The Massey Murder Page 8

  Nevertheless, disaster had been narrowly averted. The French had halted the German advance towards Paris at the First Battle of the Marne in September, and the following month the British had crushed a clumsy German attack in the First Battle of Ypres. Canadians had been shocked by the horrendous casualties during these first three months of the war—the French lost 800,000 men (300,000 dead and the rest wounded or taken prisoner) and the British suffered a total loss of 95,000. Canadian newspapers described in blood-curdling detail how corpses littered the ground where Allied troops spent November and December extending the network of trenches—and getting their first taste of the months of misery ahead. Winter weather meant that the trenches were soon flooded and foul, and guns clogged with mud. Since Christmas, the western front had been relatively quiet.

  Yet during this first year of fighting, an air of unreality lingered. Saturday Night had published a letter from an English officer in the North Staffordshire Regiment about the events on Christmas Day 1914, when German and British troops mingled freely in no man’s land, between the trenches. “This morning, after reveille, the Germans sent out parties to bury their dead. Our men went out to help, and then we all, both sides, met in the middle and in groups began to talk and exchange gifts of tobacco, food, etc. All the morning we have been fraternizing, singing songs. I have been within a yard, in fact onto their trenches, and have spoken to and exchanged greetings with a colonel, staff officers, and various company officers. All were very nice … The Germans are Saxons, and a good-looking lot, only wishing for peace, in a manly way, and they seem in no way at their last gasp … The whole thing is extraordinary … It is weird to think that tomorrow night we shall be at it again hard.” A German juggler who had been onstage in London gave an impromptu performance to both sides in no man’s land. British soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment barbecued a pig and shared it with their enemies, and Saxon troops rolled a barrel of beer over their parapet and into British trenches.

  The Christmas truce seemed to suggest that perhaps there was something noble about these warriors—that hostilities were a test of manhood rather than a brutal bloodbath. Such magical thinking didn’t last long. On December 26, snipers on both sides resumed their job of picking off easy targets. Screams, groans, and whimpers of pain replaced the sound of carols.

  Immediately after Christmas, most of the fighting had been on Germany’s far distant eastern borders. In the lakes and forests of northeastern Poland, Russians and Germans had pounded each other with deadly machine gunfire, rifle shots, shell splinters, and whirling shrapnel. Phrases like “terrific slaughter” and “inferno of shells” were scattered through printed reports of the bloody Battle of the Masurian Lakes, which began in early February in a blizzard. Once again, the carnage was shocking: the Germans killed 56,000 Russians and captured 100,000 more. According to War Office spokesmen, the Masurian Lakes battle was a victory for the Russians, who had checked a German offensive.

  Meanwhile, on the western front, the Allies’ artillery had captured two little towns on France’s border with Flanders, towns with names no one back in Canada could spell—Passchendaele and Langemarck. But these lofty pronouncements could not blot out the tales of bloody mayhem on both fronts that were seeping across the Atlantic. Some of those stories were propaganda, deliberately spread by government warmongers in London and Paris to encourage enlistment. Others were straightforward reporting from the battlefield. Canadians bombarded with such reports had no way of knowing the difference.

  “French Government Tells of the Fiendish Atrocities Perpetrated by the Kaiser’s Men” read one headline, over a story alleging that German soldiers had used scissors to gouge out the eyes of French soldiers. Army doctors reported that German shells were packed with phosphorus, which poisoned wounds and led to men dying of necrosis. At a medical triage station, a correspondent for the Toronto Daily News met men who were “tired, tired, tired … their eyes are heavy with gazing over-long in Death’s face” as they sat on trolleys and held up their “frost-bitten, bandaged feet.” The German navy had been given instructions, according to a Canadian Press dispatch, to drown any innocent women and children travelling on captured vessels. “Fiendish Determination of Germans Marks the Latest Development of Prussian Kultur.” A report from Poland asserted that the Germans were using “a new explosive, the fumes of which temporarily blind combatants.” The reporter described how the fighting was so intense that “it is no longer possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the rattle of infantry. All are mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night as if in a thunderstorm the darkness is pierced by intermittent flashes of fire while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the lines.”

  Gruesome reports like these circulated through Canada endlessly by word of mouth. The war news was increasingly unsettling: German tactics were not just belligerent, they were immoral. What kind of men assaulted women or deliberately blinded their enemies? In the little town of Leaskdale, eighty kilometres north of Toronto, the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery (who had a two-year-old son) confided to her journal, “There have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of [Germans] cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that is surely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul … I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it.”

  What was happening to the brave lads who had left farms, factories, and families to defend the Empire? Families with menfolk at the front silently whispered prayers. Few people yet questioned the righteousness of the cause, or suggested that their boys’ bravery was anything less than heroic. “‘Tommy’ is majestic in his suffering,” the Toronto Daily News proclaimed on its front page. The fortitude of the rank and file despite appalling conditions and losses awed reporters. “These, mark you, are earth’s common men, the unnoticed men in the street,” wrote the Daily News correspondent. “Where do they learn it?”

  A wave of sympathy for Canadians who found themselves helpless cannon fodder began to build. Somehow, the untoward death of a thirty-four-year-old man on the streets of Toronto didn’t seem quite so outrageous …

  Nevertheless, for the Masseys, Bert’s untimely death was a dreadful blot on the family name. Even if Bert Massey did not live on Jarvis Street like his cousin Vincent, or enjoy the perks of wealth, his close relatives were determined to protect his name and reputation.

  Two papers had already quoted Carrie Davies’s assertion that her employer had “tried to ruin me.” Had Bert Massey assaulted the girl while his wife was away? In theory, this was a shocking suggestion; in practice, within Bert’s circle for as long as anyone could remember, girls at the bottom of the social ladder had often been regarded as “easy prey” by male employers. Bert wouldn’t have been the first man in Toronto to embark on such a dalliance, which might be justified either by blaming the servant for the seduction, or by dismissing it as a “harmless flirtation.” His friends probably spent more time discussing Bert’s foolishness in getting caught or his bad luck in hiring the wrong maid. If they spent any time on Carrie’s role, it would have been to speculate on how an eighteen-year-old girl had got her hands on Bert’s pistol and knew how to fire it. What really alarmed them was the idea that a “harmless” backstairs seduction led to Bert’s death. Moreover, it looked as though the girl had planned the death: this wasn’t a crime committed in the heat of a struggle. But Bert’s relatives didn’t appreciate the salacious gossip that was starting to spread. The first step towards suppressing the story was burying the corpse. Step two was promoting the Massey version of the facts.

  Rhoda Massey, newly widowed and facing an uncertain future, remained out of sight. She did not appear at any of the court hearings in the days to come, and she made no public statements. Most likely, she and her son remained in the guest room at 165 Admiral Road, rather than return to unhappy mem
ories and the lack of domestic help at Walmer Road. Arthur Massey’s two children, eighteen-year-old Arnold and eleven-year-old Dorothy, could keep their fourteen-year-old cousin company. Meanwhile, Arthur and his wife, Mary Ethel, were more than up to the task of promoting the Massey side of the story.

  Arthur Massey was a more successful professional than his brother. Trained as a bookkeeper, with his friend Walter Chandler he had set up a hospital and physician supplies business called Chandler and Massey. It was a family affair: his sister Jennie was married to Walter Chandler’s brother, and the two men had persuaded John Haydn Horsey—Arthur’s stepfather, who now managed a Dominion Bank branch office—to be vice-president. Now forty, Bert’s brother was the picture of bourgeois respectability (although he maintained his youthful taste for rather flashy bow ties.) When a reporter from the Toronto Daily Star appeared at his Admiral Road door before the funeral, Arthur spent several minutes with him on the doorstep.

  Sporting a black armband, and speaking in a pained but stoic tone, Arthur explained, “We have only a feeling of sympathy for the unfortunate girl. We feel sure that the crime was committed in a fit of temporary insanity.” He mentioned that there had been an episode the previous summer when Carrie had behaved strangely—”she was probably deranged.” Perhaps, he suggested, she had worked herself into a frenzy because she had not heard from her young man in France. “There can certainly be no suspicions against Mr. Massey, and there is absolutely no truth in any report that credits him with any indiscretions.”

  A reporter from the Toronto Daily News was given the same spin. The paper featured it on its front page: “‘Our family bears absolutely no resentment towards the girl, because we do not believe that she knew what she was doing,’ said Mr. A.L. Massey today. ‘It was very unfortunate for us that my brother should have been the victim. She might have shot anybody who happened to come along.’” The Daily News reported as fact that the doctors who had treated her the previous summer “will testify at the trial as to her mental state,” adding, “The relatives express extreme indignation that any suggestion of indiscretion should be made against the murdered man.”

  In 1915, newspaper reporters automatically treated a man of Arthur’s position with deference. With his firm Massey chin and air of authority, his “more in sorrow than in anger” tone struck the right note of patrician forbearance as he gently sketched a compelling picture of an unhappy, unstable, and not very bright girl. He made it clear that the Masseys were not looking for revenge. Protecting the family name took priority over punishing a simpleton.

  However, Mary Ethel Massey did not share her husband’s subtlety. After the family’s return from Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Rhoda Massey had gone upstairs to rest when a reporter from the Evening Telegram rang the doorbell and asked to speak to the grieving widow. The reporter was an unprepossessing-looking character in a long black coat and with a battered bowler hat perched on the back of his head. Mary Ethel Massey, an impatient woman used to getting her way, knew that Rhoda would never speak to the press, so she led him into a room where they would be undisturbed. Undaunted by the reporter’s scruffy appearance, or the pencil hovering over his notebook, she let rip.

  “Motive? Why, there wasn’t any motive. We are all perfectly satisfied that the girl was not mentally responsible when she shot Bert. I know that it has been hinted that Mr. Massey may have been indiscreet and acted improperly towards the girl, but the whole story is ridiculous. No person who knew Bert will believe that for a minute. He was not the kind of man to act that way.”

  The reporter must have realized that a snobbish grande dame in full flow would give him a great article—one that would grip and shock his paper’s working-class readers, and that might play into the resentment of wealthy shirkers that was starting to bubble through Toronto. All he had to do was ensure that his shorthand was accurate and fast enough to stay abreast of Mrs. Massey’s tirade, and then he could slot the interview almost verbatim into the Telegram’s columns. He carefully noted how Mrs. Massey always referred to the unfortunate Carrie as “the girl” and never by name, and kept returning to the rumours of an attempted seduction.

  “We are satisfied, we are sure,” continued Mary Ethel, “that Mr. Massey was innocent of wrongdoing, and that the girl had no cause to kill him. There was no motive, except that the girl was out of her head. Of that I am quite satisfied.”

  The reporter lifted his head from his pad to ask, “What leads you to believe that there was something wrong with her mentally?”

  Mary Ethel settled back to give a long account of the incident from the previous summer to which her husband had referred. “Last summer Mr. and Mrs. C.A. Massey visited us at our summer home on the island. One night while we were over at the National Yacht Club this girl went out in the park with our maid. She suddenly became ill. She was carried from the park to our house, and when we returned from the club she was attempting to tear her hair and bite her fingers. It took six people to hold her.” The notion that it took six people to hold a girl who could not have weighed more than fifty kilograms must have seemed a stretch to the reporter, but he didn’t challenge Mrs. Massey. She continued her story, describing how the Masseys had summoned two doctors and a nurse, who suggested that Carrie had “suffered a spell.”

  After Monday night’s shooting, Mary Ethel Massey explained, she and her husband had spoken to one of the doctors. “Since talking it over, we are convinced that another spell came on … The fact that she shot Mr. Massey on the steps seems to me to prove that she was not mentally responsible. If she had shot him in the house then her story might be substantiated … Mr. Massey was not a man who would bother about servant girls or attempt to act indiscreetly.”

  The reporter then revealed that he had already talked to someone else about the case—that he had, in fact, found out a lot more about Carrie Davies than any member of the Massey family had bothered to learn. Watching his interviewee carefully, he mentioned, “The girl told her sister that Mr. Massey once came into her room in quest of a buttonhook.” (In the days before zip fasteners and Velcro, buttonhooks were used to fasten the rows of tiny buttons on women’s boots.) Unblinking, Mary Ethel brushed aside the suggested impropriety. “Well, I was just going to explain that. Mrs. Massey was going away one time and she told Bert that she was taking her buttonhook…. While Mrs. Massey was away, Bert invited a number of married couples to the house for a party. We were invited but Mr. Massey had the grippe and we could not go. When the guests were ready to go one young woman had to put on her overshoes. Bert was asked for a buttonhook and he ran up into the maid’s room and got the one she had. That is all there is to that story.”

  Had Mrs. Massey ever noticed anything wrong with the Davies girl?

  “Well, to my knowledge her character was perfectly good. She was a straight little girl as far as I know. Once or twice I was struck by a peculiar look which she seemed to have but I put it down to her English ways and the fact that she had only been in the country two years. A seamstress who calls at my house to do work told my maid that she shouldn’t go out with the girl as there seemed to be something wrong with her mentally.”

  The reporter noted down Mrs. Massey’s dismissive comments. Mary Ethel Massey rose to signal that the interview was over. With the blind self-assurance of a woman who had never had anything to do with the press, she assumed that her story would have more credibility than anything a half-educated child said. She was confident that she had convinced this obsequious newspaperman that Bert Massey, and the Massey family, were blameless.

  Mary Ethel could not have made a worse choice of reporter to whom to unburden herself. The newspaperman, whose name was Archie Fisher, was equally satisfied with the interview for very different reasons. His story about Mrs. Arthur Lyman Massey would appear in the Evening Telegram under the headline “Family of Dead Man Explain the Tragedy,” alongside an article that gave a very different picture of a young Englishwoman with “a peculiar look.”

  { CHAPTE
R 6 }

  The White-Slave Trade

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 TO SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14

  NEW WAR TAXES ALL CLASSES HELP TO CARRY THE BURDEN

  Hon. W.T. White, Finance Minister, is being congratulated on all sides today for his able budget speech … He needed money to carry on our share of the Empire’s struggle. He placed his taxes where wealth is accumulated, and as far as possible placed the burden on the rich rather than the poor.

  —Toronto Daily News, Friday, February 12, 1915

  GIRL HAD PERIODIC FITS OF DEPRESSION CARRIE DAVIES IS STILL IN JAIL BUT IS FEELING BETTER

  … The rumors of indiscretions on the part of the murdered man prior to the shooting are not credited by the majority of the police officials.

  —Toronto Daily News, Friday, February 12, 1915

  In the Don Jail, Carrie Davies heard little about the war or anything else going on outside the prison’s high walls. She remained confined to the hospital ward, under the medical supervision of jail physician T. Owen Parry. Dr. Parry was a no-nonsense, unsmiling man who rarely showed sympathy for his patients: one of his duties was to attend executions so he could sign the death certificate after the hangman had done his job. But he felt sorry for Carrie and allowed her to remain in the hospital ward, where better food was served. After a good night’s sleep, on her third morning in jail she tucked into porridge, syrup, coffee, bread, and milk. For her first two days in prison she had sobbed uncontrollably and refused to be comforted, but now she was reported to be “more cheerful” and mingling with fellow prisoners. However, on Friday morning she fainted, and Dr. Parry was quickly summoned. Was this the mental instability that the Masseys had spoken of? A diagnosis of “epilepsy” had been bandied about—devastating if true, in an age when there was no treatment and the condition was often seen as a form of demonic possession. Dr. Parry batted off the suggestion. “She has shown no signs of epilepsy. We have been watching her very closely for this since she came to the jail … She has not had any fits, but has been weak and hysterical. There was a marked improvement in her condition today.”