But the coroner’s inquest into Ada’s death came to a different conclusion. The verdict was quite clear:
Ada Maria Mills died at Montreal on the thirteenth day of June nineteen hundred & one, from a gunshot wound apparently inflicted by Clifford Jocelyn Redpath [the order of his names is written incorrectly in the report], while unconscious of what he was doing and temporarily insane, owing to an epileptic attack from which he was suffering at the time.
Is this true? It’s time to turn to Jocelyn Clifford Redpath, Ada’s youngest son. Having recently graduated with a degree in law from McGill, Cliff was studying to take the bar exam that summer. The Montreal Daily Star described Cliff as popular with his fellow students, ambitious, and interested in canoeing and horseback riding, all the traits of a picture-perfect young man of wealth. But outward appearances can be deceiving. Did Cliff’s enviable exterior hide a distressing inner life?
Like his mother, Cliff was also said to have suffered from insomnia, according to the Montreal Daily Star. Dr. Roddick, the family’s physician, who was called to the house on the night of the murders, had a lot more to say about Cliff, claiming he was epileptic, suffered from a neurological condition, was studying overly hard for his upcoming exam, and was stressed about having to care for this mother. Though he didn’t for a moment suspect Cliff of violence, Dr. Roddick stated that, given his many burdens, he wasn’t surprised the young man lost his mind.
Once the coroner’s inquest declared Cliff to be the killer, the epilepsy explanation was printed in papers nationwide. As corroborated by a Dr. Rollo Campbell, who spotted foam in Cliff’s mouth (evidence of an epileptic fit), this easy, tied-with-a-bow solution to the puzzling deaths seemed to satisfy some. In this version of the night, Cliff lost control during an epileptic seizure and shot both his mother and himself, though it’s never quite clear if one — or both — of the shots was accidental.
Looking at this explanation today, some glaring issues become apparent. To begin with, epileptics are no longer assumed to be insane, and an epileptic seizure would never hold up in court as a reason for murder. Insomnia isn’t known to drive anyone to murder either, though it’s widely noted that both Ada and Cliff suffered from the affliction, as though this is somehow a motive. Studying too much is also a flimsy excuse for homicide.
Of course, Cliff might have accidentally shot a gun while having a seizure, but that doesn’t explain what he was doing holding the gun to begin with. However, the press was keen to solve this mystery. Both the Grandview Exponent and the Quebec Daily Mercury reported that Cliff had been drinking on the day of the murders and that during a quarrel with his mother he shot both her and himself. La Presse insisted Cliff was deeply depressed. Cliff’s brother Peter, whose story seemed to change drastically each time he was interviewed, eventually claimed that his brother was homosexual and he’d told his mother for the first time that day. This led to their argument and the subsequent shooting.
But each of these stories has its holes. In a contemporary article about the murders, Jeannette Novakovich claims Cliff’s bar exam date was only a month away, and he’d already paid the fee, evidence that she believes shows he wasn’t depressed or suicidal as other sources claim. There are no other reports of Cliff being gay. And returning to the epilepsy explanation, Novakovich points out that Cliff is never once stated to suffer from the condition in the many Redpath family diaries, not even once.
Mother kills son and then herself, or son kills mother and then himself. Neither explanation is particularly convincing, and so many questions remain, the main one being why? With that question in mind, we must turn at last to the strange events that took place after the bodies were discovered.
To begin with, no one called the police. The Calgary Herald reports that the police only heard of the murders by accident. The coroner’s inquest states that three doctors were called instead. They confirmed Ada’s death and came forth with the suspicion of an epileptic fit. Another strange thing to note is the extreme swiftness of the inquest and the burials, both of which were complete by June 15, just two days after the murders. There is little to no evidence that any investigation into the murders was conducted by the police beyond that day.
Novakovich explains that the Victorian obsession with keeping up appearances and sweeping unpleasantness under the rug could explain why the deaths were dealt with so quickly and hardly spoken of thereafter. If she’s right, the Redpath murders could be a simple case of accidental death that nobody wanted to talk about, a mystery that lived on mainly due to our overactive imaginations. Or maybe not.
Maybe the Redpaths had a killer in their midst, and didn’t want anyone to find out. Maybe Ada wasn’t an invalid but was hidden away due to her alarming tendency to pull out a revolver without warning and shoot off a couple of rounds. Maybe Cliff really was an angry drunk set on killing his mother. Or maybe the murderer was someone else entirely. After all, there was an entire mansion full of rooms to hide in that night, rooms that, it seems, nobody searched. Rooms the Redpath mansion murderer might have retreated into, slipping deep into the shadows and out of sight forever.
The Heroic Death of John Easton Mills
The Wellington Basin
Although it isn’t widely known, John Easton Mills, who served as mayor of Montreal from 1846 to 1847 — for less than a year — has a ghostly connection. He was sworn in as mayor in December 1846 and had barely settled into his office when he was faced with a major crisis. In the spring of 1847, the Irish potato famine caused thousands of Irish immigrants to flee to North America. Many ended up in Montreal, and before the year was out, 6,000 Irish, weak from hunger and disease-ridden, would die on the shores of the city. Many local inhabitants, including the new mayor, died too, victims of the diseases brought by the newcomers. The death toll was enormous, so it’s hardly surprising that there are a lot of ghosts from those days.
The Irish potato famine, also called the Great Famine, was caused by a potato blight that was felt all over Europe. Over three million Irish people were entirely dependent on the potato for food, so when at least one-third of the potato crop in the country was lost to blight in 1845 it was a disaster. In 1846 three-quarters of the crop was lost. The people were starving. One million Irish people would die over the course of the famine, which lasted from 1845 to 1849. During that same time, a million Irish chose to emigrate to save themselves. The destination for one hundred thousand of those immigrants? Canada.
In her Montreal Gazette article “Montreal, Refugees and the Irish Famine of 1847,” Marian Scott states that of those one hundred thousand, seventy thousand Irish immigrants arrived in Montreal, which had a population of only fifty thousand at the time. They made the three-month journey to the New World on ships that were used to carry lumber to Europe. Normally the ships were weighed down with rocks for the journey home to make up for the weight of the wood, but as so many people were desperate to make the journey, human beings were used to fill the ships instead. These ships weren’t meant to transport people, and conditions on board were horrific. The boats were crowded and violence abounded. There was no system to get rid of human waste. Disease was everywhere, especially typhus, which was spread by lice. Death by typhus is hardly pleasant; symptoms including shivering, aches, bloating of the face, muscular twitching, delirium, a darkening of the skin, and a rapidly spreading rash. The bodies of those who died during the journey, which numbered in the thousands, were simply thrown overboard.
When these “coffin ships” arrived in the Wellington Basin, Montrealers were aghast. A great number of the travellers died right there on the wharfs. A medical superintendent of the time said that the odour wafting from the immigrant ships was like the stink of a dunghill.
The influx of the sick onto the island horrified the population, who were terrified that typhus would spread across the city. Their fears weren’t baseless — the mortality rate for untreated typhus is up to 60 percent. As a result, the immigrants