The Massey Murder (33 page)

His stockpile of rye whiskey lasted him all his life, and in later years it was black—about 120 proof. This suited the old man fine: he would shake a single drop of water into a full tumbler so he could honestly claim that he never drank it neat.

Colonel George Denison III was another old soldier who stayed long in harness: he continued to gallop through police court hearings as Toronto’s chief magistrate until his retirement, aged eighty-two, in 1921. The same year, he presided at the unveiling of the cenotaph commemorating nine members of the extended Denison family killed in the war. His belief in the nobility of military service was undimmed: “There is nothing that so much indicates the virile spirit of a nation as the habit of friends and relatives raising memorials to the memory of those … who have lost their lives in the service of their country,” he said. Colonel Denison died in 1925. Harry Wodson wrote in his obituary
in the
Evening Telegram
, “No city in the world has ever seen his like on the Bench, and it is improbable that such a man in that position will ever be seen again.” To the relief of Ontario court officials, Wodson was right.

Arthur Roebuck, the young articling clerk in the offices of Dewart, Maw & Hodgson who was the go-between with the
Evening Telegram
, achieved the career success that had eluded his mentor, Hartley Dewart. Like Dewart, he was a Laurier Liberal who often clashed with party orthodoxy. However, this did not impede his ascent. He served as attorney general of Ontario from 1934 to 1937, and was active in promoting the rights of trade unions and defending Jews from the virulent anti-Semitism that characterized the province. He then moved into federal politics, as Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of Trinity. In 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King appointed him to the Senate, and he remained a senator until his death, aged ninety-three, in 1971. In his family memoir,
The Roebuck Story
(published in 1963), he does not mention the Carrie Davies case.

Mrs. Florence Huestis served an unprecedented nine years as president of the Toronto Local Council of Women. During these years, she continued to straddle the gulf between women who wanted to be in the centre of the political action, as voters and elected officials themselves, and those who preferred “maternal feminism,” promoting more traditional welfare reforms. Under her adroit leadership, TLCW successfully lobbied for pasteurized milk, postnatal education for new mothers, purification of the water system, and allowances for widows and deserted mothers. She spearheaded the campaigns for medical and dental care for children and the provision of playgrounds in the city. Premier William Hearst must have got to know well the sound of her soft, persuasive, but insistent voice: she was constantly in his office, arguing for women to be appointed as school inspectors, for female householders to receive the same tax breaks as men did, and for more spending on health facilities.

Women like Florence Huestis made a remarkable difference to their communities across Canada, through their local organizations and the National Council of Women of Canada. Unelected and unpaid, their lives have too easily been dismissed as an unimportant reflection of their husbands’ and fathers’ status. There is no oil painting of Mrs. Huestis at Queen’s Park, nor is there any monument to the TLCW’s achievements. “She did so much, but there are few records—just a couple of old newspaper and magazine articles,” observes her great-granddaughter Kathy Weekes Southee. Florence Huestis died in 1955. The National Council of Women of Canada, which in 2013 celebrates its 120th birthday, continues to work on a wide range of issues, including violence against women, assistance for immigrant women, and proportional representation.

Joe Atkinson and the
Star
won the press war. In 1971, the
Evening Telegram
folded, because the
Toronto Daily Star
, now known simply as the
Toronto Star
, had outsold it for years. John Ross Robertson, the
Tely
’s pugnacious proprietor, died in 1918; “Black Jack” Robinson remained as editor until his death in 1928. In 1971, many of the
Tely
’s employees moved to the newly launched
Toronto Sun
, which shared the
Tely
’s Conservative politics; however, the
Star
bought the
Tely
’s subscriber list.

Today, the
Star
is Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper and largest online news source. Its politics remain true to the Atkinson vision: a nationalist voice on the left of the political spectrum. During its existence, its editors have seen Toronto become the largest city in Canada, with a population of 2.8 million that is more diverse than anybody might have imagined in 1915. Over 140 languages and dialects are spoken there today, and just over 30 percent of Toronto residents speak a language other than French or English at home. It is a very different city from the one where Masseys, Denisons, Dewarts, and Mulocks held sway. Fewer than one in five Torontonians have British backgrounds.

Yet vestiges of the Anglo-Celtic ascendancy remain. Many of Canada’s largest law firms, with dozens of partners ensconced in glass towers in major cities, grew out of the small, powerful partnerships that existed in 1915. So far, the diversity of people on Toronto’s streets is not reflected in the hierarchies in its politics or its law courts. And most of the buildings mentioned here remain. The old Don Jail has been transformed and now houses a health administration centre, and the Lombard Street morgue is a dilapidated music rehearsal space. But Old City Hall still houses the police courts, and 169 Walmer Street remains an unassuming house (now divided into three small apartments) on a quiet residential street.

When Carrie Davies fired the shot on February 8, 1915, the impact on her victim and his family were shattering. Carrie herself must have been traumatized, and she seems to have spent the rest of her life in denial that it had ever happened.

Yet Carrie’s case had surprisingly little impact on the law at the time. There is no evidence that the Davies case was ever cited in subsequent murder trials—because no decision was made on a point of law, it was never reported in any volume of law reports. To the 1915 editor of the
Ontario Law Reports
, it would have had no value as a precedent to guide future trials. Indeed, there was nothing to report because Justice Mulock gave no ruling from the bench. For the legal professionals involved, the acquittal was probably seen as a dangerous aberration—the right decision for this case, perhaps, but not the kind of thing that ought to happen other than in very exceptional circumstances. It certainly did
not
establish a tradition of judicial chivalry, let alone an assumption that a woman had the right to defend herself against sexual abuse. In fact, there was no mention of the case in law books for
the next six decades, and Canadian law continued to treat women as dependants of their fathers, husbands, or brothers. Even the enthusiasm of early feminists for special legal protections for women fizzled out. Once women had the vote, Toronto’s Women’s Court was increasingly regarded as an anachronism: it was disbanded in 1934.

But some of the emotions and concerns that Carrie’s case aroused flowed on through the twentieth century, as women entered universities, professions, and politics, and lobbied for equality.

It took a resurgence of feminism—the so-called Second Wave of the 1960s—to prompt a rediscovery of the Carrie Davies case. Feminist lawyers like Constance Backhouse and historians including Carolyn Strange wrote about the case as an example of the gender biases built into implementation of the law.

These were also the years in which Dr. Henry Morgentaler was challenging anti-abortion laws across Canada and was repeatedly prosecuted. In Quebec, on three occasions the jurors did exactly what their counterparts in the Carrie Davies case had done fifty years earlier in Ontario: they refused to apply the law and convict him. The jurors decided that the law was unfair: they deemed the rights of women worthy of precedence over legal rules that reflected the community standards of a previous era. The term “jury nullification” entered the Canadian legal lexicon.

The Supreme Court of Canada reversed the jury acquittals of Dr. Morgentaler and ordered new trials. But once the Charter of Rights became the supreme law of the land in 1984, the Supreme Court struck down the abortion law on procedural grounds. Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, added to this decision a minority opinion that the issue also involved women’s rights. “The right to reproduce or not to reproduce … is properly perceived as an integral part of modern women’s struggle to assert her dignity and worth as a human being.”

At the same time, increasing concern about domestic violence against women culminated in another important Supreme Court decision in 1990, the Lavallee decision. Canada’s highest court upheld the acquittal of a woman called Angelique Lavallee, who had shot her abusive common-law husband in the back of the head during a fight. Like Hartley Dewart, Lavallee’s lawyer had argued that his client was not guilty on grounds of self-defence. This was a much broader definition of self-defence within a relationship than had hitherto been accepted by the Canadian judiciary. Angelique Lavallee won her acquittal not because a group of men felt a chivalrous instinct to show mercy to a defenceless young virgin, but because the court recognized that a woman had a right to defend herself from a physically abusive partner. Lavallee had committed neither murder nor manslaughter: she was a battered wife who was in fear for her life.

The Lavallee decision enshrined the principle that a woman in fear of her life was justified in defending herself against an aggressor, even to the point of killing. Carrie Davies would never have passed what lawyers call “the Lavallee test”: she was not in imminent danger of assault when she killed Bert Massey with his own gun on that chilly February evening. But under today’s laws, Charles Albert Massey would have known that he harassed a young woman at his peril.

A frightened maid shot and killed her employer. Thousands of men fought and died on faraway battlefields. Day-to-day life for most Canadians went on: the generation that remembered Confederation Day in July 1867 died, and a new generation that would watch Canadian troops ship off to another European war was born. There was no dramatic change of direction: the Carrie Davies case and the Battle of Vimy Ridge were both symptoms of a larger reality—Canada’s evolution into a prosperous, autonomous country. As the country developed, so Canada’s laws, lawyers, and citizens adapted to its shifting values.

Sources

T
here is no transcript of Carrie Davies’s criminal trial, with supporting documentation, because she was acquitted. Nor are there any notes from Toronto’s police magistrate George Denison or Ontario’s chief justice, Sir William Mulock: neither man collected or preserved many professional or personal papers. The only official records of Carrie’s progress through the Ontario justice system are notices of her hearing in the police court on February 9, the transcript of evidence heard before the coroner at the inquest on February 15, and the notice filed on February 22 for her appearance in the Supreme Court of Ontario on a murder charge. These records are in the Ontario Archives (RG22–392–0-9029 MS 8564). I am particularly grateful to Justice Robert Sharpe for passing on this reference to me.

However, newspaper accounts of the case are extensive. I spent hours poring over microfilm of the
Toronto Daily Star
, the
Evening Telegram
, the
Globe
, the
Toronto Daily News
, as well as the bimonthly magazine
Saturday Night
, piecing together the story and discerning the accuracy
and biases of their reports. In most chapters, I have given attributions within the text for most quotations from newspapers: only in the trial, where differences were minimal, have I amalgamated the coverage.

There are several other reference books on which I relied for information about key figures in the case and background events. Chief among them is the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB)
, a consistently accurate and lively online resource for researchers. I also turned to some of the wonderfully portentous catalogues of eminent men dating from this period, including John A. Cooper’s
Men of Canada
(Toronto: Canadian Historical Company, 1901–02) and Geo. Maclean Rose, ed.,
A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time
(Toronto: Rose Publishing, 1886).

For information about the First World War, I turned to Tim Cook’s masterly two-volume account of Canadian contributions to the war effort:
At the Sharp End
(Toronto: Viking, 2007) and
Shock Troops
(Toronto: Viking, 2008). I also enjoyed Correlli Barnett’s
The Great War
(London: Penguin, 1979, 2000) and Adam Hochschild’s
To End All Wars
(London: Macmillan, 2011). There was much useful material in Ian Hugh Maclean Miller’s
Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

On my website (www.charlottegray.ca), I provide a selected bibliography and the precise footnotes required by more exacting readers. But for general readers, here are some broad indications of where I found my material.

C
HAPTER 1

All the details of Bert Massey’s death and how the police arrested and questioned Carrie Davies come from the transcript of evidence given at the coroner’s inquest. Information about the new age of the automobile in Canada is mainly drawn from Richard White’s
Making Cars in Canada: A Brief History of the Canadian Automobile Industry
,
1900–1980
(Ottawa: Canada Science and Technology Museum, 2007), and Heather Robertson’s
Driving Force: The McLaughlin Family and the Age of the Car
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995).