Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  The Evidence Mounts

  The next morning the testimonies continued. Joseph Baker, a local hunter, was one of the first witnesses of the day to be called to the stand.

  “I began my search on Sunday, August 17, in company with two or three hundred searchers. The search began in the burnt patch of woods. By Wednesday, I and George Uhlman and a few others left the burnt woods and worked our way toward the western side of the Branch River.”

  Baker told how they’d found the tracks. “George Uhlman first noticed the tracks and pointed them out to me. They were very distinct. As far as we could ascertain, they were the tracks of a man and a woman travelling together.”

  “How could you be certain the tracks belonged to a woman?” Kaulback asked.

  “They were lighter, like a woman’s tracks would be,” Baker explained. “That, and the fact that the mark of her skirt dragging on the ground was unmistakable. The boot tracks were sunk a little deeper, like those of a man.”

  “And can you swear that those boot tracks belonged to the defendant, Peter Mailman?” Kaulback asked.

  “I can swear to the boot that those tracks belong to,” Baker replied. “The heel was chipped and had been crudely patched with four flat-headed nails. The heads of those nails protruded slightly and they left a very distinctive impression behind. You show me that boot and I’ll show you the man I tracked from the murder site to his farm.” The broken-heeled boot prints proved to match those of the defendant, Peter Mailman.

  “We found Mary Ann Mailman’s body lying partially doubled up under the roots of a tree that had been blown over. The opening had been concealed by a handful of moss. Her dress was missing, and there were stockings on her feet, but no shoes nor a hat. It would not surprise me to find that her husband did this deed. I allow that in past times I have heard the defendant, Peter Mailman, using many harsh and cross words on his wife, Mary Ann Mailman.”

  Ben Baker, the farmer and neighbour with whom Mailman had sworn his wife was staying, testified afterwards, confirming what Angelina had already told the court.

  “I never saw Mary Ann Mailman on the day Peter Mailman told his daughter Angelina that I had,” Ben Baker asserted.

  “Why would Peter Mailman lie to his daughter?” asked Kaulback.

  “I truly do not know why he would ever say such a lie as that,” Baker replied.

  Following Ben Baker’s testimony, Robinson Cox, a medical student who had been asked to assist with the examination of Mary Ann Mailman’s remains, was called to the stand. “I discovered a fracture of the skull at the base of her head,” he explained. “There were marks of several blows from a blunt instrument. A piece of the woman’s skull was entirely too loose and had been driven into her brain tissue. The pole of an axe would have easily created such a fracture. I have no doubt that the wounds were sufficient to cause the woman’s death.”

  At six o’clock the court adjourned for the day.

  The Sentence is Passed

  On Monday, October 20, the third day of the trial, the town doctor, Albert Croucher, was called to the stand to verify Robinson Cox’s earlier testimony. Doctor Croucher confirmed that the cause of death was a blow from a blunt instrument that could easily have been the end of an axe handle.

  Testimony after testimony followed throughout the day, and Peter Mailman’s eventual conviction seemed certain, yet Mailman remained obstinately mute, refusing to speak even after his younger children were finally brought to the stand.

  On Tuesday, the jury met alone and decided their final verdict. They returned quietly to the courtroom. Peter Mailman stood at his station with his two younger children close at hand. One dim lamp lit the entire courtroom, lending the proceedings a sombre and gloomy ambience.

  The jury foreman rose slowly to his feet. He paused, as if reluctant to speak the words that needed to be said. Finally he spoke. “We find the prisoner at the bar to be guilty, guilty, guilty.”

  Peter Mailman did not flinch. His features would not betray a single careless emotion. For ten long minutes he stood in stony silence before finally speaking. “Well, I am innocent and I don’t care,” was all Peter Mailman had to say in reply.

  Five days later, on October 25, one hour before noon, Peter Mailman was brought once more to the courthouse to hear the judge’s final sentence.

  “Do you have anything to say before I pass judgment?” Judge DesBarres asked Mailman.

  “I am not guilty,” Peter Mailman loudly proclaimed. “Someone has lied.”

  The remarked was duly noted. And then duly ignored.

  “You, Peter Mailman, the prisoner at the bar, have been charged with the murder of your wife Mary Ann Mailman,” Judge DesBarres said. “You have been found guilty of that charge by a jury of your country after a long and patient and painful investigation.”

  “I am not guilty,” Mailman repeated.

  “The sentence of the court,” Judge DesBarres continued, “is that you shall be taken hence to the place from whence you came on Tuesday the thirtieth day of December next to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God Almighty have mercy upon your soul.”

  The Final Confession

  In November 1873, the truth came out. Peter Mailman sat in his makeshift cell and calmly confessed to the murder of his wife, Mary Ann.

  “We had no words on the way to the berry picking,” Mailman said. “We walked like two children, hand in hand. Coming back, we sat down by a tree, alongside of a twisting log road. We talked for a quarter of an hour. I put my hand upon her lap and I drew up to her, hoping for an embrace. She spurned my advances. What right did a wife have to do such a thing?”

  He looked at the floor, as if he were truly puzzled by the circumstances that had brought him to this point. “I accused her of being unfaithful,” Mailman went on. “I swore that if she had been with another man, I would know it. She sprung up, about to run. That was when I knew she was guilty. I took hold of my axe and I hit her. I was angry with her and hit her too hard. I did not expect to hit her as hard as I did.”

  Throughout the confession his expression remained calm. “The blow killed her. I sat down and lifted her body to a sitting position. I thought she had only been stunned. I sat there for a half an hour, but there was no more breath within her lungs.

  “I only meant to punish her,” he went on. “I only wanted to show her how much she meant to me. God knows how bad I felt. If I could have blown breath back into her, I would have. I lifted the body and laid it under the root of the fallen tree. I took the boots off and her hat and her dress and carried it home. The axe, I left in the woods. I came home and set fire to the woods beside my potato field. I burned the dress and hat and shoes at the same time. I had hoped that the mark of the fire would confuse the trackers.

  “I am truly sorry that I have broken the laws of God and my country. If I could live my life over again I would rather lose my life than take another’s. I would give all of my poor riches if I could bring my wife to life again.”

  The Execution of Peter Mailman

  On the morning of December 30, 1873, Peter Mailman was led on foot to Gallows Hill, following a brief and personal church service in his lonely cell. He was accompanied by the sheriff, by clergymen from the local Church of England, Wesleyan, and Presbyterian Churches.

  Before a crowd of nearly two thousand spectators, Mailman walked calmly to the gallows without assistance. He stood like a mannequin—not moving or resisting as his executioners bound his hands and feet so that his dying struggle would not unnecessarily prolong or hinder the process of execution.

  “Do you have anything to say?” the Reverend H. L. Owen asked.

  “No,” Peter Mailman replied. “I wish to keep my mind fixed squarely upon heaven.” He then handed the reverend a brief, signed confession that was subsequently read aloud.

  “I, Peter Mailman, aged forty-seven years, now in con
finement in this jail, do freely and of my own accord, without constraint either by fear or favour, confess that I am guilty of the crime laid to my charge.” The confession was signed with a crudely scrawled X.

  The black hood was eased over Peter Mailman’s head. He did not panic or struggle. The trap door was released and Mailman dropped through. Ten minutes later, he was pronounced dead. He was buried in the corner of the jail yard in an unmarked grave.

  Today, a utility garage is said to stand over the site of the anonymous grave in which Peter Mailman was buried. All physical traces of his interment have been swept clean by the passage of time, yet the memory of his dark deed lives on in Lunenburg to this very day. The old people still know his name and some can even tell you the story, and it has long been whispered that the restless spirit of Peter Mailman—the last man to be hung on Gallows Hill—still walks that hillside on certain moonless nights, carrying the very axe that he used to slay his sweet, loving wife.

  Murder or Nothing

  The Bannister Clan

  Pacific Junction, New Brunswick

  1936

  May Bannister had a plan. She’d convinced Moncton store owner Milton Trites that he had fathered a child with her. Convincing him had been easy. He was such a do-gooding milquetoast—always talking about how he wanted to just “help people” with that Salvation Army store of his. Then he went and left his wife and started catting around with May—what kind of a do-gooder was that? He was nothing but a pushover. Didn’t he know that life wasn’t about helping other people? Life, as far as May Bannister was concerned, was all about helping yourself.

  Milton Trites had no reason to believe that May Bannister was lying. He had slept with May many times, and had actually seen the baby swaddled in May’s arms. He knew the baby’s name and had even bought her a cradle. In fact, Milton Trites believed in his fatherhood enough to have provided May Bannister’s household with enough groceries to feed May and her two sons, Arthur and Daniel, and her two older daughters, Marie and Frances, as well as the baby, who had been named Thyra Milton Trites.

  The only problem was that the baby wasn’t real. May Bannister had bought herself a life-sized baby doll and had carefully wrapped the toy in several blankets. She carried the bundle on her hip, as a woman might carry a baby, and she stoutly refused to let Milton Trites anywhere near the so-called baby.

  “You’re the father,” she told him. “That means that you have to pay. But I’m the mother, so the baby stays with me.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Milton Trites, and he told May Bannister that. “You’re not getting one red cent more from me until I hold that baby in my arms and see her face smiling up at me.”

  There was no two ways about it. May Bannister desperately needed to have herself a baby. And on a bitterly cold night in January 1936 she found a way to get one.

  The Fire

  It was a cool Monday morning, a slow, grey January dawn that cleared gently into a baleful noon glare. The air was cold and clear, and a few inches of snow lay crusted upon the forest floor.

  Otto Blakeney had been chopping firewood all morning for Philip Lake and his family—Lake’s wife, Bertha, their twenty-month-old son Jack, and little six-month-old Betty Ann. Otto’s back was aching and sore from the hard work he had accomplished. His ribs had begun to grate against his belly and his stomach was growling like a wintered-out bear.

  “It’s time for dinner,” he decided to himself. He made his way back to Philip Lake’s farmhouse, licking his lips as he walked. Bertha Lake had promised a pot of good, simmering stew. Otto could hardly wait. He could almost smell the stew slowly cooking in the cold January breeze. Only it wasn’t stew he smelled. It was smoke.

  By the time Otto reached the Lake farmhouse he was startled to see that the shack had burned to the ground. There was nothing left but a thin sliver of dirty smoke trailing up into the sky from the ashes.

  Actually, to call the Lake homestead a farmhouse was a little more than generous. The truth of the matter was, the Lakes lived in a glorified shanty, not more than twenty-six feet long and ten feet wide, and constructed primarily out of tarpaper, bits of particleboard, and scrap lumber scavenged from the pallets and packing crates of the Canadian National Railway (cnr). The biggest piece of furniture was the massive kitchen range that provided both heat and sustenance for the Lake family.

  Now, that same kitchen range served as an ugly tombstone for what was left of Philip Lake. The man’s body was lying in what used to be a doorway. The flesh had been cooked from his bones; the only way Otto Blakeney recognized Lake was by the gleam of the man’s golden teeth, glinting from the charred remnants of what was left of Lake’s jawbone.

  But where was the rest of the family? Otto Blakeney searched wildly about the area before spotting a trail of spattered blood that led him to the gruesome sight of twenty-eight-year-old Bertha Lake, her clothes torn off, and the frozen body of her twenty-month-old son Jack, a few yards away from what was left of his mother.

  Blakeney could see that poor Bertha had died in agony. The snow was bloodied and beaten down. About her feet, he could see an arc of trampled snow, flattened by the thrashing of her heels.

  Sickened, Otto ran to town and told the station agent Omar Lutes who immediately telegraphed for the Moncton police. Constable Reginald Kent and cnr policeman Frederick Randall hastily drove to the scene of the crime where they were met by local rcmp Sergeant Bedford Peters and the coroner, Dr. R. J. Caldwell.

  It was Peters who spotted what was left of the family alarm clock. A gob of molten glass had fused itself over the hands of the clock, spot-welding the time of the crime at 11:15 am.

  Clearly, it was murder. There could be no doubt. But where was baby Betty Ann?

  Tracking Mittens

  A tracking party led by the rcmp was hastily organized. On snowshoe, they followed a trail of tracks that led them about a kilometre through the forest to the edge of the North River. Whoever had made the tracks had to have worked hard to make any kind of progress. The snow deepened through the woodland. It looked as if they were trailing at least three people. Whoever was the leader was using some sort of walking stick. At several points, there were signs that the fugitives had needed to sit and rest in the cold, deep snow.

  It was at one of these resting points that rcmp Sergeant Peters found their first clue: a hand-knit, blue-and-white-striped mitten tucked inside of a dirty leather over-mitt. A second clue materialized in the form of railwayman David Barron of Berry Mills, who reported that he had spotted someone walking the tracks toward the Lake homestead on the night before the fire.

  “It was one of the Bannister boys,” he told the police. “I recognized him right off. Even at a distance, I know that boy’s walk.”

  Nearly everyone in town knew or had heard of the Bannister family. They were thought to be a “bad bunch,” with their mother, May Bannister, being the worst of the lot. Some said that she couldn’t be blamed for her lifestyle, what with the way her husband had run out on her thirteen years ago, leaving her on her own to bring up two boys as well as a young daughter.

  The family eked out a meagre living selling mayflowers, snaring rabbits, tapping maple trees for syrup, picking blueberries and blackberries and wild strawberries, cutting firewood, and selling Christmas wreaths. There was also talk of petty thievery, and a whisper of how May Bannister occasionally dealt in “softer goods.”

  “She’s made many a lonely man welcome on long winter nights,” some said. “The squeak of the bedsprings echoes often with the jingle of exchanged coin. May Bannister will stoop to any end to turn herself a dollar or two.”

  In short, the Bannisters were prepared to do whatever needed to be done when it came to making a dollar. Still, Sergeant Peters was prepared to give the family the benefit of the doubt up until the moment he knocked on the Bannister front door with the incriminating mitten in hand. Twenty-year-old Daniel Banni
ster answered the door, and said three words when he saw the blue striped mitten.

  “Hey, that’s mine,” Daniel said. Whether he was just being stupid or simply practical, we will never know. As soon as Daniel realized what was going on, he hastily backed up his story with the explanation that he had previously lent that set of mittens to his eighteen-year-old brother, Arthur.

  “Arthur said that he’d lost that mitten hunting rabbit,” Daniel went on. “Where’d you guys manage to find it?”

  Arthur, in turn, was more than happy to admit that he had been at the Lake homestead on the night of the fire. “We were all drinking,” he told the authorities. “Me, Lake, and two fellows from Moncton. Then, when Daniel and Frances came by to pick me up at about ten at night, things got rough.”

  It took a fair bit of prodding before Arthur identified the Moncton men as twenty-two-year-old Clarence Cormier and thirty-three-year-old Alfred LeBlanc, both of whom were later brought in for questioning and promptly cleared of any suspicion.

  “Philip Lake tried to accost our sister Frances,” Arthur Bannister explained to Sergeant Peters, “and when me and Daniel took up against Lake, his wife, Bertha, came out to see what was happening. It was all Lake’s fault. He threw a chunk of firewood, and it caught his wife on the side of her skull and knocked her cold. She hit the ground and spilled over an oil lamp, and a fire lit up, and me and Daniel and Frances lit out for home, figuring that it was Lake’s own fault if he went and burned his own house down.”

  When Daniel told his version of the story, it had Bertha joining into the fight; and when young Frances told her side of the tale, she talked of Bertha running after them through the snow, calling out for help. There were enough inconsistencies in each of the stories to guarantee the authorities’ growing suspicion.