Sources and References

• Anastakis, Dimitry. Death in the Peaceable Kingdom: Canadian History since 1867 through Murder, Execution, Assassination, and Suicide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.
• Leyton-Brown, Kenneth. The Practice of Execution in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
• Phillips, Jim, and Carolyn Strange. Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.
• Backhouse, Constance. Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991.
• Backhouse, Constance. Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
• Strange, Carolyn. Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996.
• Strange, Carolyn. Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.
• Friedland, Martin L. The Case of Valentine Shortis: A True Story of Crime and Politics in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.
• Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• McNairn, Jeffrey. Essays on honour, public opinion, and criminal justice in nineteenth-century British North America.
• Iacovetta, Franca. Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006.
• Beattie, J. M. Early work on policing and criminal justice in Upper Canada and Toronto.
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography (online edition), entries for D’Arcy McGee, Louis Riel, Thomas Scott, and others.

Chapter 1: Murder as a Window on Canadian History

Why Historians Study Murder

At first glance, a course built around homicide might seem to indulge the lurid fascination that fuels true-crime podcasts and tabloid journalism. Yet historians from Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg onward have shown that a single sensational case, pursued carefully through court records, newspapers, and private correspondence, can open a window onto an entire society. The term often applied to this practice is microhistory: the close reading of a discrete episode in order to illuminate larger structures of power, belief, and social organization. A Canadian murder case, as Dimitry Anastakis argues in Death in the Peaceable Kingdom, is rarely just about one victim and one perpetrator. It draws in families, neighbours, police, judges, juries, politicians, journalists, and ordinary readers. What people find shocking, what they consider “normal” violence, whom they blame, and whom they forgive — these responses expose the assumptions of a given era about gender, race, class, religion, and the authority of the state.

The Peaceable Kingdom Myth

Canadians have long told themselves that theirs is a “peaceable kingdom,” contrasted with the supposedly gun-slinging United States. This self-image, rooted in nineteenth-century loyalist rhetoric and reinforced by twentieth-century political culture, shaped both policing and punishment. Anastakis uses murder precisely to interrogate that story. The cases examined in this course — from the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1868 to the murders of Indigenous women in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver — complicate the myth at every turn. Canada’s past contains political assassination, racialized mob violence, wrongful convictions, state executions, massacres of Indigenous peoples, and femicide. Murder is not an aberration from Canadian history; it is often one of its clearest expressions.

Chapter 2: Law, Murder, and the Canadian State

From Colonial Criminal Law to the Criminal Code

Before Confederation, the British North American colonies inherited a patchwork of English criminal law, modified locally by custom and legislation. Capital statutes were numerous and harsh, though prosecutors and judges routinely softened them through discretion — what Douglas Hay and, in the Canadian context, Carolyn Strange and Jeffrey McNairn have described as a system of qualities of mercy. Unanimous conviction was hard; petty juries, grand juries, and pardoning power all filtered the raw severity of the statute book. With the British North America Act of 1867, criminal law became a federal responsibility, and in 1892 Parliament consolidated it into the first Criminal Code of Canada, drafted largely by George Burbidge and John Thompson on the model of the English draft code of 1879.

Degrees of Homicide

The Code recognized gradations of unlawful killing that remain familiar. Murder required malice aforethought — roughly, the intention to kill or to cause bodily harm likely to result in death. Manslaughter captured killings committed in the heat of passion, under provocation, or through criminal negligence, and carried no mandatory death sentence. Infanticide, added later in the twentieth century, treated the killing of a newborn by its mother as a distinct, lesser offence, reflecting both Victorian pity for “fallen women” and medical theories about post-partum disturbance. Until 1961, all murder was punishable by death; in that year, Parliament distinguished capital from non-capital murder, with death reserved for the killing of police and prison officers and premeditated murders. In 1976, capital punishment was abolished outright for ordinary crimes, replaced by life imprisonment with parole ineligibility.

Mercy, Commutation, and the Cabinet

Kenneth Leyton-Brown’s The Practice of Execution in Canada shows that a death sentence was less an ending than the start of a bureaucratic process. The trial judge wrote a report. The federal cabinet, through the Department of Justice, reviewed every capital case. Petitions poured in from clergy, jurors, and ordinary citizens. Roughly half of death sentences between 1867 and 1962 were commuted to life imprisonment, and patterns of commutation reveal the racial, gendered, and regional prejudices of the Canadian state. Women were more often spared than men; Indigenous and immigrant defendants, less often than Anglo-Canadians. The scaffold was local — every execution took place in the jail of the county where the trial occurred — but the decision to use it was made in Ottawa.

Chapter 3: Politics and Assassination in the New Dominion

Thomas D’Arcy McGee

On the night of 7 April 1868, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Irish-Canadian journalist, poet, Father of Confederation, and sitting Member of Parliament, was shot dead on Sparks Street in Ottawa as he returned to his boarding house from a late sitting of the House of Commons. Patrick James Whelan, an Irish-born tailor suspected of Fenian sympathies, was arrested, tried, convicted on contested evidence, and hanged in February 1869 before a crowd of several thousand. His case bound together the anxieties of the first years of the Dominion: Irish republican violence, Catholic–Protestant tension, fears of American annexation, and the fragility of Confederation itself. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries on McGee and Whelan underline how the trial was, in effect, a political performance. The death of a Father of Confederation at the hands of a supposed Fenian confirmed for many English Canadians that their new nation needed both internal loyalty and external defence.

Thomas Scott and the Red River

Two years later, in March 1870, a provisional Métis government on the Red River under Louis Riel tried and executed Thomas Scott, an Orangeman from Ontario who had defied the provisional authority. Scott’s killing — technically a judicial execution, but treated by Ontario Protestants as murder — poisoned English–French and Anglo–Métis relations for decades. It turned Riel into a hero to Quebec Catholics and a villain to Orange Ontario, and it shaped the terms on which Manitoba entered Confederation later that year. When Riel returned to lead the North-West resistance of 1885, the memory of Scott made his own trial and execution at Regina a foregone conclusion in much of English Canada. Riel’s hanging on 16 November 1885 remains one of the most contested moments in Canadian history.

The Frog Lake Killings

Linked to the same North-West Resistance was the Frog Lake massacre of 2 April 1885, in which a Cree band under Wandering Spirit killed nine settlers, including the Indian agent Thomas Quinn and two Oblate priests. The subsequent mass trial at Battleford produced the largest mass hanging in Canadian history: eight Indigenous men executed together on 27 November 1885. Constance Backhouse’s work on the racialization of Canadian law, and later scholarship drawing on oral histories, interpret the Battleford hangings not merely as criminal justice but as a deliberate spectacle of colonial authority staged for Indigenous spectators forced to attend.

Chapter 4: Violence, Honour, and Community

The Black Donnellys

In February 1880, a vigilante mob from the Roman Catholic community of Biddulph Township, Middlesex County, killed five members of the Donnelly family in their farmhouse near Lucan, Ontario. The crime capped two decades of feuding rooted in the quarrels of pre-Famine Ireland, now transplanted to southwestern Ontario. Two successive trials of the accused vigilantes ended in hung juries and acquittals, despite eyewitness testimony from a boy who had hidden under a bed. The case is usually told as folk melodrama; historians use it to examine the persistence of honour cultures and communal justice in Victorian Canada, and to show the limits of state authority in a rural Irish-Catholic township where neighbours would not convict neighbours.

The Shiners and Rough Justice

Earlier generations of the Ottawa Valley had seen similar dynamics. The Shiners’ War of the 1830s pitted Irish-Catholic timber workers against French-Canadian raftsmen in the streets of Bytown. Violence became a tool of labour competition and ethnic rivalry, and local magistrates were often unable or unwilling to intervene. J. M. Beattie’s foundational work on early Canadian policing shows how such disorders drove the creation of professional urban police forces in Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere in the 1830s and 1840s.

Chapter 5: Gender in the Courtroom

Infanticide and the Unmarried Mother

Few crimes reveal the gendered double standard of Victorian Canada more starkly than infanticide. Constance Backhouse’s Petticoats and Prejudice traces dozens of cases in which young, unmarried domestic servants were prosecuted for concealing the birth — and often the death — of a newborn. Judges and juries oscillated between severity and sympathy. Medical witnesses applied crude tests (the “lung float” test) to determine live birth. Convictions for outright murder were rare; the lesser offence of “concealment of birth” served as a compromise verdict. Behind every prosecution lay the reality that a domestic servant who became pregnant faced immediate dismissal, destitution, and social ruin.

Wife Killing, Provocation, and Coverture

For married women the law imposed its own violence. Under the doctrine of coverture, a wife’s legal personality was absorbed into her husband’s; she could not hold property, sign contracts, or, in most cases, testify against him. When husbands killed wives, courts routinely accepted provocation defences rooted in supposed female infidelity or “nagging,” reducing murder to manslaughter. When wives killed husbands — often after years of documented abuse — the same leniency rarely extended. Karen Dubinsky’s Improper Advances and Carolyn Strange’s Toronto’s Girl Problem both trace how the category of the “fallen woman” or the “girl at risk” shaped what prosecutors, reformers, and judges thought they saw in any given case.

The Massey Murder

The 1915 killing of Charles Bert Massey, heir to the Massey-Harris fortune, by his eighteen-year-old domestic servant Carrie Davies brought these themes together in a blaze of wartime publicity. Davies shot Massey on the doorstep of his Toronto home, claiming he had attempted to seduce her. Her trial became a referendum on working-class female virtue, elite male predation, and the limits of the law. Her acquittal — celebrated in the streets — demonstrated how powerfully the trope of the chaste but vulnerable working girl could override the letter of the law.

Chapter 6: Race and the Administration of Criminal Justice

Colour-Coded Law

Constance Backhouse’s Colour-Coded demonstrates that Canadian criminal law was never race-neutral. From the prosecution of Chinese immigrants under opium and gambling statutes, to the segregation-by-custom of Black defendants in Nova Scotia courtrooms, to the systematic over-prosecution of Indigenous men in the Prairie West, racial hierarchies shaped who was charged, who was believed, and who was hanged. Indigenous defendants were disproportionately represented on the gallows in every decade from 1867 to 1962. Chinese-Canadian defendants, often linguistically isolated and legally defenceless, were convicted at rates that alarmed even contemporary observers.

Residential Schools, Reserves, and Policing

The North-West Mounted Police, founded in 1873, combined ordinary policing with the enforcement of the pass system, the suppression of Indigenous ceremony, and the policing of the residential school system. Scholars now understand much of the “crime” prosecuted in the Prairie West as an artefact of the colonial project: Indigenous resistance to dispossession, criminalized. The Frog Lake trials and the Riel execution stand as early, spectacular examples; the wildly disproportionate contemporary incarceration of Indigenous people is their long aftermath.

Chapter 7: The Death Penalty in Modern Canada

Mechanics and Politics of the Scaffold

By the 1920s, as Leyton-Brown shows, Canada had developed a standardized execution routine. Arthur Ellis — a stage name — served as the state’s travelling hangman for decades. Executions were held at dawn inside county jail yards, witnessed by sheriffs, coroners, clergy, and a handful of journalists. Cabinet commutation remained common. Public sentiment drifted steadily against the death penalty after the Second World War, pushed by high-profile miscarriages and by international abolitionist currents.

Lucas and Turpin

On 11 December 1962, at the Don Jail in Toronto, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin were hanged back-to-back, the last executions ever carried out in Canada. Neither man knew at the time that he would be the last; the moratorium on executions that followed was initially administrative, not legislative. Capital punishment was formally reclassified in 1961, limited further in the following years, and abolished for civilian offences in 1976 by a narrow Commons vote. Military capital offences survived until 1999.

Chapter 8: Miscarriages, Moral Panics, and Modern Memory

Truscott, Marshall, Morin, Milgaard

The modern era of wrongful-conviction scholarship in Canada begins with Steven Truscott, a fourteen-year-old sentenced to hang in 1959 for the murder of twelve-year-old Lynne Harper near Clinton, Ontario. His sentence was commuted; decades of advocacy followed; in 2007 the Ontario Court of Appeal declared his conviction a miscarriage of justice. Similar stories attach to Donald Marshall Jr. (a Mi’kmaw man wrongfully convicted in 1971), Guy Paul Morin (convicted in 1992 and exonerated by DNA in 1995), and David Milgaard (convicted in 1970, exonerated in 1997). Each case prompted a royal commission or equivalent inquiry, and each exposed a different failure mode of the criminal justice system: tunnel vision in police investigation, reliance on jailhouse informants, suggestive forensic testimony, and, in Marshall’s case, overt racism.

The Boyd Gang and the Bombing of Flight 108

Not all mid-century cases were miscarriages. The Boyd Gang’s Toronto bank robberies and the killing of Detective Edmund Tong in 1952 produced a manhunt and a double hanging; the 1949 bombing of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108 near Sault-au-Cochon, Quebec — a femicide disguised as mass murder, engineered by Albert Guay to kill his wife Rita Morel for insurance — remains one of the most chilling cases in Canadian criminal history. Guay and two accomplices were hanged between 1950 and 1953.

Political Violence: Pierre Laporte and the FLQ

The October Crisis of 1970 brought political assassination back onto Canadian soil. The Front de libération du Québec kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. Laporte was murdered on 17 October 1970. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act; hundreds of Quebec citizens were detained without charge. The event reshaped federal-provincial relations and the constitutional trajectory of Quebec nationalism, and it raised lasting questions about the legitimacy of emergency powers in a democracy.

The Montreal Massacre

On 6 December 1989, a gunman entered the École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed fourteen women, specifically targeting them for being women, before killing himself. The Montreal Massacre became Canada’s most publicly acknowledged act of anti-feminist violence and the proximate catalyst for both the long-gun registry and an annual National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. It is also a case study in how the category of “hate crime” enters — and is resisted by — Canadian public discourse.

Dudley George and Ipperwash

In September 1995, Ojibwe protester Dudley George was shot and killed by an Ontario Provincial Police officer during an occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park, land claimed as sacred by the Stoney Point First Nation. The subsequent Ipperwash Inquiry concluded that the government of Premier Mike Harris had pressured police to clear the park quickly. George’s killing is one of the few times a Canadian police officer was convicted (of criminal negligence causing death) for shooting an Indigenous protester, and the inquiry’s findings reshaped police protocols for First Nations land disputes.

Missing and Murdered: Pickton and the MMIWG Inquiry

The murders of Indigenous women Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey, among dozens of others, by serial killer Robert Pickton on a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, were made possible by decades of police indifference to missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Pickton was convicted in 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder. The case became the proximate cause of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2016–2019), whose final report used the word genocide to describe the systematic pattern of violence against Indigenous women and the systemic failures of the Canadian state to protect them. The inquiry connected contemporary femicide directly to the colonial histories examined earlier in the course — residential schools, the Indian Act, the reserve system, and the racialized administration of criminal justice.