Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
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voted for acquittal, five for conviction. With a hung jury, a new trial was ordered.
At the fall assizes that year, a different jury returned a verdict of guilty. Hammond’s death sentence was set for February 18, 1898, but with an appeal pending, the case continued to excite wide interest across Muskoka and in Toronto’s daily newspapers. A month before his pending execution, the Muskoka Herald ran the following, penned though not signed by James Boyer: “Upon the decision of the Chancery Divisional Court in regards to two points of law hangs the life of William J. Hammond, who is now in the condemned cell in the Bracebridge jail awaiting his doom on February 18th. A jury of his peers disagreed at his first trial, but when the case was heard a second time a verdict of guilty was returned and he was sentenced to the gallows. The crime was committed, according to the Crown, so that Hammond could profit by the insurance policies placed upon the life of his wife.”
With the clock running down toward his execution, the Court of Appeal decided the evidence given by Hammond at the inquest after his wife’s death should not have been allowed at the second trial. So another new trial was ordered. Hammond’s third trial for the same crime opened at the Muskoka assizes on June 2, 1898. The case had now become so notorious that Ontario’s chief justice, Sir William R. Meredith, a former leader of the Ontario Conservative Party in the legislature, travelled from Toronto to Bracebridge in Muskoka’s pleasant early summer season to conduct the trial himself.
No new witnesses were called. Very little new evidence was introduced, and that which was adduced was found immaterial. The essential story remained the same. Katie had been found in the snow in Gravenhurst March 6, 1896, in a dying condition said to be caused by swallowing poison. Constable Archie Sloan investigated and told of prussic acid purchases in Gravenhurst the same day. The jury retired for an hour and evidently found the chain of evidence about as strong and complete as circumstantial evidence could make a case. They returned to the courtroom, bringing in a verdict of guilty.
Chief Justice Meredith, seizing the opportunity, delivered a tongue-lashing to William Hammond while sending a moral message to the general public. In pronouncing, yet again, the sentence of death on Hammond, Meredith stated: “For your poor and aged father there is profound sympathy: had you been as faithful to your wife as he has been to you, the death and misery you have caused would not have taken place and you would not be standing where you are, a convicted murderer.”
Because Bracebridge’s jail was notorious for the ease prisoners had in escaping it, Hammond was imprisoned in the Simcoe County Gaol at Barrie until September 8, when he was delivered back to Bracebridge, securely shackled. Ontario’s official executioner came to town as well, and began building a scaffold in the yard of the Muskoka District Gaol on Dominion Street. The sound and sight of its construction attracted onlookers. Drama in the community mounted. Hammond himself could hear the sawing and hammering as his gallows took shape in the days before he was to die.
On the appointed day, as the eerie grey light of dawn broke over the staged spectacle, the town bell began to toll. Its hollow tone echoed ominously across the small community’s rooftops, the mood of solemn expectation thickening. In a further theatrical flourish, a black flag was run up the pole at the town hall, adjacent to the gallows, heightening the bleak moment’s macabre drama.
Up the fresh wooden steps to the hangman’s platform climbed young William Hammond. Townspeople had risen early to witness the spectacle as best they could through or over the walled-off jail yard. Performing their grim roles behind the whitewashed wooden fence were the sheriff, constables, a clergyman, and the hangman. The assembly looked on in stony silence. The convicted murderer was directed to stand on the hinged trap door. The coarse rope noose was secured around his neck. The door beneath his feet was released. The rope snapped taught as he plummeted down. The noose accomplished its crude purpose, ending William Hammond’s life early that September morning.
Public executions continued into the 1890s because conventional wisdom held that the value of such an exercise, to be a truly instructive lesson, demanded a strong closing scene, like a mutinous shipmate being flogged on deck or keelhauled in the forced presence of the crew. Public execution was believed to deliver an educational punch for the populace by being both enthralling and revolting. Hammond’s 1898 hanging took place behind a high wooden fence and out of direct sight for many people, but the event remained the talk of the town for years to come. Crime did not pay. The bleak finality of Hammond’s quest for cash and his execution set a mood that reached everywhere crimes were being tried and punished in Bracebridge, including Magistrate’s Court.
To the chagrin of public authorities, however, not every crime resulted in a criminal being brought to justice, rather counteracting the moral impact of Hammond’s ghoulish execution. Muskoka’s share of mysterious murders and unsolved thefts included, for instance, the infamous Bracebridge bank robbery of 1897.
Begun in the early 1880s, Alfred Hunt’s private bank in Bracebridge, prominent in a redbrick building on the main street of town, was the very first bank to operate in Muskoka. It provided excellent service and valued convenience to its customers, who no longer had to bank at distant centres. On Thursday morning, May 27, bank clerk T.H. Pringle arrived at his usual hour to open up, only to be greeted by the strong odour of gunpowder. He was astounded to discover the building had been entered during the night. Making his way directly to the vault, he found a hole had been drilled through the door and the combination lock blown off.
As the twentieth century arrived, Muskoka District’s prestigious new Court House opened at the corner of Dominion and Ontario streets in Bracebridge, just as James Boyer retired after a quarter-century as district magistrate. His successors would hold court here.
Across town, Thomas Magee, who had earlier reported to police several tools missing from his blacksmithy and wagon shop, soon learned that his brace, sledgehammer, and crowbar were now at Hunt’s Bank, being held as exhibits for a trial if a culprit could be apprehended. Although his tools were in the bank, gone missing from it were some one thousand dollars in cash, several gold watches, some notes of exchange, Mickle Lumber Company orders, and nine thousand dollars in the town’s most recent waterworks debentures, issued to Richard Lance of Beatrice, who had left them with Mr. Hunt for safekeeping. Magee got his tools back, in time, but no one was ever brought to justice for this well-planned robbery. The lesson from that one, to those who sought to believe it, was that crime did pay
Within the year the Hunt Bank closed. Its crash shook Bracebridge and the large surrounding area of Muskoka. The bank’s collapse wiped out Alfred Hunt’s own extensive fortune, but the depositors at his bank received the return of nearly all their money. Hunt, whom townspeople had earlier elected mayor in the mid-1890s, continued to be held in high local esteem. “The bank should not have busted,” asserted the bank’s solicitor, Arthur A. Mahaffy, who believed the Hunt Bank to still be fundamentally sound. But Alfred Hunt, focused on the bank’s sizeable problems rather than its basic soundness, and still shaken by the bank robbery the year before, persisted in assigning his assets for the benefit of the bank’s creditors. That was the end of independent local banking in Muskoka. The national banks promptly moved in.
These three cases and many other higher court proceedings in Bracebridge added to the local judicial culture of the 1890s, theatre that was rounded out by the all-too-human vignettes unfolding, at the same time, on the stage of Magistrate’s Court.
Chapter Four
The Constabulary: Producers of Police Court Drama
Without Police Chief Robert Armstrong and other law officers apprehending miscreants and hauling them into court, James Boyer and his fellow justices of the peace would have been much freer to engage in the other pursuits by which they earned their livelihoods. Yet constables were resolutely on duty, maintaining the peace and enforcing the law in and around Bracebridge, essential cast members in the town’s dramas of justice, their pivotal role in the process contributing the popular term police court to the place where justices of the peace presided.
In establishing the rule of law and producing the raw material for more trials, they