The Globe called her “Vera the Elusive.”
The police were convinced that Frank McCullough’s lover, Vera de Lavelle, was implicated in his dramatic jailbreak, and they were determined to track her down. The hunt ended on April 22, when Bart Cronin, the detective who had been on the case since Frank was first arrested, spotted her on Queen Street, Toronto. A simple “Hello, Vera” cut short her freedom.
Lavelle told investigators during the 1919 Dunlop Inquiry, struck to look into the circumstances of Frank McCullough’s escape, that she had been born in France. She was “just a babe in arms” when her mother brought her to Toronto some twenty-one years previously. She had met McCullough at a dance. The two fell in love and were planning to marry. But, as the Globe put it, “the murder of P.C. Williams upset their plans.” She denied helping her paramour to escape, although she admitted that they had seen each other on the night of his getaway. “I walked down from Broadview into the park. It was rather dark and spitting rain and I was afraid. I saw a figure coming across the park and he called my name and he took me in his arms and kissed me and said he was free.” She had not seen him since.
Fearing political fallout from such a stark exposure of the administrative ineptitude at the Don Jail, the provincial authorities chose to shield the results of the Dunlop Inquiry from public scrutiny at the time. But the public was soon treated to a different, but eminently more dramatic, story, which prompted a brand new inquiry. Harry Drew, a reporter for the Toronto Evening Telegram, presented himself at the door of the jail, ostensibly to check out the women’s quarters. Charles Spanton, the guard, let him in without question (“I did not think it was any of my business,” he told the inquiry), and head matron and reportedly execrable cook Tanny Soady took him on a tour. (“He said ‘that he did not think there were nicer quarters in Canada,’” she told the inquiry.)
And then Drew just “happened” to notice Vera de Lavelle and casually asked if he could have a few words with her. (“Well, I suppose there is no harm,” replied Soady.)
Imprudently, as it turned out, because there was indeed a great deal of harm implicit in Soady’s action. Rule 114 of the 1903 Official Rules and Regulations Governing the Common Gaols of Ontario clearly stated that “no person shall be allowed access to any prisoner for the purpose of ‘Interviewing’ him or her with a view to publishing a report of such interview.”
The story hit the headlines in the Telegram on April 26. In summary: Vera was refined, honest, and innocent; Frank was a moral and newly religious man; they loved each other; and, although she had not helped him in any way, she had met him in Riverdale Park after his escape and they had said a tender goodbye.
The authorities were furious. The guard was docked one week’s salary and the matron two weeks’ and both of them were suspended. They were, however, immediately reinstated.
The press had a field day. As quoted by Mark Johnson, after getting the runaround from the provincial secretary, the provincial inspector of prisons and public charities, the sheriff, et al., reporters fumed that “the poor public would like to know whether the Riverdale Bastille is a jail or merely a resort where hide and seek is played at the expense of law and order.”
May 2, the day that McCullough was due to be hanged, came and went.
Then, on May 8, the offer of a $1,000 reward for his recapture bore fruit. A tip led detective Cronin and his fellow officers to the second floor of a dingy boarding house on Bathurst Street in Toronto. McCullough tried to escape by leaping from an upper window, but the police were waiting below with their guns trained on him. Soon, according to a newspaper headline, the “Death Cell Door Clang[ed] Once More on Condemned Slayer.”
There was huge public adulation for McCullough, but Cronin came in for his share of praise, too. As one admirer put it in a telegram: “Congratulations for having landed the coveted prize. You must be gifted with the sixth sense of locating evil-doers.”
McCullough’s execution was rescheduled for June 13.
The day before Frank’s capture, Vera de Lavelle had been tried for aiding his escape. She faced up to seven years of prison time and was locked up in the Don to await sentence.
But she was having none of it.
To the utter confusion and embarrassment of the staff at the Don, and in spite of the fact that they had come to regard Vera de Lavelle as one of the “shrewdest, coolest and cleverest schemers with whom they had ever had to deal,” she strolled away from the jail in broad daylight.
“According to the official statement,” reported the Globe on May 31, “it would appear that Vera Lavelle and her accomplice [Ruby Masten, soon recaptured] simply took two ladders from the Laundry Building, through an open door into the jail yard, placed them against the 16-foot wall, scaled it, climbed a six-foot board fence and walked away.”
This escape made it “the second jail breaking within seven weeks, and the fact that the other case was that of the man whom she is said to have been in love with, presents a dramatic coincidence.”
The public was absolutely entranced: murder, a charming rogue, a beautiful woman of mystery, romance in the shadow of the gallows, star-crossed lovers yearning to be reunited, daring jail escapes (not one, but two, and both in the space of seven weeks!). It was a sensation.
The official reaction was far less dewy eyed. Sheriff Mowat skipped out of a meeting at City Hall and raced across town to the jail in a vain attempt to contain the fallout. And Provincial Inspector of Prisons Dunlop was apoplectic. “It’s the smallest jail in the Province, the smallest part of my work, yet it causes me more work than the whole of the rest of it. I could handle the King’s business better than the Toronto Jail,” he said.
A sampling of the thousands of petitions sent to Ottawa in 1919, all pleading for the commutation of Frank McCullough’s death sentence.
With McCullough back under lock and key, efforts to have his sentence commuted resumed with redoubled force. The federal government in Ottawa, responsible for reviewing all capital cases and deciding whether or not a death sentence should be carried out, received petitions containing well over twenty thousand names, all pleading for McCullough’s reprieve.
The government official who held McCullough’s life in his hands was the Honourable Arthur Meighen, acting federal minister of justice. Meighen could hardly be described as a kind, compassionate, or particularly merciful man, but, to his credit, he did claim to have wrestled with the case: “The responsibility of deciding on the fate of McCullough is one of the most anxious that I have ever been compelled to undertake.”
Thomas Cowper Robinette, McCullough’s lawyer, fired off telegram after telegram to Ottawa in a last-ditch attempt to obtain executive clemency. Reverend R. Bertram Nelles, McCullough’s spiritual adviser, travelled to Ottawa to plead with Meighen in person. The visit was ill-timed — Meighen’s train steamed out of town just as Nelles’s steamed in. Mere days before the scheduled hanging date, a telegram containing Meighen’s final decision came through. It was not what the myriad of McCullough’s supporters wanted to hear: the law must take its course, and McCullough must hang.
A wave of outrage and sympathy met this news. As the Toronto Daily Star reported on June 12:
Hundreds of people stood in Riverdale Park last night outside the jail yard, and waved handkerchiefs and papers to Frank McCullough, who stood at the window of his death cell and waved his hands through the bars. The crowd became so large that a policeman was assigned to keep the spectators from going too near the jail wall. One man used field glasses to see McCullough. Shortly after nine the light was turned on in McCullough’s cell and he could be seen quite plainly. A grey-haired old woman who could hardly walk, forced her way through the crowd and waved her hand, while two little girls stayed till nearly midnight. McCullough stayed at the window for many hours.
The next day, Friday, June 13, as was customary with a condemned person just before execution, McCullough ate his last meal. He chose a hearty breakfast of tea, toast, ham, and eggs. At 7:54 a.m., clad in a striped silk shirt and belted trousers, he walked “with a steady stride” forty paces east along the corridor to the death chamber. And, at 7:57 a.m., McCullough was hanged, paying what one report called “the price of death” for the murder of Acting Detective Frank Williams.
The hangman on duty that day was Arthur Ellis, an expatriate Englishman who was to become Canada’s most prolific and notorious executioner. He appeared very nervous, perhaps spooked by the hordes of demonstrators who had kept up a continuous and noisy vigil outside the jail walls.
In an unusual break with tradition, McCullough was not immediately buried in “murderer’s row,” located in the east jail yard. “A funeral service such as is rarely given a murderer will be conducted by Rev. Mr. Nelles, and will be a simple one just the same as if McCullough had died a natural death.”
Vera de Lavelle was still at large. This time, however, police were in no hurry to find and arrest her, so she surrendered herself on July 23, 1919. Evading a horde of pressmen, her lawyer, Robinette associate W.B. Horkins, and Detective Walter McConnell picked her up on Beverley Street in downtown Toronto. She was much relieved that she would be held in the Court Street cells at the corner of Church and Adelaide streets instead of being returned to the Don, which held such painful memories for her.
The following morning, she was once again in court, pleading guilty to charges of assisting McCullough with his escape from jail, and of escaping herself.
“I have considered the circumstances connected with this case,” said Judge Coatsworth, “and I don’t impose a very heavy sentence. Poor McCullough is gone, the thing is all over, and I suppose you have suffered a good deal in connection with it one way or the other, so I am going to impose a sentence of two months on the Jail Farm in this case, and two months’ imprisonment at the Jail Farm in the other case of assisting McCullough to escape, the sentences to run concurrently.”
“After I come out I am going to start life all over again,” Lavelle told the Toronto Daily Star, with emphasis on the last three words.
Of her sentence, she said: “I think it is very lenient.”
Was she married to McCullough? “That is for you to find out. That is our secret,” she replied with a laugh.
Vera quietly served out her term at the Langstaff Jail Farm just north of Toronto and quietly slipped out of sight. With her weighted words about starting life all over again, and her reference to the secret she shared with Frank, was she expecting a child, perhaps?
We shall probably never know.
It might confidently be assumed that heads would roll after this lengthy fiasco at the Don Jail, and roll they did. Two of them. The heads belonged to Miss Tanny Soady, head matron and cook, and to the jail’s laundry matron. Soady’s claim to shame was not the dreadful chow she supposedly dished up from her kitchen, but the fact that the two women’s laxity had allowed Lavelle to break out of jail. However, Soady had also broken the rules and regulations by allowing a reporter to interview Lavelle, and this probably counted against her as well.
Another low-level, but heavily implicated, member of staff appeared in court for his part in the case. In a trial by judge and jury, Ernest Currell was found guilty on June 6, 1919, of aiding and abetting McCullough’s escape, with a strong recommendation for mercy.
“This man did act contrary to his duty,” a stern Judge Coatsworth told the jury. “He brought in things to the condemned man, he brought letters back and forth.… He went to sleep several times when he was at the post of duty, the very things that a soldier is shot for — and he was a soldier himself — yet he went to sleep several times.”
However, as Mark Johnson points out, “time and a good lawyer proved to be in Ernest Currell’s favour.” Before sentence was passed, his lawyer announced that he would file an appeal. But there is no record that the case was heard again, nor any indication of a final sentence.
And what of Sheriff Mowat and Chief Turnkey Addy, the two men at the top of the chain of command, where the buck should have stopped? As the administration of the jail fell within the jurisdiction of the province, the actions and omissions of Mowat and Addy also came under the spotlight during Dunlop’s inquiry into the circumstances of McCullough’s escape. However, the authorities had no desire to bring attention to the chaos at the Don caused by the clash between government appointee Mowat and his provincial staff on the one hand and city employee Addy and his fellow municipal workers on the other. So, in spite of a heated exchange of accusations and some nervous moments — Dunlop singled out Mowat for particular censure for not adequately managing the death-watch guards and ignoring reports of “irregularities” in the food and other materials supplied to the prisoner — both Mowat and Addy escaped scot-free.
There was one positive outcome to the McCullough debacle. The provincial government decided that henceforth it was imperative to have a governor in control at the Toronto Jail, and that “the appointment should go to a person who has handled desperate men, and is able to conduct the jail in an efficient manner.” By early July 1919, the relieved authorities had found a man who would fit the bill. On September 1, 1919, George Hedley Basher stepped in to assume command.