Maritime Murder (9 page)

“Angèle Poulin is nothing more than a poor, half-witted woman,” Weldon decided. “Perhaps I might reconsider my original sentence.”

On June
29
,
1885
, Angèle Poulin was pardoned into the care of one of her married daughters. She lived quietly for many years before passing away one cold winter night, clutching a crucifix tightly to her chest.

George Dowey
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
1868

T
he hanging of George Dowey was the last public hanging in Prince Edward Island, although it was not originally intended to be so. Sometimes life—and death—can surprise you greatly.

In the year
1868
, Charlottetown was one of the busiest harbours on this side of the Atlantic, which made the bustling little Prince Edward Island seaport a natural breeding ground for prostitution, gambling, alcoholism, and sudden bouts of unexpected violence.

George Dowey was a natural-born sailor with a serious, diehard addiction to the fairer sex. “I likes them,” he would admit to any who asked him. “Blondes, brunettes, redheads—they're the best thing the Creator ever thought up, and I prays to them and I praises them any chance I can get.”

Dowey was born in Montreal, but he claimed to have raised himself on voyages from the port of New Orleans to Boston, London, and as far as the Black Sea. He was a man at home upon the water, and he valued the land as nothing more than a place to spend his earnings.

Being what he considered a “practical thinking man,” he kept acquaintance with women in all of his many ports, including a wife in Dublin, Ireland, and a steady Canadian girlfriend who was known as Flora MacQuarrie and lived her days in Charlottetown,
pei
. Oddly enough, that quiet bit of marital indiscretion would sadly prove to be the downfall of George Dowey.

The night of November
26
,
1868
, found George Dowey in Flora MacQuarrie's company. They had been drinking gin all night long; the alcohol was burning in their systems, and the “gin sweats” and the heat of the closed room had driven them out to the street to cool off in the evening breeze.

George was leaning on and pumping the heavy iron pump outside the jailhouse on Pownal Square (now known as Connaught Square) so that Flora might refresh herself with a splash of cold well water, when John Cullen stepped out into the street and boldly approached the two.

John Cullen was a sailor out of Liverpool, England, and was as much an admirer of women as George Dowey professed to be. Cullen had already approached Flora several times throughout the run of the evening with lewd suggestions that the two of them might ditch George and run off together for a mutual bedroom frolic.

Being that Flora was as much a “worldly spirit” as either John Cullen or George Dowey, this suggestion was not as outlandish as it might sound. Indeed, she had spent a lot of indiscrete and intimate moments with the good Mr. Cullen while Dowey was safely away to sea. But tonight she was with George Dowey, and she did not take kindly to John Cullen's continued insistence that she had somehow chosen the wrong man to partner with that night.

“There's nothing wrong with my eyes,” Flora said, “and I'm resting them on George Dowey tonight.”

“You can just wait your turn,” Dowey jeered. “And you might want to find yourself a comfortable spot to wait in. Somewhere far away from here.”

George Dowey took umbrage to Cullen's persistent advances, and John Cullen, for his part, took deep umbrage to Flora's reluctance to join him that evening—which is a fancy way of telling you that John Cullen took a wild, bare-knuckled swing at Dowey's chin. George Dowey, in turn, pulled a long fishing knife from the beaded leather sheath dangling at his belt, and drove that well-honed knife blade deep into John Cullen's heart.

In the crowded streets of Charlottetown, directly outside the jailhouse, it did not take much time for the long arm of the law to arrive.

“Is he dead?” Flora asked.

“I think he is,” Dowey replied, drawing the knife from out of Cullen's chest. “For the knife went into him up to the handle.” Dowey calmly wiped the blood off the knife blade before handing the weapon, hilt first, over to the Charlottetown police officer.

“I'm done with this for now,” he told the officer. “I'll have it back when the court has its say.” It turns out George Dowey would have himself an awfully long wait in the Charlottetown jail.

In March of the next year, George Dowey was brought to trial. Solicitor General Edward Palmer, Dowey's lawyer, believed that he could get the murder charge knocked down to manslaughter, based on the fact that Cullen had made the first hostile move. This would still earn Dowey some time in jail, but it would definitely remove the possibility of an execution.

However, the tactic backfired. The delay allowed time for Flora to discover the truth about Dowey's wife and children living in Dublin. Flora did not take kindly to Dowey concealing this small bit of information from her while he was courting her. Worldly woman or not, her heart was hurt at the notion that she wasn't George's only love.

“I should have been very sorry indeed to keep his company if I had known that George Dowey was a married man,” Flora testified in court. “The dog should have told me he was in the first place.”

“I thought you loved me,” Dowey shouted from his seat. “You told me you did when you came to visit me in the jailhouse.”

“I only told you that to shut you up from your constant crying and going on,” Flora retorted. “Love doesn't have a single thing to do with the way I feel about you right now.”

She further went on to testify that Dowey had instructed her to conceal the facts of the murder from the judge and jury. “But I will do nothing of the kind,” Flora swore. “The truth is, George Dowey started carrying that fishing knife two weeks before he used it on John Cullen.”

“And why did he begin carrying a knife at that time?” the prosecutor asked.

“He was manhandled by a drunk nearly half his size,” Flora said. “The great milksop. So he started carrying that knife, and he told me that the very first man who stepped in his way was going to get the business end of it, right sharp and sudden-like.”

“And did the victim, John Cullen, provoke the defendant in any way?”

“Provoke?” Flora laughed bitterly. “All that John Cullen did was tip his hat my way and that rogue and scoundrel George Dowey stuck his knife into John Cullen's heart and twisted it—and he was grinning when he did it.”

There was little that could be offered in the way of a defence after hearing a testimony such as that. On Thursday, March
25
,
1869,
Chief Justice James H. Peters pronounced the sentence of death upon George Dowey.

“I sentence that you, George Dowey, should be taken hence to the jail from which you came, and from thence you must be taken to Pownal Square, in Charlottetown, on Tuesday the thirtieth day of March next, between the hours of six o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the afternoon, when you are to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God almighty have mercy upon your soul.”

Dowey fell upon his knees, raising his manacled hands towards the judge's bench. “Mercy,” he cried out. “I must have time to prepare.”

“And I must have time to hunt marsh geese,” Chief Justice Peters replied. “Very well. The court will be pleased to grant you a stay of execution in which you may make your peace with God. And may God help you, sir, for on April
9
,
186
9
, you shall be hanged by the neck until you are good and dead.”

It came down to this: twenty-three-year-old George Dowey had only fifteen days left to live. Fifteen days before he would face one of the most horrifying executions performed in Canada.

Dowey spent those fifteen days as productively as possible. He wrote an eight-page essay, scrawled in tight, fine handwriting, detailing the events of his life and what he felt had brought him to this situation. He wrote letters to his wife in Dublin, as well as to his aged mother. He also composed a seventeen-stanza poem that later evolved into a popular folk song entitled “Dowey to his Mother,” as well as a shorter poem, “The Prisoner in his Cell, on the Morning of his Execution,” which was published in the Prince Edward Island newspaper
The
Islander
.

This essay and all of Dowey's poems were later collected and privately published by a group of literary and liturgically inclined Protestant ministers in the short chapbook
A Voice From the Scaffold
.

While Dowey was giving play to his literary muse, his lawyer, Edward Palmer, kept himself busy as well. Palmer appealed to the colonial office for a royal pardon, based upon the fact that after the trial, Flora MacQuarrie openly admitted that she had outright lied upon the stand.

“For spite's sake,” Flora admitted. “He oughtn't to have lied to me about having a wife and children, now should he?”

However, Chief Justice Robert Hodgeson, who was serving as administrator for the court while James Peters hunted his marsh geese, felt differently. “After consultation, I see no ground for interfering with the ordinary course of the law,” Hodgeson stated. “His sentence shall stand.”

Appeal or not, lies or not, poems or not, George Dowey would surely hang. Three times.

It was Friday, April
9
,
1869
. At half-past noon, George Dowey was escorted from his jail cell by the right and noble Reverend Fitzgerald of St. Paul's, and twenty militia volunteers who were armed with loaded rifles and bayonets. The authorities were taking no chances on the crowd staging some sort of impulsive attempt to rescue Dowey. They had good reason to fear this. There had been far too much written of Flora's lying ways for the crowd to see this hanging as anything more than a miscarriage of justice.

Dowey reached the gallows and nodded at the crowd that numbered nearly 1,500 souls. A ragged cheer went up. Some drunken wag shouted, “Rescue the man!” The militiamen brought their bayonets to the ready, and all thoughts of revolution and rescue flew to the four winds.

George Dowey walked up the steps to the gallows, taking them two at a time. The executioner was waiting for him. The executioner was new at this job, and overdressed for the role, wearing a large, flaxen wig under a black hood, a large black-rubber fishing coat, and heavy-top boots. John Ross, publisher of the
North Star
, noted, “The disguise of the hired hangman was most inappropriate for the occasion and perhaps better suited for a masquerade ball.”

Along with the overdressed hangman were the Reverends Pope and Perkins of the Wesleyan Church, the sheriff, the prison doctor, and the jailer. The clergymen had arranged for a heavy oak armchair to be placed over the trap door. Dowey sat upon the armchair, made himself comfortable, and then read his essay and poems to the crowd for a half an hour. During his public reading, he readily confessed his past sins and indiscretions, and he pledged his belief in the workings of Christ. He warned others to shun “drink, vicious inclinations, evil habits, and dens of iniquity.” He wore two photographs
—
one of his wife in Dublin, pinned to his sleeve, and another, of
his mother, pinned over his heart. He touched these pictures constantly. He thanked the clergy for praying over him. He thanked his lawyers for their hard work. He even took a moment to tell the executioner that there were no hard feelings between the two of them.

“You've a job to do,” Dowey said. “And you may as well be about it now.”

Dowey calmly stood and faced the noose. The executioner pulled the chair away and Dowey allowed his legs to be bound. Next, the executioner eased the rope over George Dowey's neck. He drew the noose tight. He stepped away, and cleared his throat noisily as if he too were about to make a speech. And then he threw the switch that opened the trap door.

At that point the rope broke, and George Dowey fell sixteen feet to the dirt below. He hit hard, sprawling like a rag doll. Unsure of what to do, the authorities carried Dowey back to his jail cell. An hour later they carried George Dowey back up to the gallows, where a brand new rope was waiting for him.

The crowd was enraged by now. Some were screaming that by rights Dowey ought to be freed. Again and again the militia was compelled to force the crowd back at bayonet point.

Hastily the executioner slipped the rope over Dowey's neck. The trap door opened. This time, the cleat that secured the rope pulled free and for a second time George Dowey crashed sixteen feet to the dirt below. He lay there, barely moving, stunned by the second unfortunate impact.

Determined to finish the execution, the hangman, his two assistants, and three volunteers from the crowd took hold of the rope and hoisted Dowey's twisting and still-noosed body hand over hand—dangling him from off of the side of the scaffold—holding him there until his kicking finally stopped, thereby hanging George Dowey for the third and final time.