for his execution. He went to his death with the words “God save Ireland! And God save my soul!” on his lips. It took seven long minutes for Whelan to die.
Executed individuals were usually buried in the cemetery of the prison where their hanging took place. Whelan was no exception: he was interred in an unmarked grave in the courtyard of the jail. But in 2002, following petitions from his family, a box of earth was dug up from the jail yard and taken to Montreal to be symbolically reburied beside Whelan’s widow’s remains in the Notre-Dame-Des -Neiges Cemetery.
How ironic that memorials to the two men — one murdered, the other hanged for his murder — now stand in such close proximity.
But was Whelan actually guilty of the crime?
Many say yes. Whelan, like McGee, lived in Montreal. As noted by Wilson, Whelan was either a Fenian or a Fenian sympathizer, and he hated McGee. He had been stalking McGee for months, following him to Ottawa when McGee went there on parliamentary business. He was in the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons on the morning of the murder. He left the House at the same time as McGee and had no alibi for the time between 2:10 and 2:30 a.m. When the police arrested him, they found his Smith & Wesson revolver, which looked as though it had recently been fired. During Whelan’s trial, Joseph Faulkner, a tailor who worked with him in Montreal, testified that Whelan had said that McGee “was a traitor and deserved to be shot.” Another witness from Montreal, Alexander J. Turner, told the court that after McGee was elected to parliament, Whelan had threatened to “blow his bloody brains out before the session is over.”
On the other hand, there were signs that justice had not been done. Sir John A., McGee’s great friend, sat next to Judge William Buell Richards during the trial, which could have seriously influenced the jury’s decisions. Turner, whose evidence was particularly damaging to Whelan, was accused by the defence of lying in the hope of claiming a chunk of the reward money. In the two failed appeals against Whelan’s death sentence, Judge Richards, by now promoted to his new role as chief justice of Ontario, cast a deciding vote instead of stepping aside to make sure the process would be unbiased.
Other troubling questions remain. Witnesses had described a mysterious man sitting next to Whelan in the House of Commons on the night of the murder, making threatening gestures as McGee gave his final speech. Who was this suspect, and why was nothing done to investigate him further? What about reports of a horse and buggy seen speeding away from the crime scene? Was Whelan telling the truth when he said, just before he was hanged, “I know the man who shot Mr. McGee,” but that he was not prepared to rat on him? Could it be, as Wilson suggests, that Whelan was not a lone assassin but part of a hit squad?
And what about the murder weapon? Some commentators say that the evidence linking Whelan’s revolver to the crime was weak and circumstantial. This argument was tested when the gun turned up in 1973 in the possession of a private owner, Scott Renwick, an auto mechanic from Dundalk, Ontario. It seems that the original investigating officer had kept the firearm, which was a perfectly acceptable practice in the 1800s, and it was passed down through his family from generation to generation.
With new forensic tools available, Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences found that a bullet fired from the gun looked a lot like the McGee bullet. This did not prove conclusively that Whelan shot McGee, but it did show that McGee was shot with the same kind of gun and ammunition Whelan was carrying when he was arrested.
Whether Whelan was guilty or not, this case has gone down in the record books. Thomas D’Arcy McGee is the only Canadian federal politician, and a very high-profile one at that, ever to be assassinated.
Patrick Whelan was the second-last individual in Canada to be officially executed in a public space. Later in 1869, the year Whelan was hanged, Sir John A. Macdonald signed a bill in an attempt to ensure that, beginning the following year, hangings would take place either out of the public’s view or with restrictions on the number of onlookers allowed to attend.
Chapter 4
Crowd Control
H ow would you feel if you went to all the trouble of organizing a hanging and no one came? If you were John Macdonald, sheriff of Huron County, Ontario, on December 7, 1869, you would be exceptionally relieved. Macdonald surreptitiously changed the time of the hanging at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich to 8:45 a.m., hours earlier than scheduled, to keep the crowds away. Imagine his shock when, in spite of the early start, around three hundred people still showed up. The execution was mercifully quick and efficient, as noted by John Melady in his book Double Trap , and after thirty minutes the corpse was cut down, placed in a pine coffin, and taken to the train station. On the way, it passed thousands of people heading in the opposite direction, all hell-bent on watching the spectacle unfold later that morning.
The fact is, Sheriff Macdonald had every reason to be afraid, very afraid. The hangman was clearly nervous, too. He had blackened his face and hands to disguise himself, leading the Huron Expositor to describe him as “fiendish looking.” The case had ignited a fiery reaction in the community. Many felt that the prisoner, the only person convicted for the crime, had been betrayed by his associates and entrapped by a police informant. In addition, out-of-control mobs at public executions were a fearsome reality. Both the sheriff and the executioner might well have read, or heard, of the shenanigans at the execution of Edgar Harter exactly nine years previously in not-too-distant Brockville, Ontario. As the Brockville Monitor reported:
Wet and exceedingly unpleasant as the day was, it did not prevent crowds of morbid sightseers thronging from all quarters into Brockville to see the execution … until at length some four thousand strangers swarmed along the streets.… Hard-looking men, and brazen-looking women, and blackguard boys might be encountered at every point. As the necessary sequence of such an assemblage there were laughing and shouting, and snowballing, and ribaldry prevailing, with some fighting and drunkenness, leading one to question very seriously the propriety of public executions, which usually draw such indecent mobs together.
Fortunately for Sheriff Macdonald and his henchman, the disappointment of the hordes when they realized they had been duped did not explode into violence as it could so easily have done.
It must be said, though, that when it came to crowd misbehaviour, Canada couldn’t hope to compete with the Brits. A case in point was the execution of husband-and-wife murderers Frederick and Marie Manning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in London, England, in 1849. According to a horrified Charles Dickens in a letter to The Times , “thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment.”
The man hanged at the Huron County Gaol in Goderich that harsh December morning in 1869 was Nicholas Melady Jr., convicted of brutally murdering his father, Nicholas Sr., also known as Old Melady, on June 6, 1868. Also murdered that day was Melady Jr.’s pregnant stepmother, Ellen. The Huron Signal described a neighbour’s visit to the Melady farmhouse just outside Seaforth the following morning, where “a most shocking sight met his horrified gaze. At the bedroom door lay Mr. Mellady [sic ] shot through the head, and at the bedside was stretched the lifeless corpse of his wife, her skull split open and her body otherwise horribly mutilated.… The walls and floors of the rooms were literally covered with the gore of the victims.”
The case was dreadful in the extreme. Old Melady was a wealthy farmer generally reviled in the area for his hard drinking and foul temper. He was particularly hated by his six children, especially since he frequently threatened to disinherit them, promising to leave his fortune to his second wife and their unborn baby. The whole family seemed to have been
