Authors: Charlotte Gray
Only a sense of humour softened Denison’s paternal Toryism and patrician bias. He filled scrapbooks with cartoons of himself (he was easy to caricature), and Harry Wodson enjoyed watching the Beak suppress a chuckle at the cheeky remarks from court regulars. Dodson suggested that his genial manner endeared him to most defendants who appeared before him. A 1913 cartoon pictured a tattered husband and wife jostling each other in front of Denison’s seat, and the woman saying to her husband, “Ain’t I got as much right to enjoy the pleasure of bein’ tried by Colonel Denison as you have?”
Carrie knew none of this when Miss Mary Minty, the beefy, square-jawed Scotswoman who had become Toronto’s first female police constable in 1913, escorted her into the Women’s Court on the second floor of City Hall. Exhausted and traumatized after a night in the police cells, she barely understood that the stern, snappy man presiding over the court would decide whether she should be kept in custody or allowed out on bail.
The women on the public benches craned forward to see the eighteen-year-old, as she sat on the prisoners’ bench alongside gaudily dressed prostitutes (“petticoated birds of paradise and prey,” in Wodson’s phrase), petty thieves, and haggard drunks. In her worn brown cloth coat and black hat, Carrie seemed out of place in such company. Her face was swollen with tears, and her hands played nervously with her knitted gloves as she looked around the large square room.
Colonel Denison launched proceedings like a Gatling gun at full throttle. The morning’s case list began with a handful of cases involving drunkenness, vagrancy, and petty theft, which were dispatched before most people had drawn breath. The prisoners’ bench rapidly emptied, until only Carrie’s slight figure was left. Finally, Carrie’s name was
called above the subdued whispering that filled the courtroom. She rose, and stumbled forward to stand in front of the magistrate. This case was too serious to give the Beak any cause to slow down. He fixed his eyes on her and, in his parade-ground bark, addressed her: “Carrie Davies, you are here accused of murder.”
There was a collective gasp. The most serious accusation possible had been brought against Carrie—an accusation that, if upheld by trial, could take her to the gallows. In early-twentieth-century Canada, the death penalty was regularly invoked and frequently imposed. Only the previous year, thirty-one people had been sentenced to death: sixteen of them would see their petitions for clemency dismissed and would feel the noose around their necks.
Had the court clerk, Mr. Chapman, not wedged a chair behind Carrie, she would have collapsed on the floor. She sat, hunched forward, without saying a word as Colonel Denison consulted the Crown attorney about the court calendar. He announced that Carrie should return to the Women’s Court in a week’s time, on February 16, after evidence had been gathered and the coroner’s inquest completed, so that the date for her criminal trial might be set. Meanwhile, she should be remanded in custody.
Miss Minty stepped forward, took Carrie’s arm, and led her back to the bench. Denison made a few general remarks to his clerks, slammed his casebook shut, and strode out of the court. Miss Minty escorted Carrie back into the corridor. None of Carrie’s friends or family, nor any members of the Massey family, was present this morning, nor did Carrie have a lawyer. Accused of murder, she was not eligible for bail—but even if she had been, there was nobody to stand bail for her. At this point, she was completely alone in the justice system’s grip.
Newspapers that catered to the city’s elite reported simply that Carrie had been remanded for a week. They devoted more ink to portraying the dead man as an agreeable
bon vivant
. The
Globe
described
“the late Mr. Massey” as “well known about town. He was fond of motoring and took much enjoyment out of life … A diamond ring and stick pin worth several hundred dollars and some money were found on him.” The
Toronto Daily News
mentioned that he was educated at Albert College, Belleville, later attending an American preparatory school, and was a “prominent figure among the young social set.”
But reporters from papers with a blue-collar readership put the spotlight on Carrie. Was her impassivity the result of dazed terror or hard-boiled criminality? The
Evening Telegram
portrayed her as young and guileless: “a rather short, fair-haired girl, of eighteen, whose blue-grey eyes looked as though they had wept most of the night … More like a mild and gentle Sunday School pupil did she look, and very subdued and sorrowful this morning.” The
Toronto Daily Star
took a very different line: “The heaviness over her eyebrows resembles the Slavic type more than the English, and her mouth is strong, showing capacity for resentment out of all keeping with a round, childish chin.”
As spectators streamed out of the courtroom, each made her own judgment as to whether Carrie Davies was subdued Sunday school pupil or resentful, aggressive immigrant. That evening, readers of the
Evening Telegram
were able to glean more about the young girl now accused of murder. A day earlier, soon after Bert Massey had been killed, a
Tely
reporter named Archie Fisher who had been at City Hall when she was brought in had discovered that Carrie Davies had a sister living in the distant east end of Toronto. Fisher had hurried along Gerrard Street for six kilometres until he reached Morley Avenue, where a jumble of wooden telegraph poles and tiny brick houses, many single-storey and all squatting on small lots, lined a soggy gravel thoroughfare just south of the train tracks. Cursing the darkness, he stumbled north, up an incline, until he found number 326. A woman came to the door after he knocked, and looked at this stranger with surprise.
The reporter realized he had got there before the police. “Are you Maud Fairchild, Carrie Davies’s sister?” he demanded in a voice sombre with authority. Maud Fairchild said she was, and immediately asked, “What has happened to Carrie?” The reporter continued to grill her as Maud’s husband, Ed Fairchild, emerged from the kitchen with a baby in his arms. “Does your sister work for Mr. Massey?” Maud looked anxious. “Yes. Tell us what is the matter.” The reporter stepped importantly through the door into an ill-lit, narrow hall and announced that Carrie had shot her employer.
The Fairchilds were devastated. As Ed asked, “Was Mr. Massey badly hurt?” his wife gasped, “Poor Carrie.” By now the reporter had manoeuvred them into the tiny parlour: Maud sank into a chair and a toddler immediately ran to her and clung to her skirts. Neither Ed nor Maud could believe that Carrie would do such a thing: she was such a shy little thing, she could barely kill a fly. She had worked for the Masseys for two years, and always said the Masseys were good to her. She had been taken poorly the previous summer, Maud stuttered, while she was with the Masseys at their summer cottage, and they had looked after her so well. She had been her normal, quiet self when she spent Sunday afternoon with the Fairchilds.
Then Ed remembered something. When Carrie was with them on Sunday, the Fairchilds had friends visiting, so she hadn’t been able to talk much to her sister. However, she had taken her brother-in-law aside in the kitchen and whispered to him that Mr. Massey had tried to kiss her the previous day, when she was cleaning up after a dinner party. Ed insisted that Carrie hadn’t seemed particularly upset. “I told her not to think about it too much about that,” said Ed. “Probably he was feeling a little good and he would forget about it. She said that she guessed he would be ashamed of himself.” As Carrie was leaving at the end of the evening, Ed had mentioned Mr. Massey’s behaviour to his wife. Maud was concerned, but she didn’t stop her sister returning to Walmer Road.
Now, a day later, she recalled telling her sister that if anything should happen, to run right out of the house and rush into a neighbour’s house, “no matter whether she was fully dressed or not.”
But now Carrie was in real trouble. Ed Fairchild grabbed his coat and insisted he must leave immediately and get downtown: he planned to stand bail for his sister-in-law and get her out of police custody. The reporter had not yet divulged that Bert Massey was dead. He immediately offered to accompany the distraught man downtown. The two men disappeared into the February dark—but not before the man from the
Tely
had asked Maud to lend him a photograph of Carrie which he knew his editor would publish in the next edition. On the following day, after Carrie’s appearance in the Women’s Court, it appeared next to the
Tely
’s scoop—the most informative account of the murder so far, under the headline “News of What Had Happened a Cruel Blow to a Little East End Household.”
Carrie, an uneducated eighteen-year-old who had taken a man’s life, had barely uttered a word on the day of her first court appearance. Over the course of the next three weeks, her own words would be recorded on only three occasions. A century later, those remarks are all we have in her voice on which to base speculation on her state of mind: she left no diary or letters that reveal what she was thinking or feeling. We know her reactions to events only if they were noted in others’ accounts or newspaper articles. However, observers have always been happy to project their own assumptions onto her. In 1915, she was on her way to becoming a lightning rod for the fears and prejudices swirling around Canada’s largest English-speaking city.
P
ARADE OF
4,000 S
OLDIERS THROUGH CITY
Mounted rifles swing into Queen Street at the foot of University Avenue
.
B
RITISH
L
OSSES
T
OTAL
104,000
Premier Asquith speaking in the [British] House of Commons to-day said that British casualties in all ranks in the western arena of the war, from the beginning of hostilities to February 4, amounted to approximately 104,000 men. This includes killed, wounded and missing
.
—Globe
, Tuesday, February 9, 1915
Mr. Frederick Massey … said that he had viewed the body in the morgue, and recognized it as that of Charles A. Massey, whom he knew intimately
.
—Toronto Daily Star
, Wednesday, February 10, 1915
O
nce Colonel Denison had closed the Women’s Court proceedings, Miss Minty marched her prisoner through the spectators gathered at the courtroom door, round to the other side of City Hall’s second floor, and waited for the elevator to rattle up in its metal cage from the ground floor. When its doors opened, a group of self-assured women in smart hats and fur coats bustled out. Carrie shrank back, but nobody took any notice of the shabby domestic: these women had other concerns. The members of Toronto’s Local Council of Women were on a mission to persuade Mayor Thomas Langton Church and the Board of Control that the Women’s Court must not fall prey to government cuts. Once these women had stomped off, Carrie and Miss Minty stepped into the elevator for the creaky ascent to the third floor. There, the policewoman escorted her charge to the police office, where Carrie would begin the ordeal of being admitted, on remand, to the notorious Toronto Jail, better known as “the Don.”
Carrie was told to remove her hat and coat. First, she was photographed from the front and both sides. Next, a police clerk bustled up to her, wielding a pair of steel calipers. Carrie’s eyes widened with alarm, but Miss Minty reassured her. There followed a lengthy procedure in which twenty-five dimensions of Carrie’s body were measured, including her height, head length, left foot, left little finger, right ear, nose size and shape, ear lobe, chin, teeth, and the width and tilt of her
forehead. All these measurements, plus her birthplace, occupation, and hair colour, were noted down in a big, brown leather-bound volume: the Toronto police force’s “Bertillon” register.
The Bertillon system of identification had been invented forty years earlier by Alphonse Bertillon, a pale-faced, misanthropic records clerk in the Paris Police Department. As police forces in Europe and North America expanded and became more professional in the nineteenth century, they found themselves hampered by their inability to track offenders. Hardened criminals were often sentenced as first offenders because there was no accurate way to identify recidivists or escapees. Bertillon, a self-important, obsessive little man with a thrusting beard and deep voice, was exasperated by this haphazard approach to identification. His father, an anthropologist and statistician, had spent his career researching the unique variations in physical characteristics in every human being, and Bertillon built on this research to develop a criminal identification scheme. He used his father’s measuring techniques on arrestees and convicts, carefully recording physical features (eye colour, shape and angles of the ear, brow, and nose) that no disguise could hide. He accumulated a vast amount of data on cards, which were then categorized and cross-indexed.
In the late nineteenth century, when innovations like photography, the telephone, and the gramophone were taking off like wildfire, Bertillon’s system won instant popularity. No wonder—as the first use in history of scientific detection to catch a criminal, it combined two obsessions of the time: science and crime. Adopted in 1882 by the Paris police, “Bertillonage” became all the rage in France after it successfully identified 241 multiple offenders. In 1887, the warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary introduced it into the United States, and its use quickly spread across the continent. By the mid-1890s, Alphonse Bertillon was an international celebrity. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, showed “enthusiastic admiration of
the French
savant
,” and in Conan Doyle’s 1901 novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, another character described Holmes and Bertillon as being the two best detectives in Europe.