“Left alone with her thoughts,” Mulock continued, “she brooded over the events of the day before, which she regarded as a terrible distress to her, added to, perhaps, by her idea of the fidelity she owed to her lover.”
Several people behind the bar nodded their heads emphatically at this portrayal of Carrie Davies as the epitome of obedient womanhood, who kept her word and remained true to her soldier lover facing the enemy in France. Carrie’s own passivity in court and the conflation of her plight with that of her mystery fiancé underlined the image. Yet Sir William Mulock had gone way beyond the conventional role filled by a Canadian judge in a jury trial. He had not stuck to the provisions of the Canadian Criminal Code, or unpicked Hartley Dewart’s subtle appeal to an “unwritten law” that justified Carrie’s behaviour. He did not tell jurors that Dewart’s appeal to them was inappropriate, because however persuasive it might be, it made a mockery of the law’s specific provisions. And now, in his instructions to the jury, he had implicitly endorsed the idea that Carrie was justified in defending her honour.
At 11:45 a.m., the jury retired to their room to decide on their verdict. Twelve men too old for war debated whether they should defend a young British girl’s honour and offer her their paternal protection. In the meantime, Chief Justice Mulock and the two lawyers retired to their separate chambers, and Carrie was taken to one of the basement cells. A subdued murmur rose in the courtroom, as spectators tried to second-guess what the jury would decide, and how long it would take.
The chief justice had barely had time to take a fortifying mouthful of whisky before his clerk told him that the jurors had made their decision. It had taken them a mere half hour. At 12:15 p.m., the judge, lawyers, and prisoner all returned to the court. Then, twelve men filed back into the jury box as reporters and spectators watched in rapt silence. Maud Fairchild’s hands were clenched tightly together; Ed Fairchild had a protective arm around his wife as he stared at the jurors’ faces, trying to discern their intentions. The hush was, suggested the Evening Telegram, “the stillness that precedes a summer storm.”
Chief Justice Mulock relished the drama: ever the politician, he loved a captive audience. He waited until the very last fidget, throat-clearing, and whisper had been stilled. Then his voice rang out across the court: “Gentlemen of the jury, is your verdict ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’?” Samuel Miller, a farmer from East Gwillimbury who was jury foreman, rose, glanced at Carrie, and addressed the judge: “Not guilty.”
The storm broke as, noted the Globe, “all the pent-up and nervous anxiety of the past two days poured out in sympathy with the forlorn figure huddled in the prisoners dock, sobbing and shaking violently.” The Evening Telegram reported that pandemonium erupted: “From three hundred throats came one tremendous cheer such as never rang through a Canadian courtroom before.” Reporters rushed out to telephone their editors and urge that special editions be published. The Tely had no misgivings about declaring that the crowd was a homogeneous “cheering mass of Britishers” who were “clapping and shouting and surging forward towards the railing near the prisoner’s box.” One man whooped so exuberantly that two court constables leapt over the railing that separated the public from the court officers, seized the loudmouth, and hustled him out of the room. Chief Justice Mulock, appalled at the noise, half-rose from his chair with “amazement on his face” as court clerks shouted, “Order! Order!”
In the middle of the mayhem, Carrie Davies seemed stunned. When the Salvation Army matron leaned into the prisoner’s box, hugged Carrie, and, with a broad smile, told her that the ordeal was now over, Carrie almost fainted. Only with the support of both Miss Minty and the matron was she able to stand upright while Sir William Mulock spoke to her.
“Carrie Davies,” began the chief justice, in far warmer tones than he had hitherto allowed himself to use, “you have heard the verdict?”
Carrie recovered her poise. “Yes,” she replied, drying her eyes and perking up. Mulock announced that the verdict was one “in which I concur, if that is any comfort to you.” He admitted that perhaps the jury had taken a view of the case “not absolutely in conformity with strict rules, but they have rendered substantial justice. They found that when you killed Mr. Massey you lost control of yourself and at that moment had no murderous intent.
“You have had a strict bringing up and the influence of your parents upon you has fallen upon good grounds. You have had the highest regard for morality and honour. Those qualities caused you to take a stronger view of what Mr. Massey would have done than the facts warranted, but nevertheless your education, training and nature were such as to fill you with alarm of the possible consequences of meeting him again, unprotected, and so, from the very highest motives, you did a thing which you will regret perhaps all your life. It was a mistaken sense of duty.”
By now, the crowd was starting to hum with excitement and eagerness to celebrate Carrie’s release, but the chief justice raised his voice above the noise. “The proper thing for you to have done was not to have returned. Respect for your duty caused you to go back. Your mental training seems to have made it your bounden duty to go back to Mr. Massey’s. You were between two forces—your promise to Mrs. Massey that you would not leave and your fear of Mr. Massey.”
The chief justice’s face softened as he looked over his glasses at Carrie. He had three daughters of his own: although some years older than the prisoner, they still seemed like children to him. Although he had earlier reprimanded Dewart for referring to his client as a “little girl,” he now nodded at Carrie: “You are now a free girl.”
Sir William Mulock’s sentimentality (and perhaps that of the Tely correspondent) then got the better of him. “Tears were welling in the judge’s eyes as he made his parting homily to the girl in the dock,” the Tely reported, “and before he had finished his voice had failed him … There were few dry eyes in the courtroom.”
For Hartley Dewart, the verdict was the triumph he had craved. Carrie had been declared not guilty by a jury of her peers. His impassioned defence—”Brute slaughter, not manslaughter!”—had been as effective as Blackie Johnston’s twenty years earlier in the Clara Ford case. Twelve men had weighed the law against their own sense of natural justice and decided in favour of the latter. They had accepted the notion of “unwritten law” in order to protect an innocent against a sexual predator.
For Edward Du Vernet, the verdict was a defeat. He had always known that he did not have the public on his side, but now he discovered that even the judge had bought into the luridly melodramatic defence. With a not-guilty verdict, the Crown had no avenue of appeal, although the verdict was a clear contravention of Canadian law, which the judge had failed to explain in his instructions to the jury. Twelve unassuming men had collectively decided that, in this case, the law was oppressive—that Carrie Davies’s behaviour was excusable. And now the courtroom crowd was behaving as though the jury had won a victory in Europe. Du Vernet could merely shrug and marvel that a woman who had taken the law into her own hands had got away with it.
For both lawyers, the Carrie Davies case had been a professional challenge. Now that the verdict was rendered, each would move swiftly on to his next case. They shook hands cordially, and barely cast a glance at Carrie as they gathered up their papers.
But for Carrie Davies, the verdict meant she dared to think about tomorrow, next month, next year. Clutching the Salvation Army matron’s arms, she looked up at Chief Justice Mulock and stammered through her sobs, “I thank you, your Lordship.” Then she turned to the jury box: “I thank the jury which has tried me.” Once again, the Tely reporter revelled in the drama: “Even strong men not much given to sentimentality surreptitiously pulled handkerchiefs from their pockets and applied them to their eyes.”
The clerk unlatched the gate of the prisoner’s dock, and Carrie was helped over to where her sister sat. The two sisters fell into each other’s arms, weeping with relief. The sight was irresistible for both reporters and spectato
rs. “Several hundred spectators refused to leave the corridor when the court adjourned, and hovered around waiting to get a glimpse of the girl,” reported the Toronto Daily Star. The Tely’s Archie Fisher managed to exchange a few words with the sisters. Carrie told him, “I was nervous at first, but now …” Then Maud Fairchild broke in: “I didn’t sleep last night thinking of it. Carrie will go right home with me and stay. She needs the rest.” She tugged at her sister’s arm, but Carrie still had something to say as the Fairchilds and friends hustled her towards a waiting car: “They have treated me very kindly down there [in the Don Jail]. I didn’t care much about the exercise I got down there. It was like a lot of soldiers marching. The bed that I had to sleep on was rather hard, but I have nothing to complain of.”
Chief Justice Mulock told his hangers-on that he had never experienced such emotional scenes in a courtroom. He was obviously fired up by both the verdict and the excitement.
It was late afternoon before the last spectator finally left the building and court officials were able to lock the doors of the room where the Supreme Court sat. But by then, Carrie Davies and the Fairchilds were safely installed back in the little house on Morley Avenue. How the Massey family, which had steered well clear of proceedings, took the news was not recorded.
Editors of Toronto’s three evening papers had held the printing presses until they heard the outcome of the trial: none of them could afford to miss a story that the city would chew over all weekend. Two days later, the verdict was still a sufficiently hot news item to be on the front page of the morning Globe. “As the slight, pathetic figure supported by two women moved out of the courtroom, which she had entered that morning with a dark shadow hanging over her young life, the curtain rang down on what was probably the most dramatic scene ever enacted in a local court of justice. It was a sensational finish to a sensational case, a felicitous ending to a pitiful human drama that was full of bitterness and tears.”
Emotions ran high in Toronto for the next few days. In her own way, Carrie Davies had become a reality show celebrity before reality shows were invented or the cult of celebrity understood. Reporters besieged the Fairchilds’ house in the east end of the city, where she was staying.
The Toronto Star managed the biggest scoop—a long interview with Carrie, under a front-page headline: “Carrie Davies Says She Did a Terrible Thing.” Carrie spoke of her treatment at Don Jail: “I was given good food and allowed to walk and talk with the matrons. They were awfully kind and I will never forget it.” The reporter asked her what she was going to do now. “I would like to go home—to go home and see my mother, but I know I cannot do that, at least at present,” she replied. “I want to work and work and work until I have saved up enough money to go back to my home and live in comfort. I want to go to work right away but my sister wants me to stay here with her for two or three weeks so that I may forget just what happened. I want to forget it and I know that I will, but it will be hard—that is, at least for a while. People don’t forget those things very easily, do they?”
Finally, Carrie Davies’s own spontaneous voice can be heard. On the only other occasions on which her words were captured—in her initial statement to Inspector Kennedy on the night of Massey’s death, and during her appearance in front of Chief Justice Mulock—she answered questions, but never volunteered information. Interpretations of the eighteen-year-old’s feelings and actions were projected onto her by lawyers, reporters, witnesses, and members of the Massey family. And her voice in this Toronto Star interview is the guileless voice that convinced the twelve members of the jury to acquit her, although she had shot dead an unsuspecting man. Carrie really was the meek, vulnerable “little girl” that her lawyer, the newspapers, and the onlookers wanted. Her naivety had protected her from the traumatic consequences of her action. She spoke of how good the Masseys had been to her when she worked for them, adding, “I always kept my place. I knew I was only a domestic—just a servant. I did what I was told and didn’t think, like many other girls do, that I was as good as the people who were employing me.”
A wistful note crept into the young woman’s voice as she noted, “I have not heard a word from the Masseys since it all happened.” She seemed unable to comprehend the damage she had done to the family, and the grief she had caused fourteen-year-old Charlie and his mother, Rhoda.
Would she return to domestic service, asked the reporter?
“Why yes, but not to the kind of domestic service that I have been in,” Carrie replied, revealing her lack of imagination about the future. In a world of widening opportunities for women, Carrie wanted to continue in “her place”—the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Her ambition was to become a parlour maid “or something like that. Some kind of light service where I will not be left alone or where I will not have too much responsibility. That is where the trouble was at the Masseys. I was left alone too much.” She was locked into the subservient role assigned to her.
Carrie’s sister Maud Fairchild shooed the reporters away. Maud was astonished to discover that Carrie’s remarks about staying in service prompted job offers from people who had been following the case. Maud scotched any suggestion that her sister was ready to return to work. “There is plenty of time yet,” Maud told the Star. “Carrie will rest for a while until she has recovered from the shock before she decides what she will do.”
Two days after the trial had ended, a rumour erupted that the young woman was in a downtown Royal Bank branch office at the corner of Richmond and Yonge Streets. Immediately, people massed in front of the bank, peering through the glass windows and crowding through the doors. The frazzled manager sent a clerk out to find a policeman, but the sidewalk and intersection were so congested that the policeman had to call for backup. In the end, it took three sturdy Toronto police officers to clear the crowd. Carrie had never been near the bank.
The verdict triggered furious debate in pulpits and the press, as people tried to understand what had actually happened in the courtroom. The day after the verdict, the New York Times carried an article that reflected shock at the outcome. Describing Massey as a “wealthy clubman,” the article’s author pointed out in his first paragraph that the grounds for the acquittal were “something almost unknown to Canadian jurisprudence.” The headline was “Unwritten Law In Canada: It Saves Carrie Davies, Slayer of ‘Bert’ Massey at Toronto.” In London, England, the Daily Sketch also headlined its report “‘Unwritten Law’ Trial,” but the tone of the subsequent article (“Bedfordshire Girl Acquitted of Murder in Canada”) was more sympathetic to Carrie. As if loyalty to Empire might justify everything, the article’s final line read, “She has a sweetheart, who is now with the Canadian contingency of the Expeditionary Force.”
It was all very well to talk about “unwritten law” or “substantial justice … not strictly in accord with the rules,” but how far might such a pliable concept be pushed? Had old-fashioned notions of chivalry towards a weak and defenceless woman swamped the rule of law? In Wesley Methodist Church the day after the verdict, the Reverend Dr. J.A. Rankin pronounced, “Justice miscarried. I believe every word the girl said. But no man can say that what that man did deserved the death penalty.” A week later, at Bond Street Congregational Church, the Reverend Byron Stauffer deplored Canadian overuse of clemency. Citing the Carrie Davies verdict, he said, “We are becoming so lenient that we are apt to be swept off our feet at times.”
A “prominent Toronto lawyer” sounded off in an article headlined “Has the Carrie Davies Verdict of ‘Murder No Crime’ Created Dangerous Precedent?” The article (so sympathetic to the Masseys that they could have commissioned it) was carried in the Star Weekly, the Saturday supplement to the daily paper that had been most skeptical about Carrie’s story in early February. Insisting that the verdict was deplorable, despite its popularity, the lawyer suggested that the chief justice’s instructions to the jury were completely inadequate, that Hartley Dewart’s defence “extolled his client as a heroine in a l
anguage that would have been effusive if applied to Joan of Arc,” and that the newspapers’ treatment of the case was exploitative.
Newspapers’ correspondence columns were filled with passionate letters on both sides of the argument. “A father of four girls and two boys” told the Star that he admired Carrie’s “keen sense of honour. We may yet hope that a girl or woman could go through her life in Canada at least, in office, factory, or domestic life, without that fear of man that I fear too often rightfully exists at the present time.” Such sentiments enraged another Star reader: “It is a blot on Christian justice to so glorify this girl’s act … There is a home broken up, a widow, a boy left fatherless. No sympathy for them is spoken of. What honor was there in staying in the house till her mistress came back, if it was only to remain and shoot the husband dead?” In the Daily News, John Simpson of Avonmore suggested the decision had “brought Canada into disrepute as a British country,” and he accused the jury of being “carried away by the twaddle served up by the lawyer for the defence.”
Critics of the verdict were particularly angered by the way donations rolled into the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association’s Carrie Davies Defence Fund, which the Evening Telegram continued to promote. Donors put their sense of solidarity with the young servant on display: accompanying the dollars, dimes, and quarters were notes signed by “Another funny-looking English girl,” “A few English working girls,” “English integrity,” “A young Englishman,” “Mother of six,” “Five sympathizers,” “A Yorkshire woman,” “Another English Carrie,” “A mother of twelve,” “Defender of Faith,” “Another Funny-looking one,” “Employees, Prince George Hotel dining-rooms,” “English Sympathizers at Ottawa,” “Polson Ironworks Machine Shop,” “Girls’ Ideal Women’s Wear,” and “A few box makers.” One hundred and eighteen captains and privates from an unnamed regiment contributed twenty-five cents each.
The Massey Murder Page 22