Patrick Whelan was the second-last individual in Canada to be officially executed in a public space. Later in 1869, the year Whelan was hanged, Sir John A. Macdonald signed a bill in an attempt to ensure that, beginning the following year, hangings would take place either out of the public’s view or with restrictions on the number of onlookers allowed to attend.
Chapter 4
Crowd Control
H ow would you feel if you went to all the trouble of organizing a hanging and no one came? If you were John Macdonald, sheriff of Huron County, Ontario, on December 7, 1869, you would be exceptionally relieved. Macdonald surreptitiously changed the time of the hanging at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich to 8:45 a.m., hours earlier than scheduled, to keep the crowds away. Imagine his shock when, in spite of the early start, around three hundred people still showed up. The execution was mercifully quick and efficient, as noted by John Melady in his book Double Trap , and after thirty minutes the corpse was cut down, placed in a pine coffin, and taken to the train station. On the way, it passed thousands of people heading in the opposite direction, all hell-bent on watching the spectacle unfold later that morning.
The fact is, Sheriff Macdonald had every reason to be afraid, very afraid. The hangman was clearly nervous, too. He had blackened his face and hands to disguise himself, leading the Huron Expositor to describe him as “fiendish looking.” The case had ignited a fiery reaction in the community. Many felt that the prisoner, the only person convicted for the crime, had been betrayed by his associates and entrapped by a police informant. In addition, out-of-control mobs at public executions were a fearsome reality. Both the sheriff and the executioner might well have read, or heard, of the shenanigans at the execution of Edgar Harter exactly nine years previously in not-too-distant Brockville, Ontario. As the Brockville Monitor reported:
Wet and exceedingly unpleasant as the day was, it did not prevent crowds of morbid sightseers thronging from all quarters into Brockville to see the execution … until at length some four thousand strangers swarmed along the streets.… Hard-looking men, and brazen-looking women, and blackguard boys might be encountered at every point. As the necessary sequence of such an assemblage there were laughing and shouting, and snowballing, and ribaldry prevailing, with some fighting and drunkenness, leading one to question very seriously the propriety of public executions, which usually draw such indecent mobs together.
Fortunately for Sheriff Macdonald and his henchman, the disappointment of the hordes when they realized they had been duped did not explode into violence as it could so easily have done.
It must be said, though, that when it came to crowd misbehaviour, Canada couldn’t hope to compete with the Brits. A case in point was the execution of husband-and-wife murderers Frederick and Marie Manning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in London, England, in 1849. According to a horrified Charles Dickens in a letter to The Times , “thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment.”
The man hanged at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich that harsh December morning in 1869 was Nicholas Melady Jr., convicted of brutally murdering his father, Nicholas Sr., also known as Old Melady, on June 6, 1868. Also murdered that day was Melady Jr.’s pregnant stepmother, Ellen. The Huron Signal described a neighbour’s visit to the Melady farmhouse just outside Seaforth the following morning, where “a most shocking sight met his horrified gaze. At the bedroom door lay Mr. Mellady [sic ] shot through the head, and at the bedside was stretched the lifeless corpse of his wife, her skull split open and her body otherwise horribly mutilated.… The walls and floors of the rooms were literally covered with the gore of the victims.”
The case was dreadful in the extreme. Old Melady was a wealthy farmer generally reviled in the area for his hard drinking and foul temper. He was particularly hated by his six children, especially since he frequently threatened to disinherit them, promising to leave his fortune to his second wife and their unborn baby. The whole family seemed to have been involved in a conspiracy to kill the old man, but Nicholas Jr. went to the gallows alone.
“Cherchez la femme,” the old saying goes, and there certainly was a woman in this case: Jenny Smith (real name Janet Cooke), a beautiful, young police informer planted in the prison where Melady Jr. was being held. In cahoots with veteran police detective William Smith, Jenny posed as a prisoner with the aim of insinuating herself into Melady’s affections and possibly wresting a confession from him. She communicated with Melady through his cell window, which overlooked the women’s exercise yard. He fell in love with her and was shattered when she gave evidence against him at his trial. He was found “guilty as charged” and sentenced to death.
As described by author John Melady (yes, he is family — he claims Nicholas Jr. as his cousin), the scaffold was built atop the east wall of the jail, with the stairs inside the wall and the trap on the outside. So Melady dropped to his death on the same side of the wall as the curious onlookers gathered below.
That made it, technically, the last hanging in a public place in Canada. In 1869, An Act respecting Procedure in Criminal Cases, and other matters relating to Criminal Law, 1869, introduced some important changes. Section 109 of this piece of legislation, which was based almost word for word on a similar British law passed in 1868, provided that “judgment of death to be executed on any prisoner after the coming into force of this Act, shall be carried into effect within the walls of the prison in which the offender is confined at the time of execution.” Additionally, at the beginning of 1870, an Order-in-Council containing a series of rules and regulations written by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, in his capacity as minister of justice, attempted to impose uniformity in how executions were carried out across Canada.
An Order-in-Council was issued on November 25, 1869, refusing a request to commute Nicholas Melady’s death sentence. Melady’s hanging on December 7 was the last one in a public place in Canada.
So public executions went private, hidden behind prison walls. The official act reflected the extreme discomfort felt by polite nineteenth-century Victorian society in the face of the violence, obscenity, callousness, and contempt shown by mobs at a hanging. But an uneasy tension remained: if you prevented the public from attending hangings because they behaved so badly, how could you make sure that executions would remain a powerful deterrent and that their retributive message — if you commit a crime, you will be punished — would endure in the public consciousness?
As Ken Leyton-Brown observes: “Means had to be found to enable the continuation of public involvement, in what was to be considered private execution.” The authorities tried to deal with this thorny problem by allowing representatives of the public to be present at executions — the sheriff who was handling the execution, the gaoler, doctors or surgeons, justices of the peace, prisoners’ relatives “or other persons as it seems to the Sheriff proper to admit within the prison for the purpose,” and, of course, ministers of religion. Also, the 1869 act provided for certain procedures to be followed after an execution: a doctor was to examine the body of the hanged person and sign a death certificate; the sheriff was to sign a declaration that the person had been executed; and a coroner’s inquest was to be held.
Other measures to advertise that an execution was taking place were specified in the rules and regulations. Rule 3, for example, provided for “a black flag to be hoisted at the moment of execution, upon a staff placed upon an elevated and conspicuous part of the prison, and to remain displayed for one hour.” So, on December 13, 1901, after Joseph Ernest Laplaine was executed in Montreal, Quebec, for the murder of his landlady Valérie Charbonneau, the Montreal Gazette reported