The Massey Murder Read online

  Miss Minty stepped forward, took Carrie’s arm, and led her back to the bench. Denison made a few general remarks to his clerks, slammed his casebook shut, and strode out of the court. Miss Minty escorted Carrie back into the corridor. None of Carrie’s friends or family, nor any members of the Massey family, was present this morning, nor did Carrie have a lawyer. Accused of murder, she was not eligible for bail—but even if she had been, there was nobody to stand bail for her. At this point, she was completely alone in the justice system’s grip.

  Newspapers that catered to the city’s elite reported simply that Carrie had been remanded for a week. They devoted more ink to portraying the dead man as an agreeable bon vivant. The Globe described “the late Mr. Massey” as “well known about town. He was fond of motoring and took much enjoyment out of life … A diamond ring and stick pin worth several hundred dollars and some money were found on him.” The Toronto Daily News mentioned that he was educated at Albert College, Belleville, later attending an American preparatory school, and was a “prominent figure among the young social set.”

  But reporters from papers with a blue-collar readership put the spotlight on Carrie. Was her impassivity the result of dazed terror or hard-boiled criminality? The Evening Telegram portrayed her as young and guileless: “a rather short, fair-haired girl, of eighteen, whose blue-grey eyes looked as though they had wept most of the night … More like a mild and gentle Sunday School pupil did she look, and very subdued and sorrowful this morning.” The Toronto Daily Star took a very different line: “The heaviness over her eyebrows resembles the Slavic type more than the English, and her mouth is strong, showing capacity for resentment out of all keeping with a round, childish chin.”

  As spectators streamed out of the courtroom, each made her own judgment as to whether Carrie Davies was subdued Sunday school pupil or resentful, aggressive immigrant. That evening, readers of the Evening Telegram were able to glean more about the young girl now accused of murder. A day earlier, soon after Bert Massey had been killed, a Tely reporter named Archie Fisher who had been at City Hall when she was brought in had discovered that Carrie Davies had a sister living in the distant east end of Toronto. Fisher had hurried along Gerrard Street for six kilometres until he reached Morley Avenue, where a jumble of wooden telegraph poles and tiny brick houses, many single-storey and all squatting on small lots, lined a soggy gravel thoroughfare just south of the train tracks. Cursing the darkness, he stumbled north, up an incline, until he found number 326. A woman came to the door after he knocked, and looked at this stranger with surprise.

  The reporter realized he had got there before the police. “Are you Maud Fairchild, Carrie Davies’s sister?” he demanded in a voice sombre with authority. Maud Fairchild said she was, and immediately asked, “What has happened to Carrie?” The reporter continued to grill her as Maud’s husband, Ed Fairchild, emerged from the kitchen with a baby in his arms. “Does your sister work for Mr. Massey?” Maud looked anxious. “Yes. Tell us what is the matter.” The reporter stepped importantly through the door into an ill-lit, narrow hall and announced that Carrie had shot her employer.

  The Fairchilds were devastated. As Ed asked, “Was Mr. Massey badly hurt?” his wife gasped, “Poor Carrie.” By now the reporter had manoeuvred them into the tiny parlour: Maud sank into a chair and a toddler immediately ran to her and clung to her skirts. Neither Ed nor Maud could believe that Carrie would do such a thing: she was such a shy little thing, she could barely kill a fly. She had worked for the Masseys for two years, and always said the Masseys were good to her. She had been taken poorly the previous summer, Maud stuttered, while she was with the Masseys at their summer cottage, and they had looked after her so well. She had been her normal, quiet self when she spent Sunday afternoon with the Fairchilds.

  Then Ed remembered something. When Carrie was with them on Sunday, the Fairchilds had friends visiting, so she hadn’t been able to talk much to her sister. However, she had taken her brother-in-law aside in the kitchen and whispered to him that Mr. Massey had tried to kiss her the previous day, when she was cleaning up after a dinner party. Ed insisted that Carrie hadn’t seemed particularly upset. “I told her not to think about it too much about that,” said Ed. “Probably he was feeling a little good and he would forget about it. She said that she guessed he would be ashamed of himself.” As Carrie was leaving at the end of the evening, Ed had mentioned Mr. Massey’s behaviour to his wife. Maud was concerned, but she didn’t stop her sister returning to Walmer Road. Now, a day later, she recalled telling her sister that if anything should happen, to run right out of the house and rush into a neighbour’s house, “no matter whether she was fully dressed or not.”

  But now Carrie was in real trouble. Ed Fairchild grabbed his coat and insisted he must leave immediately and get downtown: he planned to stand bail for his sister-in-law and get her out of police custody. The reporter had not yet divulged that Bert Massey was dead. He immediately offered to accompany the distraught man downtown. The two men disappeared into the February dark—but not before the man from the Tely had asked Maud to lend him a photograph of Carrie which he knew his editor would publish in the next edition. On the following day, after Carrie’s appearance in the Women’s Court, it appeared next to the Tely’s scoop—the most informative account of the murder so far, under the headline “News of What Had Happened a Cruel Blow to a Little East End Household.”

  Carrie, an uneducated eighteen-year-old who had taken a man’s life, had barely uttered a word on the day of her first court appearance. Over the course of the next three weeks, her own words would be recorded on only three occasions. A century later, those remarks are all we have in her voice on which to base speculation on her state of mind: she left no diary or letters that reveal what she was thinking or feeling. We know her reactions to events only if they were noted in others’ accounts or newspaper articles. However, observers have always been happy to project their own assumptions onto her. In 1915, she was on her way to becoming a lightning rod for the fears and prejudices swirling around Canada’s largest English-speaking city.

  { CHAPTER 3 }

  The Corpse in the Morgue

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9

  PARADE OF 4,000 SOLDIERS THROUGH CITY

  Mounted rifles swing into Queen Street at the foot of University Avenue.

  BRITISH LOSSES TOTAL 104,000

  Premier Asquith speaking in the [British] House of Commons to-day said that British casualties in all ranks in the western arena of the war, from the beginning of hostilities to February 4, amounted to approximately 104,000 men. This includes killed, wounded and missing.

  —Globe, Tuesday, February 9, 1915

  Mr. Frederick Massey … said that he had viewed the body in the morgue, and recognized it as that of Charles A. Massey, whom he knew intimately.

  —Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, February 10, 1915

  Once Colonel Denison had closed the Women’s Court proceedings, Miss Minty marched her prisoner through the spectators gathered at the courtroom door, round to the other side of City Hall’s second floor, and waited for the elevator to rattle up in its metal cage from the ground floor. When its doors opened, a group of self-assured women in smart hats and fur coats bustled out. Carrie shrank back, but nobody took any notice of the shabby domestic: these women had other concerns. The members of Toronto’s Local Council of Women were on a mission to persuade Mayor Thomas Langton Church and the Board of Control that the Women’s Court must not fall prey to government cuts. Once these women had stomped off, Carrie and Miss Minty stepped into the elevator for the creaky ascent to the third floor. There, the policewoman escorted her charge to the police office, where Carrie would begin the ordeal of being admitted, on remand, to the notorious Toronto Jail, better known as “the Don.”

  Carrie was told to remove her hat and coat. First, she was photographed from the front and both sides. Next, a police clerk bustled up to her, wielding a pair of steel calipers. Carrie’s eyes widened with alarm
, but Miss Minty reassured her. There followed a lengthy procedure in which twenty-five dimensions of Carrie’s body were measured, including her height, head length, left foot, left little finger, right ear, nose size and shape, ear lobe, chin, teeth, and the width and tilt of her forehead. All these measurements, plus her birthplace, occupation, and hair colour, were noted down in a big, brown leather-bound volume: the Toronto police force’s “Bertillon” register.

  The Bertillon system of identification had been invented forty years earlier by Alphonse Bertillon, a pale-faced, misanthropic records clerk in the Paris Police Department. As police forces in Europe and North America expanded and became more professional in the nineteenth century, they found themselves hampered by their inability to track offenders. Hardened criminals were often sentenced as first offenders because there was no accurate way to identify recidivists or escapees. Bertillon, a self-important, obsessive little man with a thrusting beard and deep voice, was exasperated by this haphazard approach to identification. His father, an anthropologist and statistician, had spent his career researching the unique variations in physical characteristics in every human being, and Bertillon built on this research to develop a criminal identification scheme. He used his father’s measuring techniques on arrestees and convicts, carefully recording physical features (eye colour, shape and angles of the ear, brow, and nose) that no disguise could hide. He accumulated a vast amount of data on cards, which were then categorized and cross-indexed.

  In the late nineteenth century, when innovations like photography, the telephone, and the gramophone were taking off like wildfire, Bertillon’s system won instant popularity. No wonder—as the first use in history of scientific detection to catch a criminal, it combined two obsessions of the time: science and crime. Adopted in 1882 by the Paris police, “Bertillonage” became all the rage in France after it successfully identified 241 multiple offenders. In 1887, the warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary introduced it into the United States, and its use quickly spread across the continent. By the mid-1890s, Alphonse Bertillon was an international celebrity. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, showed “enthusiastic admiration of the French savant,” and in Conan Doyle’s 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, another character described Holmes and Bertillon as being the two best detectives in Europe.

  However, there were flaws in both the system and its author. Pumped by success, Bertillon also claimed to be a handwriting expert. In the 1890s he had testified for the prosecution in the explosive Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer in the French army was wrongly accused of being a German spy. Bertillon’s rambling evidence helped condemn the innocent Captain Alfred Dreyfus to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Moreover, Bertillonage was fallible: different officers could make their measurement in different ways, while two individuals with the same measurements could be confused. In 1903, two men—one named Will West and the second William West—were convicted in Kansas for different crimes, yet were found to possess the same Bertillon measurements.

  The decline in Bertillon’s credibility was as rapid as his rise, after another set of unchanging human characteristics, fingerprints, was shown to be more reliable. By the early 1900s, police departments in Britain and the United States were switching over to a fingerprint classification system developed by Commissioner Edward Henry of Scotland Yard. Fingerprinting offered odds of 67 billion to one of any two individuals having identical prints. Alphonse Bertillon died in 1914, a year before Carrie faced the calipers. By then, the Toronto Police Department was one of the few forces still laboriously measuring lobes, noses, and feet. Judging by the skimpy records in its leather-bound Bertillon Register, it did so with dwindling conviction of its usefulness.

  Toronto’s police department was old-fashioned and struggled to keep up with its British equivalent, the Metropolitan Police Force in London’s Scotland Yard. The man in charge of Toronto’s police, Colonel Henry Grasett, was a contemporary of Colonel Denison’s who shared the Beak’s militaristic pretensions and patrician attitudes. The two men saw each other regularly at the Toronto Club. A militia officer born into a prominent Toronto family (his father was rector of St. James’ Cathedral, bastion of elite Anglicanism), Colonel Grasett had fought alongside Denison against Fenian invaders in 1866 and had led operations against Chief Big Bear in the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. The chief constable believed in spit-and-polish discipline and parade ground drills, but he was not a dinosaur. Interested in progressive policing, he tried to keep abreast of modern policing trends.

  When Grasett had become chief constable in 1886, there were only 172 police officers in the city and the force’s toughest challenges were vagrancy, burglary, and fistfights. Now there were over six hundred police officers, the majority of them British (particularly Protestant Irish) immigrants, with a far greater range of rules to enforce. Not only were they dealing with street traffic, insurance frauds, and violent crimes, they were also responsible for regulating parades, processions, dance halls, gambling, liquor laws, censorship, Sabbath-breaking, the ages of newsboys, and any new forms of “immorality” that came to police attention. As reporter Harry M. Wodson observed, Toronto had become a city of “shall nots,” where it was more important for citizens to memorize six thousand bylaws than the Ten Commandments. In 1902, Chief Constable Grasett was elected vice-president of the Police Chiefs Association of the United States and Canada, in recognition of the growing muscle of the Toronto boys in blue. But police resources were stretched—by the city’s dramatic growth, by the loss of many constables to the army in 1914, and by the city fathers’ determination to impose their morality on the working classes.

  Grasett had replaced an informal “rogues’ gallery” of photographs of criminals with the Bertillon system after a visit to the state-of-the-art Chicago Police Department in 1897. But technological innovations like the telegraph and telephone cost money, and Toronto was slow to adopt them because City Council was not always sympathetic. Grasett finally managed to establish a motorcycle squad in 1911 to enforce the new fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit on city streets. (Riders often wore business suits so that speeders would not realize they were being monitored.) Nonetheless, in 1914 the Toronto force was still using horse-drawn police wagons: it was another three years before the department acquired motor cars. Although the Dominion Police, with its headquarters in Ottawa, abandoned Bertillonage soon after the turn of the century (partly because many of its technicians had dropped their calipers and joined the stampede to the Klondike goldfields in 1898–99), the Toronto Police Force continued to take Bertillon measurements until 1915, although they also began fingerprinting suspects in 1906.

  Carrie Davies’s Bertillon measurements would never be used, but the process was part of the intimidating ordeal of arrest. After she had been Bertillonaged, Carrie was escorted downstairs by Miss Minty, and then driven off in a police wagon to Toronto Jail, three and a half kilometres away on the other side of the Don River. There, she stepped out of the paddy wagon at the intersection of Gerrard Street and Broadview Avenue and looked up at the monstrous building in which she was to be incarcerated. Constructed of cold grey stone and black iron, with small barred windows set high in its walls, it was one of the largest jails in North America and often described as the “Riverdale Bastille.” Built half a century earlier to hold about three hundred prisoners, it had recently been condemned by the provincial inspector of prisons as “over-crowded, ill-ventilated and unsanitary, a fire-trap, and the worst jail on the continent of America.” Conditions for women were especially disgusting. The Toronto Star had recently revealed that a woman confined to the punishment cell there had killed seventy-three rats and thirteen mice. A group of women visitors had discovered that women inmates were not supplied with underwear or socks (male prisoners got both) and had no access to books. A particular disgrace was that “the night toilet pails [do] day duty for scrubbing. [This is] neither sanitary or modern. As many of these women are victims of socia
l diseases, it stands to reason in the light of modern bacteriology that this state of affairs should desist.”

  There was little chance that the current governor of the jail would take any action on these complaints: he was as ineffective as he was well meaning, and he had no idea how to run a large, complex institution. The Reverend Dr. Andrew B. Chambers, vice-president of the Upper Canada Bible Society, had got the governor’s job solely on the grounds of his Conservative Party links, and in the words of a contemporary, he “simply wanted to be a friend to everybody, especially those in trouble.” Most people, including the chief turnkey and the guards, took advantage of him.

  But Dr. Chambers’s soft heart did save Carrie from exposure to the Don’s toughest elements. He decided that this woebegone young woman was far too feeble to be locked up with the other women prisoners, many of whom were delusional, violent, or worse. Since Carrie’s days on this earth seemed likely to be numbered, they should be as comfortable as possible. He sent her up to the prison hospital and put her in the charge of Mrs. Sinclair, superintendent of the Women’s Department. For the rest of the day, Carrie refused to eat or speak: she just stared around her in fear.

  Oblivious to Carrie’s lonely journey, the Local Council of Women delegation was still busy on the second floor, protesting to Mayor Church and the Board of Control against a proposal to move the Women’s Court out of City Hall.

  The number and range of Toronto’s women’s organizations in 1915 were truly startling. A middle-class Toronto woman could spend every afternoon or evening attending the Women’s Conservative Club’s knitting circle, the sale of homemade dainties by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a knitting tea sponsored by the Political Equality League, or the Toronto Women’s Patriotic League’s collection drive for mufflers, socks, and wristlets for soldiers. The Heliconian Club ran regular sessions on literature, travel, and music for its members. In addition, there were church-sponsored groups, arts-focused clubs, and other get-togethers that allowed the wives of Toronto’s swelling professional classes to meet each other.