Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  “We’ve got an ugly job ahead of us tonight,” Foster told the men.

  “How do you intend to manage this?” Steadman asked Foster, as they approached the brothel through the shadowy Moncton streets.

  “I intend to walk directly through that front door,” Foster replied. “I see no reason for subtlety.”

  “If you go through that door, you will very likely not come out alive,” Steadman grimly prophesized. “The back door seems a far likelier and safer prospect.”

  “As chief of police, the duty and danger must fall to me,” Foster answered. “Steadman, you go to the side door. Scott and Colborne, you two take the back. McRae, being a civilian, you should wait out here.”

  Foster promptly kicked down the front door and stepped through with a billy club in one hand and a police revolver in the other.

  “The cops are here!” one of the working girls shouted.

  Buck drew a .32 calibre revolver out of his coat pocket. “Hey, Jim,” he shouted, giving warning to his partner, who rushed for the side door. Buck was close behind. Foster was delayed by the crowd of brothel-goers he had to push his way through. McCrae and Colborne were likewise delayed at the rear door. So it all came down to policeman Joseph Steadman.

  Jim reached the side door first. He threw it open as Steadman came charging through. Steadman ran into Buck, and the two men came to grips. By this time, Jim had his own pistol out and was firing wildly, far more concerned with making a run for freedom than striving for any real accuracy.

  McRae tried to grab Jim, but was far too slow. Within an instant, Jim vaulted over the backyard fence and made good his escape, fleeing down the darkened streets of Moncton.

  Inside, Steadman and Buck were still tangled up together. Two shots rang out as Scott drew close enough to club Buck into submission.

  “My God, boys, I’m shot,” Steadman cried out—just before he sank to the floor, stone cold dead.

  Buck was handcuffed and dragged off to the Moncton jail. He was limping; he had taken a bullet in the leg. It was not clear whether the bullet had belonged to his partner, Jim, or whether he had accidentally shot himself. The police had made it a point not to fire a single shot during the entire procedure, not wanting to risk any accidental shootings of friendly—or unfriendly—spectators.

  Scott coaxed Buck to the jailhouse with several sharp raps of his billy club.

  “My God,” Buck protested. “Don’t hit me again. My head is already broken in two.”

  “You didn’t get half enough of what’s due,” Scott said, striking him again to make his point. “If I get tired of clubbing you, I might just kick you once or twice for the sheer, spiteful fun of it.”

  “But I did not do it,” Buck protested.

  “They all say that,” Scott replied.

  Steadman’s body was carried to the Park Hotel where it was laid out for the night. A crowd gathered, and some called for a public lynching. Steadman’s faithful golden retriever, Chub, who had often accompanied his master on his midnight beat, pushed through the crowd until he finally caught his master’s scent. The faithful old dog made his way into the hotel, evading the bellhops and the attending policemen’s best attempts to keep him out. Finally, the old dog found the room where his master’s body was being kept. The dog laid his head down upon his dead master’s chest and howled long and mournfully.

  The Coroner’s Inquest

  The evidence piled up very quickly. Part of the problem was Buck. He was a young man of about thirty years of age, a short, stocky little pit bull of a fellow—about five feet, seven inches, and 150 pounds, with a set of high cheekbones and mean little eyes. His arms were covered with tattoos of American flags and bald eagles. He hadn’t shaved, would not give any other name than “Buck,” and either ducked his head or covered his face every time a photographer drew near. “He just looked dangerous,” one reporter said.

  Two bullets had been fired from Buck’s revolver, and there was gunpowder residue freshly smeared upon his greasy, mildewed jacket. In addition, there was a small mend in the fabric at the bottom of Buck’s coat pocket. This mend was most likely to alleviate the wear and tear of the weight of a revolver constantly kept in his pocket.

  The morning following the shooting saw Buck standing in Moncton’s police court before a hastily organized coroner’s jury. After a short period of mandatory deliberation the jury formally charged Buck with the willful murder of policeman Joseph E. Steadman.

  The largest funeral procession ever seen to that date in Moncton assembled to carry veteran policeman Joseph Steadman to his final resting place. Steadman was well-liked, and he had the reputation of being a fair and honourable man. Many citizens had appreciated his lenient stance on the Scott Act, which forbade the selling of alcohol—a stance that some felt had actually hindered his chances of career advancement, but made him immensely popular with the people of the street.

  Steadman’s casket was borne by members of the Orange Order, a Protestant-based fraternal order of which Steadman was a member of some standing. Several high-standing officials came forth to give tribute and offer up deeply felt and moving eulogies.

  “As an officer he was both fearless and bold in doing his duty, and his affable manner in the performance of such duty won for him many a friend,” Police Chief Charles Foster solemnly said. “We will long remember him.”

  This epic funeral did much to fuel the heat of the public outrage over this situation and local authorities grew more and more concerned over how they could hastily and conclusively resolve the situation.

  Meanwhile, Buck’s compatriot was still at large. Police Chief Foster offered a reward of an unheard-of $250 for the apprehension of the fugitive. Police and the public scoured the countryside.

  The results of the search were immediate. A stranger, who was spotted standing in a field of cows, was cornered after a brief chase. It turned out that the stranger was a local farmer dressed up for his wedding day, trying to round up a few missing cows before setting out to face the minister and the marriage altar. He had not expected to find himself in such dire circumstances. When he saw the policeman coming toward him he was certain that his bride’s family had sent the police to drag him to the church at gunpoint if necessary.

  As the hunt for his accomplice continued, Buck still stubbornly refused to reveal his own name. He did, however, ask constantly about the whereabouts of his partner, Jim Christie. “Has Jim been took yet?” he would ask. “Did you scoundrels shoot him?”

  A break in the case occurred when a telegram was received from Detective Gross of Montreal, who identified Buck as one Buck Whelan, a thumper and a thieving dog, well-known in Montreal as a very desperate character and allegedly the nephew of James Whelan, the man who was hanged for the Ottawa shooting of noted Father of Confederation and politician Thomas Darcy McGee in 1868.

  “That’s not me,” Buck argued. “My name is Robert Olsen. I was born in Norway. My parents immigrated to America twenty years ago. They settled in a little farm outside of St. Paul’s, Minnesota. Don’t tell them of my circumstances. It would only break their hearts to know what has befallen their only son.”

  The owner of the brothel/hotel had another story to relate. “He told me that he was a sailor on a schooner out of Saint John,” Thomas Donnelly told the authorities. “He wouldn’t tell me where he was bound for. He told me it was none of my business.”

  The public clamour concerning the case grew. Day and night found angry crowds gathered outside of the Moncton jailhouse. The talk of a public lynching continued to grow. Extra policemen were brought in and stationed at the jailhouse in order to protect their prisoner from harm. The reward for Jim Christie rose to $500—a princely sum back then.

  From there it went up to $750, and was bumped again to $1,000. When it rose to $1,000, famed Pictou police detective Peter Owen “Peachy” Carroll decided to step in and take a hand in t
he case.

  Peachy Calls His Shot

  Pictou detective Peachy Carroll had been building a reputation for himself as a man who got things done. He was a flamboyant man, tall and broad-shouldered, and sported a great, bushy moustache that looked as if it might have been ripped off the wrong end of a grizzly bear. And he was also a man of great personal ambition, with a keen eye for possible publicity.

  “I had a dream I was wrestling Jim Christie last night,” Peachy told local reporters soon after he arrived on the Moncton train on August 8, 1892. “It seemed to me that it was a sign that I needed to step in on this case and see justice served right and proper.”

  Peachy Carroll and DeLancey Wilbur set out that day on a two-man hunt for Jim Christie. DeLancey, or Lance, as he was known to friends, was a local hunter and guide, and a rough-and-tumble fellow who had built himself a reputation as being a very successful bounty hunter. He hadn’t liked the idea of teaming up with the Pictou detective, but Carroll needed someone who was familiar with the local territory, and Lance needed the money that Carroll offered him.

  Peachy and Lance decided it was most likely that Jim Christie was following the railroad tracks on his escape. They walked the tracks through the rain and cold wind until they stumbled into a bit of good luck at Harcourt Junction, where they overheard two boys talking about an egg theft in Bass River.

  “He ate ’em raw,” the bigger boy said. “Boy, he must have been hungry.”

  “You know anyone hungry enough to eat raw eggs?” Peachy asked Lance.

  “Me, right now,” Lance replied. “But it might be our man Christie.”

  Following the boys’ lead, Peachy and Lance hitched a ride to Bass River in a local’s wagon. There, they spoke with the farmer in question.

  “The fellow lifted the kitchen window and come right in,” the farmer told them. “He took a whole basket of eggs from the pantry and a loaf of bread. He took my razor from beside the wash basin. Hell, he even took my boots! He left tracks, though,” the farmer said. “You can tell they’re my boot tracks from the horseshoe nails that I mended them with just last week.”

  Peachy and Lance tracked the fugitive for five kilometres, until they confronted Christie at another farmer’s house. Christie was sitting calmly in a chair by the wood stove. Peachy came through the door, and Christie drew a pistol from his pocket. Peachy socked him squarely between the eyes and Christie crashed backwards against the wall before crumpling into a heap on the floor. Peachy stepped on Christie’s wrist, twisted the pistol from his grasp, and snapped a pair of stainless steel handcuffs onto the fugitive’s injured wrist.

  “You are under arrest for the murder of Joseph Steadman,” Peachy said.

  “I fired four shots, but none of them hit Steadman,” Christie argued. “I was firing a .38 calibre, and Buck was firing a .32 calibre pistol.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Peachy said. “You are still under arrest.”

  They dragged the fugitive to the train station and then boarded a train for Moncton, just barely ahead of a local lynch mob who had decided to save the court the cost of a hanging.

  Rooting Out the Truth

  Peachy Carroll had the train stopped at the north crossing, just before entering the Moncton city limits. Chief Foster and a half-dozen rifle-armed policemen were there to make certain there was no chance of vigilante justice. Even so, crowds of angry locals ran after the wagon and threw stones and clumps of horse manure to express their deep-seated anger and displeasure.

  The prisoner’s identity was still a bit of a mystery. Like Buck, Jim had his own version of the truth to tell. “My name is Thomas Moore,” Jim insisted. “I’m originally from Toronto.”

  “Judging from his talk he is doubtless well-educated and he appears to be pretty well-read on matters in general,” Peachy observed after the two men had spent their first night together in a Moncton jailhouse. “But if his name is Tom Moore, you can start calling me the high and holy Emperor Montezuma.”

  That wasn’t just a guess on Peachy’s part. He had already heard a significant part of the two men’s stories—although neither Buck nor Jim were aware of everything that Peachy already knew. Peachy had spent the first night of Jim Christie’s incarceration hiding quietly one cell over, listening to Jim and Buck whisper back and forth between their jail cells. He had heard enough to piece together the fact that Buck and Jim had known exactly what they were doing when they had taken arms against a policeman. He had also heard enough to know that the two men were concealing their identities. He probably had sufficient evidence to take them to trial, but he was determined to claim that thousand-dollar reward, and he would leave nothing to chance.

  “You made a hell of a job of it, Buck,” Jim had whispered. “Why didn’t you shoot low? I always told you to shoot low.”

  “I couldn’t help it, Jim,” Buck had replied. “I couldn’t get clear of that policeman. You’d have done the same. When I fired I thought I’d get clear of him, but the other fellow clubbed me out cold.”

  Buck and Jim were transferred to the county jail in Dorchester, New Brunswick, where they would stand before Judge John James Fraser, the former premier of the province. A grand jury charged Buck with murder, and Jim likewise received seven counts, ranging from robbery to discharging a pistol at Steadman feloniously, willfully, and with considerable malice of intent.

  The trial itself took place in September 1892. The most damaging testimony came from Peachy Carroll himself, as he repeated the conversation overhead in the jail cell.

  “And were you drinking that night?” the defending lawyer asked Peachy, determined to undermine the detective’s credibility.

  “It gets awfully cold in a jail cell,” Peachy admitted. “You ought to try it sometime. I had me a snort or two, just to keep the fire going.”

  “And might your judgment have been clouded by the alcohol you consumed?” the defence attorney asked.

  “He was as bent as a dog’s hind elbow,” Buck called out. “Drunk as two lords, and I’ll swear to it.”

  Peachy turned and stared directly at the judge “I had three or four drinks of sherry,” he admitted with a certain dignity and candour. “Just look at the size of me, your honour. I am an awfully big man. It would take a whole lot more than a swallow of sherry to intoxicate me.”

  William Wilson of Chatham was called in next to testify. He identified the Mexican silver dollars that had initially led Chief Foster to the arrest. Officers Scott and Colborne also testified. In addition, the Donnelly family was called to the stand to add their version of the events that occurred on the night of Joseph Steadman’s death.

  Defending attorney Grant fired off arguments for over two and a half hours, spitting out statements and accusations like a Gatling gun spewing out bullets. Why hadn’t Detective Carroll brought an arrest warrant with him? Why hadn’t the Crown insisted on removing the bullet from Buck’s leg? Might it not be argued that because Joseph Steadman had failed to identify himself as a police officer that the defendants’ resulting actions could merely be described as simple self-defence? Might not the blow from Joseph Steadman’s billy club have actually struck the trigger of Buck’s revolver, and thus have inadvertently caused the officer’s resulting demise?

  Each of these arguments was swiftly shot down. Jim Christie was acquitted of murder but convicted of shooting with intent to wound, and three counts of robbery, including a store burglary following Steadman’s shooting. Judge Fraser sentenced Christie to twenty-five years of confinement behind the walls of Dorchester Penitentiary.

  Buck—who now declared that his actual name really was Robert Olsen, and that Buck was just a casual nickname—was sentenced to be hanged on December 1, 1892.

  The Hanging

  The execution of Robert “Buck” Olsen required a fair bit of effort and expenditure upon the part of the province of New Brunswick. For starters, they constructed an anne
x to the Moncton jailhouse, consisting of a twenty-foot-high wall, eighteen feet wide by twenty-two feet long. This wall would properly ensure that the public would be unable to easily witness the final end of Olsen’s life. No one wanted a repeat of the disastrous George Dowey execution of 1868.

  In addition, the services of a professional hangman were secured. John Radcliffe of Toronto, Ontario, had trained under British hangman William Marwood. A Dominion order-in-council, upon the recommendation of Justice Minister Sir John Thompson, had recently declared Radcliffe to be Canada’s first official executioner; at the time of his death on February 26, 1911, at the age of fifty-five, Radcliffe had reportedly supervised a total of 150 legally sanctioned executions.

  Radcliffe oversaw the construction of the gallows, which consisted of two upright posts of about eight feet tall, with a crossbeam. Attached to the crossbeam was a pair of pulleys: one received the rope that would be noosed about the convicted man’s throat, while the other received a reinforced line that fastened to an iron weight of 364 pounds. This was Radcliffe’s own innovative design, what he called a “jerk ’em up” gallows. He felt that this construction ensured a more rapid and merciful means of execution.

  Buck Olsen awoke at seven o’clock in the morning without prompting. At half past seven, a local priest, Father Cormier, held a religious service for the condemned man. He apologized for not being able to perform the last rites, a sacrament only allowed to those in danger of death from a natural cause. Mrs. Atkinson and Mrs. Emmerson of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union were on hand to sing several “uplifting” hymns. The prisoner was allowed to say goodbye to his friend.