Maritime Murder (4 page)

Minnie McGee
St. Mary's Road, Prince Edward Island
1912

Minnie McGee

Put matches in tea

And poisoned all of her family

Now she's in the penitentiary

One, two, three!

—
pei
children's skipping rhyme

A
ppearances can often be deceiving. Nearly everyone who lived on St. Mary's Road, eight kilometres north of Murray River, would have sworn on a church full of Bibles that Minnie McGee was a totally devoted mother to her eight wonderful children. “She watches those children like a nesting hawk,” one neighbour swore. “She never takes her eyes off of them.”

Minnie's father, Thomas Cassidy, a local mailman and part-time constable, would have completely agreed with that verdict. As a child, Minnie had cheerfully raised an entire houseful of younger brothers and sisters, after her mother had mysteriously passed away following a long battle with a fever.

“My little Minnie never complained,” her father said. “She was a regular saint.”

Saint Minnie. Now there was a name to conjure with.

It was true that Minnie didn't complain as she took care of her brothers and sisters. She didn't complain when her father met and married another woman. And she didn't complain when she met and married Patrick McGee. She was twenty-one years old and Patrick was twenty-five. He really didn't seem to have much of a future, but he loved Minnie and treated her as best as he could manage.

Oh sure, she was a little odd at times. There was no denying how fascinated she was with fire, but all that talk of her burning down a boat shed and a haystack and a henhouse was nothing but idle gossip. Wasn't it?

After all, Minnie was a dutiful wife and a natural mother who promptly gave birth to nine children—although one of the children died a few days after birth, which left her with eight. Now, eight children was still a very
large family, even for that day and age. However, none of these children would live
to see adulthood.

In late January
1912,
an epidemic of whooping cough ravaged the St. Mary's Road area. Two of Minnie's children, the two youngest, died in a fevered paroxysm of agonizing, uncontrollable coughing. After Minnie watched her two youngest children being buried, she began to look at her husband, Patrick, with a strange and sad expression on her face.

“They're better off now, aren't they?” she said. Something had definitely changed.

After their deaths, Minnie grew increasingly anti-social. She stayed in her house for days on end. Even when she did go out, it was only into the yard. She would not venture into the town at all. She brooded for hours on end over the slightest little problem, only to lash out in fits of uncontrollable rage.

“I remember being surprised when she tore a page out of a perfectly good book to scribble a note on,” Patrick would later testify. “When I mentioned it to her, she flew into a fit of anger and tore the entire book to shreds before my eyes.”

That was Minnie's way. She would never actually hit anyone. She would take her anger out on an inanimate object—a mug, or a picture frame, or a mop. She would throw or kick or smash anything that got in her way. Kitchen utensils were often found broken, snapped, or useless in the McGee household.

The tantrums sure didn't help the household budget. Patrick worked just as hard as he could, but the only work he could find was often far away. He laboured as a factory hand or on fishing boats or as a field hand, only returning home occasionally to give Minnie a bit more money. Eventually, Patrick decided that it would be best if he stayed away from home permanently. The word “divorce” was never mentioned, but it was understood that Minnie and her six
remaining children were on their own.

Times were very hard. There was never enough money and Minnie's anger didn't help one bit, but whenever the subject was raised it was just as quickly dismissed. She was a mother who had lost her two youngest children. Of course it would take her time to work her anger out.

Minnie's father, perhaps knowing her better, was not so sure about that. “There's something not quite right about Minnie,” Thomas would tell anyone who listened. “She gets her temper from her mother.” He spoke often of the possibility of committing his daughter Minnie
to an insane asylum, but as far as most people saw it these tantrums were quite understandable. Small towns are like that, I guess. People will cut you an awful lot of slack just so long as you live there.

However, small town or not, that perception drastically changed when five of Minnie's six remaining children turned up stone cold dead.

It was Thursday, April
11
,
1912
. Minnie and five of her children—thirteen-year-old Louis, twelve-year-old Penzie, eight-year-old George, six-year-old Bridget, and five-year-old Thomas—sat down to a splendid feast of herring, cornmeal bread, and sweet tea. The only child missing was young
Johnny, who was spending the night at his uncle's farmhouse.

“Johnny
should be here,” Minnie kept saying, over and over. “It isn't right that he is missing out on all of this.”

Shortly after supper, all five children became violently ill. They were suffering from pounding headaches and near-crippling stomach cramps, and were vomiting profusely. Minnie placed cold compresses upon their foreheads and sent them to bed. In the morning she called for the doctor, but by the time Dr. Roy Fraser of St. Mary's Road arrived on the next day, three of the children were dead. By the time that Friday, April
12,
was over, the other two had passed away as well.

That night, Patrick McGee rushed home to his family. Provincial Health Officer Dr. W. J. MacMillan arrived later that night to witness the horrifying tableau of five dead children laid out with neat, almost military precision, side by side in Minnie's parlour.

It did not take long for MacMillan and Fraser to decide that the cause of death was poisoning. At first they blamed it on the herring, because the symptoms described matched those of ptomaine poisoning. However, following a more careful investigation and autopsy that Saturday, it was determined that the five children had perished from something far more sinister than a pot of bad fish. Phosphorous poisoning—a condition usually found in long-time match-factory workers—was determined the most likely cause of death.

“You know children,” Minnie first argued. “They'll chew on anything they get their hands on. It wouldn't surprise me none to find out that the whole lot of them have all been chewing on matches.” Next, she blamed the candy they ate. “Or maybe it was that fish. It smelled awfully funny,” she claimed.

Local police constable Thomas McCarron was certain that Minnie was a murderess. There were far too many inconsistencies and contradictions in her testimony for his liking.

However,
Dr. Roy Fraser felt any inconsistencies could be blamed on the stress of a mother having to face such a tragedy. Basically, the doctor could not believe that the children's deaths had been anything more than a tragic accident. Perhaps a box of matches had accidentally been dropped into the cooking pot.

McCarron was not convinced. “I did not like the way that Minnie kept looking balefully at her surviving son, Johnny, as if he had done something wrong,” McCarron later testified. “I knew then that she had killed her children, and I knew that she was going to kill Johnny next.”

Unfortunately, it was not McCarron's decision to make. No murder could be proven, and upon the testimony of Dr. Fraser, the authorities decided to set Minnie free.

Dr. MacMillan had certain vital organs removed from the children's bodies and sent to Montreal as a precaution. It was also decided that the two children who had died of whooping cough should be exhumed and examined.

McCarron went to Johnny's uncle Ambroise Cassidy, Minnie's brother. He told him of his fears and begged that Johnny should be released into McCarron's protective care. Ambroise listened to McCarron's plea, but in the end he would not go against his sister's decision.

On Saturday morning, April
13
,
Minnie picked up young Johnny McGee from his uncle's farmhouse. Johnny's uncle argued that he would be more than happy to keep care of him, but Minnie would not be denied.

“The boy needs to be home for the funeral,” she declared. “It's a mother's right to want that for her child.” No one would argue with her.

The five children were buried on Sunday
,
April
14
. On Monday morning, April
15
, Patrick McGee returned to his latest job at a lobster processing plant in Sturgeon. “It was Minnie's idea,” Patrick explained. “She was always the boss. She said we needed the money, what with the funeral expenses and everything. She said go, so I went.”

That left ten-year-old Johnny McGee at home alone with his mother who promptly—that Tuesday morning—sent him to the store with a penny to buy another box of matches. By Thursday morning, little Johnny McGee was gravely ill.

Meanwhile, Constable McCarron continued his investigation. He still wasn't convinced of Minnie's innocence.

The truth came out when the clerks at the two local general stores testified that Minnie had been regularly purchasing an inordinate supply of wooden matches. When authorities looked into, it they discovered that Minnie had spent twenty-one cents during the week of April
11
,
1912
, and had purchased a total of twenty-one one-gross boxes of matches—over three thousand wooden matches. Twenty-one cents was a lot of money for a poor, working class family to spend back in
1912
.

Based on Constable McCarron's findings the attorney general ordered
young Johnny's
removal from his home on Thursday evening, but by then Johnny
was already dying from a dose of the same bitter poison that had stolen the life from his brothers and sisters. Dr. Fraser attended to the boy at Minnie's house, unaware of Constable McCarron's new evidence against Minnie.

“Your boy is in great agony,” Dr. Fraser told Minnie.
“He must be given nothing to eat or drink until his condition improves.” Moments later, Fraser caught Minnie feeding Johnny a drink of warm, sweet milk.

“He's thirsty,” she argued. “A mother needs to feed her children.”

By now, Fraser had begun to wonder if McCarron's earlier
suspicions had been true. In spite of Minnie's protests, Dr. Fraser gently wrapped Johnny in a blanket and took him by wagon to Johnny's Grandmother Cassidy's home for safekeeping, but it was too late. By two o'clock that afternoon Johnny had slipped into a coma. He died on the evening of Friday, April
19
.

On April
23,
toxicological studies in Montreal revealed that Johnny McGee had died from the very same poison that had taken the lives of his five brothers and sisters. It was also proven that the initial deaths of Minnie's youngest two children had indeed been whooping cough.

On April
26
, Constable Thomas McCarron placed Minnie McGee under arrest, under the suspicion of having deliberately poisoned six of her children. She did not resist arrest, but continued to maintain her innocence in the matter. She took to life in a jail cell only asking for a set of curtains to be installed upon her cell window.

On Tuesday, July
16
,
1912
, Minnie McGee was formally indicted and brought to trial by the grand jury. Finally, she would stand trial in the courthouse of Georgetown,
pei
, for the murder of young Johnny McGee.

Proceedings began when a court-appointed lawyer, A. J. Fraser of Souris,
pei
, pleaded Minnie not guilty before Justice R. R. Fitzgerald. Following Fraser's statement, the crown prosecutor, J. A. Mathieson, raised the question of Minnie's possible insanity.

“While the Crown will make no move to prove or disprove this issue,” Mathieson stated, “the jurors should definitely keep this distinct possibility, of finding the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity, firmly in mind.”

Later that morning, Minnie took the stand. She appeared calm and lucid. She explained, at great length and in minute detail, how the entire affair had been nothing more than the result of a series of unplanned accidents and coincidences. She alternately laid the blame on bad candy, bad fish, and a bad batch of oatmeal.

“And what about the matches?” Crown Prosecutor Mathieson asked.

“Visitors took them,” Minnie blurted. “Everyone who visited used my matches to light their cigars and their candles with. Some of them even stole my matches. I know that they did. Don't try and tell me they didn't do it.”