Canadians shared the taste for murder: books by Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle were bestsellers on this side of the Atlantic, especially among British immigrants. But by Carrie’s day, a unique brand of crime fiction had evolved here, featuring two aspects of the country that enthralled outsiders: its wilderness, and its North West Mounted Police as incorruptible heroes. (The villain was often winter weather.) The first serial character in Canadian crime fiction was Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police, launched in 1912 by the bestselling author Charles Gordon, a Presbyterian minister whose pen name was Ralph Connor. The same year, the Mounties’ image got a jolt of hero-worship from the ballad “The Riders of the Plains” by Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake):
For these are the kind whose muscle makes the power of the Lion’s jaw,
And they keep the peace of our people and the honour of British law.
All melodrama celebrates the triumph of virtue, but Canadians’ glorification of the Mounties reflected respect for law and morality. Canadian readers enjoyed police procedurals even more than grisly murder mysteries, and they ate up black-and-white morality tales. The simplistic crime reporting from Toronto’s police court provided by the Tely’s Harry Wodson and his colleagues fed this appetite.
Blackie Johnston knew all about the public taste for melodrama. His forte as a Canadian defence lawyer was to construct a convincing theory of innocence for his client, and then to tailor every question in his cross-examination to support his portrayal of Clara Ford as a wronged damsel and her victim as a debauched scoundrel. By the time he had finished his defence, jurors could almost hear the wicked cackle of the victim—now transformed into a villain.
Johnston had served a year as honorary president of the Canadian Bar Association in 1911, and Dewart (who was elected a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada the same year) had heard him discuss his methods. As the elderly lawyer liked to remind colleagues, he never asked a question to which he did not know the answer, and he never allowed a witness to lead him off in an unplanned direction. The job of a defence lawyer, insisted Johnston, was to weaken his opponent’s arguments and win his client’s acquittal, and his witnesses were carefully rehearsed. To expose truth or falsehood was not his job, and he rarely spoke directly to a client accused of murder. Instead, he wove together a compelling script from the facts gathered by his juniors, then treated the jury with Uriah Heep–like deference as he staged his storytelling magic. His case for the defence always captivated the popular imagination. There was little defence for Clara Ford in the letter of the law, but an appeal to the jury’s hearts had overridden that technicality.
Hartley Dewart never forgot his defeat at Blackie Johnston’s hands. Moreover, nervous little Carrie was a much more virtuous heroine than belligerent Clara Ford. Twenty years after Dewart had lost the Ford case, Carrie’s case offered him the chance to prove himself the equal of the great Ebenezer Blackie Johnston in playing the coveted role of defender of wounded womanhood. If he won, he would be the envy of his peers and the talk of the town. All in all, the prospect of emerging as the victor in a David-and-Goliath battle against the mighty Masseys was irresistible.
But to win, Dewart had to develop a storyline for Carrie, and the clock was ticking. The winter session of the Ontario Supreme Court was due to wind up within days—it had already extended its sitting by two weeks. Nevertheless, both the Crown and Chief Justice Mulock had let it be known that they wanted to deal with Carrie this month, rather than letting the case and its attendant publicity fester for several weeks until the spring session opened in April. Carrie’s case would be heard with a rapidity that was unusual in 1915 and would be unheard of today.
{ CHAPTER 12 }
Fallen Angels
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24 TO THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25
German submersibles have scored again. The British steamer “Oakby,” going “light” from London to Cardiff, Wales, was torpedoed and sunk and the crew landed all safe today at Ramsgate. A Berlin report that a British transport had been sunk probably referred to the government collier “Branksome Chine,” destroyed off Beachy Head yesterday.
—Toronto Daily News, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
HEARST HEARS OLD STORY PROMISES “CONSIDERATION” PROSPECTS FOR VOTES FOR WOMEN AT A WAR SESSION NOT VERY BRIGHT BUT THERE WAS NO ROW
Canada was rapidly becoming a nation, said Dr. Stowe Gullen. It was high time that Canada recognized the rights of women … The war would not have occurred if women had equal rights in the world and had a chance to direct affairs.
—Evening Telegram, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
At the second police court hearing, Dewart had entered a plea of not guilty on Carrie’s behalf. But how could her defence team justify that plea? What were the choices facing Hartley Dewart, as he sat at his desk in the Home Life Building and started to map out his strategy to rescue Carrie from a murder rap?
Dewart was well aware that his options were limited. If Carrie were found guilty of murder, the only punishment in law was the mandatory death penalty. However, Dewart also knew that, even if his client was convicted, she was unlikely to hang. Since Confederation, close to half a century earlier, only twenty-one women, compared to 555 men, had been convicted of murder and had faced the death sentence. Most female convictions involved miserable stories of family abuse and social stigma, with violent husbands or unwanted children as the victims, and judges and juries had chosen to be lenient. Such women were more to be pitied than punished, in the eyes of the community if not the law. In the wake of all twenty-one murder convictions, petitions for clemency were sent to the governor general in Ottawa (although the minister of justice in fact made the decision): eighteen of the death sentences had been commuted to manslaughter and the women given prison sentences. Only three of the twenty-one women swung from the gallows.
But a woman who killed her employer in cold blood presented a different and more serious kind of challenge. The closest precedent to Carrie’s case augured ill for Carrie. Hilda Blake, a twenty-one-year-old English-born domestic servant in Brandon, Manitoba, shot and killed her employer’s wife in July 1899. Local newspapers went over the top in their relish for bloody details. The Western Sun described the killing as “one of the most atrocious crimes in the annals of Manitoba’s history and one of the most villainous that ever occurred in the Dominion of Canada.” Although Hilda was an attractive woman who may have been seduced by her employer, she had allegedly destroyed the kind of Victorian marriage idealized in literature, and her crime left four young children motherless. She was sentenced to hang. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Laurier refused to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, despite arguments in her favour from no less an advocate than Governor General Lord Minto.
The outcome fit all the demands of melodrama. On December 27, 1899, before twenty-five ticket holders in a small enclosure just outside Brandon courthouse, Hilda was hanged. She put on a brave show, climbing the steps to the noose with “her head erect and her bearing that of a young lady going to an evening party, rather than the gallows,” according to the Winnipeg Morning Telegram. The press revelled in the grim drama. “She was ashy pale, but completely composed and plucky to the end,” intoned the Winnipeg Free Press. Nevertheless, the paper showed little sympathy for the penniless domestic.
Hilda Blake had refused legal counsel. Carrie Davies had one of the best barristers in Toronto. Could clever Hartley Dewart save her?
One option was for Dewart to offer a plea of not guilty on grounds of insanity—the plea that the Masseys would like to hear, so the story could be buried. The first comprehensive Canadian Criminal Code, passed by Parliament in 1892, made a specific provision for such a plea if the accused was “laboring under natural imbecility or disease of the mind.” But what did this mean? The House of Commons committee that debated the new Criminal Code had spent more time struggling with a definition of insanity than with any other clause in the lengthy bill, and it remained controversial.
Courts were notoriously leery of accepting that an individual was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Besides, the Don Jail’s Dr. Owen Parry had already dismissed the suggestion that Carrie Davies was epileptic or obviously unstable. “I have her in the hospital ward and she is under observation,” he told reporters. He considered her “perfectly rational so far as we can determine … She drinks a quart of milk every day and is in fine condition physically.”
Dewart could suggest to his client that she make a plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. Such a plea would eliminate even the possibility of the gallows, but if found guilty she likely faced a long stretch in jail. However, a manslaughter plea had none of the brio of Blackie Johnston’s “murder or nothing” appeal to the jury in the Clara Ford case.
It was possible that the jury might come up with a third verdict: that she was not guilty because, in the jurors’ minds, there were compelling extenuating circumstances. For this, Carrie would have to plead not guilty, despite all the evidence that she had deliberately fired the fatal shot. Only a not-guilty plea would generate the excitement that the Clara Ford case had enjoyed. Only a not-guilty plea would respond to all the different demands on this case—including the ambition of Hartley Dewart, the public sympathy for Carrie, and the crusading zeal of John Ross Robertson’s Evening Telegram. Only a heroic defence would ramp up contributions to the Carrie Davies Defence Fund, increase the Tely’s circulation, and pay Dewart’s fee.
The Tely continued to track donations to the fund, but William Goldsmith, secretary of the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association, acknowledged that the flow was sluggish. Most of the donations were tiny, and by Wednesday, February 24, only $249.05 had been collected. Contributors included “A Working Woman, $2; ‘Justice’ $2; ‘Bedfordshire to Aid’ 25 cents; ‘Two Business Girls,’ 50 cents; Mr. and Mrs. Hall, $2; two Englishmen, $2.” A list of those who had contributed one dollar included “Another Funny-looking English Girl,” “One of those Funny-looking English Girls,” “An English Girl,” “Every Little Helps,” “Well-Wisher,” “Canadian Girl,” and “A Few Lovers of British Fair Play and Justice.” Mr. Goldsmith fretted: “May we ask for a more generous and urgent response for this worthy case?” The amount raised was paltry compared to the $22,912 the Ontario branch of Grand Trunk Railway employees announced, on the same day, it had raised for Sir William Mulock’s Patriotic Fund.
But on what grounds could Hartley Dewart make a not-guilty plea on Carrie’s behalf? A recent Ontario case suggested that self-defence because of a fear of future violence was a shaky line of argument. In 1911 in Sault Ste. Marie, a pregnant Italian mother of four children had taken an axe to her sleeping husband. Twenty-eight-year-old Angelina Napolitano had been abused for years: six months earlier, her husband, Pietro, had stabbed her nine times, scarring her face, shoulder, and neck. Pietro had now demanded that she earn some money by selling her body so he could build a house. Angelina had apparently snapped. But when her case went to court, despite her scars and her trauma, she was found guilty because the judge ruled that “if anybody injured six months ago could give that as justification or excuse for slaying a person, it would be anarchy complete.” She was sentenced to hang three months later—to allow her time to give birth. Only an international outcry persuaded the minister of justice in Ottawa to commute her sentence to life imprisonment.
Hartley Dewart carefully scrutinized the notes that Henry Maw had made of his conversations with Carrie Davies when he visited her in Don Jail. Undeterred by the Napolitano verdict, he and Maw began to sketch the outlines of a plea on the grounds of “self-defence,” the words that Carrie had uttered when the police first arrested her immediately after the shooting. The arguments against the plea were strong. Carrie was not under attack when she shot Bert Massey; it had been close to thirty-six hours since her employer had pawed at her. Moreover, Bert had been unarmed, several feet away from her, and completely unaware of the danger when she fired. But Carrie was a timid British immigrant rather than an inarticulate Italian—a “hot-blooded foreigner,” as the Sault Star had described Angelina Napolitano. Dewart had a plan.
At Don Jail, Carrie remained in the prison hospital, better fed and rested than she had been for most of her life. To Dr. Parry, she seemed curiously indifferent to her predicament. He told the reporters who clustered day and night around the Don’s wooden gates, “She is in good spirits and chats with the nurses in the ward.” She would have heard the whispered gossip among staff and fellow inmates about her case, although newspapers were not allowed in the jail. Her sister or brother-in-law visited her when they could, and perhaps their accounts of public donations to the Carrie Davies Defence Fund allowed her to believe that she would not be convicted.
But sixteen days after she was arrested, she had a jolting reminder of what lay ahead. On Wednesday, February 24, she and Miss Carmichael were bundled into a police wagon and she returned for the third time to City Hall. But this time, instead of facing Colonel Denison, whippet-thin in a dark business suit, she found herself in the larger presence of the chief justice, in crow-black robes, with a thick, trimmed beard almost as white as his starched cravat. Carrie’s appearance today was a formality: it was her arraignment, in which Hartley Dewart entered a plea of not guilty on her behalf and declared that he needed a few days before the case was heard because he had made arrangements with “several medical men to examine his client.” Chief Justice William Mulock watched over the top of his wire-framed glasses as Dewart negotiated a timetable with Crown prosecutor Edward Du Vernet, the lawyer who would make the case against Carrie. No one paid any attention to the accused herself, as she sat silently, watching three men debate her fate.
Dewart asked for the case to start the following Monday at the earliest, and assured the court that the case would be closed in two days. Dewart, Du Vernet, and Chief Justice Mulock were all eager to deal with Carrie as quickly as possible. Finally, in a deep, loud voice, the chief justice announced he would hear the case on Friday.
Dewart’s talk of “medical men” suggested to observers that, once again, Carrie’s sanity was going to be tested by “alienists,” like Dr. Beemer from Mimico’s Hospital for the Insane. The Toronto Daily News announced in a front-page headline, “Doctors to See Carrie Davies … Indications are That the Defence Offered Will be Insanity.”
The Daily News was wrong. The two physicians who arrived at the Don Jail the following day to examine the eighteen-year-old were not looking for evidence of insanity. For Carrie Davies, the arrival of Dr. Andrew Harrington and Dr. Duncan Anderson was simply one more episode in her alarming experience with medical professionals. After being manhandled on Toronto Island the previous summer by the Masseys’ doctor, then facing the Bertillon calipers after her first court appearance on February 8, she now underwent yet another intrusive examination. The two physicians, both well-established family doctors in Toronto, were met at the door of the jail by Dr. Parry and escorted through the jail’s dank corridors up to the hospital wing, where Carrie was waiting in a windowless examination room.
Dr. Harrington asked Miss Carmichael and Dr. Parry to wait outside. Shutting the door behind him, the doctor told the eighteen-year-old to remove her underwear and lie on the iron cot with her legs apart. Then he took from his black bag an instrument that looked like a pair of blunt scissors with bent ends. He inserted this vaginal dilator into Carrie’s vagina and peered inside. He may also have examined her manually. Next, his colleague did exactly the same. Then they stood back, told her to get dressed, and left the room. Did they guard against contamination when they performed this unexpected procedure in the jail’s filthy surrounds? Perhaps. Although rubber surgical gloves had been in widespread use for about twenty years, there was still resistance to them. Did they tell Carrie what they were checking for? Probably not. They did not tell the jail personnel, either. Instead, Dr. Harrington wrote a quick note to Hartley Dewart.
Dewart must have been elated when he opened the note a
nd read the brief message inside. The doctors confirmed that Carrie Davies was a virgin.
Virginity defined a woman in Carrie’s era. It was fetishized in a way that is hard to believe today—unless we look at some of the fundamentalist sects of Christianity or Islam. Virginity and purity were synonymous, and Toronto in 1915 was a society in which seams of hypocrisy and prudery ran deep. Only a few days earlier, the manager of the Toronto exhibition grounds had triggered outrage when he authorized a poster that featured the figure of a female angel taken from a painting by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel. The city’s Moral Reform Association complained to Colonel Denison, the police magistrate, that the image was obscene since Raphael had given the angel only a pair of wings and a wreath of roses to hide her nakedness. Angels, in Carrie’s day, had to be fully clad and unflinchingly demure—and the same was expected of decent women.
The Massey Murder Page 17