eleven
Putting Flesh to Bone
Although the tale of John McLoughlin Jr. is “a fascinating, if somewhat pathetic, narrative,” his tragic demise has not received the attention it deserves. Two-time McLoughlin biographer Dorothy Nafus Morrison dedicated only a handful of pages to his death, as did Burt Brown Barker in his chronicle of the family dynasty. James Raffan’s discussion of the murder runs little more than a page, while similarly scant accounts appear in Williams’s Highlights of the First Two Hundred Years of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Galbraith’s much-lauded biography of George Simpson, The Little Emperor. The murder warrants only a single sentence in Newman’s Empire of the Bay: “The dispute between the two climaxed as a result of Simpson’s mishandling of the investigation of the murder of McLoughlin’s son in the territory.” Just two chapter-length academic considerations of the crime have ever been published: Hamar Foster’s “Killing Mr. John,” which examined whether England, Upper Canada, or Russia had jurisdiction to prosecute the shooter; and an essay by Walter Kaye Lamb focusing entirely on the deteriorating relationship between McLoughlin’s father and Governor Simpson after the murder.
Indeed, the friction between the two men seems to be the only aspect of the crime scholars care about, and much of the rhetoric hinges on a single question — whose version of events was correct: Simpson’s or McLoughlin’s? While the Company’s ruling class threw its lot in with the Governor, historians have sided with the victim’s father. Willard Ireland spoke for many when he wrote: “In all fairness, it must be added that McLoughlin was in the right.”
But was he right? Was his mutiny theory any more plausible than the self-defence narrative championed by Simpson? Answering that question requires delving into the crime at a level never before attempted, and reconstructing the scene using the latest investigative methods.
Cases like McLoughlin’s are the bane of modern forensic investigations. Murders masquerading as suicides, accidents, natural deaths, or even justifiable homicides are often mishandled. The scenes are not properly examined, autopsies are deemed unnecessary, and the collection of physical evidence is cursory at best. It is only after the true nature of the crime is revealed that investigators must piece together the event with whatever remains.
In this case, what remains is a series of witness statements in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, as well as a few hand-drawn maps and some personal and business correspondence relating to the shooting. There was no police service in 1842, and no autopsy was performed on John McLoughlin. Ironically, although his medical career never amounted to much, he was the closest thing the fort had to a doctor, and as chief trader he was also its resident law enforcement. Had the bullet struck another, it would have fallen to McLoughlin to examine the body and investigate the circumstances. His untimely demise left a void no one else could fill, and, as a consequence, the specifics of his murder were recorded solely in the depositions of lay eyewitnesses.
Relying on such statements to reconstruct the crime is a perilous but necessary proposition. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in the best of circumstances, and evidence derived from individuals with strong motives to deceive makes it all the more questionable. Such potentially biased investigations raise the spectre of a deductive ouroboros, a circular argument endlessly feeding on itself.
The lack of objective, professional scrutiny is an obstacle, but it is far from an insurmountable one. Even in the age of DNA and chemical analysis, murder investigations still rely heavily on eyewitness testimony. The former is meant to augment the latter, not replace it, as the analysis of physical evidence serves to confirm or refute the narrative of witnesses by alerting investigators to incongruities in the story being told.
Today, a number of hallmarks are used to evaluate the credibility of witness testimony. The first is consistency: does the story change with each telling? In this case, witnesses were interviewed at least three times over the course of two years by different interrogators: Governor George Simpson, chief trader Donald Manson, and chief factor James Douglas. In reconstructing the events at Fort Stikine, testimony that shifted over time was discounted, while preference was given to the narrative threads that remained constant. Second, convention holds that multiple witnesses offering identical descriptions are more credible than a single witness straying from the pack. That is not to say that the lone voice is inherently incorrect or lying, but simply that there is legal safety in numbers. Finally, testimony must match the physical evidence and obey the laws of gravity, physics, and the space-time continuum to be deemed credible. Then, as now, a person cannot be in two places at the same time, a bullet in flight behaves in predictable ways, and it is safe to assume the laws governing force and energy were not temporarily suspended in 1842.
§
The first step in any crime scene reconstruction is to understand the spatial relationships, which in this case include the fort’s layout and the position of each witness when the fatal shot was fired. Not everyone present in Fort Stikine on the night of the murder is relevant to the discussion. Certain individuals — such as McLoughlin’s wife, Francois Pressé, or Benoni Fleury — were excluded as suspects because they were asleep, incapacitated (drunk or in irons), indoors, or unarmed.
Maps drawn during the depositions were augmented with details from the interrogations, and the resulting diagram reveals the setting as well as the physical relationships of players central to the action.
The next step is to collect the physical evidence retroactively, beginning with the body of the victim. Although no autopsy was performed, McLoughlin’s injuries were well documented by his men, who described the nature of his wounds consistently, even if they disagreed as to their source.
McLoughlin’s cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the chest from “a bullet which seemed to have entered his back between the shoulders and came out through the gullet above the breast bone,” “having broken the spine as it passed.” The slug wreaked havoc on McLoughlin’s anatomy, and “the wounds made by the ball were very large, both openings being circular and three inches in diameter.”
Now the comparison of physical evidence, spatial relationships, and witness statements begins. According to Kakepé, Captain Cole, and William Lasserte, McLoughlin was making his way along the front of the men’s quarters when Urbain Heroux came around the southwest corner of the house. Heroux then stopped and raised his weapon — a Northwest or “Indian trade” gun, known as the Hudson’s Bay fuke — firing the lethal shot as “the Deceased was about four feet from the muzzle of the Gun.” Both men were on level footing, standing on the wooden platform built to protect pedestrians from tidal flooding, and both men were of similar stature.
There is only one problem: the angles are all wrong. The physical evidence and ballistics do not match the story, as is made clear by the trajectory (the bullet’s flight from the gun to the target) and wound track (the path of the bullet through flesh). At a distance of four feet, a standing man firing a long gun at another standing man would inflict a level wound track, with the bullet entering and exiting the body at roughly the same horizontal plane. McLoughlin’s wound track indicates the shooter was behind him and significantly below him, resulting in the gunshot wound described. Furthermore, the trajectory of a bullet travelling at the angle indicated by the wound track would not have hit the carpentry shop door, as was reported by several witnesses, but would have struck a point well above the shop’s entrance.
The only armed man in a position to fire at McLoughlin from behind and below was William Lasserte, who was hiding at ground level between the bathhouse/carpentry shop and the men’s kitchen. Lasserte, however, could not have been the shooter. Given Lasserte’s location, the bullet needed to defy the laws of physics by completely reversing direction, hitting McLoughlin and then travelling back the way it came, in order to strike the door of the carpentry shop. Furthermore, all three witnesses repeatedly swore they saw Heroux fire the fatal shot: “The night was clear and Lasserte says when the shot went off, the flash of the powder in the pan enabled him to see Heroux most distinctly.”
When such inconsistencies arise in criminal investigations, physical evidence always trumps eyewitness testimony, but in this case there is another piece of the puzzle to consider. Several witnesses stated McLoughlin was moving “in a stooping position looking very intently before him,” crouching as he made his way along the platform and hugging the wall for protection. Taking McLoughlin’s altered stance into account, the shooter, the bullet’s trajectory, and the wound track now align.
This brings us to the crux of every homicide investigation: intent. According to George Simpson, Heroux shot McLoughlin in self-defence, yet a crouched man cowering along a wall with his back to the shooter does not represent an imminent threat. Indeed, shooting a man in the back has long been thought to be an act of cowardice, not self-protection. But was McLoughlin’s hunkered stance an indication of fear or of menace? Could he have been creeping along the wall, stalking his prey, Urbain Heroux? Forensic reconstruction provides proof of the victim’s posture, but it cannot determine why he was in that position. McLoughlin’s stance alone does not conclusively answer the question of either man’s intent. It is a curious artifact, which both Dr. McLoughlin and Simpson could argue in their favour, and it remains a question best left for you, reader as hypothetical juror, to decide: was McLoughlin hiding or hunting?
§
A virtual autopsy of McLoughlin’s body also helps dispel or confirm other aspects of the divergent accounts. For instance, in both historical versions of the killing, McLoughlin insisted Urbain Heroux shot him in the arm, giving the chief trader ample cause to hunt Heroux down, yet even as McLoughlin nursed his wound, doubts swirled as to the validity of his claim. He displayed his sleeve to Louis Leclaire minutes after the alleged shooting, pointing to an area near the elbow where it was torn. When Leclaire told him he heard no shots fired, McLoughlin became agitated and shouted: “Look where the balls passed through which they fired at me.” A similar exchange took place moments later between McLoughlin and Charles Belanger, who testified: “I examined his arm but could discover no wound nor any appearance of a ball mark on the shirt.”
Schematic showing the relative positions of Heroux and McLoughlin at the time of the fatal shooting.
Leclaire and Belanger were not alone in their skepticism. Antoine Kawannassé also discounted McLoughlin’s claim: “I heard no report, Which I could not have missed doing if a gun had been discharged within the fort.” Thomas McPherson swore: “I saw no blood upon his shirt…I looked at his arm but saw no wound, the shirt only was torn.” In fact, most witnesses believed the chief’s shirt was torn as he wrestled with Fleury while trying to put the drunken man to bed, and many felt McLoughlin exaggerated the attack, either to garner sympathy or to create a reason to detain Heroux.
One witness, Simon Aneuharazie, thought McLoughlin was simply lying. Aneuharazie later testified: “I saw him tear the arm of his shirt with his teeth and exhibit the rent as produced by the passage of a ball.” Aneuharazie was the lone voice accusing McLoughlin of fabricating the injury to his arm, and his allegation must be viewed with caution. What is certain is that, when the Kanakas washed and prepared the body for burial, there was no bullet wound or laceration to McLoughlin’s arm.
There were, however, other injuries to the body that warrant further consideration. The first: “one of his hands were swelled from a blow he had given it some days before.” The trauma may explain why McLoughlin could not load his own guns, and why he never drew his pistols. He was right-handed —his correspondence lacks the telltale ink smears of a southpaw — and though his injury would not have prohibited his use of a long gun (in which the left hand pulls the trigger), he might have lacked the grip strength or range of motion needed to fire a pistol with his wounded right hand.
The swollen hand has other implications. Both the timing and source of this injury are relevant in assessing whether McLoughlin could have brutally beaten several of the men, as George Simpson claimed. Thomas McPherson was one of two witnesses to notice the hand swelling, though all he knew of its cause was that Mr. John “had hurt it the day before.” The injury likely occurred on April 19, the date of McLoughlin’s last journal entry. It is unclear if the “blow he had given it” occurred during one of McLoughlin’s alleged beatings or in some other manner. It can also be argued the swelling and pain related to the injury prevented the chief trader from administering such corporal punishment. Whether McLoughlin’s swollen hand was the result of his excessive abuse of his troops, or evidence he was physically incapable of committing such violence, is again a question for the jury.
John McLoughlin’s body sustained one final injury, “a large gash in his forehead,” “a perpendicular cut…in a line with the nose.” The cause of this injury was a major point of contention. Pierre Kannaquassé swore the forehead laceration occurred when McLoughlin fell on the barrel of his rifle. Urbain Heroux stated McLoughlin received the wound “from an Indian with his dog,” although both Iroquois had reason to be deceitful. Less biased witnesses cite an entirely different source for the injury. Captain Cole was in his room when he heard the gunshot just outside his door. As he ran out, he saw McLoughlin “lying on his side, but still breathing audibly and Urbain…seized [McLoughlin’s] rifle and struck him a severe blow to the forehead, and in doing so broke the rifle, after which he replaced it by the body.”
Cole’s insistence that John was alive and breathing is at odds with Kannaquassé’s recollection, in which Kannaquassé approached the body “and with one hand under the neck raised the head and trunk when a deep aspiration followed which was the last sign of animation. He had previously perceived no signs of life.” All other eyewitnesses side with Captain Cole. According to many of the Sandwich Islanders, the gunshot wound was not instantly fatal, and McLoughlin “did not appear to be quite dead, as there was a slight motion of the chest.” Several Kanakas also reported hearing McLoughlin draw a few laboured breaths, “writhing in the Agonies of death.”
Captain Cole offered a more detailed account, testifying that McLoughlin “made an attempt to rise after he fell.” This statement may seem implausible, given McLoughlin’s traumatic chest injury, but medical evidence supports Cole’s claim. The wound path destroyed his upper thoracic vertebrae but bypassed the cervical column and the nerves of the brachial plexus. Therefore, the injury was low enough on the spinal column to allow at least the potential for movement in the neck and arms. Cole’s testimony is also corroborated by others. From his vantage point on the upper gallery, Kakepé saw Heroux put his foot on McLoughlin’s neck “to prevent his rising.” Heroux kept his foot on the dying man’s neck, “as if determined to accomplish his villainous purpose,” and he pressed “upon it with his whole force, until Mr. McLoughlin ceased to breathe and life was extinct.”
Curiously, none of the men who prepared McLoughlin’s body for burial noted the presence of bruising or lacerations on his neck. That is not unusual with this particular type of injury, and the absence of evidence must not be misconstrued as evidence of absence. The sloe, or characteristic discolorations associated with bruising, takes time to develop fully. In modern autopsies, histological sections (tissue samples examined microscopically) are needed to accurately assess contusions, especially in the immediate aftermath of an assault. Today it is customary to put victims of suspected blunt force trauma on a twenty-four-hour “bruise hold” to give sufficient time for the contusions to manifest after death. McLoughlin also had a full beard, which may have hidden any damage associated with this specific injury. Even after his face was scraped clean by Belanger’s razor, it is possible the sloe would not yet be evident.
§
The final physical evidence to consider is the guns, specifically McLoughlin’s firearms. The question is whether McLoughlin had a working gun when he was shot, as it is crucial to the issue of self-defence. In his narrative, Kannaquassé was adamant that, as the killer stood over McLoughlin’s body, “Urbain had no gun.” Charles Belanger was equally certain Heroux had “seized the deceased’s rifle and struck him in the forehead, after which he pushed the rifle under the body.” Captain Cole’s account concurred, adding that Heroux struck with such force, he “broke the rifle.” Had Heroux grabbed a loaded long gun by the barrel and struck it down with sufficient force to break it, the gun would have discharged, potentially harming or even killing the man holding it. That the weapon did not fire indicates it was not loaded.
Others tell different tales regarding the damaged rifle. Kakepé swore that when McLoughlin was shot, he fell so hard against “the door of the men’s house…as to break the stock of his rifle.” George Heron believed the gun fractured when McLoughlin dropped it after being struck by the bullet. Heron did not see the actual event, but from his hiding place he heard “a noise as if a musket had fallen on the platform.” All he could say for certain was he later “saw Mr. John’s rifle standing against the house with the stock broken.” Although the men could not agree how the rifle was broken that night, virtually all agreed it was irreparably damaged, a fact that becomes relevant in light of what followed. To garner support for Simpson’s ruling of justifiable homicide, the depositions taken by Donald Manson and James Douglas specifically addressed whether McLoughlin was armed when he died. Each witness was asked “Was his rifle loaded when he was killed?” Most deponents replied they did not know or offered hearsay, swearing only that they “heard it was.”
Two men gave more specific answers. Thomas McPherson and Antoine Kawannassé claimed to have loaded McLoughlin’s weapons in the moments before he died. When asked if McLoughlin’s rifle was functional, Kawannassé replied, “When he first came out with his Rifle, he fired a shot at random. I reloaded it and he did not again discharge it. It was loaded when he fell.” McPherson corroborated Kawannassé’s account in his deposition before Donald Manson. McPherson also swore that, on the day after the murder, he fired McLoughlin’s rifle and pistols, proving his guns were still loaded.
Perjury can be difficult to recognize in the moment, and nothing in McPherson’s claim struck Manson as questionable. Even the victim’s father missed the inconsistency when he reviewed the statement sometime later. But in hindsight, McPherson’s sworn statement reads false on one crucial point: how was he able to fire a broken rifle? In his testimony, McPherson made no mention of the weapon being damaged in any way, and he had no idea it had been rendered inoperable during the murder. Claiming to have fired it the next day suggests intentional deception, and, as will soon be evident, it was not the only lie Thomas McPherson told regarding the death of John McLoughlin Jr.