The Massey Murder by Charlotte Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

James’ Cathedral, bastion of elite Anglicanism), Colonel Grasett had fought alongside Denison against Fenian invaders in 1866 and had led operations against Chief Big Bear in the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. The chief constable believed in spit-and-polish discipline and parade ground drills, but he was not a dinosaur. Interested in progressive policing, he tried to keep abreast of modern policing trends.
    When Grasett had become chief constable in 1886, there were only 172 police officers in the city and the force’s toughest challenges were vagrancy, burglary, and fistfights. Now there were over six hundred police officers, the majority of them British (particularly Protestant Irish) immigrants, with a far greater range of rules to enforce. Not only were they dealing with street traffic, insurance frauds, and violent crimes, they were also responsible for regulating parades, processions, dance halls, gambling, liquor laws, censorship, Sabbath-breaking, the ages of newsboys, and any new forms of “immorality” that came to police attention. As reporter Harry M. Wodson observed, Toronto had become a city of “shall nots,” where it was more important for citizens to memorize six thousand bylaws than the Ten Commandments. In 1902, Chief Constable Grasett was elected vice-president of the Police Chiefs Association of the United States and Canada, in recognition of the growing muscle of the Toronto boys in blue. But police resources were stretched—by the city’s dramatic growth, by the loss of many constables to the army in 1914, and by the city fathers’ determination to impose their morality on the working classes.
    Grasett had replaced an informal “rogues’ gallery” of photographs of criminals with the Bertillon system after a visit to the state-of-the-art Chicago Police Department in 1897. But technological innovations like the telegraph and telephone cost money, and Toronto was slow to adopt them because City Council was not always sympathetic.Grasett finally managed to establish a motorcycle squad in 1911 to enforce the new fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit on city streets. (Riders often wore business suits so that speeders would not realize they were being monitored.) Nonetheless, in 1914 the Toronto force was still using horse-drawn police wagons: it was another three years before the department acquired motor cars. Although the Dominion Police, with its headquarters in Ottawa, abandoned Bertillonage soon after the turn of the century (partly because many of its technicians had dropped their calipers and joined the stampede to the Klondike goldfields in 1898–99), the Toronto Police Force continued to take Bertillon measurements until 1915, although they also began fingerprinting suspects in 1906.
    Carrie Davies’s Bertillon measurements would never be used, but the process was part of the intimidating ordeal of arrest. After she had been Bertillonaged, Carrie was escorted downstairs by Miss Minty, and then driven off in a police wagon to Toronto Jail, three and a half kilometres away on the other side of the Don River. There, she stepped out of the paddy wagon at the intersection of Gerrard Street and Broadview Avenue and looked up at the monstrous building in which she was to be incarcerated. Constructed of cold grey stone and black iron, with small barred windows set high in its walls, it was one of the largest jails in North America and often described as the “Riverdale Bastille.” Built half a century earlier to hold about three hundred prisoners, it had recently been condemned by the provincial inspector of prisons as “over-crowded, ill-ventilated and unsanitary, a fire-trap, and the worst jail on the continent of America.” Conditions for women were especially disgusting. The Toronto Star had recently revealed that a woman confined to the punishment cell there had killed seventy-three rats and thirteen mice. A group of women visitors had discovered that women inmates were not supplied with