Authors: Charlotte Gray
“It was a contest, then, between fear and duty?’
“Yes.”
“But Mrs. Massey told you that you could go?”
“Yes, but I had told her that I wouldn’t go out unless Mr. Massey was home.”
“Had you made up your mind to go out that night?”
“If Mr. Massey was in, yes. If not, I wouldn’t.”
Carrie’s clear answers and composure belied her claims to vulnerability. Du Vernet wanted to raise doubts about Carrie’s state of mind. Was she really as panic-stricken as she said? He pressed her: “You want the jury to understand that from what took place on Sunday you were frightened till you shot him?”
“Yes.”
“That was at 2:30 p.m.?”
“Yes.”
“And you shot him at 6:20 p.m. the next day?”
“I’m not sure of the time. It was about that.”
“You knew all the time you could have gone to your sister’s, but you felt you ought to stay?”
“Yes.”
“There was nothing happened on Monday to cause you to be frightened?”
“No.”
“There was a telephone in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Had you any friends that you could have got on the other end?” asked Du Vernet.
“Only Mary Rooney,” replied Carrie, “and she worked for his brother.”
“You weren’t more frightened as it got darker?”
“No. I was frightened all day Monday.”
“Didn’t you realize that Mrs. Massey would rather that you had left than that this should have occurred?”
“Yes,” came the simple response.
Whatever question the Crown prosecutor asked, Carrie’s answer repeated her obsessive fear that her employer was going to “ruin” her. Du Vernet approached the same issue from a different angle: Why did Carrie continue to pull the trigger, even after she had seen Mr. Massey turn and run away?
“I didn’t realize what I was doing.”
“You don’t want the jury to think that you shot him because you were angry?”
“No, it was because I thought he might try what he had done the night before.”
Du Vernet glanced at his notes and said he had no further questions. Carrie’s lawyer, Dewart, said he had no further witnesses to call. He was ready to give his final address to the court.
It was now four o’clock in the afternoon, and the exhaustion on the faces of the jurors, who had paid careful attention to hours of evidence and cross-examination, was evident. Justice Mulock announced that the hearing would resume the following day at 9 a.m., an hour earlier than usual.
“Miss Davies,” reported the
Evening Telegram
, “was led away through the crowded corridor. She was smiling as she entered a cab.” It was the first time the
Tely
had ever mentioned a smile on the face of the newspaper’s chosen victim; in its columns, Carrie was usually portrayed as a woebegone child. The reporter left it to readers to speculate on the cause of the smile. Was it relief that she had survived the ordeal? Was it because she had finally been permitted to tell her story in full? Or was
it because she had followed to the letter the script that Hartley Dewart had written and rehearsed with her?
And did the reporter himself, who may or may not have been Archie Fisher, mention the unexpected smile as an editorial comment on Dewart’s theatrical, effective—and perhaps creative—defence?
L
ADY
H
OLDS
P
ATENT OF
T
RENCHING
T
OOL
The patent for the 25,000 combination entrenching shovel and bullet-proof shield with which the Canadian Expeditionary Force is equipped is held by Miss Eva Macadam
[sic],
Private Secretary to the Minister of Militia [General Sam Hughes]… Miss Macadam, as the “inventor” of the shovel, has not received any royalty … These were some of the interesting facts given to the Commons this afternoon by General Hughes
.
—Globe
, Friday, February 26, 1915
S
LAYER OF
M
R
. M
ASSEY
G
AVE
E
VIDENCE IN
H
ER
D
EFENCE IN A
C
ALM AND
E
RNEST
M
ANNER
, O
CCASIONALLY
A
SKING IF
I
T
W
AS
N
ECESSARY
TO
A
NSWER
Q
UESTIONS
. M
R
. D
EWART
L
ED
H
IS
C
LIENT
S
LOWLY
U
P TO THE
C
LIMAX OF THE
S
ENSATIONAL
E
VIDENCE.
—Toronto Daily News
, Saturday, February 27, 1915
T
he second, and final, day of Carrie Davies’s murder trial would open with her lawyer’s address to the jury. Hartley Dewart already knew that this trial was a glorious opportunity to shine—to demonstrate his skill with the jury and to put the Masseys in a poor light. Better still, after his client’s performance the previous afternoon, he could feel, as only an experienced trial lawyer could, that it was going his way.
If he glanced at the newspapers while eating his breakfast that day, the headlines would have boosted his elation. For the past two days, the major news stories in the “quality” papers had all been about events in France, and they reinforced the anxiety amongst Toronto families with relatives at the front. On Friday, when the trial opened, the
Globe
’s main story ran under the headline “The Canadian Expeditionary Force in Action: Canadians Capture Some Trenches … Several Men are Reported Killed and Wounded in Recent Fights … Toronto Man Receives Notice That His Son Has Been Wounded.” The
Globe
hit exactly the note of patriotic sacrifice Dewart wanted. “From this time forward, thousands of Canadians will watch with anxiety for news from the front,” read the first item in the paper’s front-page war summary. “Now many of the Dominion’s sons are at the front, and are proving that Canadian valor will be of service in turning the invaders out of France and Belgium. In a very real sense now the war is ours. With the
laurel will come pain and heartache, lessened by the assurance that those who fall die in defence of liberty.”
Today, the
Globe
’s war coverage was equally dark. “Clearing Hospital for the Canadians” was the headline over a report that Surgeon General Jones, Director of Medical Services from Canada, had left for France to facilitate the transport of Canadian casualties back to England. There they would be treated at the Canadian Red Cross hospital set up at Cliveden House, the lavish Buckinghamshire estate belonging to the Astor family. The Red Cross was busy enlarging the hospital from 150 to 500 beds, to accommodate the expected wave of maimed, wounded, and dying soldiers.
Globe
readers with relatives at the front would not be able to stop themselves imagining their loved ones, swathed in bandages and groggy with pain, lying in those beds. The same story mentioned that three Canadians had been killed a couple of days earlier, although their names were not given. As newspaper reports told the story, they had died defending the honour of the British Empire, facing unequal odds and an enemy that, through brutal attacks on civilians, had proved itself to be immoral and treacherous.
Dewart stepped out of his comfortable house on Elmsley Place. A brisk wind followed him down Bay Street as he made his way a dozen blocks south to City Hall. The journey gave him the time to rehearse the case he would make once he reached his destination. Like any good trial lawyer, he had watched the faces of jury members carefully yesterday, and he knew that the Massey name did not cut much ice with them. Bert Massey’s behaviour, like the events in Europe, was stirring up subcurrents of indignation, resentment, rage, helplessness, and unease in Toronto. The trick, he realized, would be to harness them all together.
It was unusual for the criminal courts to sit on a Saturday, and it was particularly unusual that the Assize Court was starting its session at nine o’clock. Once again, a predominantly British crowd surged into the courtroom as soon as the doors opened. When Carrie Davies was led in, just after the hour had struck, the previous evening’s confidence appeared to have drained away: “She sat quietly in one corner of the box, furtively wiping her eyes from time to time,” according to the
Toronto Daily Star
. Chief Justice Mulock swept into the room with frosty dignity, and the clerk of the court began his incantation, “Oyez, oyez, oyez …”
Hartley Dewart preened in the limelight from the moment he rose to address the jury. With exquisite courtesy, he acknowledged that the charge before the court was one of murder, for which the penalty was death. The jury might reduce the case to one of manslaughter. But there was a third alternative that the jury might consider, he continued—then paused, to hold the jurors’ attention. With all eyes upon him, he uttered one crisp word: “Acquittal.”
“Never in the history of Canadian courts,” said Dewart, “has a charge of murder of so peculiar a character been presented—in which the alleged motive for the murder was of such a character as that which the Crown presented.”
Dewart began with a grand
tour d’horizon
of typical murder cases, where motives and guilt were easily understood. “You are accustomed to cases of murder in which sheer brutality plays so important a part and in which the wife or some member of a family may be attacked by a husband whose brutish instincts have overcome him, where sordid motives and the love of gain have led men to take the lives of others. There are many cases where jealousy plays an important part and in which you can find the motive in the relationship. You are familiar with the class of case in which revenge and the outraged confidence or vengeful feelings of a woman who has been despoiled of her virtue is the motive that leads to murder.”
But this case was different—this case, suggested the lawyer, was on an altogether different and more lofty plane. “Never before has an honourable and virtuous girl been charged with the crime of murder because she successfully resisted the attacks of her master upon her person, and where her only motive was the defence of her honour and virtue against unequal odds and a treacherous assailant.”
Lowering his voice, Dewart went on, “I desire you to consider the girl herself—for she is still in her teens—who was charged before you. In every crime of murder, intention is a most important part; in every crime of intention you must look for a foundation in probability and consider the life, the character, the circumstances and the surroundings of the person charged. These are facts for your consideration quite as much as the sworn testimony of the witnesses.” Otherwise, Dewart asked with a Shakespearian flourish, “Where lay the virtue of character?” The jury had heard all about Carrie’s upbringing in Bedfordshire—her loving mother, her father (“a man of fighting blood”), the wholesome discipline in the home, where “daughters were brought up as daughters should be brought up.” Carrie Davies had come to Canada because her family was impoverished and she wanted to earn money to help her family back in Bedfordshire. “We have placed upon ourselves as Canadians the duties of trustees and guardians for girls who come from homes such as this to Canada,” intoned the lawyer. “We find her here in service, trusted, favoured and respected. We find her sending home from her scanty means all but what was needed for the barest necessities of her existence. Murderous intent is only found growing in a character filled with viciousness. It was not so in this case.”
The crescendo to this portrait of Carrie as a virtuous, self-sacrificing daughter was a masterpiece of rhetoric. “In the first place,” Dewart insisted, “as there was provocation, there was and could be no murder. In the second place, with the lack of murderous intent, there could be no murder. In the third place, I shall ask you to find that the
circumstances of this case afforded to this worried girl a justification for the act she has done and that you should not find her guilty of any offence.
“Was her life to be ruined by a married man who was her master? Was she to bring disgrace into a family that never knew a stain of such a kind? Her safety lay in self-defence. She was no match for him, and she took the pistol to intimate to him that he could not pursue his course with impunity. She shot with aimless rapidity; she shot in the direction of the man, but there was no intent to cause the death of that man.
“This attack gave the girl only one alternative choice. If she did not defend herself against this man she would have been a fallen woman, an outcast, one more sacrifice to brutish lust.”
The lawyer stopped speaking for a full minute, then walked towards the jury and continued with deadly emphasis: “Let that sink into your mind. It was not manslaughter, it was brute slaughter … she was defending herself against a man in whom all the principles of decency were dead as far as she was concerned.”
What a phrase! “Not manslaughter, but brute slaughter”! Reporters scribbled as spectators hung on Dewart’s every word. This was judicial drama at its most riveting. The contrast between the banality of Carrie’s vocabulary and the theatrics of her lawyer’s address underlined the gulf that yawned between an ill-educated servant and the legal elite.
Next, Dewart turned to the evidence that the Crown prosecutor had introduced the previous day. “To get at the facts of the attempts to debase and shame this young girl, we must go back to the supper party and the orgy of Friday night … Her mistress was away, and a party was given which exceeded all the bounds of decency and propriety. There were doings which outraged the feelings of this young girl in service. There were doings of which her master cautioned her to be silent. He complimented her. Then the ring was produced—a bauble to affect the young and untrained mind. She becomes the target
for this person’s fulsome attentions. Effusive attentions and flattery are often the beginning for a certain line of conduct. We find her the target for improper proposals …”