Maritime Murder

by Steve Vernon

  He was calm and cool, like he was telling a story around the campfire. But all the calm and the cool in the world was not going to erase the sight of young Maggie Dutcher standing in the witness box pointing at him and saying, “John Sullivan. That is the man.”

  On January 27, 1897, the jury found John Sullivan guilty as charged. Judge Hanington sentenced Sullivan to be hanged on March 12, 1897.

  Later, in his lonely cell, Sullivan had this opinion to voice: “I can count the hours when I will be taken from here and asked to say goodbye to all of the world before I mount the scaffold and die. Judge Hanington says so. The order must be obeyed. I am as innocent as a child unborn of the crime of murder, but what does that matter? The Crown wanted a victim, and I was the only available man. I have nothing to fear,” Sullivan concluded. “I have faced death a hundred times. I am not going to flinch now.”

  When famed hangman John Radcliffe visited Sullivan in his cell to weigh and measure him, Sullivan expressed his relief to see the man. “I am right glad to see you, Mr. Radcliffe,” Sullivan said. “I was afraid that the sheriff might be asked to undertake the hanging. He is an old and fussy man, and I’m afraid he would have bungled the task and caused me undue torture. I have no fear of that, seeing you here before me now.”

  Sullivan was hanged at a quarter to eight the next morning, before a crowd of nearly sixty people. His entire family came out to watch the proceedings. So too did Detective Peachy Carroll, who stood at a distance with his fat gold pocket watch in his big, meaty hand.

  “I watched John Radcliffe hang Buck Olsen back in 1892 for the shooting of Joseph Steadman, a damn good policeman. Olsen took fourteen whole long minutes to die after Radcliffe dropped him. He twitched like a St. Vitus Day dancer. I’m more than a little curious to see if Radcliffe has improved his game any.”

  John Radcliff had indeed improved his game. John Sullivan’s neck broke cleanly. He died within two minutes of being dropped into eternity.

  They cut Sullivan’s body down, lowered it into a waiting coffin, and drove it by wagon to a nearby graveyard. He was given a quiet and dignified Catholic funeral service, and buried just a short distance from Buck Olsen’s grave.

  the nova scotia bluebeard

  Samuel Herbert Dougal

  Halifax, Nova Scotia

  1885

  In 1697 Charles Perrault penned the tale of Bluebeard, a rich noble who was married to a series of women, each marriage lasting only long enough for the bloodthirsty nobleman to tire of each woman, one by one, and led her down to the cellar, where he would kill her in secrecy.

  The story goes something like this:

  Bluebeard came to a lord’s castle one night and asked for the hand of his youngest daughter. It took some convincing, but eventually the old lord decided that Bluebeard would make a fine son-in-law. There was a great marriage, and then Bluebeard drove away in a carriage and led his sweet, young bride to his mansion.

  “My home is now your home,” Bluebeard told his new wife. “I will give you keys to every chamber, but you must promise me faithfully never to enter the furthest room in the deepest cellar. That room must remain forever closed.”

  “What is in that room?” the girl asked her husband.

  “It is a great and terrible secret.”

  One night Bluebeard went out hunting. While he was gone, curiosity got the best of his young bride. She went downstairs to the furthest room in the deepest cellar and unlocked the door. Inside, she found an unholy altar decorated with the decapitated heads of what she assumed were Bluebeard’s ex-wives.

  Although she tried to hide her discovery from her husband, he soon figured out that she knew his secret—he found the bloodstains upon the key to his secret chamber. Depending on who tells the story, it can end in a variety of ways. Some would have you believe that the young bride’s sister and brothers save the day at the last possible moment. Others will tell you that the bride manages to steal her murderous husband’s sword and decapitate him, leaving his head hanging on a hook above the remains of his other dead wives.

  Whichever version of the Bluebeard story you choose to believe, it might surprise you to find out that Nova Scotia had its own version of the homicidal husband.

  This tale is one of the strangest in the collection. It spans an entire ocean and nearly two decades, as well as the lives and deaths of three young women and the terrorizing of several others.

  Samuel Herbert Dougal was born in Bow, an area of London, England, in the year 1847 to parents Samuel and Mary Dougal. He finished school with a good grade average and found himself a position of promise as an apprentice in a civil engineer’s office. As an employee, he was described as dutiful and diligent, but his nightlife left much to be desired.

  His debts mounted, his drinking increased, and he was building a very bad reputation as a chronic womanizer. So, it was no surprise to any who knew him that he left his position to join the British Army in 1866. After shipping out to Wales and serving with the Royal Engineers for three years, he met and married nineteen-year-old Lovenia Martha Griffiths in Holywell, the fifth-largest town in Flintshire, North Wales, in March 1869.

  One wonders what Lovenia was thinking as she and Samuel Herbert Dougal stood beside Saint Winifred’s Well—for which the town was named—where Saint Winifred was beheaded by an angry lover. According to legend, Winifred had announced to her suitor, Caradog, that she was going to dedicate her life to the service of Christ. Enraged, Caradog beheaded his young love. Where her head fell to the dirt floor, a holy spring shot up. When the water kissed the cheek of Caradog, the hot-tempered lad melted away faster than a freshly bucketed Wicked Witch of the West.

  Winifred’s maternal uncle, Saint Bueno, retrieved her head from the mouth of the spring and stitched it back onto her body with a silver needle and blessed thread. Saint Winifred rose up, healed by the holy man’s efforts at tailoring. She then went on a pilgrimage to Rome and performed many holy works along the way—at least, that’s how the story is most often told.

  Lovenia In Love and Out

  Lovenia bore Samuel Herbert Dougal four strapping children. She followed him to his new station in Halifax, Nova Scotia. By all reports, her life with Dougal was miserable. He cheated on her. He beat her. He wiped his boots upon her heart and spat upon her affections. Lovenia died on the morning of Monday, June 29, 1885, after falling suddenly ill and enduring twelve hours of non-stop dry heaving, vomiting, and bouts of convulsion. Dougal hastily arranged for a burial, not more than twenty-four hours after she had passed away. She was buried in Fort Massey Cemetery, in the South End of Halifax.

  Dougal returned to England in an apparent state of mourning, leaving his four children entrusted to an aunt’s keeping. Not more than six weeks following his first wife’s death, he met and proposed to twenty-eight-year-old Mary Herberta Boyd, the youngest daughter of a successful Irish veterinarian.

  “I do not want to wait for a church wedding,” Dougal told his new bride. “I mean to make you mine as hastily as propriety allows.”

  The two were married on August 14, 1885, at the home of the curate of London’s St. Paul’s Anglican Church. Mary then accompanied Dougal by ship back to Halifax, and not more than two months later—on Tuesday, October 6, 1885—died in a similar fit of vomiting and seizure.

  Mary was likewise hastily buried at Dougal’s request, not more than a few plots over from his first wife, Lovenia, in the Fort Massey Cemetery of Halifax, Nova Scotia. There was no inquest or autopsy. Being a military wife and living in military quarters meant that her death was the Army’s problem and no one else’s. The fact that both women’s families were living in the uk at the time meant that there was no one there who would speak for the dead.

  Oddly enough, neither woman had left behind a last will and testament, which meant that any worldly belongings would have been left to their lawful spouse—namely Dougal. The autumn leaves of Halifax
wove a cold, comfortless shroud for the two women while Dougal shed great crocodile tears into the graveyard dirt.

  Are you keeping count? That is two dead wives in four months. However, Dougal was not finished yet. There were others yet to come.

  Wife Number Three

  Two years later, in 1887, Dougal finished his military service in Aldershot, where he was serving as quartermaster-sergeant and chief clerk. Dougal shipped back home to England with his detachment. His prospects appeared bright, as he was freshly decommissioned with a modest military pension and an immaculate record of service.

  Somewhere in that time, Dougal also found himself another woman, whose name has quite mysteriously never been revealed. She journeyed with Dougal to Britain when he shipped back home. Shortly afterwards she travelled back home to Halifax alone, claiming to be the widow of Dougal, although Dougal was in fact still quite alive.

  The two were never married, although one child was born from the relationship. She managed to keep her identity hidden for seventeen years, until a reporter from the Halifax Daily Mail tracked her down.

  “Hanging is the proper death for Dougal,” she told the reporter. “He treated me badly, beat me, and often threatened to kill me. He was a monster and I was one of his victims.”

  At the woman’s request, her identity was not revealed in the paper. At the time of the interview, the woman was in her thirties, had quietly remarried, and was determined to get on with her life and forget about whatever mark Dougal had left. “Indeed,” she told the reporter, “until you so boldly approached me, I had managed to live my life without so much as mentioning his name, but his memory will haunt my nightmares forever.”

  To this day, the actual identity of Dougal’s third “wife” remains a mystery to one and all. The newspaper reporter took the secret to his grave.

  An Attempt at Arson

  Following his third woman’s flight, Dougal was reported to have lived with a Maidstone widow, who likewise referred to herself as Dougal’s “wife.” He apparently had lost none of his oily charm, but the pattern remained surprisingly similar. His cruelty to her grew to be too much to bear, although none of their neighbours had the slightest inkling of his abusive nature. Eventually she too fled from him, taking with her the two children that had resulted from the three-year relationship.

  Following this, Dougal ran a small pub in Ware, Hertfordshire, supported by an elderly woman and her modest fortune. She proved a little too wary for Dougal, confiding to her friends that it had become obvious to her that he really only wanted her for her money.

  She let him keep the pub, but after several months, money problems began to occur. Dougal secured a small house directly across the street from the pub; in 1889 the pub burned to the ground. Dougal attempted to claim the insurance, but wound up in St. Albans Crown Court, charged with arson. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and Dougal was cleared. Then, after insuring his house with a different insurance agent, he burned it down as well. He stood his trial at the assizes at St. Albans, and on December 5, 1889, was again acquitted for lack of evidence.

  Neither of the fires resulted in much of a financial return on his efforts. Indeed, he had barely escaped with his own freedom. So Dougal fled England and travelled to Ireland, where he married his third legitimate wife, Sarah Henrietta White, on August 7, 1892. This marriage soon fell apart, although a formal divorce was never agreed upon.

  Three years later, on April 9, 1895, Dougal was arrested for the theft of “one linen duster, two tea cloths, and four yards of dimity cotton—a fabric generally employed in the making of bustles” from Emily Booty, a woman he had become involved with a year previous to meeting the Maidstone widow in London. The relationship did not last, however, as Dougal and Booty were at this point completely unable to get along. Dougal was granted bail and then turned around and counter-charged Miss Booty with the theft of an egg incubator.

  Dougal beat the charges by falling back upon his impeccable military career. “I served in the Royal Engineers for twenty-one years, and have a pension of fifty pounds a year, and if I am convicted of stealing so much as a penny I shall lose every penny of my pension.”

  Dougal’s luck held out. The court, apparently moved by his impeccable term with the military, ruled in Dougal’s favor, although this and the arson charges would serve as a blot on his career. This blot was further exacerbated by a charge of cheque forgery that led to a brief incarceration in Pentonville Prison, located just north of London. Discipline at the prison was depressingly medieval, with prisoners incarcerated in cells located in five radiating wings that fanned out from around a central guardhouse. The cells were small—four metres long, two metres wide, and three metres high. Prisoners were forbidden to speak. During exercise periods, they marched mutely in rows, wearing brown cotton masks. Each day, they attended chapel, sitting in closet-like cubicles with nothing but their masked heads poking out.

  Dougal seized an opportunity in chapel to wrap the bell rope around his neck and attempt to hang himself. As suicide goes, it was a fairly half-hearted attempt. There were no rope burns, no signs of tracheal damage—but the attempt did serve to get his sentence commuted to a brief stay in the London County Lunatic Asylum at Cane Hill.

  His behaviour during his term in the asylum was exemplary, and as a result, he was released and duly certified as a sane and potentially productive member of British society once more. His luck seemed to be holding true, but as a result of the blotches that the arson, theft, and forgery charges had left on his civilian life, he lost his military pension. That hurt.

  He wrote an impassioned plea to the Pension Office on a scrap of butcher’s paper, pleading that they consider his condition, and intending to get said letter signed by several of the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum. Unfortunately for Dougal, no one would sign his scrap of butcher’s paper.

  Alone, in his late fifties, and sadly pensionless—a failure as a professional arsonist, a flop as a forger, a fool as a petty thief—Dougal determined to return to the fields in which he had found the most success: womanizing and wife killing.

  The Moat Murder

  Dougal’s first attempt at finding a woman to support him in his lifestyle was a clear mark of desperation. He advertised in a local religious newsletter for “a mentally or otherwise afflicted lady to take close personal care of.” Surprisingly enough, there were no takers.

  In 1898 he met fifty-six-year-old Camille Cecile Holland in a time of mutual distress. He was still in mourning for his lost military pension and she was still in love with her childhood sweetheart, a young naval officer who had drowned in the performance of his duty. She still wore his ring decades later, and until she met Dougal, she had given no thought to the possibility of there ever being any other love but her childhood sweetheart. Dougal swept down on her like a hawk upon a field mouse, his eyes squarely fixed upon the seven-thousand-pound inheritance that Camille had recently received. In her state of over-advanced bereavement, she made herself an easy victim for Dougal’s slick approach.

  “He was a tall military looking man,” she wrote in her diary, “who referred to himself as Captain Dougal. He had a fine pointed beard, a stalwart chest, plentiful hair, and a clever touch with a pen.”

  Camille fell in love with “Captain” Dougal, and rented a small, modest home for the two of them to reside in for thirty shillings a week. Dougal had other plans, however. He got in touch with a land agent in January 1899 and arranged a contract in his own name using Camille’s inheritance fund to purchase a small but costly country estate known as Moat Farm. The farm was at the end of a muddy cart track, and the house was only accessible by a footbridge over a naturally occurring moat. It was, in fact, the perfect trap.

  When Camille found out about the farm, she took action, getting in touch with the land agent, destroying Dougal’s unfinanced contract, and securing a contract of her own that would name her as the sole own
er of Moat Farm. This act of independence must have tested Dougal’s patience to the limit, but he could not do anything against her wishes because, in point of fact, Camille had not yet married him.

  It was at this point that Dougal’s third wife—Sarah Henrietta White—stepped back into his life. She had heard of his good fortune and most definitely wanted a part of it. Amazingly enough, Camille apparently allowed Dougal’s wife to move in with them at the farm. Sarah White immediately took up residence, and was often seen about the grounds wearing what looked to be Camille’s best gowns.

  Shortly after White arrived in the early spring of 1899, Dougal began circulating the story that Camille had gone abroad and was travelling on the continent. This story was believed for several years, while Dougal lived it up at the farm with his third wife, Sarah, and a series of working girls who were hired and fired just as quickly as Dougal tired of them.

  Eventually, in 1902, White tired of Dougal’s brutality and womanizing ways. Dougal seemed unbothered by his third wife’s departure. The stream of female servants and working girls increased. It was March 1903 before the truth finally came out, when Dougal slipped up and was caught forging Camille’s signature on a cheque.

  After four years of living the life of Riley, “Bluebeard” had finally been found out. No one would now believe his story regarding Camille’s absence. A search party took action. It took four weeks of searching, but a woman’s body was found buried in a ditch. The corpse was rotted beyond identification, but there was enough left of her footwear for Camille’s shoemaker to identify the boots as belonging to her.

  “If Dougal had thought to bury his victim in the farmyard waste heap,” the pathologist later remarked, “the acidic nature of the ordure would have left little or nothing to identify.”