Maritime Murder (12 page)

Further investigation showed that there was a wound behind McCarthy's left ear that might have been made by a sharp blow. He was wearing the waterproof overcoat that Annie Parker had sworn Osborne had stolen.
In his right pocket was $
52
. In his left pocket was $
207
. He also carried a piece of silver and a solid gold pocket watch
that Annie had also said were stolen, as well as a fully loaded seven-shot revolver.

The inquest was performed the day after the body was discovered. Several local physicians, including Coroner D. L. Hanington, performed the autopsy, in which it was agreed that Timothy McCarthy's death could have happened in much the way that Annie Parker originally described it.

Annie Parker was called to testify at the coroner's inquest, and repeated her story for the third time. However, this time she added the detail that Timothy McCarthy had told her that he was leaving his wife Helen and was travelling to Prince Edward Island later that week. She stuck to her version of the story in regards to the disposal of Timothy McCarthy's waterproof overcoat.

Agnes Buchanan, a friend of Annie's, swore that Annie Parker had told her that Mrs. McCarthy was going to “keep her living like a lady” if she would only stick to her story that the Osborne family had indeed killed her husband. “I believe Annie may have been drinking at the time that she told me this story,” Agnes allowed. “Actually, come to think of it, I might have been drinking at the very same time as well.”

The inquest officially ended on June
2
,
1878
, with a hung jury. It was determined that due to these inconclusive results, it would be necessary for the Osborne family to stand trial. The jury was subsequently dismissed.

A week later the river was dragged, and a rock matching Annie's description of the one Harry Osborne had used to weigh down McCarthy's body was found in the immediate vicinity of where McCarthy's remains were discovered.

The first official trial of the Osborne family began on July
18
,
1878
. The Dorchester courtroom was packed with spectators, so many that the floorboards gave way beneath the weight of the onlookers, necessitating a brief adjournment while hasty repairs were made to the courtroom floor.

Annie Parker repeated her testimony for a fourth time, and by now she had it memorized by heart. She had been staying in the Hampton jailhouse since the case had first begun because authorities feared both for her safety and for the possibility that she might run out on them.

Such fears appeared to be groundless. Annie was quite enjoying her prestige as the woman who would bring the Osborne family to justice, and put them in jail, once and for all. Remember, Annie was still in her late teens, and it did not take an awful lot to work up her enthusiasm.

The Osbornes' lawyer, A. L. Palmer, raised doubts that a seventeen-year-old boy could move a fully grown man by himself. He further went on to suggest that perhaps Timothy McCarthy had merely fallen from the bridge in a state of drunken stupor, and perhaps had broken his skull upon a piling before drowning—which would not explain the rope that was found about his neck, nor the rock that might possibly have been originally tied to the victim.

Palmer also called upon a dentist named Campbell and two travelling salesman, who all swore that they had stayed at the Waverly Hotel on the night in question and had heard nothing out of the ordinary. Palmer also hinted that perhaps McCarthy's wife, Helen, was behind the murder, although he could offer no actual proof to that insinuation beyond Agnes Buchanan's previous testimony.

Palmer proved to be quite a showman. At one point in the proceedings he donned McCarthy's hat and handed Annie Parker the hatchet that the defendant had allegedly used to kill McCarthy. Annie raised the hatchet nervously and then gently tapped the lawyer behind the ear. Later that day when asked if she “cared much for boys,” Annie coyly replied that she far preferred married men, and certainly handsome ones such as lawyer Palmer.

The trial went on without intermission until August
23
,
18
78
, when, after an eleven-hour deliberation, the jury finally announced that, like the jury at the inquest, they too were unable to reach a conclusive decision upon the verdict. The members of the second jury found themselves hung in indecision and were also dismissed, which meant that there would have to be a second trial for the Osborne family.

While the court prepared for another trial, John Osborne was released on bail. His family remained securely behind bars, as did Annie Parker.

On the morning of November
13
,
1878
, a third jury sat down to try the Osborne family. The trial continued until December
16
,
1878
, and ended again with a split decision. Insider sources suggested that the vote was divided between seven jurors in favour of a conviction, and five jurors in favour of an acquittal.

After a hearing, an inquest, three juries, two sets of lawyers, and two trials, the Osborne family was declared to be innocent of all wrongdoing.

Given the debatable veracity of Annie's testimony, it was decided that she would have to stand before a hearing to determine whether or not she needed to be tried for the crime of perjury. The Osborne family had apparently insisted upon pressing charges. Fortunately, Annie wasn't all that hard to find. She was living with Timothy McCarthy's widow, Helen McCarthy. It seems the two had somehow bonded.

Annie seemed a little weary of yet another appearance in court, telling one of the lawyers that he “had too much talk in him for such a little man.”

Dr. Campbell—the dentist whom defence lawyer A. L. Palmer had originally called to stand in the Osbornes' second trial—had a somewhat different story to tell this time around.

“As I look back,” Campbell testified, “I can recall coming down one morning to find the barroom had been freshly scrubbed. I cannot remember if it was the morning following Timothy McCarthy's disappearance, but it very well might have been. I remember overhearing Harry Osborne and Annie Parker having a heated argument. In this argument, I heard Annie say to Mr. Osborne that she ‘knew enough to send him to Dorchester,' to which Osborne replied that he ‘knew enough to send her to Hell.'”

When asked why, exactly, he did not mention this at the last trial, the dentist replied, “I am afraid of the Osbornes, and Annie Parker as well. I am afraid of what they might do if I spoke the truth of the matter. However, I will say this: if Annie Parker said that she saw Harry Osborne kill Timothy McCarthy, then I will not contradict her.”

When further pressed, Campbell had this to say: “My opinion is my own; however, I feel that the Osbornes are dangerous. On certain points I will tell all that I know. On others I will not. The law cannot compel me otherwise.”

After all the trouble that had been gone through, the Crown finally decided to drop all charges against Annie. She would not stand trial. Annie was absolutely relieved. Later that year, she even sold tickets and gave short talks on the ordeal, charging twenty-five cents a person. She made a little money from her venture, and shortly thereafter either left town or completely disappeared.

As for the Osborne family, they eventually relocated and settled in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Amazingly enough, the murder of Timothy McCarthy remains an unsolved mystery to this very day.

William Preeper
Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia
1887

I
t was Saturday, October
15
,
1887
. Peter Doyle had risen early. He wanted to get a good start on the day. It was a lovely, fine morning, and the sun had already burned off the morning mist. He hayed down the horses, cleaned up the stalls, and tended to what chores needed seeing to.

Peter Doyle groaned, and massaged his aching back. At fifty-seven years old, he sure wasn't getting any younger. He was grateful for the help of his hired man, William Preeper. Mind you, Preeper wasn't that big on conversation, but he was always there when Doyle needed him, following him about the farm as closely as if he were Peter Doyle's very own shadow.

“We done yet?” Preeper asked.

Doyle smiled. “We're about as done as we're going to get, I guess,” he said. “We might as well head for the house before I drop dead from hunger.” The two of them headed home for breakfast.

Peter's wife, Jane, was waiting for him in the kitchen, along with his seven-year-old stepson, Maurice, and three-year-old son, Frank. Breakfast was hot and steaming and it looked delicious, but as he sat down, Peter Doyle felt his appetite waning. He poked a fork into his hotcakes.

“Aren't you hungry?” Jane asked.

He put a hand on his stomach and grimaced. “My gut is acting up again,” he told her. “I'm sure it will pass.”

Doyle had been having problems with his digestion most of the summer. He blamed it on working too hard and getting older and the pounds that he had accumulated over the years.

When he'd eaten what he could manage to get down, he dressed himself in his best white shirt, black tie, and grey homespun jacket, and his dark trousers, which were worn shiny at the knees but still quite serviceable.

“Time for church,” he told his family. “I'd best be going.” Jane kissed him on the cheek and bade him farewell.

Doyle walked two kilometres to his nearest neighbour, a farmer named Miller. Once a month, Miller welcomed local Catholics to his barn, where an Enfield circuit priest by the name of Reverend Father Desmond held monthly services for those of the Catholic faith. Jane, being a diehard Protestant woman, did not attend. Neither did her children.

Following the service, Peter Doyle headed for home. He never made it.

Two days later, on Monday, October
17
,
1887
, Jane Doyle walked a whole kilometre along with her children to the Ledwidge farm.

“I'm worried about Peter,” Jane told Robert Ledwidge. “He came home from church service about three o'clock on Saturday and then decided to go hunting. He never returned. I'm worried he might have fallen somewhere. He's been having trouble with his stomach and I'm worried for his heart.” Jane wasn't quite telling the whole truth—but Ledwidge didn't know that.

Robert Ledwidge hitched a team and a wagon, and asked two of his hired hands to accompany him. The three of them drove Jane, Maurice, and Frank back to their farmhouse. Then, with the aid of Jane's directions, Ledwidge and his hired hands set out along the path that Peter Doyle had taken on his hunting expedition. They searched until late evening with no results. Ledwidge drove his team and wagon to the village of Guysborough Road and gathered a group of worried neighbours.

The next morning, Tuesday, October
18
,
1887
, there were dozens of Guysborough residents combing the surrounding wilderness with very little to show for their efforts.

On Wednesday morning the villagers were joined by John E. MacDonald, a Guysborough lumberer who had brought his entire logging crew to search for the missing Peter Doyle. “We'll look in another direction,” MacDonald said. “There's a small logging road that he might have followed. We'll try there.”

MacDonald and his crew followed the wood road until they spotted a set of footprints in a soft patch of moss. “This way,” MacDonald said. “Follow me.”

One of MacDonald's loggers found Peter Doyle's remains in an orchard just off of the lumber road. “There he is,” he called out. “I've found him.”

MacDonald raised his rifle and hastily fired a couple of shots into the air to alert the other searchers. “This doesn't make much sense,” MacDonald said. “I mean, just look at the man.”

Peter Doyle's body was still dressed in his best church-going apparel. He was sitting almost upright, propped against a large, grey boulder. His head was thrown back on his shoulders as if he was looking up at something above him. His hat was tangled in the snarling branches of a young spruce tree directly behind him. Doyle's large, muzzle-loading musket lay a few feet in front of him, where he'd dropped it. His powder horn and half-smoked pipe of tobacco lay in the dirt at his side. There was a single bullet wound midway down his back.

“It looks to me like he's been dead for the last couple of days,” MacDonald noted. “Although, what a man would be doing hunting in his Sunday best suit and tie is completely beyond my reckoning.”

They wrapped the body in a blanket and carried it to Doyle's home, where Dr. McKay of Musquodoboit performed a hasty inquest and autopsy in the shelter of Doyle's barn, which resulted in a verdict of “shot to death by an unknown hand.”

“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.

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.

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.”