winsby, and several local citizens transported Mrs. Pipes and her daughter to the home of John Sentorius, a local boatman who made his living ferrying people along the River Philip. He hastily ferried Mrs. Pipes and her daughter to Pugwash, where they could be seen to by a proper surgeon.
“I know who done it,” Sentorius admitted, as he spoke to a local named Joshua Chandler. “It were Maurice Doyle. He come to me yesterday and borrowed a boat. Said he needed to row some supplies to John Clem’s place. How was I to know that Clem had fired the man? He come back in that boat about four hours later, and he looked a right mess, but that didn’t surprise me at all—the way he’s so addicted to elbow-bending. He asked me to row him to where the road to Amherst meets the river. He borrowed a shirt of mine,” Sentorius continued. “Said his was too dirty from all of the lugging he’d done. He left his shirt on my boat and told me he’d bring my shirt back.”
The shirt that Doyle had left behind on John Sentorius’s boat was rolled up at the cuffs and badly stained. When the cuffs were unrolled, the stains that had been concealed were revealed to be spatters of blood.
“It makes sense now,” Sentorius concluded, “what he told me before he headed down the road. He said he owed money that he couldn’t pay. Then he told me he’d got some farm girl in trouble and he needed to be elsewhere when her daddy found out. Then he begged me to tell anyone who asked that he had taken the road to Pugwash, rather than the road to Amherst that I left him on.”
A Two Man Manhunt
Local constable Asa Filmore and Justice of the Peace Joseph Avard rode out that very morning, bound for Amherst. “We’ll bring the scoundrel back for questioning,” Avard promised. “Filmore knows what the man looks like, so he’ll be able to properly identify Doyle.”
They rode hard the rest of the day and all night long, crossing the New Brunswick border, and catching up to Maurice Doyle in the town of Sussex just as Doyle was about to board a stage to Saint John.
Doyle was a stocky, muscular man with a reputation for a bad temper, and neither of the manhunters was inclined to take any chances. Caught up in the heat of the moment, Avard leaped from his horse, landing square upon Doyle’s shoulders and back, using his own weight and momentum to wrestle the suspected murderer to the ground. Filmore, in turn, pulled a pistol from under his jacket, and pointed it at Doyle as Avard bound him fast.
“What’s this for?” Doyle asked, seeming surprised at his treatment.
“John Clem is dead,” Avard said, still trying to catch his breath. “And you are the supposed murderer. We have orders to take you back to Amherst to speak to a judge.”
Bound as he was, with Filmore still pointing that pistol his way, Doyle was in no position to argue. He seemed surprised at their news, and offered little resistance as the two manhunters searched his pockets, uncovering a red and black striped leather wallet with £25 worth of banknotes within.
“I worked for that money,” Doyle argued. “You have no right to take it.”
“I’m giving it to the court at Amherst for safekeeping,” Avard said. “You can have it back once you’ve proved your innocence.”
They took him to a local tavern. “We rode all night,” Avard explained. “And it’s been a while since either of us ate much of anything.”
“I could do with a bite myself,” Doyle agreed.
“You can watch us chew,” Filmore said.
During the meal, Doyle explained that he had been travelling to meet his brother in Saint John who was sailing for the West Indies. “The last I saw of John Clem, he was carrying a sack of barley toward his farm,” Doyle went on, “and he looked very much alive to me.”
“You can tell that to the judge,” Avard said. And that was all he would say.
The Trial of Maurice Doyle
Maurice Doyle spent the next three months in the Amherst jailhouse. On September 25, 1838, he stood before Judge Brenton Halliburton, a small, delicate man with a keen eye for detail. Halliburton had a reputation as being one of the best judges in Nova Scotia. Doyle was led into the courtroom surrounded by a half-dozen guards armed with steel-tipped ceremonial staves.
Hussey and Winsby described how they had found the victim. Cumberland County coroner George Bayman appeared with the axe that had been found outside Clem’s cabin. The axe was still stained with Clem’s blood and a few tufts of matted hair. Samuel Patterson, a Pugwash surgeon, described the wound that had ultimately proven to be the death of John Clem.
“It was a gaping wound to the temple,” Patterson explained. “The blade of the axe had penetrated at least two inches deep into the victim’s brain. Whoever swung that axe had certainly used it with lethal force.”
Doyle’s reputation as a drinker, a wastrel, and an unscrupulous man was reiterated throughout the trial. Ferryman John Sentorius was called to testify on what he knew of Doyle’s actions. John Mulroy, a neighbour of Clem’s, testified that Doyle had paid an unexpected visit to him the day before the murder.
“He quizzed me rather soundly about the comings and goings of anyone who might have been living with Clem. I would have thought that Doyle would have known more about the man he was working with.”
Further testimony from Amherst native George Glendenning banged one more nail into Maurice Doyle’s coffin. “When I met the defendant, he was walking toward Amherst on the main road, about seven miles from the town. He said his name was Hales. He gave me five shillings for a wagon ride to Sackville, New Brunswick. When we reached Sackville, he offered me more money to take him to Saint John, but I declined.”
Finally, the two manhunters—Avard and Filmore—retold their story of the hunt for Doyle. “He gave us a good chase but we caught up to him in Sussex, and found this red and black striped wallet on his person.”
When the red and black striped wallet was examined, Amos “King” Seaman testified that he had repaired that very same wallet for John Clem about eight years earlier. “It was beautiful red leather,” Seaman said, “but torn in the middle. I hadn’t any red leather to match it, but John Clem agreed that he would be happy if I would just mend it with a strap of black leather. I thought it a handsome compromise, myself, and Clem agreed with me. There is no mistaking that wallet. I recognized the red and black colour combination, and I know my own stitch work when I see it.”
Elizabeth Pipes, still bandaged and slowly recovering from her attack, likewise confirmed that the red and black striped wallet did indeed belong to the murdered man. “John Clem and Maurice Doyle had travelled to
Pugwash on June 27,” Elizabeth Pipes testified. “That evening John Clem returned alone. He told me that he had dismissed Doyle that very day. ‘The man is not faithful,’ was what he told me, ‘and I do not like him.’ I never cared for the man either,” Elizabeth Pipes continued. “He swore once in the heat of an argument that he would cut my damned head off if he ever caught me alone.”
Young Jane had also recovered from the attack, but the court felt it unnecessary to bring such a young child into court to testify against Doyle.
The Final Verdict
Chief Justice Halliburton sent the jury to their final deliberation with these words: “The night before the murder, the property is in Clem’s house, and at ten o’clock that same night the prisoner is seen within half a mile of the murder house. On Friday morning, he is 120 miles away, with the property on him. In the name of God, if he is not the person who committed this deed, how came he by the property?” It took the jury about twelve minutes to reach their decision.
On the morning of October 8, 1838, Maurice Doyle walked to the gallows. He maintained his innocence as he walked up the freshly cut wooden steps. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “You are making a great mistake.” According to Elizabeth Pipes, he went through the trap door with a grin on his face, as if he thought he was getting away with something.
The Legend of the Headless Spectre
Maurice Doyle was reputedly buried in an old French burial ground outside the town of Minudie. The burial was seen to by old King Seaman himself—or so the legend goes. It has been said that Seaman later sold the body to a group of Boston medical doctors who were deeply interested in the physiology of the criminal brain.
For a fee, King Seaman was said to have dug up Doyle’s body and allowed the body’s head to be amputated. Some say that Seaman decapitated Doyle’s remains himself with the very axe that Doyle used to murder John Clem. He did it for money, some say, while others claim that King Seaman was merely being practical. But people say a lot of things.
They also say that the headless ghost of Maurice Doyle still walks that graveyard, searching for his missing head. The head that King Seaman is said to have sold for thirty-two shillings.