The
MASSEY
MURDER
A MAID, HER MASTER, AND THE TRIAL
THAT SHOCKED A COUNTRY
CHARLOTTE GRAY
Dedication
For George
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
PREFACE
LIST OF CHARACTERS
MAP OF TORONTO, 1915
PART ONE: The Story
CHAPTER 1: Bang!
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1915
CHAPTER 2: The Beak in the Women’s Court
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9
CHAPTER 3: The Corpse in the Morgue
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9
CHAPTER 4: The Muscle of the Masseys
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11
CHAPTER 5: A Peculiar Look
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11
CHAPTER 6: The White-Slave Trade
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 TO SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14
CHAPTER 7: Newspaper Wars
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13 TO
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14
PART TWO: The Law
CHAPTER 8: “With Malice Aforethought …”
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15
CHAPTER 9: “Well-Dressed Women Who Might Find Better Things to Do …”
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16
CHAPTER 10: Deadly Bayonet Work
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17 TO FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19
CHAPTER 11: Legal Circles
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 TO WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24
CHAPTER 12: Fallen Angels
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24 TO THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25
PART THREE: The Trial
CHAPTER 13: “A Most Unpleasant Duty”
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26
CHAPTER 14: Brutish Lust
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27
CHAPTER 15: A Bleeding Corpse
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27
CHAPTER 16: “Order! Order!”
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27
PART FOUR: Aftermath
CHAPTER 17: March 1915 TO NOVEMBER 1918: Total War
MARCH 1915 TO NOVEMBER 1918
CHAPTER 18: The Later Years
Sources
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Charlotte Gray
Photographic Insert
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
In Europe, a bloodbath had begun six months earlier. Across Canada, men volunteered to fight, and women prepared to cope alone as they watched husbands and sons march awkwardly away. Politicians talked endlessly of “the War Effort”; generals calculated how many battalions they could raise. A nerve-racking suspicion that the world would never be the same again was seeping into the public consciousness.
And then, on a gloomy February evening in 1915, a gunshot rang out on a quiet Toronto street. A city caught up in the midst of the greatest conflict ever known was suddenly gripped by the strange story of the maid who shot a Massey. The incident itself was unusual and shocking, but it began as a private drama. Yet it quickly mutated into a public scandal on the home front, its flames fanned by passions beyond the control of those most intimately involved.
Ostensibly, at the centre of this story is Carrie Davies, a lowly domestic servant who worked in the household of a member of one of Canada’s most famous families. Yet she is the object rather than the subject of events because her fate was taken in hand by so many other actors and forces. This book is a story about Toronto in the early twentieth century, a fast-changing and divided community in the process of reinvention, and about Canada as it embarked on a century of dramatic evolution. A single bullet fired on Walmer Road had an extraordinary significance.
Most of my previous books have been about people or events that made a difference. I looked through the telescope of history and brought into focus lives that created change. Writers who helped shape Canada’s literary heritage; an inventor who transformed the world by creating instant communication; a gold rush in the subarctic north that hinted at vast mineral wealth below the snow. In these books, individuals contributed to larger national and international stories, and each book covered several years (in the case of Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich on the Klondike), if not decades (in my full-length biographies of Susanna Moodie, Pauline Johnson, and Alexander Graham Bell). For each book, I was able to understand my subject from the inside, because he or she had left personal papers in which I could read what they thought and hear their voice. Yet after finishing each one of these books, I found myself wondering about forgotten lives, the long-dead individuals who left no record behind them. What happens to anonymous, powerless individuals who are swept up by events and currents completely beyond their control?
Then I discovered the case of Carrie Davies. Nobody would ever have heard of the timid eighteen-year-old if she had not run afoul of the law. She herself left none of the traces bequeathed to biographers like me, who want to hear our subjects’ voices. There were no letters, journals, notes, or diaries, although I know she was literate. However, I realized I could explore Carrie’s circumstances through the record of her imprisonment and trial. I could enter not only the enthralling world of a true crime, but also the story of someone in the shadows of a past era. Carrie Davies herself remains something of an enigma, and she had no immediate impact on history. But the turmoil of her times, on both the home front and the battlefields of France, decided her fate.
So this time I have used the literary equivalent of a microscope rather than a telescope as I gazed backwards across the years. It allowed me to bring into sharp focus day-to-day events that convulsed a city during three crucial weeks. Then I lifted my head from the eyepiece and set the various characters I discovered onto the larger landscape of history that drove the conclusion. No one appreciated it at the time, but the Carrie Davies case gave spectators a glimpse of the Canada to come.
My sources for the legal case that is at the core of the story were limited. I had to rely on the official report of the coroner’s inquest, plus newspaper articles. But I was lucky. For reasons that I describe, the day-to-day coverage of this shooting was detailed and vivid. Different newspapers gave radically different accounts. The passions aroused were as strong as any triggered by more recent violent events that have involved difficult ethical questions.
The background to Carrie’s case was extensive: my challenge was to prevent the layers of circumstantial detail from overshadowing the story. In 1915, Canada was abuzz with “-isms”: militarism, imperialism, feminism, and nascent nationalism. Each of these movements affected Carrie’s case, although she herself probably knew nothing about them. But she was a cork floating on powerful cross-currents of assumptions about class, race, and gender: her canny lawyer, Hartley Dewart, used those currents to her advantage.
Nonetheless, Carrie Davies is the central figure of this book, and I have had to use all the conventions of narrative non-fiction to bring this silent witness to life. I imagine, but I do not invent. I do not fabricate characters, events, or dialogue—anything in quotation marks comes from a written source. Physical descriptions, of people and buildings, come from photographic evidence. However, I speculate and I interpret, based on empirical evidence and knowledge of common practice and human behaviour. I do so cautiously, and only when I am confident that I am more likely to be right than wrong. In the words of the historian Modris Eksteins, “For facts to become memorable, an element of fiction [is] essential.”
And sometimes, that element is the only way to understand what it was like to actually be there, as the ordered world crumbled and war broke the old vision.
List of Characters
AT 169 WALMER
ROAD, TORONTO
Charles Albert “Bert” Massey, 34, Studebaker car salesman, house owner, and grandson of the late Hart Massey
Rhoda Vandergrift Massey, 34, Bert’s wife
Charles Massey, 14, Bert’s son
Carrie Davies, 18, English-born housemaid
AT 326 MORLEY AVENUE, TORONTO
Ed Fairchild, Carrie’s brother-in-law, foreman with Jas. R. Wickett, Ltd., a building firm Maud Davies Fairchild, 22, Carrie’s older sister and Ed’s wife
Two small children, Bobby and Joyce
MASSEY FAMILY MEMBERS
Arthur Lyman Massey, 41, Bert Massey’s brother, resident of 165 Admiral Road
Mary Ethel Massey, 38, wife of Arthur and sister-in-law of Bert Massey
Vincent Massey, 27, cousin, resident of 515 Jarvis Street
Fred Massey, cousin
THE POLICE
Patrol Sergeant Lawrence Brown, from Police Station 11 on London Street
Constable Follis, Police Station 11
Constable Martin, Police Station 11
Inspector George Kennedy, senior detective, City Hall
Constable Mary Minty, Toronto’s first female police constable
Colonel Henry James Grasett, 67, chief constable of Toronto
OFFICERS OF THE COURT AND JUSTICE SYSTEM
Colonel George Taylor Denison, 75, chief magistrate, resident of Heydon Villa, Toronto
Mr. Chapman, police court clerk
Rev. Dr. Andrew B. Chambers, governor of Don Jail
Mrs. Sinclair, superintendent of Women’s Department, Don Jail
Miss Carmichael, matron of hospital wing, Don Jail
Dr. Arthur Jukes Johnson, 67, chief coroner of Toronto
Sir William Mulock, 72, chief justice of the Exchequer Division of the Supreme Court of Ontario (later simply chief justice of the Supreme Court)
WITNESSES
Ernest Pelletier, 16, newsboy
Dr. John Mitchell, resident of Walmer Road
Beatrice Dinnis, resident of Walmer Road
Joseph Pearson, guest of Walmer Road resident
Mrs. Edna Nesbitt, passerby
Dr. J.E. Elliott, physician who performed post-mortem
John L. Hynes, friend of deceased and resident of 106 Walmer Road
LAWYERS
Dewart, Maw & Hodgson, of Home Life Building, Adelaide Street, Toronto:
Carrie’s defence team
Herbert Hartley Dewart, KC, 54
Henry Wilberforce Maw
T.C. Robinette, clerk
Arthur Roebuck, clerk
Richard Greer, 37, Crown attorney for York County
Edward Du Vernet, 49, Crown counsel
Arthur John Thomson, 37, Massey family lawyer
NEWSPAPERS
John Ross Robertson, 74, proprietor of the Evening Telegram (the “Tely”)
“Black Jack” Robinson, editor of the Evening Telegram
Archie Fisher, “The Crow,” reporter at the Evening Telegram
Joseph Atkinson, 49, owner and editor of the Toronto Daily Star
Helen Ball, reporter at the Toronto Daily News
TORONTO’S LOCAL COUNCIL OF WOMEN
Florence Gooderham Hamilton Huestis, 42, president
TORONTO, 1915
1. Adelaide Street Courthouse
2. Albany Club
3. City Hall
4. Court Street Police Station
5. Don Jail
6. Euclid Hall
7. Fred Victor Mission
8. Massey Music Hall
9. Morgue
10. National Club
11. Osgoode Hall
12. Police Station 11
13. Toronto Club
{ PART ONE }
The Story
{ CHAPTER 1 }
Bang!
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1915
Charles Albert Massey sauntered away from the new Dupont streetcar station, heading west into the chilly dusk. Most of a recent snowfall had been shovelled off the sidewalk by Toronto’s Public Works department, which meant that heaped banks of dirty snow protected pedestrians from cars, horse-drawn carriages, and delivery trucks. Dupont was a teeming downtown thoroughfare, lined with grocery stores and bakeries. Massey, a slender man of medium height, carefully picked his way around dog excrement and slushy puddles, thankful that, despite a hangover, he had remembered to pull galoshes over his leather shoes that morning.
Bert, as his friends called him, was a member of one of Canada’s most prominent families, a dynasty that had built its fortune by producing the wagons, tractors, threshers, reapers, and binders on which Canada’s newfound prosperity, and reputation as the “bread basket of the Empire,” was based. The thirty-four-year-old cut a stylish figure, with a diamond stick pin in his silk tie and his dark hair slicked back from his wide forehead. Right now, he was probably too eager to get home to let his thoughts linger on either agricultural implements or the fact that his American wife, Rhoda, had not yet returned from a visit to her family, the Vandergrifts, in Bridgeport, Connecticut—a visit that she had kept extending. When she left a week earlier, they had not parted on good terms. Rhoda didn’t share her husband’s sense of fun. A rather shy New Englander, she certainly didn’t have his appetite for fast cars and late nights: she preferred to stay out of the limelight.
After a block, Bert Massey turned south past the dairy at the corner of Dupont and Walmer Road. Within minutes, he could no longer hear the Dupont traffic or smell the sour milk from the empty churns in the dairy’s backyard. Bert lived in the Annex, the area between Bloor and Dupont, west of Avenue Road, that had been developed over the previous three decades as Toronto’s population exploded and streetcars allowed middle-class residents to live farther away from their workplaces. The Bloor Street end of Walmer Road was the fashionable part, with circular towers, portes cochères, and tall chimneys ornamenting spacious stone mansions. Most of the houses near Dupont, where Bert Massey lived, had been hastily constructed and lacked the imposing bulk, wraparound porches, and extensive grounds enjoyed by Toronto’s wealthier families—the kind of homes that Bert’s rich relatives lived in. Nevertheless, a few of the flourishes of grander mansions had migrated north to Walmer Road’s pokier residences. There were pillared porches, stained-glass windows in some front doors, and dormer windows for attic bedrooms in which servants slept.
Number 169, where Albert and Rhoda Massey lived, was particularly shabby. Squeezed between its neighbours, it lacked their balconies and decorated bargeboards. It was not even well maintained. If Massey had raised his eyes to his roof, he would see that a recent warm spell had melted much of the snow from his tiles, blocking the gutters and creating dangerous icicles overhanging the front porch. Did he make this typical homeowner’s check? Probably not. It was after six o’clock, so visibility was poor despite newly installed street lamps. And he was tired. After socializing until 1:45 a.m. the previous night at a neighbour’s, he had risen early to reach York Motors Ltd. on Yonge Street. Bert Massey did not work in the family firm; instead, he had a job at a Studebaker dealership, selling cars that were built with American-made parts and assembled in Walkerville, Ontario.
In theory, Bert Massey had a great job in a booming industry. In the past few years, automobiles had gone from exotic rarities to status symbols. Back in 1908, traffic monitors at one Toronto intersection noted only six automobiles in ten hours. Cars were expensive (around $1,400 each—twice the annual salary of a schoolteacher, and four times as much as an ordinary labourer earned), so ownership was slow to gather momentum. But within four years, the motoring craze had taken off, and the same intersection was seeing 382 cars each day. Now, in 1915, there were close to 100,000 vehicles on Canadian roads, the majority of them in the increasingly urban central provinces. It was all quite chaotic: there were no stop signs or traffic lights, and drivers in some provinces stuck to the British custom of driving on the left-hand side of the road, while in others they followed the American custom o
f driving on the right. Prince Edward Island had banned automobiles altogether until 1913. But what man could resist progress, or the excitement of having a McLaughlin-Buick, or a Ford, or a Cadillac, or a Reo, or a Hupmobile parked outside his home? Even Laura Borden, the irreproachably respectable wife of Prime Minister Robert Borden, cheerfully drove herself through Ottawa’s muddy streets in an electric car.
Bert’s job as a Studebaker salesman gave him a certain social flash, since his friends could glimpse him cruising down Yonge Street, one hand on the steering wheel as he showed a potential buyer how to signal for turns, or double-declutch during a gear change. It certainly suited his employer to have a Massey as a salesman. This week, Bert had been busy helping hang banners and bunting in York Motors’ state-of-the-art showroom for a display of four splendid new Studebaker models in mid-February.
But in practice, Bert’s income didn’t match the flash: he sold on commission, and with a war on, sales had slumped. The job required him to be smartly dressed, on his feet, and professionally charming all day, no matter how rude or stupid the customers. Today had been particularly exhausting, so icicles hanging off his porch were the least of his concerns. Anyway, Bert Massey didn’t bother much with routine chores—in his wife’s absence, he had barely bothered to sweep the snow off the sidewalk.
Before Bert Massey reached home, he met Ernest Pelletier, the sixteen-year-old paper boy who had just delivered a copy of the Toronto Daily Star to the Massey house. Massey flashed his most charming smile as he pulled out a quarter to pay for delivery of the Star for the previous month. Ever since Christmas, the war in Europe had dominated the Star’s front page: today, the news was that Britain’s Russian allies had attacked German troops in the Carpathians on the eastern front, and its French allies had dynamited a German trench on the western front. As usual, the Star had found a poignant local human-interest story for the middle of the page. A short article described how, the day after a local woman had received an official telegram informing her that her husband was dead, a letter had arrived from him containing the message, “Cheer Up Girlie, I’ll Be Home by May.”
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