Today, the Globe’s war coverage was equally dark. “Clearing Hospital for the Canadians” was the headline over a report that Surgeon General Jones, Director of Medical Services from Canada, had left for France to facilitate the transport of Canadian casualties back to England. There they would be treated at the Canadian Red Cross hospital set up at Cliveden House, the lavish Buckinghamshire estate belonging to the Astor family. The Red Cross was busy enlarging the hospital from 150 to 500 beds, to accommodate the expected wave of maimed, wounded, and dying soldiers. Globe readers with relatives at the front would not be able to stop themselves imagining their loved ones, swathed in bandages and groggy with pain, lying in those beds. The same story mentioned that three Canadians had been killed a couple of days earlier, although their names were not given. As newspaper reports told the story, they had died defending the honour of the British Empire, facing unequal odds and an enemy that, through brutal attacks on civilians, had proved itself to be immoral and treacherous.
Dewart stepped out of his comfortable house on Elmsley Place. A brisk wind followed him down Bay Street as he made his way a dozen blocks south to City Hall. The journey gave him the time to rehearse the case he would make once he reached his destination. Like any good trial lawyer, he had watched the faces of jury members carefully yesterday, and he knew that the Massey name did not cut much ice with them. Bert Massey’s behaviour, like the events in Europe, was stirring up subcurrents of indignation, resentment, rage, helplessness, and unease in Toronto. The trick, he realized, would be to harness them all together.
It was unusual for the criminal courts to sit on a Saturday, and it was particularly unusual that the Assize Court was starting its session at nine o’clock. Once again, a predominantly British crowd surged into the courtroom as soon as the doors opened. When Carrie Davies was led in, just after the hour had struck, the previous evening’s confidence appeared to have drained away: “She sat quietly in one corner of the box, furtively wiping her eyes from time to time,” according to the Toronto Daily Star. Chief Justice Mulock swept into the room with frosty dignity, and the clerk of the court began his incantation, “Oyez, oyez, oyez …”
Hartley Dewart preened in the limelight from the moment he rose to address the jury. With exquisite courtesy, he acknowledged that the charge before the court was one of murder, for which the penalty was death. The jury might reduce the case to one of manslaughter. But there was a third alternative that the jury might consider, he continued—then paused, to hold the jurors’ attention. With all eyes upon him, he uttered one crisp word: “Acquittal.”
“Never in the history of Canadian courts,” said Dewart, “has a charge of murder of so peculiar a character been presented—in which the alleged motive for the murder was of such a character as that which the Crown presented.”
Dewart began with a grand tour d’horizon of typical murder cases, where motives and guilt were easily understood. “You are accustomed to cases of murder in which sheer brutality plays so important a part and in which the wife or some member of a family may be attacked by a husband whose brutish instincts have overcome him, where sordid motives and the love of gain have led men to take the lives of others. There are many cases where jealousy plays an important part and in which you can find the motive in the relationship. You are familiar with the class of case in which revenge and the outraged confidence or vengeful feelings of a woman who has been despoiled of her virtue is the motive that leads to murder.”
But this case was different—this case, suggested the lawyer, was on an altogether different and more lofty plane. “Never before has an honourable and virtuous girl been charged with the crime of murder because she successfully resisted the attacks of her master upon her person, and where her only motive was the defence of her honour and virtue against unequal odds and a treacherous assailant.”
Lowering his voice, Dewart went on, “I desire you to consider the girl herself—for she is still in her teens—who was charged before you. In every crime of murder, intention is a most important part; in every crime of intention you must look for a foundation in probability and consider the life, the character, the circumstances and the surroundings of the person charged. These are facts for your consideration quite as much as the sworn testimony of the witnesses.” Otherwise, Dewart asked with a Shakespearian flourish, “Where lay the virtue of character?” The jury had heard all about Carrie’s upbringing in Bedfordshire—her loving mother, her father (“a man of fighting blood”), the wholesome discipline in the home, where “daughters were brought up as daughters should be brought up.” Carrie Davies had come to Canada because her family was impoverished and she wanted to earn money to help her family back in Bedfordshire. “We have placed upon ourselves as Canadians the duties of trustees and guardians for girls who come from homes such as this to Canada,” intoned the lawyer. “We find her here in service, trusted, favoured and respected. We find her sending home from her scanty means all but what was needed for the barest necessities of her existence. Murderous intent is only found growing in a character filled with viciousness. It was not so in this case.”
The crescendo to this portrait of Carrie as a virtuous, self-sacrificing daughter was a masterpiece of rhetoric. “In the first place,” Dewart insisted, “as there was provocation, there was and could be no murder. In the second place, with the lack of murderous intent, there could be no murder. In the third place, I shall ask you to find that the circumstances of this case afforded to this worried girl a justification for the act she has done and that you should not find her guilty of any offence.
“Was her life to be ruined by a married man who was her master? Was she to bring disgrace into a family that never knew a stain of such a kind? Her safety lay in self-defence. She was no match for him, and she took the pistol to intimate to him that he could not pursue his course with impunity. She shot with aimless rapidity; she shot in the direction of the man, but there was no intent to cause the death of that man.
“This attack gave the girl only one alternative choice. If she did not defend herself against this man she would have been a fallen woman, an outcast, one more sacrifice to brutish lust.”
The lawyer stopped speaking for a full minute, then walked towards the jury and continued with deadly emphasis: “Let that sink into your mind. It was not manslaughter, it was brute slaughter … she was defending herself against a man in whom all the principles of decency were dead as far as she was concerned.”
What a phrase! “Not manslaughter, but brute slaughter”! Reporters scribbled as spectators hung on Dewart’s every word. This was judicial drama at its most riveting. The contrast between the banality of Carrie’s vocabulary and the theatrics of her lawyer’s address underlined the gulf that yawned between an ill-educated servant and the legal elite.
Next, Dewart turned to the evidence that the Crown prosecutor had introduced the previous day. “To get at the facts of the attempts to debase and shame this young girl, we must go back to the supper party and the orgy of Friday night … Her mistress was away, and a party was given which exceeded all the bounds of decency and propriety. There were doings which outraged the feelings of this young girl in service. There were doings of which her master cautioned her to be silent. He complimented her. Then the ring was produced—a bauble to affect the young and untrained mind. She becomes the target for this person’s fulsome attentions. Effusive attentions and flattery are often the beginning for a certain line of conduct. We find her the target for improper proposals …”
By now, despite the crowding, few people fidgeted on the public benches. Dewart’s mentions of an orgy, a bauble, and brutish lust enthralled his listeners. The lawyer continued his seamy tale. “Take the interview downstairs on Sunday. The boy had gone out and the two were alone in the house. Every suggestion and appeal that could be calculated to arouse passion in the mind of a young girl was made to her. Reference was made to indelicate acts at the supper party … The suggestions were painful for her to refer to, b
ut they were brought out in evidence only to show the depths to which the master went in order to bring suggestive thoughts to her mind—all these things from which she escaped, but which were coming with increasing pressure.
“She was called by him to make up his bed. And then still more increasing pressure is brought to bear on her by this man. He suggests that she don his wife’s underwear to see how she would look in it. He tried to throw her on the bed … Though some may think it an easy matter to cast these things off, these are terrible things to a young and innocent girl.” Dewart could not be too explicit in his lurid version of events, but he picked his euphemism carefully: “She felt the full weight of what was being forced upon her.”
With silky ease, the lawyer went on with his gothic horror story. “Do you wonder that, alone in the house, all that day she brooded over this horrible thing that had come into her life? Can you wonder that, when night fell, when the darkness was coming on, when the mind is more susceptible and the feelings more wrought up—do you wonder that at the close of that terrible day she thought only that he was going to do her harm? That was the one thought she had in her mind. She was possessed with it. Then when evening came, and the shadows fell, she was still thinking that he would come again, and do her harm.”
Du Vernet watched his opponent with a mix of admiration and exasperation. Suggestive thoughts …! The shadows fell …! Dewart’s polemic was a mesmerizing mix of penny-dreadful titillation and Biblical phraseology—a mix that was irresistible to the sensation-seeking, churchgoing residents of his city.
“Oh, how that echo rang through that young girl’s brain! How it possessed her mind! When I asked her, in the witness box, why she acted as she did, her reply was that she knew her master to be a man who would do as he said. She knew he meant to accomplish his purpose. Do not these things constitute provocation? … She was in fear of a brutal attack, a horrible attack on herself, a fear she could not drive from her mind. Under the circumstances, don’t you see how the very first sight of him revived every insult and emphasized every feeling? He seemed so near to her that it would seem as if his hot, passionate breath was again approaching her … The man was nothing to her except the one attacking force that had to be resisted.
“He was a strong man, against whom her weak strength could not avail. Her one thought was of defending herself. It was in self-defence that she did what she did. She has never wavered from that statement.
“She did not carry the revolver around with her. When she saw her master, then it was that she got the weapon. She did not even know that she had hit him. At the police station, she could only cry, ‘Take me away.’ Why? Because she still had the fear in her mind that he would do her harm.”
Dewart only occasionally glanced at his notes as he stood at the defence counsel’s table and directed his arguments to the jury and judge. He gave a scientific gloss to the narrative he was spinning. “Constant irritation on the mind,” he said, “brought on a state when the limit of resistance was reduced and the sufferer was akin to one under delusions. This is not a story but a fact.” He quoted from the Criminal Code a provision that allowed a “reasonable apprehension of bodily harm” to be grounds for acquittal in a murder trial, although that clause was usually applied to killings that occurred in the middle of a violent altercation. Speaking directly to the twelve middle-aged men in the jury box, he stated, “You have the power to make the law common sense by returning a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ Gentlemen, I wish to put it strongly, not to your sympathies but to your brains, your intelligence, your common sense and to point out where your road lies.”
Jurors stared stoically at the lawyer. It was difficult to resist the passion of his arguments, especially if they coincided with a juror’s own sympathies.
After drawing breath, Dewart continued. “Look at the prisoner! Is she a murderess? She is a heroine, a woman of strong character, of stamina, of strong principles. Faithful to her duties as a servant, standing fast by the inherited principles of her family, true to her soldier lover, this girl is not of the stuff of which murderers are made.” The jurors turned their eyes to the hunched, scared figure in the prisoner’s dock. No one could look less like a murderess.
Dewart had been speaking for close to an hour, but he was now reaching the point in his address where he knew he was skating on thin ice. He was going to appeal to British patriotism, Imperial loyalties and class solidarity—sentiments that, privately, made him feel queasy. But he had watched events for the past three weeks. He had seen the emotions ripple through his city, whipped up by British propaganda, ambitious newspaper owners, and family fears. He knew how powerful such an appeal would be in a Toronto jumpy with war nerves.
“What are British troops fighting for at the present moment?” he asked, his voice ringing with passion. “Why has Canada sent 30,000 men to aid them, being prepared to send, if necessary, thirty times as many? It was the honour of Britain for which they fought. If honour was the principle for which British troops and the prisoner’s soldier lover were fighting, was not the prisoner herself fighting similarly? The honour of the individual made for the upholding of the honour of England. In repelling an insidious attack from an unexpected enemy, the girl has not committed murder.
“When you look at the way the working classes view these questions of honour and morality, it makes us proud of the stamina that goes to make the people of the Empire. When you contrast some so-called society people with those in lowlier walks of life, we can see that it is the stamina, the principle and the conduct of the so-called working classes that make for the greatness and the continued greatness of the Empire.”
It was a tour de force. But Hartley Dewart had not finished yet. He was going to bind generic British pride and a naked appeal to class sentiment with a pathetic scene that might have been taken straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. “Over in Bedfordshire there is a little home where a widowed mother is sitting today,” he continued, lowering his voice and shaking his head as if in sorrow. “Her eyes are dimmed, and she is going blind and cannot pursue her work. She was depending upon her little girl. There are five other little children there. That mother has nurtured her daughter and instilled into her the principle that is exemplified in her conduct here. What will your verdict be? What will be the message that you are going to send across the sea? Will you say the girl is guilty because she defended herself from a fate she felt was worse than death? Nay verily, gentlemen.
“Look the facts in the face. You have a wife, a daughter or perhaps a sister at home. You are married men and have children. Can you look them squarely in the face and with a clear conscience say that you had done your duty in the case if you leave a stain upon this girl by your verdict? … Put someone near and dear to you in her position. Would you feel that ten or twelve men had treated you fairly if one of your dear ones was on the same set of facts found guilty?
“Our Sovereign Lord the King has tens of thousands of soldiers at the front, fighting and defending the honour of the Empire. None of them more faithfully defended the honour of the Empire than this girl defended her own honour.
“Never in recent years has so much interest been taken in any case as has been taken in this. The eyes of all Canada are upon you, so are the eyes of the people of Bedfordshire and the eyes of the people of England. A verdict of acquittal means that the standard of morality stands high in the county of York.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the issue is with you. You cannot shirk it.”
For several minutes after Hartley Dewart finished speaking, the courtroom remained completely silent, with all eyes fixed on him.
{ CHAPTER 15 }
A Bleeding Corpse
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27
GERMAN CORPSES THICK IN FRONT TRENCHES “EVERYWHERE STILL GREY FIGURES CAN BE SEEN LYING” EXTENSIVE CAPTURE OF THE GERMAN HAND BOMBS PROVE VERY USEFUL, AS THEY ARE TURNED AGAINST THE ENEMY WITH GREAT EFFECT.
—Globe, Saturday, February 27, 1915
EATON�
�S DAILY STORE NEWS DAINTY UNDERWEAR THAT THE FASTIDIOUS WOMAN LOVES A SPECIAL DISPLAY IN THE FRENCH ROOMS ON MONDAY
La Grecque Tailored Drawers, in envelope style, of extra good quality white nainsook, made to fit neatly at the waist without fullness, finished with pearl buttons, trimmed with dainty Valenciennes lace insertion and edging of lace. All sizes, price, each, $1.25
—Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, February 27, 1915
Hartley Dewart’s bravura performance had lasted an hour and a half. Even the chief justice, who could have intervened several times to reprimand the defence counsel for introducing points that were irrelevant or inadmissible, seemed spellbound.
A handful of reporters scrambled towards the door in order to telephone their newsrooms and relay Dewart’s speech to their editors. As they left, replacement reporters from the same papers arrived to take their places and stay abreast of the drama. Meanwhile, Dewart sat down, a satisfied smile on his thin lips, while everyone else in the courtroom absorbed his powerful challenge to the jury. He had done what every courtroom lawyer wants to do: he had shaped a compelling narrative to hook the jury. He had put Bert Massey on a par with the vicious Huns, and he had made Carrie Davies’s trial all about duty—the duty of Carrie to protect her honour after a wanton attack, the duty of Canadian lads in the trenches to defend the Empire, the jury’s duty to acquit Carrie in order to prove that purity and honour were more valuable than life itself. The acquittal of his client would be tantamount to a patriotic act. He had used the fact that Bert Massey had not raped Carrie to prove that she had just cause to kill. He had argued that Bert Massey deserved to be killed.
The Massey Murder Page 20