Around noon on Saturday, August 7, 1920, eight-year-old Philip Goldberg left his home at 112 McCaul Street, Toronto. With eleven cents jingling in his pocket, he was headed for the moving-picture show near the corner of Queen and McCaul streets. His family was disturbed when he hadn’t returned by four o’clock; by midnight they were frantic. Less than two hours later, two of Philip’s older siblings were at the morgue, where a hideous task confronted them: positively identifying the body of a young boy as that of their brother.
At 4:35 that Saturday afternoon, a passer-by, Robert McMurtrie (also spelled in reports as McMurty or McMurtry), had found Philip lying between two billboards on a vacant lot adjacent to High Park in Toronto’s west end. The boy was still breathing but he was bleeding heavily. Initially thinking that the child had tumbled from one of the billboards, McMurtrie hailed a man he described as hurrying away from the scene, asking him to watch the boy while he went to get help.
As McMurtrie later told police, the man’s reply was, strangely, “I had nothing to do with it. I know nothing about it.”
When McMurtrie returned with a policeman, the man was gone, and the boy was dead.
But Philip Goldberg had not had a traumatic fall: he had been brutally murdered. In addition to several head and throat wounds, each one severe enough to have been fatal, the boy had suffered what the Globe called “bestial offences.”
Police surmised that the unknown man was the perpetrator of the savage murder and rape. Investigations revealed that he was Frederick L. Davis, a neighbour of the Goldberg family and a man known to Toronto police. Described as being in his midforties, he had one gold tooth and wore a wig. He also had open sores, possibly from advanced syphilis, and walked with a pronounced limp. But Davis was not waiting around for the police to nab him; he fled to the United States. It took nearly a year, but he was eventually tracked down to Auburn Prison in New York, where he was serving time for burglary and the theft of machinists’ tools in Rochester. Detective Bart Cronin — you will remember him as the man who played a significant role in the Frank McCullough case just two years previously — was sent down to Auburn to confront the suspect.
Yes, said Davis, he knew Philip Goldberg. He had taken him to the movies on that August day. Afterwards, he bought ice cream cones in Grange Park for himself, the boy, and two or three little girls.
“Where did you go next?” asked Cronin.
“To High Park.”
For Cronin, that was the clincher. He charged Davis with Philip Goldberg’s murder. After a few moments of silence, the man said: “I’m not a bad fellow at heart. Liquor was at the bottom of this thing.”
On his release from Auburn, Davis was extradited and sent back to Toronto for trial in January 1922. Robert McMurtrie positively identified him in court as the man he had seen scurrying away from the crime scene. It didn’t help Davis’s case that the police read a confession, admittedly unsigned, into the records. But what really sank the accused was what the press called “the keen wit” of an eight-year-old girl. Sarah Friendly swore that she had seen Davis in Grange Park on the day of the murder. He was accompanied by a little boy, dressed in “brown running shoes and black stockings and pants fastened and buttoned and blue little hat.” The man offered her and her friend Rachel Weindrow ice cream cones. “Absolutely not,” said Sarah, “we don’t take anything from strangers.” She categorically denied the defence lawyer’s suggestion that her memory had been jogged by photos the police had shown her or by Bart Cronin’s prompts at the identification parade at police headquarters, rather than by her actual recollection of the event.
Just before Sarah stepped down from the witness box, the judge, Justice William Renwick Riddell, asked her if she would take a message to her school teacher: “Tell her the Judge says you are the best witness he has seen for many a long day.”
The jury may have set some kind of Canadian record in coming to their decision. As tersely documented in the trial report:
Jury retires at 3 p.m.
Jury reports with verdict at 3.02 p.m.
REGISTRAR: Gentlemen of the Jury have you agreed upon a verdict?
FOREMAN: Yes, guilty.
Riddell sentenced Davis to death. In his mandatory special report to the federal minister of justice after the trial, Riddell noted that Davis had informed the jail surgeon in Toronto that “when a boy in England under 10 years of age he was initiated in homo-sexual practices by a grown man.” In a chilling case of abused turning abuser, Davis also “gave a history … of obscene but not criminal practices with young boys and men in Toronto.”
In spite of the defence’s attempts to have Davis committed to “some public institution” on the basis of his mental and physical condition, he was led by executioner Arthur Ellis to the gallows at the Don Jail just before 8:00 a.m. on May 9, 1922. According to the Globe, he “walk[ed] to his doom with steady mien.” According to the jail physician, Davis’s health had deteriorated to such an extent that he could not have lived more than another two years. An hour later, Davis’s body was buried in the northeast corner of the jail yard, where a short burial service was held.
The harrowing details of this crime resurfaced, both literally and figuratively, during excavations at the Toronto Jail in late 2007 and early 2008. At that time, a site investigation led by Dr. Ron Williamson of Archaeological Services Inc. was launched as a core requirement for the approval of the Bridgepoint Health master plan.
Photograph of Frederick Davis from the Toronto Star of May 9, 1922, the day he was executed for the savage murder of eight-year-old Philip Goldberg.
During the ninety long years between 1872 and 1962, thirty-four men had been hanged at the Old Don Jail. Sources such as old site plans and archival newspapers had indicated that burials had sometimes taken place in the northeast exercise yard, formerly called “Murderers’ Row” or “Murderers’ Graveyard.” The jail’s perimeter wall had been torn down and the area paved over for use as a parking lot, but it was no surprise when backhoes, shovels, trowels, and brushes turned up evidence of human remains. What was surprising was the actual number of “murderers’” skeletons the investigators managed to unearth — fifteen. Although not only hanged men died at the jail, none of the existing records seemed to indicate that inmates who died from other causes had been buried on site.
Back in 1872, the first person hanged, and buried, at the Toronto Jail was twenty-year-old John Traviss of East Gwillimbury, Ontario. He had shot and killed a local farmer, either, depending on which newspaper you happened to pick up, in a fit of cold rage directed against a rival in love or against a neighbour who had given him a bad name with the family of his beloved. Court records describing the victim, John Johnson, as an older man with a family suggest that the latter was the correct version. According to a witness, all that Traviss would say on his arrest was: “I am satisfied. I have had my revenge.” The last man buried in the northeast yard was Edward Stewart, in March 1930. Stewart was a thirty-three-year-old labourer who murdered a Gerrard Street butcher during a bungled robbery attempt.
Originally, there had been a requirement that people executed for murder should be interred in the cemetery of the jail where they had been hanged. By 1930, however, this rule was no longer being rigorously adhered to. For the next thirty-two years, the bodies of men hanged at the Don Jail were generally claimed and buried by family or friends. An exception was the case of the last two men executed there in late 1962, Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas. Immediately after they were hanged back-to-back just after midnight on December 11, their bodies were hastily bundled into plain pine coffins and carted away to the Prospect Cemetery on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto — not even embalmed, to the great sorrow and disgust of Salvation Army chaplain Cyril Everitt, their spiritual adviser, friend, and the officiant at their very early morning burial.
The archaeological investigators had an array of clues, tools, and techniques to aid them in their efforts to identify exactly who was buried in each of the unmarked graves. Historical research (much of it gleaned from archival news items), based on factors such as age, physical appearance, and descriptions of what the individuals were wearing at the time of death, was used to build up as comprehensive a profile as possible for each person hanged at the jail. These profiles were then systematically compared with data obtained in the field, both biological (stature, dental decay or missing teeth, soft tissue, and hair) and archaeological (bone or shell buttons, remnants of socks, a copper cross). The investigators were particularly interested in whether the men — pubic and cranial morphology confirmed that they were, indeed, all men — had actually been executed, so they looked for injuries to the cervical vertebrae that would point to judicial hanging.
The site report noted that historical records were often incomplete, vague, or simply incorrect. A newspaper report possibly from the early 1900s, for example, stated that a certain Robert Coulter was buried at the Don Jail. His execution took place in 1862; the construction of the jail was only completed a couple of years later. It seems highly unlikely that anyone would have been buried in the exercise yard before the jail was actually up and running. As it turned out, Coulter’s body had been laid to rest in Toronto’s St. James Cemetery. The lack of any kind of chronological arrangement in the location of the burials also complicated exact identification. And where were the graves of John Traviss, John Williams, and George Bennett, all known to have been buried there, in relation to one another? Rival newspapers gave conflicting reports. “Given these kinds of limitations, the personal identification of the remains should be considered provisional with only a few exceptions,” warned the report.
So, for example, it was “possible” that Burial 10 was George Bennett, the bitter and resentful former Globe employee who took a gun to his ex-boss, George Brown, and was, as a result, hanged on July 23, 1880. He was described as being thirty-two years old at the time of death; he was wearing a suit and leather shoes; and his coffin had “silver ornaments.” There seems to be a strong link in this case between the archival descriptions on the one hand, and, on the other, factors in Burial 10 such as the age range of the skeletal remains, the style of the clothing, and the presence of silver ornaments in the coffin.
It was also “possible” that Burial 14 was Frank McCullough, the charismatic and wildly popular folk hero doomed for shooting a Toronto policeman in 1918. He was in his midtwenties when he went to the gallows on June 13, 1919, which fits the age range established for Burial 14. McCullough was reportedly wearing “high black shoes” and buried in a “nice casket.” Remnants of blunt-toed leather uppers and leather laces that were dated to the early twentieth century and six stamped-tin coffin studs seem to back up this supposition.
There were, however, absolutely no possibles or probables when it came to Burial 8. This individual was “almost certainly” Frederick L. Davis, the man hanged on May 9, 1922, for the rape and brutal murder of eight-year-old Philip Goldberg. There were so many positive pointers. Court documents put his age at forty-six, which matched the estimated age range of the skeleton. Archival newspapers reported that Davis had a gold tooth, wore a wig, walked with a cane, and was suffering from a terminal disease that would have killed him within two years. The excavation of Burial 8 turned up a gold-and-enamel dental bridge and remains bearing signs of advanced tertiary venereal syphilis. Symptoms of this disease include difficulty in coordinating muscle movements, bone loss, and, grimly, dementia. This would explain the cane, the missing teeth, the dental work, and the kind of mental deterioration that may have been a contributing factor in so savage a crime.
The site investigation concluded that, unless separately claimed for reburial by family members, the fifteen individuals should be “disinterred and re-interred in a proper cemetery.” No one stepped forward to claim any of the bodies, and they have all now been laid to rest, still in unmarked graves, on a grassy slope framed by majestic old trees in St. James Cemetery on the west side of the Don River. A simple brass plaque announces that “Here lie the remains of 15 men, executed and buried at the Don Jail between 1871 [sic] and 1930 prior to the abolition of the death penalty in Canada. Their remains were moved to this plot in 2008.”
But there must be at least one person who sometimes spares a thought for these lost souls. On a warm July day, a small, crumpled bouquet lies beside the marker — its flowers, once blue, now dry and faded.
Brass memorial plaque, dated 2008, at St. James Cemetery in Toronto. It commemorates the reinterment of fifteen bodies found in the “Murderer’s Graveyard” at the Don Jail.