The Massey Murder Read online

  All this activity stood in dramatic contrast to the way that the wives of Toronto’s elite, or those who aspired to join it, had conducted themselves until recently. The cornerstone of sociability in the late Victorian era was the “At Home,” an elaborate and suffocating ritual that might include a few intimates or a cast of hundreds, and took place in private houses during the afternoon. The rules were set by the wives and daughters of Toronto’s most patrician families, who shared their husbands’ stout belief that moral superiority sprang from good breeding and lots of money.

  An At Home event was rigidly formal. It began with a stiff white card, engraved with the holder’s name and address, and with a handwritten note of a weekday on the lower left-hand corner. The card was an invitation to join the holder for a tea on the day prescribed: it would be left with a maidservant at a door—but only after the hostess and her prospective guest had been formally introduced. Each society hostess had her At Home on a particular day, and over the years the occasions had grown increasingly competitive. Should the hostess offer a rose tea, a strawberry tea, a tea-and-talk, or a five o’clock tea?

  The city’s grandes dames slowly patrolled the drawing rooms of their social equals, sipping from bone china cups and making small talk. Their daughters dutifully handed around dainty sandwiches and petits fours and displayed their fathers’ or husbands’ wealth in the form of sable collars and diamond brooches. Grace Denison, niece by marriage of the police magistrate, wrote a society column about them in Saturday Night magazine, under the sobriquet Lady Gay. Over time, these afternoon receptions had become increasingly crowded, arduous, and competitive, as hostesses scheduled their teas on the same day so that guests had to rush between them. Lady Gay regularly complained about “the crush,” in which she risked being “trodden upon, prodded in the ribs, squeezed, smeared and rent.” For women whose waists and ribcages were already uncomfortably squeezed into unnatural shapes by whalebone corsets, At Homes could be purgatory. A Saturday Night article in 1906 had bemoaned the monotony of “the same decorative mums and roses, the same orchestral accompaniment, the same women, in the same frocks, the same suffocation in the tea-room.”

  Such events were still going strong in 1915, but with the new century, fashions and rituals began to change. Even the corsets loosened up—the new Tango model, made by the Dominion Corset Company of Toronto, claimed to “mould the figure, enhancing nature’s charms without strain or compression.” Most of the wives and daughters of Toronto’s middle and upper classes did not expect to go to university or to look for paid employment. Only a few years earlier, the widely circulated medical journal Canada Lancet had belittled educated women as “withered, shrunken-shanked girls” with “stooping gait and … spectacles on nose.” Who wanted to look like that? But many younger women did want to do something more useful than pass around Royal Doulton teacups.

  As the city expanded, so did the options for women to escape from crowded parlours and the accumulation of social debts. Public tearooms, like McConkey’s on King Street or the Savoy on Yonge Street, became fashionable meeting places where women could gather without having to disrupt their own households. Sometimes it was the same small talk in these commercial establishments as it had been in Rosedale drawing rooms, but frequently women gathered to talk about larger national issues and shared projects. Concern for public welfare, the campaign to eliminate alcohol from public life, women’s right to vote—in tearooms, churches, and Women’s Institutes, women in unprecedented numbers at different social levels were discussing these topics. Clubs, committees, groups, and associations were formed at a rapid rate to exchange information and opinions. The daughters of Yonge Street, Forest Hill, and Annex families showed the same enthusiasm for taking initiatives as Manitoba farm wives. The activities of the McConkey’s set inspired some pejorative comment about “clubwomen” who had nothing better to do. While they sat discussing the vote, women like Carrie Davies were scrubbing their floors, cooking their dinners, and polishing their silver. But even if these women did not question some aspects of the status quo, they were genuinely concerned with improving conditions for the poor and exploited. And with the outbreak of war, a whole new range of challenges—from fundraising and knitting to encouraging enlistment—had opened up for them.

  Seventy-two of these women’s groups belonged to Toronto’s Local Council of Women, the federation of early feminists that had successfully lobbied for the Women’s Court. LCW membership was almost entirely Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and middle or upper class; nevertheless, it represented a wide range of opinions and priorities. Some groups operated exclusively in their own neighbourhoods; others monitored provincial and federal politics. Some focused on philanthropy, others on educating their members. Some groups passionately supported female suffrage, particularly now that women out west were close to winning the right to vote in provincial elections; others felt that women didn’t “need” the vote and shouldn’t be demanding it while the nation was at war. The LCW maintained cohesion by focusing on maternal feminist goals: fresh from its success getting the Women’s Court off the ground, it was now lobbying for safe milk, clean water, mothers’ pensions, and children’s playgrounds. The organization’s philosophy was that “women and particularly mothers had the capacity to infuse social institutions and political life with superior moral virtue and maternal qualities.”

  No one worked harder to infuse Toronto with superior moral virtue than the LCW’s president, Florence Gooderham Hamilton Huestis, who led today’s delegation to see Mayor Church. Mrs. Huestis had social status. She was married to Archibald Morrison Huestis, a sweet-natured but retiring man from a Nova Scotia United Empire Loyalist family who worked at Toronto’s Methodist Book Room—but Florence’s status didn’t derive from Archie (relatives referred to him as the “Prince Consort,” because he was overshadowed in every way). Florence Huestis cut a swath through Toronto because of her two middle names. Florence’s grandfather was William Hamilton, a wealthy Toronto industrialist whose fortune came from ironworks and toolmaking: his foundry produced the ornate iron fence that encircled Osgoode Hall. She was also part of the Gooderham dynasty, founded by William Gooderham, who with his nephew and partner James Worts had built a massive whisky distillery in the city’s east end that by 1861 was the world’s largest, producing 7,500 gallons of spirits a day. Flush with whisky profits, Gooderham had gone on to amass a fortune from railways, livestock, and banking. Mrs. Huestis had a gold-plated Toronto pedigree and sufficient family wealth that Mayor Church, for one, would be foolish to ignore.

  An attractive, self-assured woman, Huestis was a fearless champion for those less fortunate than herself, and she was widely admired for her efforts. Always elegantly dressed, in the latest long-jacketed suit and brimmed hat, Mrs. Huestis smiled sweetly at male adversaries as she crisply dismissed their arguments. However, there was more to Florence Huestis’s commitment to the underdog than benevolence. Unknown to many of her admirers, Mrs. Huestis had a secret. Her pedigree was not as gilded as it seemed, because her parentage was (and remains) shrouded in mystery. Born in 1873, little Flora Hamilton had been raised first by her grandfather Hamilton, and after his death by William’s daughter Mary and Mary’s husband, Henry Gooderham. Who were Florence’s own parents? Was she the orphaned child of a distant relative? Had one of William Hamilton’s several children given birth to her—presumably an illegitimate birth, since she wasn’t even christened until age seven, when her grandfather died and she was shunted into the Gooderham household? Did a female member of the extensive Gooderham clan get herself into trouble, so that baby Florence mysteriously appeared after her mother had vanished from society for a few months? Or was she the offspring of one of Mary Hamilton Gooderham’s brothers and a family maid?

  Growing up, Florence herself was haunted by the mystery; she never forgot the taunts about her origins that she endured at the hands of toffee-nosed fellow students at Bishop Strachan School, where the daughters of Toronto’s wealthy famil
ies were educated. She had emerged from the humiliation determined that she, and other women, should not be condemned to powerlessness. The stigma of her origins had been channelled into a powerful commitment to social welfare and women in peril.

  By 1915, Mrs. Huestis was the mother of four daughters (whom the Huestises sent to Havergal Hall, Bishop Strachan School’s rival). Firmly entrenched within Toronto’s elite, she was “poised, capable and enthusiastic, a gay hat lending charm to her animated face.” She was personally responsible for establishing the Big Sisters movement in Toronto, and she worked hard to expand the Women’s College Hospital, where she presided over the board of governors. When the Toronto Council of Women held their monthly meetings, she stuck to the issues the members were comfortable championing: the Women’s Court, pensions, playgrounds. But she never hid her personal conviction that women should be reaching for more radical change and demanding the vote. When the British suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst visited Toronto in 1911, Florence Huestis invited her to tea at her mansion at 10 Homewood Place, a block east of Jarvis Street. As the two women sat in the Huestis drawing room, surrounded by Florence’s collection of fine English china, it must have been a stimulating meeting of minds. These two individuals came from completely different backgrounds, but shared a belief that the fastest solution to the world’s problems was for women to win political rights.

  The case of Carrie Davies touched Mrs. Huestis with particular intensity, and she followed the case avidly in the newspapers. But on February 9, while Carrie was being Bertillonaged on the third floor of City Hall, Mrs. Huestis was fighting another battle. The mayor was trying to brush off the LCW delegation with the specious argument that the city could not afford a dedicated court space for women until the war was over. Tely reporter Harry Wodson couldn’t agree more strongly: he had no time for the “petticoated fiends” who “luxuriated in a court of their own” and who were often, in his view, arch hypocrites and menaces to society. But the LCW delegation was determined not to lose the court it had fought so hard for, in which “fallen girls and women” could be helped to see the error of their ways. They were also determined to improve the grim conditions for women at Don Jail, where Carrie was now incarcerated. One of Florence Huestis’s colleagues, a Madame Ratti, spoke about her visits of inspection to the women’s sections of prisons and reformatories throughout Canada. Madame Ratti expressed perfectly the tension that she and some others felt between appropriately “feminine” behaviour and reformer tactics when she explained that prison wardens had been effusively helpful because “I did not use suffragette methods. I am a French woman and I get what I want.”

  However, as a strange scene the same evening revealed, Carrie Davies had not been completely abandoned to the court system. A couple of blocks east of City Hall, on Lombard Street, stood the bleak two-storey city morgue. Bert Massey’s corpse had been bought here from Walmer Road, because the law required a coroner’s inquest in cases of violent death. The inquest was held on the second floor, but the whole building stank with the stomach-wrenching odours of decaying flesh and disinfectant that leaked up from the room downstairs. Bert now lay on a marble mortuary slab alongside unclaimed bodies found in the streets after the previous week’s cold snap.

  In 1915, a coroner’s inquest into the death of a crime victim required a jury of twelve. At 8 p.m., Chief Coroner Arthur Jukes Johnson was eager to start, and he waited impatiently as a coroner’s jury was sworn in. The foreman was a contractor named James Burford, and his eleven fellow jurors were all men; not until the 1950s would women be admitted to jury service in most Canadian jurisdictions. Like Burford, most of the jurors were skilled workers with British names: they included an electrician, a butcher, and four merchants. Only a John McMahon, of Albany Avenue, described himself as a “gentleman.” The point of an inquest, as spelled out in law, was to decide who the deceased was, and how, when, where, and by what means he had died. The jurors would hear witnesses so they could answer these questions, but it wasn’t their job to make any decisions about who was responsible for the death. Their focus was Charles Albert Massey, not the individual who had held the gun. But their verdict would decide Carrie’s journey through the legal system. Since Carrie Davies had already been remanded in custody on a charge of murder, most of those present expected that she would be there to give her side of the story.

  Coroner Arthur Jukes Johnson and his jury soon found themselves stuck in the middle of a legal dogfight. Carrie was not present, but representatives from two different law firms had appeared, each claiming that his firm had been retained to represent her. Neither had actually spoken to Carrie.

  Outside the morgue’s filthy windows, feeble street lamps carved tiny circles in the dark February night. Inside, bright electric lights hung from the ceiling, casting inky shadows on faces and making the coroner’s brows look even more ferocious than usual. Dr. Johnson, the city’s first chief coroner, was not amused. A former surgeon who owed his appointment to a fascination with crimes and poisons, Johnson was in his late sixties and known for being snappy and churlish. He was an expert at his job: he had written a book on a coroner’s duties, and he had written it in excruciating detail. “Before going to an inquest,” he instructed his disciples, “the Coroner should see that he has with him convenient writing materials—a good pen and ink, a box of adhesive seals, some double sheets of foolscap, together with certain forms.” Now Johnson gave a sigh of exasperation as he looked from one lawyer to the other, and then at the jury, which was patiently waiting to hear from witnesses what had happened the previous night. Should he proceed without Carrie, or should he adjourn? He was inclined to adjourn: “Where a person is accused of a serious crime like this, they have the right to give evidence on their own behalf,” he told the jury. “I think it would be better to adjourn until she can be here.”

  At this point, the older and more confident of the two legal representatives spoke up. Mr. Henry Wilberforce Maw, a partner in the law firm Dewart, Maw & Hodgson, insisted he had been officially retained by Ed Fairchild, Carrie’s brother-in-law. The other law firm’s emissary turned out to be a law student sent on spec, looking for business, so he was quickly dismissed. Maw spoke with great authority about his client, although he had been unaware of her existence until Fairchild had managed to secure an interview with him that day. “I don’t wish her to be here tonight,” he announced. “She is very much agitated and upset…. The thing is so sudden that we have not had time to form conclusions as to the best form of procedure to take. Most of her relations and friends are in the Old Country. She is very excited and it would be very unwise to bring her here tonight.”

  Relieved to have an experienced lawyer on the case, Coroner Johnson would have been happy to adjourn for the night until Carrie could be present. But that is not what Henry Maw wanted. He had not yet spoken to his client; he only knew what he had heard from Carrie’s brother-in-law and read in sensationalist newspaper stories. He didn’t know the exact details of Bert Massey’s death, let alone what Carrie had told the police. It was rumoured that the girl was so distressed he ‘d never get a decent account of events from her. He needed to know the official story before he could decide how to proceed. But he was not an experienced courtroom lawyer, so he was on uncertain ground. He was unsure about the need to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty on behalf of his client in the coroner’s court (it was unnecessary), so he prevaricated. Turning to the coroner, he said, “I am prepared to hear what evidence you have here, but I think it most unfair to ask us to decide what our election will be before a tithe of evidence has been given … I have not seen the statement she is alleged to have made to the police. The girl is not in a fit state of mind to talk matters over quietly. I think you should take the evidence so far as you can and then adjourn for a week. Then we will be in a position to decide whether we will bring her here or not.”

  Chief Coroner Johnson was not impressed by Maw’s obfuscation, and blatant play for information before he develope
d a defence strategy. If the coroner wanted Carrie at the inquest, he would order her brought from jail. But Richard Greer, Ontario’s attorney general, was sitting at the back of the room, drawn to observe what was going on in this shocking case. He could see that Maw would need more information if he was going to represent his client adequately. He rose to give his views. “It seems to me a breach of the fundamental ideas of British Fair Play when a girl is not given an opportunity to instruct counsel … The woman is young. She has not many friends in this country. Counsel has not been properly instructed by her.”

  Johnson harrumphed, but conceded that Carrie’s lawyers might at least hear the outline of events from the witnesses present before the inquest adjourned. He raced through the rest of the formalities. Who would identify the deceased? Two well-dressed young men at the back of the room came forward: Mr. Frederick Massey, a distant cousin of the deceased, accompanied by his lawyer. Bert’s brother, Arthur Massey, had not stinted in defence of his family’s interests: he had hired Arthur John Thomson. A Harvard graduate and son of a distinguished lawyer, Thomson had been the Osgoode Hall Law School Gold Medallist in 1900. Thomson stuck close to his client, alert for any procedural errors.

  Fred had already been downstairs to identify the body: he reappeared, white-faced and gagging, and ready to confirm that yes, the dead man was Bert Massey. Next, the coroner and the jury heard evidence from two Walmer Road residents: Dr. John Mitchell, who had watched Bert Massey take his last breath, and Beatrice Dinnis, who had seen the gun flash. Neither witness had any doubt that the Masseys’ maidservant had aimed and fired a gun at her unsuspecting boss. But nothing like this had ever happened on Walmer Road before, and Miss Dinnis had been dizzy with excitement ever since. She had replayed the whole macabre drama several times in her head, and now told the jury that she saw a dark figure come out onto the verandah, adding in a whisper, “but that may have been my imagination.”