Authors: Charlotte Gray
The Massey Murder (27 page)
By now, despite the crowding, few people fidgeted on the public benches. Dewart’s mentions of an orgy, a bauble, and brutish lust enthralled his listeners. The lawyer continued his seamy tale. “Take the interview downstairs on Sunday. The boy had gone out and the two were alone in the house. Every suggestion and appeal that could be calculated to arouse passion in the mind of a young girl was made to her. Reference was made to indelicate acts at the supper party … The suggestions were painful for her to refer to, but they were brought out in evidence only to show the depths to which the master went in order to bring suggestive thoughts to her mind—all these things from which she escaped, but which were coming with increasing pressure.
“She was called by him to make up his bed. And then still more increasing pressure is brought to bear on her by this man. He suggests that she don his wife’s underwear to see how she would look in it. He tried to throw her on the bed … Though some may think it an easy matter to cast these things off, these are terrible things to a young and innocent girl.” Dewart could not be too explicit in his lurid version of events, but he picked his euphemism carefully: “She felt the full weight of what was being forced upon her.”
With silky ease, the lawyer went on with his gothic horror story. “Do you wonder that, alone in the house, all that day she brooded over this horrible thing that had come into her life? Can you wonder that, when night fell, when the darkness was coming on, when the mind is more susceptible and the feelings more wrought up—do you wonder that at the close of that terrible day she thought only that he was going to do her harm? That was the one thought she had in her mind. She was possessed with it. Then when evening came, and the shadows fell, she was still thinking that he would come again, and do her harm.”
Du Vernet watched his opponent with a mix of admiration and exasperation.
Suggestive thoughts …! The shadows fell …!
Dewart’s polemic was a mesmerizing mix of penny-dreadful titillation and Biblical phraseology—a mix that was irresistible to the sensation-seeking, churchgoing residents of his city.
“Oh, how that echo rang through that young girl’s brain! How it possessed her mind! When I asked her, in the witness box, why she acted as she did, her reply was that she knew her master to be a man who would do as he said. She knew he meant to accomplish his purpose. Do not these things constitute provocation? … She was in fear of a brutal attack, a horrible attack on herself, a fear she could not drive from her mind. Under the circumstances, don’t you see how the very first sight of him revived every insult and emphasized every feeling? He seemed so near to her that it would seem as if his hot, passionate breath was again approaching her … The man was nothing to her except the one attacking force that had to be resisted.
“He was a strong man, against whom her weak strength could not avail. Her one thought was of defending herself. It was in self-defence that she did what she did. She has never wavered from that statement.
“She did not carry the revolver around with her. When she saw her master, then it was that she got the weapon. She did not even know that she had hit him. At the police station, she could only cry, ‘Take me away.’ Why? Because she still had the fear in her mind that he would do her harm.”
Dewart only occasionally glanced at his notes as he stood at the defence counsel’s table and directed his arguments to the jury and judge. He gave a scientific gloss to the narrative he was spinning. “Constant irritation on the mind,” he said, “brought on a state when the limit of resistance was reduced and the sufferer was akin to one under delusions. This is not a story but a fact.” He quoted from the Criminal Code a provision that allowed a “reasonable apprehension of bodily harm”
to be grounds for acquittal in a murder trial, although that clause was usually applied to killings that occurred in the middle of a violent altercation. Speaking directly to the twelve middle-aged men in the jury box, he stated, “You have the power to make the law common sense by returning a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ Gentlemen, I wish to put it strongly, not to your sympathies but to your brains, your intelligence, your common sense and to point out where your road lies.”
Jurors stared stoically at the lawyer. It was difficult to resist the passion of his arguments, especially if they coincided with a juror’s own sympathies.
After drawing breath, Dewart continued. “Look at the prisoner! Is she a murderess? She is a heroine, a woman of strong character, of stamina, of strong principles. Faithful to her duties as a servant, standing fast by the inherited principles of her family, true to her soldier lover, this girl is not of the stuff of which murderers are made.” The jurors turned their eyes to the hunched, scared figure in the prisoner’s dock. No one could look
less
like a murderess.
Dewart had been speaking for close to an hour, but he was now reaching the point in his address where he knew he was skating on thin ice. He was going to appeal to British patriotism, Imperial loyalties and class solidarity—sentiments that, privately, made him feel queasy. But he had watched events for the past three weeks. He had seen the emotions ripple through his city, whipped up by British propaganda, ambitious newspaper owners, and family fears. He knew how powerful such an appeal would be in a Toronto jumpy with war nerves.
“What are British troops fighting for at the present moment?” he asked, his voice ringing with passion. “Why has Canada sent 30,000 men to aid them, being prepared to send, if necessary, thirty times as many? It was the honour of Britain for which they fought. If honour was the principle for which British troops and the prisoner’s soldier lover were fighting, was not the prisoner herself fighting similarly? The honour
of the individual made for the upholding of the honour of England. In repelling an insidious attack from an unexpected enemy, the girl has not committed murder.
“When you look at the way the working classes view these questions of honour and morality, it makes us proud of the stamina that goes to make the people of the Empire. When you contrast some so-called society people with those in lowlier walks of life, we can see that it is the stamina, the principle and the conduct of the so-called working classes that make for the greatness and the continued greatness of the Empire.”
It was a tour de force. But Hartley Dewart had not finished yet. He was going to bind generic British pride and a naked appeal to class sentiment with a pathetic scene that might have been taken straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. “Over in Bedfordshire there is a little home where a widowed mother is sitting today,” he continued, lowering his voice and shaking his head as if in sorrow. “Her eyes are dimmed, and she is going blind and cannot pursue her work. She was depending upon her little girl. There are five other little children there. That mother has nurtured her daughter and instilled into her the principle that is exemplified in her conduct here. What will your verdict be? What will be the message that you are going to send across the sea? Will you say the girl is guilty because she defended herself from a fate she felt was worse than death? Nay verily, gentlemen.
“Look the facts in the face. You have a wife, a daughter or perhaps a sister at home. You are married men and have children. Can you look them squarely in the face and with a clear conscience say that you had done your duty in the case if you leave a stain upon this girl by your verdict? … Put someone near and dear to you in her position. Would you feel that ten or twelve men had treated you fairly if one of your dear ones was on the same set of facts found guilty?
“Our Sovereign Lord the King has tens of thousands of soldiers at the front, fighting and defending the honour of the Empire. None of
them more faithfully defended the honour of the Empire than this girl defended her own honour.
“Never in recent years has so much interest been taken in any case as has been taken in this. The eyes of all Canada are upon you, so are the eyes of the people of Bedfordshire and the eyes of the people of England. A verdict of acquittal means that the standard of morality stands high in the county of York.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the issue is with you. You cannot shirk it.”
For several minutes after Hartley Dewart finished speaking, the courtroom remained completely silent, with all eyes fixed on him.
G
ERMAN
C
ORPSES
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HICK IN
F
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F
IGURES
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URNED
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.
—Globe
, Saturday, February 27, 1915
E
ATON’S
D
AILY
S
TORE
N
EWS
D
AINTY
U
NDERWEAR
T
HAT THE
F
ASTIDIOUS
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OMAN
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OVES
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S
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ISPLAY IN THE
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RENCH
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OOMS
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ONDAY
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—Toronto Daily Star
, Saturday, February 27, 1915
H
artley Dewart’s bravura performance had lasted an hour and a half. Even the chief justice, who could have intervened several times to reprimand the defence counsel for introducing points that were irrelevant or inadmissible, seemed spellbound.
A handful of reporters scrambled towards the door in order to telephone their newsrooms and relay Dewart’s speech to their editors. As they left, replacement reporters from the same papers arrived to take their places and stay abreast of the drama. Meanwhile, Dewart sat down, a satisfied smile on his thin lips, while everyone else in the courtroom absorbed his powerful challenge to the jury. He had done what every courtroom lawyer wants to do: he had shaped a compelling narrative to hook the jury. He had put Bert Massey on a par with the vicious Huns, and he had made Carrie Davies’s trial all about duty—the duty of Carrie to protect her honour after a wanton attack, the duty of Canadian lads in the trenches to defend the Empire, the jury’s duty to acquit Carrie in order to prove that purity and honour were more valuable than life itself. The acquittal of his client would be tantamount to a patriotic act. He had used the fact that Bert Massey had
not
raped Carrie to prove that she had just cause to kill. He had argued that Bert Massey
deserved
to be killed.
Edward Du Vernet felt himself drowning in the emotion of his colleague’s address. He knew exactly what Hartley Dewart had done:
without actually using the phrase “unwritten law,” Dewart had made an implicit appeal to the American doctrine that said a murder was justified when committed in defence of a woman’s honour. In lawless American cities and on the gunslinging frontier, the idea that a man was justified in avenging the seduction of a woman for whom he was responsible had proved an effective legal defence. Women, as the weaker sex, required a man’s protection, according to this notion, and if a man killed an evil seducer, the latter only had himself to blame. In the American West, several men had beaten murder raps by invoking this “unwritten law” as a defence of their actions in shooting a sister’s, wife’s, or daughter’s lover. The notion had crept north, and courts in British Columbia were also sympathetic to the idea that a man who tried to steal another’s wife “deserved to die,” and the man who killed him was simply doing what any “real man” would do. In a 1906 case in Vancouver, a man called Charles Johnson was found near the dead body of his lodger, yelling, according to a witness, that he would “learn somebody to come around to try and fuck his wife.” Johnson was acquitted of murder.
But vigilante justice was not a concept that carried weight in central Canada—in fact, it is unlikely that Toronto’s lawyers even knew much about judicial rulings from the other side of the Rockies. Moreover, the idea that a killing might be justified when an individual’s honour was in jeopardy only came into play when the killer was a man. It is unlikely that it had ever been used in a case like Carrie’s, where the female victim of the attempted seduction had later turned a gun on her seducer. Carrie might be just a frightened eighteen-year-old, but her actions did not fit the “weaker sex” stereotype.
Du Vernet had watched the forcefulness of Dewart’s fanciful oratory overwhelm Chief Justice Mulock and the packed and sympathetic audience. Yet the Crown prosecutor had raised no objections: Dewart’s address had been gripping. Du Vernet’s heart must have sunk. He knew that the prosecution case was far more firmly grounded in facts and
law than Dewart’s heated rhetoric, but it lacked the passion: his own summing-up would sound Gradgrindishly pedantic. In the prisoner’s dock, Carrie Davies’s huddled figure reinforced her lawyer’s brilliant depiction of her as a helpless victim, fighting with the same courage as the boys in France. Her very passivity bespoke an innocent victim, although she certainly had not been passive when she pulled the trigger. Had her lawyer
told
her to keep dabbing at her eyes like that?
