Authors: Charlotte Gray
The outcome fit all the demands of melodrama. On December 27, 1899, before twenty-five ticket holders in a small enclosure just outside Brandon courthouse, Hilda was hanged. She put on a brave show, climbing the steps to the noose with “her head erect and her bearing that of a young lady going to an evening party, rather than the gallows,” according to the
Winnipeg Morning Telegram
. The press revelled in the grim drama. “She was ashy pale, but completely composed and plucky to the end,” intoned the
Winnipeg Free Press
. Nevertheless, the paper showed little sympathy for the penniless domestic.
Hilda Blake had refused legal counsel. Carrie Davies had one of the best barristers in Toronto. Could clever Hartley Dewart save her?
One option was for Dewart to offer a plea of not guilty on grounds of insanity—the plea that the Masseys would like to hear, so the story could be buried. The first comprehensive Canadian Criminal Code, passed by Parliament in 1892, made a specific provision for such a plea if the accused was “laboring under natural imbecility or disease of the mind.” But what did this mean? The House of Commons committee that debated the new Criminal Code had spent more time struggling
with a definition of insanity than with any other clause in the lengthy bill, and it remained controversial. Courts were notoriously leery of accepting that an individual was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Besides, the Don Jail’s Dr. Owen Parry had already dismissed the suggestion that Carrie Davies was epileptic or obviously unstable. “I have her in the hospital ward and she is under observation,” he told reporters. He considered her “perfectly rational so far as we can determine … She drinks a quart of milk every day and is in fine condition physically.”
Dewart could suggest to his client that she make a plea to the reduced charge of manslaughter. Such a plea would eliminate even the possibility of the gallows, but if found guilty she likely faced a long stretch in jail. However, a manslaughter plea had none of the brio of Blackie Johnston’s “murder or nothing” appeal to the jury in the Clara Ford case.
It was possible that the jury might come up with a third verdict: that she was not guilty because, in the jurors’ minds, there were compelling extenuating circumstances. For this, Carrie would have to plead not guilty, despite all the evidence that she had deliberately fired the fatal shot. Only a not-guilty plea would generate the excitement that the Clara Ford case had enjoyed. Only a not-guilty plea would respond to all the different demands on this case—including the ambition of Hartley Dewart, the public sympathy for Carrie, and the crusading zeal of John Ross Robertson’s
Evening Telegram
. Only a heroic defence would ramp up contributions to the Carrie Davies Defence Fund, increase the
Tely
’s circulation, and pay Dewart’s fee.
The
Tely
continued to track donations to the fund, but William Goldsmith, secretary of the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association, acknowledged that the flow was sluggish. Most of the donations were tiny, and by Wednesday, February 24, only $249.05 had been collected. Contributors included “A Working Woman, $2; ‘Justice’ $2;
‘Bedfordshire to Aid’ 25 cents; ‘Two Business Girls,’ 50 cents; Mr. and Mrs. Hall, $2; two Englishmen, $2.” A list of those who had contributed one dollar included “Another Funny-looking English Girl,” “One of those Funny-looking English Girls,” “An English Girl,” “Every Little Helps,” “Well-Wisher,” “Canadian Girl,” and “A Few Lovers of British Fair Play and Justice.” Mr. Goldsmith fretted: “May we ask for a more generous and urgent response for this worthy case?” The amount raised was paltry compared to the $22,912 the Ontario branch of Grand Trunk Railway employees announced, on the same day, it had raised for Sir William Mulock’s Patriotic Fund.
But on what grounds could Hartley Dewart make a not-guilty plea on Carrie’s behalf? A recent Ontario case suggested that self-defence because of a fear of
future
violence was a shaky line of argument. In 1911 in Sault Ste. Marie, a pregnant Italian mother of four children had taken an axe to her sleeping husband. Twenty-eight-year-old Angelina Napolitano had been abused for years: six months earlier, her husband, Pietro, had stabbed her nine times, scarring her face, shoulder, and neck. Pietro had now demanded that she earn some money by selling her body so he could build a house. Angelina had apparently snapped. But when her case went to court, despite her scars and her trauma, she was found guilty because the judge ruled that “if anybody injured six months ago could give that as justification or excuse for slaying a person, it would be anarchy complete.” She was sentenced to hang three months later—to allow her time to give birth. Only an international outcry persuaded the minister of justice in Ottawa to commute her sentence to life imprisonment.
Hartley Dewart carefully scrutinized the notes that Henry Maw had made of his conversations with Carrie Davies when he visited her in Don Jail. Undeterred by the Napolitano verdict, he and Maw began to sketch the outlines of a plea on the grounds of “self-defence,” the words that Carrie had uttered when the police first arrested her immediately
after the shooting. The arguments against the plea were strong. Carrie was not under attack when she shot Bert Massey; it had been close to thirty-six hours since her employer had pawed at her. Moreover, Bert had been unarmed, several feet away from her, and completely unaware of the danger when she fired. But Carrie was a timid British immigrant rather than an inarticulate Italian—a “hot-blooded foreigner,” as the
Sault Star
had described Angelina Napolitano. Dewart had a plan.
At Don Jail, Carrie remained in the prison hospital, better fed and rested than she had been for most of her life. To Dr. Parry, she seemed curiously indifferent to her predicament. He told the reporters who clustered day and night around the Don’s wooden gates, “She is in good spirits and chats with the nurses in the ward.” She would have heard the whispered gossip among staff and fellow inmates about her case, although newspapers were not allowed in the jail. Her sister or brother-in-law visited her when they could, and perhaps their accounts of public donations to the Carrie Davies Defence Fund allowed her to believe that she would not be convicted.
But sixteen days after she was arrested, she had a jolting reminder of what lay ahead. On Wednesday, February 24, she and Miss Carmichael were bundled into a police wagon and she returned for the third time to City Hall. But this time, instead of facing Colonel Denison, whippet-thin in a dark business suit, she found herself in the larger presence of the chief justice, in crow-black robes, with a thick, trimmed beard almost as white as his starched cravat. Carrie’s appearance today was a formality: it was her arraignment, in which Hartley Dewart entered a plea of not guilty on her behalf and declared that he needed a few days before the case was heard because he had made arrangements with “several medical men to examine his client.” Chief Justice William Mulock
watched over the top of his wire-framed glasses as Dewart negotiated a timetable with Crown prosecutor Edward Du Vernet, the lawyer who would make the case against Carrie. No one paid any attention to the accused herself, as she sat silently, watching three men debate her fate.
Dewart asked for the case to start the following Monday at the earliest, and assured the court that the case would be closed in two days. Dewart, Du Vernet, and Chief Justice Mulock were all eager to deal with Carrie as quickly as possible. Finally, in a deep, loud voice, the chief justice announced he would hear the case on Friday.
Dewart’s talk of “medical men” suggested to observers that, once again, Carrie’s sanity was going to be tested by “alienists,” like Dr. Beemer from Mimico’s Hospital for the Insane. The
Toronto Daily News
announced in a front-page headline, “Doctors to See Carrie Davies … Indications are That the Defence Offered Will be Insanity.”
The
Daily News
was wrong. The two physicians who arrived at the Don Jail the following day to examine the eighteen-year-old were not looking for evidence of insanity. For Carrie Davies, the arrival of Dr. Andrew Harrington and Dr. Duncan Anderson was simply one more episode in her alarming experience with medical professionals. After being manhandled on Toronto Island the previous summer by the Masseys’ doctor, then facing the Bertillon calipers after her first court appearance on February 8, she now underwent yet another intrusive examination. The two physicians, both well-established family doctors in Toronto, were met at the door of the jail by Dr. Parry and escorted through the jail’s dank corridors up to the hospital wing, where Carrie was waiting in a windowless examination room.
Dr. Harrington asked Miss Carmichael and Dr. Parry to wait outside. Shutting the door behind him, the doctor told the eighteen-year-old to remove her underwear and lie on the iron cot with her legs apart. Then he took from his black bag an instrument that looked like a pair of blunt scissors with bent ends. He inserted this vaginal dilator into
Carrie’s vagina and peered inside. He may also have examined her manually. Next, his colleague did exactly the same. Then they stood back, told her to get dressed, and left the room. Did they guard against contamination when they performed this unexpected procedure in the jail’s filthy surrounds? Perhaps. Although rubber surgical gloves had been in widespread use for about twenty years, there was still resistance to them. Did they tell Carrie what they were checking for? Probably not. They did not tell the jail personnel, either. Instead, Dr. Harrington wrote a quick note to Hartley Dewart.
Dewart must have been elated when he opened the note and read the brief message inside. The doctors confirmed that Carrie Davies was a virgin.
Virginity defined a woman in Carrie’s era. It was fetishized in a way that is hard to believe today—unless we look at some of the fundamentalist sects of Christianity or Islam. Virginity and purity were synonymous, and Toronto in 1915 was a society in which seams of hypocrisy and prudery ran deep. Only a few days earlier, the manager of the Toronto exhibition grounds had triggered outrage when he authorized a poster that featured the figure of a female angel taken from a painting by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel. The city’s Moral Reform Association complained to Colonel Denison, the police magistrate, that the image was obscene since Raphael had given the angel only a pair of wings and a wreath of roses to hide her nakedness. Angels, in Carrie’s day, had to be fully clad and unflinchingly demure—and the same was expected of decent women.
If a woman lost her virginity before marriage, she had forfeited the right to be considered “pure”; in fact, she had become a pariah or, in the euphemisms of the period, a “fallen angel” or a “soiled dove.” Men could not be expected to control their natural impulses if a woman had lost her virtue, so a “fallen angel” was fair game for male seducers because she was already corrupted. This was true for unmarried women at all levels
of society—for the daughters of Toronto’s Fine Old Ontario Families as much as for servants like Carrie. It was the standard to which Carrie herself clung when she feared that an assault by her employer would lead to her “ruin” because she would be instantly transformed into little more than a prostitute.
Hartley Dewart knew exactly how to use this medical evidence. He would weave a story in which his client’s purity made Bert Massey the pariah in this case.
Almost certainly, Dewart shared the contents of Dr. Harrington’s note with young Arthur Roebuck in his office at the Home Life Building, knowing the news would be transmitted to John Ross Robertson at the
Evening Telegram
. The trial of Carrie Davies on a charge of murder would start within twenty-four hours, on Friday, February 26. Her counsel was ready.
9,000 C
ANADIANS
I
NCLUDING
A
LL
T
HE
T
ORONTO
R
EGIMENTS
IN
A
CTION
S
UNDAY
F
IRST AND
T
HIRD
B
RIGADES
W
ERE IN
T
RENCHES
A
LL
S
UNDAY
, A
ND
W
ERE
E
NGAGED
P
RACTICALLY
A
LL THE
T
IME
T
HEY
W
ERE
T
HERE
P
RINCESS
P
ATS
G
RADUALLY
D
RIVING THE
G
ERMANS
B
ACK.
—Toronto Daily Star
, Wednesday, February 24, 1915
W
OMAN
W
EAK AND
N
ERVOUS
. F
INDS HEALTH
I
N
L
YDIA
E. P
INKHAM’S
V
EGETABLE COMPOUND …
For forty years this famous root and herb medicine has been pre-eminently successful in controlling the diseases of women. If you have the slightest doubt that Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound will help you, write for advice. Your letter will be opened, read and answered by a woman, and held in strict confidence
.
—Evening Telegram
, Friday, February 26, 1915
P
olice officers, lawyers, court officials, and clerks were braced for the crowd that converged on City Hall on the final Friday of February 1915. Nevertheless, there was an unholy hubbub outside the building for Act III of the Carrie Davies drama, in which her fate would be decided. No case in living memory had captured the public imagination and stirred up the city like the one due to be heard that day. Reporters from all six Toronto newspapers, representatives of various women’s organizations, concerned citizens, and idle gawkers all crowded around the narrow wooden doorway into the courtroom where Chief Justice Mulock would hear the case. The sounds of various regional British accents and the smells of damp woollen coats and nervous sweat were suffocating.