Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  “Judging from the position of the body and the location of the wound, there is no question that Peter Doyle was shot by an unknown assailant. It could not have been either suicide or accidental death. Whoever put that bullet in Peter Doyle’s back knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Later that day, Detective Power of the Halifax Police Department arrived at the scene, and, after a careful inspection, decided to dispatch two local officers to arrest Jane Doyle and William Preeper on the suspicion of cold-blooded murder.

  Both Jane and Preeper were arrested and confined in the Halifax jailhouse. They spent the winter there; but by spring, Jane was acquitted, and Preeper would stand alone as the sole murder suspect. By all reports, Preeper made the best of his incarceration. He was a young man, and became quite popular with some of the local women, who would bring him piping hot meals to eat, baskets of fresh fruit, and an abundant supply of biblical tracts.

  The Evidence Mounts

  In spite of Preeper’s constant insistence of his innocence, the evidence began to pile up against him. Emily Dillman, Jane’s sister, stated that on the day that the searchers carried Peter Doyle’s body into his own barn, William Preeper told Jane, “I think they may have found me out.”

  She also reported that, earlier that summer, she had seen her sister boiling strips of flypaper into a tea that she later served to her husband. “That wasn’t any tea she had steeping,” Emily swore. “That were strips of flypaper.”

  The arsenic in the flypaper would have been enough to kill a man, or at the very least cause him stomach problems, a condition of which Peter Doyle had complained all summer long.

  Perhaps the most damning of testimonies was that delivered by seven-year-old Maurice Doyle, who testified that William Preeper had taken a gun and loaded it with shot, and wadded that shot with torn pages of a farmer’s almanac that the Doyle family kept in their kitchen. “He then hurried off in the very same direction taken by my father on his walk to church,” Maurice declared. “I am sure, because I watched him carefully.”

  Dr. McKay confirmed that there actually were fragments of paper taken from the wound in Peter Doyle’s back. Further examination proved that the fragments of paper were a match for the missing almanac pages. “There can be no mistake,” Dr. McKay stated.

  On Thursday, October 25, 1888, Supreme Court Judge James MacDonald declared that “the defendant, William Preeper, would be taken to the County Jail in Halifax, and on the morning of Wednesday the Sixteenth of January next, between the hours provided by law, be hanged by the neck until dead. May God have mercy upon your wretched soul.”

  When asked if he had anything to say, Preeper simply replied, “I am not guilty of such a crime.” Whether he was guilty or not, it seemed evident that Preeper was destined to hang.

  A Royal Intervention

  Preeper was still quite popular in Halifax. Petitions were circulated throughout the city, placed in local taverns, and taken door to door. These petitions asked for either a lighter sentence or a retrial. Eventually, over seven thousand signatures were gathered by the petitioners.

  Very few of these signatures came from Guysborough citizens. “We know what went on here in Guysborough Road,” one anonymous citizen declared. “Preeper and Jane Doyle were up to romantic shenanigans. She was up the hoop with another man’s child, and murder seemed the only way out for her. When poison didn’t do it, she sent her lover with a musket to give her a swift and undeniable gunpowder divorce decree.” The consensus in Guysborough Road was that Preeper was getting what he deserved, and they’d be quite happy to see Jane Doyle strung on the gallows beside her young lover.

  In spite of what the residents of Guysborough Road felt personally, Halifax public opinion and the power of a well-written petition won out, and Preeper’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence to be served out behind the walls of Dorchester Prison. In 1891, King George v, then known as the Prince of Wales, visited Nova Scotia. It was customary for all prisoners of good conduct to be granted a full pardon, and Preeper’s conduct behind bars had been impeccable. Preeper was set free.

  He fled Nova Scotia for the Black Hills of South Dakota. “It’s cleaner out here in this wild country,” he said. “Space like this gives a man a place to think.” He returned to Nova Scotia a few years later, and apparently spent a night or two in the abandoned farmhouse of Peter Doyle. Whether it was a case of a criminal returning to the scene of a crime, or just a nostalgic and jilted lover mooning over his old haunting grounds can never be known for certain.

  As for Jane Doyle, she married a retired British Army sergeant three years following the death of her second husband. They moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia, and opened a tavern. By all reports, she was perfectly content with her life as it stood.

  The only remaining trace of Peter Doyle’s passing is a stone cairn that was erected by lumberman John MacDonald and the logging crew that had originally discovered Doyle’s remains. “He was a man badly wronged,” MacDonald said. “There needs to be some sign of his passing.”

  “I’ll kill all hands before they hang me”

  Alexander Gillis

  Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

  1885

  Finding a dead body in a cemetery shouldn’t be that remarkable an event. However, on Sunday, May 24, 1885, John Longworth found it to be one of the strangest experiences he’d lived through—and it took him three whole days to find that dead body in the first place.

  It began when John Longworth noticed that James Callaghan, the ancient groundskeeper of the Sherwood Cemetery located just outside of Charlottetown, had left a basket and garden tools outside his cottage home.

  “Those tools will rust in the rain,” Longworth said to himself. “Perhaps the old man forgot them outside. I’ll put them inside the door of his cottage where they’ll be safe. No doubt he’ll thank me for it.”

  He knocked on the door. No answer. He turned the knob and opened the door. “The place was a mess,” he later testified.

  Potato sets were laid out in a wicker basket in the porch, ready for planting. Only they hadn’t been touched. The potato sets were dried up and looked as if they had been sitting there for three or four days. The kitchen was a mess. Beans and peas were scattered across the floor. I walked into the bedroom, afraid that the old man had taken a seizure, but all I saw was a heap of bedclothes and bedding mounded up on the floor beside the bed. I touched nothing. I called out for the old man but there was no answer. I left the house and then I checked the outdoor privy, in case he was in there. Then I left. There was nothing else I could do but leave. I was absolutely terrified by the silence of the place.

  Three days later, Longworth’s son Brenton returned to Callaghan’s graveyard house at his father’s urgings. “The reek of the place was horrible,” Brenton testified. “I knocked and no one answered. I went inside, and the stench nearly choked me. I saw the heap of bedclothes mounded beside the bed. A black cat was sitting upon the bedclothes, daintily licking its chops. I shooed the cat and moved the bedclothes, and found the old man lying there beneath his bedding, face downward with his right arm entangled about the leg of his bedside table, as if he’d been trying to pull himself up from the floor. There was blood spattered near the body.

  “I ran as well. It seems that flight must run in our family bloodline,” Brenton continued. “I drove our wagon around the cemetery before returning to the old man’s house, praying that the sight I had seen had been nothing more than a horrible, fear-induced vision.”

  Only it was no vision. It was horrifyingly real.

  Summoning the Authorities

  Brenton Longworth lashed his horses and drove them directly to Charlottetown, where he alerted Marshall Thomas Flynn, who was what we would now call a chief of police. Marshall Flynn, in turn, summoned the coroner. The three of them rode back to the Sherwood Cemetery, only to find that a crowd had already begun to gather in the gr
aveyard.

  While Marshall Flynn worked at keeping the crowd at a respectful distance, the coroner examined the body of James Callaghan. The murdered man lay face down upon the floor with his legs doubled up into a near fetal position, as if he had been trying to protect himself from an assailant. The defensive wounds upon his hands bore this deduction out. Judging from the slashes along the backs of his hands, Callaghan had obviously attempted to ward off a knife.

  In addition, there was a deep slash across Callaghan’s throat. One eye was completely swollen and popped nearly out of its socket, and Callaghan’s skull was completely shattered open, exposing the grey tissue of his brain.

  “I would say, judging from the state of the body’s decomposition,” the coroner stated, “that the victim has been lying under these bedclothes stone cold dead for at least four days.”

  Once help had arrived to contain the growing crowd, Marshall Flynn busied himself with a search of the house. He discovered three suspicious implements that were most likely used in the assault. He found a large, blunt knife, such as one might use for gardening. The blade of the knife was soaked in dried blood. In addition, he found an iron gate bar that was bent suspiciously and likewise stained with blood. Lastly, he discovered a heavy hardwood meat pounder, also stained with blood.

  “The murder was obviously committed by more than one assailant,” Marshall Flynn decided. “Why else would there be so many murder weapons?”

  “That makes sense to me,” the coroner agreed. “But what about a motive?”

  “The motive is simple,” Marshall Flynn stated. “Everyone in town knows that James Callaghan was a tight-fisted old miser. There was bound to be some money hidden around here.”

  The coroner wasn’t so certain about that. “I don’t see too many signs of wealth in this rundown old shack,” he said.

  “It might be that the culprits found it and made off with it,” Flynn conjectured. “Besides, whether there was money or not doesn’t really matter. All that really matters is whether or not his murderers thought there was.”

  The First Arrest

  After three weeks of testimony at a coroner’s inquest, an unexpected lead turned up. Alexander Gillis was arrested on an unrelated charge of burglary at Harmony Station, pei, and was found to be carrying James Callaghan’s watch in his pocket.

  “It was an easy enough item to identify,” Marshall Flynn remarked, “being as it had two solid gold sovereigns attached to the end of the chain as a fob. We’ve since talked to many a reliable witness who had seen the victim, James Callaghan, in prior possession of that very same watch.”

  Alexander Gillis was born in the little town of Arisaig, located on the northern coast of eastern mainland Nova Scotia, about fifty kilometres east of New Glasgow. In 1851 Gillis moved with his family to settle in the southeast corner of Prince Edward Island, in the Kings County capital of Georgetown. They did not stay there very long, however, moving permanently to a somewhat rundown bungalow in Charlottetown.

  Gillis was unhappy and restless in Charlottetown. At the age of eighteen he left the city and worked as a farmhand for a short time, before signing on as a fisherman in a boat that fished out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Life for young Gillis fell into a rhythm that was almost tidal in its nature. He would work a voyage, earn his pay, and then spend it in the local taverns. When his wallet ran dry, he would head back to sea again.

  In 1879, at the age of twenty-three, Alexander Gillis graduated from itinerant fisherman to full-fledged highwayman. This career move led to a subsequent conviction and six years in the Massachusetts Penitentiary. Still, Gillis made the best of the career change. He was found to be a good-natured inmate of the penitentiary, and was appointed as sub-warden over the condemned prisoners. By all reports, Gillis flourished in this role, showing uncommon sensitivity in dealing with gallows-bound inmates. In 1881, after a little over a year of imprisonment, Alexander Gillis was released for his impeccable behaviour.

  Five months later he was discovered in the act of burglary, and received a three-year return to his much-beloved penitentiary. Regardless of his recalcitrant behaviour as a free man, Gillis seemed to excel at life behind bars. He again received much praise and several commendations for his properly penitential behaviour, and his sentence was again commuted.

  However, the time behind bars had been hard on Gillis’s physical health. In 1884 he made the journey back to Prince Edward Island, and returned to his hometown of Harmony as a prodigal and penitent citizen. His sister took pity on him and let him stay on at the family home. He found himself a small income from day labour in farming and lobster fishing, and in between the work, he drank. “I’d rather die wet than dry,” he told any man who would listen. “A dram or two both warms the heart and calms the nerves wonderfully.”

  There was a little sunlight in Gillis’s dreary existence, however. He felt the pangs of love—or at the least, desire—for young Mary Ellen MacDonald, who lived with her parents a mere six kilometres from his sister’s home in Harmony. Mary Ellen welcomed his attentions, but her parents were not pleased with her selection of suitors.

  “He doesn’t even go to church on Sundays,” Mary Ellen’s mother would complain. “You cannot trust a man who would rather spend his days getting pickled on pop-skull than praising the Lord.”

  It didn’t help all that much when Mary Ellen MacDonald gave birth to the illegitimate child of Alexander Gillis in November 1885. Rather than force a shotgun marriage with a known ex-convict, Mary Ellen’s parents preferred to simply keep the two apart from each other. Their efforts certainly seemed to be well-founded when Gillis was arrested for the murder of James Callaghan.

  Still, the lovebirds kept in contact through the many love letters that Mary Ellen wrote to her sweetheart while he awaited trial. For his part, Gillis did write the occasional letter back. Mary Ellen’s family discreetly intercepted the bulk of Gillis’s correspondence and promptly burned the letters, but one single letter did manage to get through to the young girl.

  “Please, please, please,” Gillis wrote to Mary Ellen. “If you have the least bit of love for me, you must seek to prove that I was at your home on the day of James Callaghan’s murder.”

  When it comes to guilt, desperation like that is a very bad sign. Things did not look good for Alexander Gillis.

  The Trial of Alexander Gillis

  Owing to the dampness of the clothing that James Callaghan’s body was found in, it was established that the murder must have taken place on May 20, 1885—four days before John Longworth walked into Callaghan’s bedroom.

  “It had rained all day,” Marshall Flynn explained at the trial. “Callaghan was an older man, and had obviously set out to plant his potato sets. A rainy day would save him the trouble of watering the sets, and the damp earth would make it easier to plant them. That, and the mildewed dampness of the clothing that he was found in, prove this indisputably.

  “Alexander Gillis had visited his sweetheart, Mary Ellen MacDonald, one week prior to the murder,” Flynn went on. “But by noon the next day, he left to take the train to Charlottetown. Only he didn’t go to Charlottetown. Instead, he took the train to Mount Stewart, about thirty kilometres northeast of Charlottetown. He shaved off his moustache on the train ride in a pitiful attempt to disguise himself. When he arrived in Mount Stewart, he went to the North Star Hotel and booked a room under the name of Trevor McInnis.”

  The testimonies continued to mount. “I thought it was awfully peculiar that this McInnis fellow didn’t seem to know any of the McInnis family in Harmony,” hotel-keeper Duncan McMillan testified. “I was more bothered by him forgetting to pay his bill. He told me he was taking the train back to Harmony, only he wasn’t at the station when the train came in.”

  “A day later, he turned up in Mount Stewart again,” the station master, Horace McEwen, testified. “He was trying to make change for a solid gold coin. I made the
change for him, and I kept the gold coin; but when Marshall Flynn asked for it, I gave it to him, and I would like to know who is going to make good on the amount of money that is owed to me?”

  That same gold coin was later proven to have belonged to James Callaghan.

  “He showed up at our door two days after poor Mr. Callaghan was murdered,” Mary Ellen’s mother testified. “I noticed right off that he had shaven his moustache off, but I gave it no mind. It did bother me when I came down at eleven o’ clock in the evening to find him ranting at my daughter. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he swore, using the Lord’s name in vain. ‘I am going to be hanged anyway. I will kill all hands before they hang me.’

  “He started banging around the furniture and going on about being hanged and having to kill everyone, and then he finally tired out. I didn’t like to see him that way, but I also knew that Mary Ellen had her heart set on him, so I did not know what to do. He stayed until Sunday morning the twenty-fourth. He went away and did not come back, and I was glad to see him go, even though Mary Ellen cried some at it.”

  “I saw Alexander Gillis in my store on Monday the twenty-fifth,” John Haley, a local storekeeper, testified. “He asked about the Callaghan murder. He told me that he had seen Callaghan, and said he was a pretty fine old fellow, and that whoever had murdered him should have just taken his money and let him live. He said he was sure that the old fellow had some money—‘All Irishmen generally have,’ is how he put it.”

  “We found a bloodstained vest and other pieces of clothing that had belonged to James Callaghan hidden in a trunk in Gillis’s sister’s field,” Marshall Flynn testified. “When I confronted Gillis with the vest, he said that the clothes were most likely hidden in that trunk by the real murderer, which seemed a bit of a stretch, to my way of thinking.”