The new governor of the Don Jail, Reverend Doctor Andrew B. Chambers, was a political appointee with no prior experience; his claims to fame being that he was a Mason, a member of the Conservative Party, and the polar opposite, it seemed, of the disgraced Garrett Vanzant whom he had replaced. Chambers ran the jail between 1907 and 1917 in a caring but totally ineffectual manner.
Perhaps the most outstanding quality Chambers brought to his job was the Christian virtue of kindness. As quoted by Mark Johnson in No Tears to the Gallows, fellow clergyman S.D. Chown noted that Chambers “simply wanted to be a friend to everyone, especially those in trouble.”
One short-term resident of the jail who certainly benefitted from Chambers’s benevolence was a timid, terrified eighteen-year-old girl called Carrie Davies, on trial in February 1915 for murdering her employer, Charles Albert Massey, a scion of the powerful Canadian Massey family. She shot him, she claimed, because he had made indecent advances to her. She was desperately afraid of losing her precious virginity to the cad. Chambers granted Davies shelter in the hospital wing from exposure to the rough conditions and the tough female inmate population while her sensational case sped through the criminal justice system. The masterly efforts of her defence counsel led to an acquittal, and, weeping, she thanked the judge, the jury, and the jail.
But perhaps to underscore just how inept the new regime was, the Globe reported in a large, bold headline on July 18, 1908 — that is, just one year after the appointment of Reverend Chambers — that seven “desperate” prisoners had escaped from the Toronto Jail. The escape of these desperadoes, several of whom were awaiting sentence for serious crimes, was grave enough, but the circumstances of their jailbreak made it one of the most egregious (and embarrassing) getaways ever.
The offenders, among them Alexander Rose, awaiting sentence on charges of feloniously (and brutally) wounding, and Henry Churchill, awaiting trial on charges of robbing Pullman cars on the Grand Trunk Railway, had been confined in a corridor specially reserved for inmates pending sentence or trial. As Chambers explained in the records of the prisoners, they “got into the cell used as a death chamber … and cut through the wall to the jail yard — stood on each other’s shoulders to scale the twenty-foot jail wall and disappeared up a lane — were dressed in their usual clothes, so they would look like ordinary citizens.” The escape was “carefully planned and executed”: the men had coolly obtained a duplicate of the key to the execution chamber, and, probably over the course of several days, had cut a large opening through the three-foot-thick wall of the room, using as a tool the lever that triggered the trap door of the gallows. Of the seven escapees, just one was immediately recaptured, and a follow-up story in January 1909 revealed that the ringleader, Alex Rose, had been apprehended in Huntingdon, West Virginia. At that point, the remaining five offenders were still at large.
“Over the Don, Toronto.” This postcard, ca. 1910, depicts the jail on the east side of the Don River.
On the organizational level, Chambers’s well-intentioned but completely feeble skills translated into a full decade of absolutely no leadership at the Don.
By 1917, with Canada deeply embroiled in the First World War, there was a concerted push in Toronto to introduce measures to help the war effort. So, when a call went out to cut costs and slash jobs, the city looked into what — or whom — it could cull. The consensus was that the jail was overstaffed, and both the governor and the deputy governor of the Don were let go. Although the two men were not consulted beforehand, they were compensated for their dismissal.
The governor was not replaced, and it fell upon two officials to head up the administration of the jail. The first was Frederick Mowat, sheriff for the City of Toronto, a provincial and political appointee who had his father, former premier of Ontario Sir Oliver Mowat, to thank for his cushy job and his spacious office at City Hall. Reporting to him, and often at loggerheads with him, was the man in charge of the day-to-day administration and an employee of the City of Toronto, chief turnkey Henry Addy.
Their mutual dislike and opposition came to a head in 1919 when a so-called “drifter” named Frank McCullough, who had been convicted of murdering a policeman, was locked up in the death cell at the Don Jail, awaiting execution.
The crime had taken place on November 19, 1918. The following day, the Toronto Daily Star gave its readers the full scoop in a story that stretched over five-and-a-bit columns. “The beginning of the tragedy occurred early in the afternoon when McCullough and another man drove up in a buggy to Madame Mayes, 372 College street [sic] and opened negotiations for a sale of a quantity of furs. Their actions aroused suspicion in the mind of the woman, who excused herself and telephoned No. 3 Police Station. Before Acting Detective [Frank] Williams and Constable Walter McDermott could reach the store in a police automobile the men had departed.” The policemen learned that the suspicious characters had hired the buggy from Cross’s Livery, and they hurried over to the stables on King and Bathurst streets in downtown Toronto. The men had not yet returned, and despite the owner’s caution (“I warned him that they were big men, and would likely be hard to handle”), Williams decided to wait for them alone.
This proved to be a fatal decision.
One of the suspects, later identified as Albert Johnson, ran away, but shots were fired in a tussle between Williams and the other man, Frank McCullough. Things escalated so quickly that Williams had no opportunity to pull out his revolver. Instead, he set upon McCullough with his baton. As the two men continued to struggle, McCullough fired once more.
Williams dropped to the ground.
“I’m shot, get the doctor,” he whispered.
Then he died, with a bullet through his heart. He was the first Toronto police officer since the incorporation of the city in 1834 to be killed in the line of duty.
McCullough fled onto King Street, where he was tackled and brought down by a newsboy. He was transported to police headquarters by Bartholomew Cronin, the detective assigned to the case. Cronin was to play an important role in the roiling saga that unfolded over the next eight months.
In an article published at the time, twenty-six-year-old Frank McCullough was described as “5 feet 11¼ inches in height, clean shaven, brown hair, fair complexion, protruding blue eyes, prominent forehead and cheek bones.” What neither the press nor the police realized was that “Frank McCullough” was actually Leroy Ward Fay Swart, a fugitive from tiny Westville, New York. Even after these facts emerged, no one in Canada used his real name. He was so charming and disarming that most people, even the tough cops he tangled with, simply called him Frank.
McCullough had done jail time in the States before enlisting in the army and then deserting. After crossing into Canada, he carried on with his thieving ways and served a year at the Burwash Industrial Farm near Sudbury, Ontario, for burglary and assault.
This time, however, his criminal activities had landed him in the worst possible hole: the automatic punishment for murder was death by hanging. By a stroke of apparently immense good fortune, a legal colossus represented him in court in January 1919: Thomas Cowper Robinette, King’s Counsel (KC), regarded as the most prominent criminal lawyer in Toronto. Relishing the challenge and tempted by the prospect of publicity, Robinette had taken on his case pro bono.
Robinette argued that McCullough was only trying to escape from Acting Detective Williams and had had no intention of killing him. If McCullough was guilty of anything, it was manslaughter. Robinette’s persuasive powers came to nothing. After five hours of deliberation, the foreman of the jury pronounced McCullough guilty, the judge sentenced him to hang, and McCullough stepped into the death cell at the Don Jail to await his execution on May 2.
Conflict flared up between Sheriff Mowat and chief turnkey Addy over the “death watch,” the mandatory three-man team whose duties took them right into the death cell with the condemned man. The team’s task was, one at a time, to maintain round-the-clock surveillance and ensure that their charge neither escaped custody nor committed suicide.
Since all hiring and firing was handled by the province, Addy had approached Mowat for extra staffers for this demanding job. The sheriff selected two men who worked for him at city hall: Alfred Amory, a former policeman, and Sam Follis, a driver. Both seemed logical choices as they had recently manned the death watch for the previous tenant of the death cell, and they knew the drill. They promptly snagged the two daytime shifts. The problem, then, was to find a candidate for the graveyard shift.
Mowat came up with what he considered a brilliant choice: a desperate war veteran, Ernest Currell. “McCullough’s Guard Served in Trenches: Was Wounded Eleven Days After He Went into Action,” explained a headline in the Toronto Daily Star on April 16, 1919. The returned soldier “was wounded on October 10, 1916. He had been in the trenches only 11 days when a bullet struck him on the hand. He went to the front on September 29. Prior to enlistment he was a tinsmith by trade.”
Currell had a bad back and had not worked since the war. He was sick and pitifully poor; he had three children with another on the way; the family lived in a tiny house; and, on several occasions, the bailiff had come knocking. The job of night watch at the rate of three dollars a shift could not have come at a better time for him.
Mowat was emphatic. As he later told a 1919 inquiry set up under the leadership of W.W. Dunlop, provincial inspector of prisons and public charities (In the Matter of the Prisons and Public Charities Act and inquiry pursuant to Section 9 — henceforth called the Dunlop Inquiry): “I thought there was no question but that he was a suitable man.”
The rules governing prisoners awaiting execution were crystal clear: the only visitors allowed were the condemned person’s doctor, lawyer, and spiritual adviser. All others would have to obtain written permission from the sheriff. Within two days of McCullough’s arrival in the death cell, however, this iron rule was bent, leading to a blow-up between Sheriff Mowat and chief turnkey Addy.
The innocent cause of this hostility was sixteen-year-old Doris Mytton, the daughter of McCullough’s landlady, Gladys Mytton. Doris turned up at the Don Jail, asking to see Frank. Addy refused; Doris insisted. To fob her off, Addy sent her to the sheriff, never dreaming that she would actually get permission to see the convicted murderer. But get it she did.
As author Mark Johnson succinctly puts it in his admirable book on the life and times of Frank McCullough: “The issue was who was in charge of the jail.” Addy felt that if Mowat wanted to break the regulations by allowing unprecedented visits from outsiders, he certainly had the authority to do so. But what if something went wrong? As chief turnkey, Addy strongly suspected that he would be the one on the hook for it. And, frustratingly, there was no authority above Mowat to appeal to.
Two opposing factions were now facing off at the Don: the regular staffers, with chief turnkey Addy at their head, and the death-watch guards, who reported and were most grateful to Sheriff Mowat. This quickly exacerbated the dysfunction at the jail, a situation that the cunning and slippery McCullough took full advantage of.
It began in a small way. Death watchman Alfred Amory belonged to the Western Congregational Church, the same church that Doris Mytton attended. The Sunday after her visit to the jail, she handed Amory a letter and asked him to take it to Frank. Strictly against regulations, Amory did so. As a result of Doris’s suggestions, McCullough requested the appointment of Western Congregational’s pastor, Reverend R. Bertram Nelles, as his spiritual adviser.
Reverend Nelles welcomed his new role. He was genuinely concerned about the spiritual wellbeing of his charge and accepted McCullough’s claims of innocence and remorse. Also, since McCullough was not a religious or church-going man, converting this notorious sinner could only lead to positive publicity for Nelles’s struggling church. Before long, Nelles was conducting rousing prayer meetings for McCullough’s salvation, and members of the congregation, especially the younger ones, organized letter campaigns and petitions in favour of having his death sentence commuted.
McCullough’s cell was basic and sparsely furnished, containing just a bed, a rough wooden table, two chairs, a small stove, and a little cupboard. There were bars on the door and on the three windows. There were, however, some luxuries not found in a typical cell. For example, members of Mrs. Bell’s Young Women’s Bible Class lovingly put together care packages of fresh eggs and cookies for the prisoner, and Alfred Amory smuggled them in. But he was not the only offender. It was his co-worker, Sam Follis, who provided the cupboard to safely store McCullough’s abundant supply of illicit goods. Even Reverend Nelles broke the rules, although he later ’fessed up only to bringing in candies and the occasional strawberry.
Complaints to the sheriff from Addy and his staff fell on deaf ears. Chief guard Harry Denning was especially outraged at the clownish goings-on of McCullough and his so-called guardians: “Then I saw a deck of cards in there [McCullough’s cell] and that is something we don’t allow in the gaol. I reported that and asked who brought them in. It turned out it was the night man who brought in the cards. Right along from one time to another things were taken in. Sometimes there would be five scuttles of coal in there. I never saw anything like the way this fellow was treated.”
And, as it emerged, the biggest offender of all was the vulnerable night watchman, Ernest Currell. He had completely fallen under McCullough’s spell in the course of those long nights spent together in the death cell. In addition to bringing items into the jail, he invited into his home on multiple occasions a particular friend of McCullough’s, a “mysterious” young woman later identified as Vera de Lavelle. This is how Addy described to the Dunlop Inquiry an attempt by this mystery woman to visit McCullough: “She had a little parcel and I did not let her in; she wanted to know if she could see Frank and I said no, so she went away. She was well dressed, wore dark clothes, plainly made, was of dark complexion, rather French looking, I thought.”
All these swirling issues were to come to a head less than three weeks before McCullough’s date with the hangman. In the early morning of Wednesday, April 16, 1919, he took advantage of a violent thunderstorm and broke out of jail.
As shown by the jailbreak of Alexander Rose and his six companions back in 1908, escapes from the Don were not unheard of. This one, however, really stung.
The Toronto Daily Star explained in their six o’clock edition, beneath the blaring bold headline “M’CULLOUGH, MURDERER, DOPES GUARD, ESCAPES”:
Frank McCullough … escaped from his death cell at the Toronto Jail sometime between eleven o’clock last night and five this morning. It is believed McCullough was in possession of a quantity of veronal which, by means unknown, he was able to place in coffee drunk by his guard, who was occupying the cell with him, causing the guard to sleep until about five o’clock this morning, when he awoke and gave the alarm of McCullough’s escape.
The jailers who rushed to the scene found the embarrassed Currell — shirtless, trouserless, and clutching a handwritten note from McCullough, which was clearly meant to exonerate the night watchman from blame:
Currell, old man,
I am sorry, but it had to be done. Now do not you be scared for it isn’t your fault, for I doped your coffee with a sleeping powder of Veronnal [sic], so you see kid they cannot blame you…. Wish me luck. I am sorry but you know life is sweet, old man.
So long.
Frank
Although McCullough also informed Currell in due course that he would return Currell’s “borrowed” clothing as soon as he could, he omitted to mention in this, or in any of the other chatty letters and postcards he wrote during the time he spent on the lam, how he had obtained the hacksaw he used to cut through two iron bars on his cell window before taking a perilous leap onto a retaining wall far below, inching over to the perimeter wall of the jail, and dropping to freedom.
Currell was immediately arrested and charged with aiding and abetting McCullough’s escape. His alibi just didn’t hold water. The “gaol surgeon” commented that veronal was not a strong enough sedative to knock a person out for hours, especially when taken in coffee, which would counter its effects. And press reports suggested that it would have required several nights’ work to saw through the bars of the death-cell windows.
“Collusion!” accused Addy.
Ironically, Currell found himself locked up in the Don Jail, his own workplace. Investigations later revealed that Vera de Lavelle, who turned out to be McCullough’s lady love, had hidden the saw in a box of chocolates that Currell had taken in to McCullough.