Seale received twenty-two pints of blood throughout the night, but his kidneys failed and he was placed on life support. Doctors operated twice, but at about 8:00 p.m. on May 29, 1971, less than twenty-four hours after being stabbed, Seale died without regaining consciousness. Although it was the hospital’s policy to notify the medical examiner when a patient died within twenty-four hours of surgery, surgeon Dr. Mahomad Naqvi, who operated on Seale, didn’t remember having done so. No autopsy was performed on Seale’s body to gather evidence for the police investigation.
It was Sydney’s first murder in five years, and the force’s police officers had little training in conducting investigations of this nature. Constable John Mullowney was dispatched to the park the morning after the stabbing to search for clues, but the crime scene hadn’t been secured nor photographed, and Mullowney didn’t have any training in handling evidence. He found a bloody Kleenex and turned it over to MacDonald without protecting it from contamination. Although the Sydney Police sometimes used the RCMP’s expertise with investigations, this time they rejected the help. They didn’t ask RCMP identification specialist John Ryan to photograph the park and the scene of the murder until more than two months later.
Sergeant of Detectives John MacIntyre took over the investigation the morning after the stabbing. Marshall spent much of that weekend at the police station in case officers had questions about the stabbing, but he wasn’t asked to give a formal statement until Sunday May 30, 1971. At 4:50 p.m., Marshall spoke to MacIntyre for twenty-two minutes during which he recounted meeting Seale in the park, then standing and talking on a footbridge for a few minutes before two men called them over to Crescent Street asking for cigarettes. The men said they were priests from Manitoba. Marshall said the older man was short, stocky, grey-haired, wore glasses, was dressed in a long blue coat, and was about fifty years old. He said he didn’t like “Indians” or “Negroes” when he stabbed Seale and slashed Marshall’s left arm. The younger one was tall, had black hair, and wore a blue V-neck sweater. The only information police had was what Marshall himself had told them. Sergeant-Detective Michael MacDonald gave MacIntyre the description, but he didn’t attempt to find the men.
MacIntyre had no evidence, hadn’t searched Marshall’s home for a murder weapon, nor had he taken any formal statements from witnesses. Yet he decided within hours of taking over the investigation on May 29, 1971, that Marshall had stabbed Seale during an argument. He discussed the case with the RCMP during a meeting at the Sydney Police station. He believed the cut on Marshall’s arm was self-inflicted because it didn’t line up with the tears in the yellow jacket he was wearing. Then he interviewed teenagers John Pratico, sixteen, Chant, fifteen, and Patricia Harriss, fourteen. The information they provided didn’t support his theory. He interrogated them until they provided statements incriminating Marshall.
Pratico had consumed twelve to sixteen beers, and about one-and-three-quarter litres of wine before, during, and after the dance at the church hall the night of the stabbing. He first heard about the incident when it was mentioned on the radio the next morning. He learned more details when Marshall happened to walk by his house later that day. Another boy told police that Pratico had information about the stabbing. During questioning on Sunday, May 30, Pratico told MacIntyre that he knew nothing about the stabbing. But he sensed that the burly, intimidating, six-foot MacIntyre didn’t believe him. It was standard police practice to have a parent present during questioning, but MacIntyre spoke to Pratico alone.
A week later, on June 4, feeling pressure from MacIntyre, the sixteen-year-old gave a different statement. MacIntyre told him he could go to jail if he didn’t tell the truth. Pratico then told MacIntyre that he was sitting behind some bushes in Wentworth Park drinking more beer when he saw Marshall and Seale argue. Then Marshall took out “a shiny object” and stabbed Seale. Pratico, a jumpy, nervous teenager, had been under psychiatric care since August 1970. In 1982, Dr. M. A. Mian, medical director of the Cape Breton Hospital, would say in a sworn affidavit that Pratico suffered “from a schizophreniform illness manifested by a liability to fantasize and thereby distort reality” and a “rather childish desire to be in the limelight.”[1]
On May 30, 1971, detectives MacIntyre and William Urquhart interviewed Chant. In his first statement to police, Chant said that he was walking through the park on his way home when he ran into Marshall. He said Junior told him there had been a stabbing and asked for help. The two detectives interviewed Chant again on June 4. As the interrogation progressed, police told his mother, Beudah Chant, that her son would talk more openly if she weren’t present. She agreed to leave the room. The burly MacIntyre reminded Chant that he was on probation and that he could be sent to jail if he didn’t tell the truth. The police were convinced that he had seen more than he was telling. As Chant sat alone, MacIntyre accused him of lying in his previous statement and said he could be jailed for up to five years for lying. He was told that another witness had placed him near the scene of the stabbing. That witness was John Pratico. As with Chant, he wasn’t even in the park when Seale was stabbed. A frightened Chant just wanted to get out of the room. He decided to tell police what they wanted to hear so that he could get the interrogation over with. The fifteen-year-old signed a five-page statement in which he claimed to have witnessed Marshall stab Seale. The police brought him to Wentworth Park, where they helped him fill in the details of his testimony. “I didn’t feel I was being told what to do, but suggestions were offered, such as ‘Could you have been standing here, you could have seen it more clearly,’” he later said.[2]
Detective MacDonald had interviewed fourteen-year-old Patricia Harriss twice and her story was consistent. She corroborated Marshall’s story again when she gave detective Urquhart a statement at 8:15 p.m. on June 17. She said that she and her boyfriend were on their way back from the dance at St. Joseph’s when they saw Marshall talking to two men before the stabbing. Seale wasn’t with them. She gave a description of Ebsary that matched the one Marshall had given police earlier. Harriss wasn’t the only one to see Ebsary and his companion in the park the night Seale was stabbed. Teenagers George and Roderick McNeil went to the police station the next day. They said they were on their way back from the dance when they saw the two men ask a young couple for a cigarette. Sydney Police was given a detailed description.
Harriss didn’t have a chance to sign her statement before MacIntyre entered the room and began interrogating her again. Her mother, Eunice, only spent about an hour of the interrogation with her daughter before MacIntyre asked to speak to her daughter alone because she might be more forthcoming. Police didn’t believe Patricia had seen Marshall with the two men. Whenever she mentioned them, police crumpled up her statement and made her start over. She broke down and cried, but finally gave in. After five hours of questioning, she just wanted to leave. In her second statement, at 1:20 a.m. the next morning, she said she had seen Marshall and Seale together. But when she left the police station she was upset that police had told her what to say in her statement. As she later recalled in an affidavit to the RCMP in December 1982, “I found they (MacIntyre and Urquhart) were needlessly harping at me, going over and over telling me what they thought I should see … They took statements and changed them … My parents were not allowed in …”[3]
Once the police had statements from Chant and Pratico, they moved in to arrest Marshall on June 4, 1971. The Marshalls had received threatening phone calls after the fatal stabbing, so they had packed up their family and gone to his maternal grandfather’s home on the Whycocomagh reserve. The police drove to his grandparents’ house that evening and picked him up. As they took him back to Sydney, they said they had two eyewitnesses who said they saw him kill Seale. Marshall couldn’t believe his ears. He was placed in a cell at the Cape Breton County Jail.
MacIntyre believed that the gash on Marshall’s wound was self-inflicted. Once Marshall was behind bars, he wanted to get a sample of Marshall’s blood to strengthen his case. MacIntyre had the jackets Seale and Marshall had worn that fateful night, but there wasn’t enough blood on Marshall’s jacket to get a sample. MacIntyre asked a doctor at the Sydney hospital to take a sample while removing Marshall’s stitches. But Marshall had removed the ten or twelve stitches