The Massey Murder (25 page)

Dewart piled on more evidence of Carrie’s virtue. His next witness was Carrie’s brother-in-law Ed Fairchild, who talked about Carrie’s family.

“Did you know your wife and the little girl in the dock in their home in England?” Dewart asked Fairchild. When the latter said he did, Dewart asked a series of questions about Carrie’s father, the army pensioner, and the discipline in the Davies home. Ed described how strictly the girls were supervised: they were not allowed to speak unless spoken to, they were allowed out only two nights a week, and they had to be home by nine o’clock.

Next, Dewart asked, “Did you know the little girl’s mother?”

At this point, Justice Mulock himself spoke up. “Do you mean the prisoner?” he rebuked Dewart. Dewart agreed that the “little girl” was the woman accused of murder, then continued with his examination of Fairchild. Ed explained how Carrie had appeared on the Sunday night before the shooting when the Fairchilds had visitors. She had told Ed that her employer had given her a ring, and kissed her twice, but her sister had indicated she should not talk about this anymore in front of the visitors. “She only told me that Mr. Massey tried to kiss her, nothing else.”

“It didn’t occur to you not to let her go back?” Dewart pressed Carrie’s brother-in-law.

“No,” replied Ed Fairchild, shuffling uneasily in the witness box. He described how, the previous summer, he had gone to Toronto Island when Carrie was taken ill, and offered to take her away. Mr. Massey had told him it wasn’t necessary as the Massey family doctor was looking after her and she was getting the best attention. Carrie had not asked to be taken away. The Fairchilds were predisposed to trust members of
the distinguished Massey family; besides, their own house was already overcrowded. Now, in this latest crisis, Ed still couldn’t believe that Bert Massey was a serious threat. “When she was sick at the island … Mr. Massey told me then that he was interested in that girl. He said he would look after her and that his wife would look after her, that she would see that Carrie did not keep bad company. That alone threw me off.” He didn’t think there was any danger if Carrie returned to Walmer Road. Carrie herself had suggested that Massey must have been drunk, and would regret his behaviour the following day. “She did not mention anything about upstairs in the bedroom.”

Finally, the moment that the crowd had been waiting for arrived. Hartley Dewart called his client to the witness stand. This was the first time that reporters and public would hear the young woman’s account in her own voice and could judge for themselves the accused murderer’s credibility. Justice Mulock agreed that she could sit as she gave her evidence. She spoke, commented the
Globe
, “coherently, distinctly and without faltering.”

Dewart began with a line of questioning that reinforced the picture of Carrie as a dutiful daughter. Carrie’s eyes rarely strayed from her lawyer’s face as she gave brief, informative answers to his questions. He nodded approvingly after each response. She had come to Canada in order to earn money to send back to her mother in England, she explained, because her father was dying and her mother was losing her sight. She had always sent money home, and since her father’s death the previous summer, she had been sending five or ten dollars a month.

Next, Dewart asked Carrie about her illness the previous summer at Toronto Island. Carrie gave an answer that surprised those who had heard Mary Ethel Massey’s dramatic account at the coroner’s inquest of Carrie’s hysteria. According to Carrie, her discomfort was nothing more than mild gastroenteritis: the doctor had told her that her “trouble was caused through not digesting her food properly.”

Then Dewart embarked on the subject that the spectators were eager to hear about, and the
Evening Tely
reporter had been primed to listen for: the events of the weekend when Rhoda Massey was away, which had prompted Carrie to grab a gun and shoot her employer.

“Was there any special work you did at the house during the week [Mrs. Massey] was away?” Dewart asked.

“There was a dinner party,” replied Carrie.

“When?”

“On the Friday night.”

“Were there many there?”

“There were twelve.”

“How did you know what to get for dinner?”

“Mr. Massey gave me a slip of paper with some things on. He told me he would leave the rest to me. He brought home several things.”

Prompted by Dewart, Carrie described how she had cooked and served the dinner, but she did not have anything to do with the drinks. Then her lawyer asked, “Did anything strange happen at that dinner?”

“Ladies and gentlemen were drinking rather heavily,” Carrie replied in a clear voice.

“Did it have any effect upon any of them?”

“Yes, sir, except Mr. Massey. I didn’t notice that it affected him.”

“How do you know liquors were served?’

“I knew there was liquor in the glasses and by the bottles that were sent out afterwards to be put down the cellar.”

“Were there many courses of liquor?”

“Several.”

“What time did the party break up?”

“I think it was after midnight. They gave Mr. Massey three cheers as they left the door. Mr. Massey came and thanked me for what I had done.”

“Anything unusual on Saturday?”

“No.”

“On Sunday what took place?” Dewart went on.

Carrie described how Bert Massey had spent much of the day wandering around the house in his bathrobe. His son had gone out, and Bert had found Carrie cleaning up the dining room. He had given her a ring to thank her for all her efforts on Friday night; when he tried to put it on her finger, it proved to be too small. He told her to take it to Eaton’s (where he had likely purchased it) and get it enlarged.

The ring, a small gold circle with a shamrock picked out in pearls, was produced, and the jurors passed it from one large, callused hand to the next. Reporters craned forward for a glimpse. Despite the press of people, the courtroom was utterly silent as Dewart continued to lead Carrie through the next stage of her story. He asked Carrie what her employer had said next.

Carrie continued her story without hesitation: “He asked me if I noticed anything Friday night. Did I see a lady drop her table napkin so many times, and did I see him run his hand up and down the lady’s stocking. I didn’t answer him, but just looked hard at him.”

“What else did he say?” continued the lawyer.

“He said that he had a lady friend of his own.”

“Did he do or say anything further?”

Carrie hesitated, then said, “He asked me if I heard any kissing going on Friday, and if I did, not to say anything to [my friend] Mary Rooney or my sister.”

“What did he do then?”

“He caught me by both hands around the waist and said he liked little girls. Then he kissed me and I struggled, but he kissed me again.”

Behind the bar of the court, there was scarcely a movement amongst the spectators. In the jury box, the jurors turned their heads first to the tall figure of the defence lawyer as he prompted his client, then to the tense figure standing in the witness box, next to the judge.

“Did he do anything else?”

“No, he only kissed me.”

“What was his physical condition?”

“He was trembling and very much excited.”

“What happened when you got away?”

“I went into the kitchen and he went upstairs to his room. I heard him turn the water on in the bathroom and then he called me to go and make his bed. When I went up he was in his bedroom, but I had thought he was in the bathroom.”

Dewart smiled encouragingly at Carrie as he led her gently through the story, and she, with her eyes focused only on his face, appeared oblivious to the breathless tension in the courtroom.

“What was he doing?” Dewart asked.

“He was looking through Mrs. Massey’s bureau drawers … He caught me again and started talking. He brought out Mrs. Massey’s underwear.”

“What did he say?”

“He wanted me to put them on for him and then he came towards me and tried to throw me on the bed. I struggled and ran away from him. I got out of the room and went to my own room and locked the door, because I was frightened of him.”

“How close was he when you got into the bedroom?”

“I was over near the bed and nearly had it made when he spoke to me. There was only a small passageway between me and the bed.”

“What did you do when you got to your room?”

“I got dressed, and though it was not my afternoon out, I left the house. I crept downstairs quietly and went to my sister’s … I started to tell my sister what happened, but there was a little boy there and she looked at me as much as to tell me to say nothing.”

Carrie explained that she started playing with her sister’s children and forgot to tell Maud the rest of the story about her employer’s
behaviour. And she hadn’t wanted to give her brother-in-law the details—details that enthralled the crowd in the Ontario Supreme Court. She had returned to Walmer Road and slipped upstairs without seeing anybody. She thought Mr. Massey was out.

“Tell me about Monday,” Dewart asked his witness. Carrie kept her eyes locked on his and spoke in a steady voice.

“I called Mr. Massey about 8:15 in the morning. Then I got his breakfast ready and put it on the table. Then I went down into the cellar.”

“Why did you go there?”

“Because I was frightened of him.”

Carrie described how she had stayed in the cellar until she heard the front door slam and, through a window, watched her employer walk down the front path. She was unable to do her work most of the day because “I was worried over what had happened on Sunday … He was my master and he kissed me and that worried me … I knew he was a man who meant to do it from what he said.”

When the paper boy rang the doorbell at six o’clock that evening, she saw her employer sauntering down Walmer Road. “I guess it was then I lost control of myself, and I thought of what he was going to do, and it frightened me. Everything was misty before me.”

“What were the thoughts in your mind?” Dewart asked.

“I could only think of him doing me harm, sir, and I knew that I would have to defend myself some way or other … I went for the revolver that was hanging in the little boy’s room.”

“Had you ever used it before?”

“Never before.”

“Had you ever been shown anything in reference to it?”

“The boy had showed me how to use it and how to load it. He had fired it before and I had watched him fire it.”

From the hush that fell over the court and the expressions on the jurors’ faces, Hartley Dewart knew his client’s story was having just
the impact he hoped. Carrie was emerging as a dutiful young domestic servant with a dissolute employer. The graphic new details—about Bert Massey stroking a woman’s leg and having a special “lady friend”—had provoked short, shocked murmurs. The story of Bert Massey asking Carrie to don his wife’s underwear was as vivid as anything that appeared in silent films. The holes in Carrie’s sad tale (Why had she not told her sister about these traumatic events? Why had she given her brother-in-law the impression that she found Massey’s behaviour pathetic rather than menacing? Why had she returned to Walmer Road?) had been smoothed over. But Dewart still had to stamp out any suspicion that Carrie’s actions had been premeditated.

“Was it after you had seen Mr. Massey outside that you only thought of going to get the revolver?” he pressed Carrie.

“Yes.”

“Had you thought of getting it before that?”

“No.”

“How do you account for it at all?”

“I could not tell you,” replied Carrie, wide-eyed and clear-voiced, speaking directly to her lawyer as he smiled at her.

Prompted by Dewart, Carrie described how she took the revolver and six cartridges from Charles Junior’s bedroom and loaded five of the cartridges into the gun as she returned downstairs, “thinking all the time how he would do me harm.” She was almost at the front door when it opened, so she immediately fired. “Then I turned and ran. I was pulling the trigger all the time, but the revolver did not seem to work … I thought of him doing me harm, that was the only thought I had in my head.” She saw her employer walk back down the outside steps, then fall on the sidewalk. “I thought he was just lying there to escape the bullets. I only saw his head; the other part of his body was behind some snow.”

Dewart took her quickly through the rest of the story—how she had run up to her room, written letters to her sister and Mary Rooney,
and then heard the police arrive. “I did not know what I had done until I got to the police station and until I heard some man say on the phone, ‘The man is dead, all right.’ That is the first time I knew what I had done.”

Hartley Dewart concluded his questions by asking Carrie once again what she was thinking.

“That he was going to do me harm. That was my only thought.”

“What kind of harm?”

“That he was going to disgrace me.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dewart asked. Raising his voice and speaking quickly before the Crown prosecutor could object to leading questions and melodramatic language more appropriate for a penny thriller than a courtroom, he forged ahead: “ … That he would forcibly have connection with you, that he would ravish you, and accomplish his purpose?”

“Yes,” Carrie replied demurely.

Crown Counsel Du Vernet rose to cross-examine the accused, but he knew that the spectators’ sympathy was all on Carrie’s side. He felt blindsided: both the evidence of Carrie’s virginity and the titillating details about Massey’s behaviour at and after the dinner party had come as a complete surprise. Du Vernet pulled out some points from Carrie’s evidence that put the Masseys in a better light—that they had always treated her kindly, and that they had regularly increased her wages. He asked Carrie why she had returned to Walmer Road that Sunday night if she was so scared of her employer. Carrie replied the idea “simply didn’t seem to go to my head.” Then Du Vernet asked her why she didn’t return to her sister’s the following day, after she had hidden in the cellar until her employer had gone to work. Carrie
answered, “It was my duty to stay in the house. I was expecting Mrs. Massey home.”