The Massey Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

soft brick colour, pictures hanging on them, and an ordinary chair rather than a railed dock for prisoners. Most important, women who were discharged from the court could slip away without being harassed by onlookers. The Globe remarked, “To the onlooker it seemed all as simple as being called to the teacher’s table at school.”
    The muckraking journal Jack Canuck enthused over this new institution, suggesting that “the new and humane order of things will work wonders in the reclamation of the unfortunate daughters of Eve.” Mrs. Florence Huestis, the formidable president of the Toronto branch of the NCW, reported that her members attended the court regularly and “did their best to help fallen girls and women.” This was where Carrie Davies, already en route from Court Street police station cell, would appear.
    By 9.30 a.m., when court sessions were scheduled to begin, the tiled corridors of City Hall were thronged with idlers eager for a glimpse of the trigger-happy domestic. The sensational tale of the murdered Massey had swelled the throng, but Carrie Davies wasn’t the only draw. Toronto’s police courts, where 90 percent of the city’s criminal cases began and ended, always pulled a crowd. Local newspapers covered these courts as if they were covering circus acts and music hall turns, reducing a day’s slate of individuals charged with crimes to a cast of ridiculous stereotypes—drunken Irishmen, comic African Americans, naive hayseeds, tarts with hearts. Rubberneckers cheered for decisions they supported and booed those they disagreed with.
    The Evening Telegram ran a regular column, “Police Court To-day,” with brief and often tongue-in-cheek entries. A typical report, under the heading “Judicious Mixture,” described how “John Keyler showed some discrimination in his thefts from the Robert Simpson Company Limited. When he took some jam and candies he also annexed a quantity of cascara and headache wafers. Sent down for fifteen days.”
    Why did the city’s residents find justice so entertaining? Largely because of one man: Colonel George Taylor Denison, a tall, silver-haired character with a bony face and walrus moustache who was the police court magistrate—an office that did not require a law degree or any special training, but did imbue its holder with immense authority. Magistrates in England and Canada were often referred to as “beaks,” but in Toronto there was only one court official who was invariably called “The Beak,” and he was a favourite of the Press Gallery. Denison was the unchallenged monarch of City Hall’s police courts. One journalist had recently written that a trip to Toronto without visiting a Denison courtroom “would be like going to Rome and not seeing the Pope.”
    Police Magistrate Denison stood for everything that was most British about Canada in 1915. Denisons had fought for Canada from the earliest days, and the name was synonymous with loyalty to theBritish Empire, the Anglican Church, and conservative political principles. There were well over a hundred Denisons in Toronto by 1915, and there had been scarcely a single event in Toronto’s development in which a Denison hadn’t played a starring role. The Beak’s grandfather, the first Colonel George Taylor Denison, emigrated to British North America from Yorkshire in 1792 and fought under General Brock in the War of 1812. The second Colonel George Taylor Denison helped suppress the 1837–38 uprisings and founded a family cavalry regiment, Denison’s Horse, which eventually became the Governor General’s Horse Guard. Before becoming the police court magistrate, City Hall’s Colonel Denison saw service in the militia against the Fenians at Ridgeway in 1866 and the Metis and Indians during the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. He had also made himself an authority on military tactics, especially the élan of the cavalry charge: in 1877, he had travelled to Moscow to receive an award from the Russian tsar