Afterword

AN ACT OF INJUSTICE is a novel inspired by the lives of Rosannah Leppard and Cook Teets – real people who lived and loved. Vandeleur is a real place, although Leonard Babington and Kathleen Fitzgerald bear no resemblance to any actual persons, and there never was a Vandeleur Chronicle.

I became aware of the tragic fates of Rosanah and Cook while researching wrongful hangings in Canada. An astonishing story turned up in the October 12, 1908, issue of the Toronto Evening Telegram. A single paragraph buried below the fold of an inside page, it bore the headline, HANGED AN INNOCENT MAN. The story carried neither attribution nor byline, but suggested a plot far deeper than the modest space it occupied might indicate. The actual murderer had confessed, leaving no doubt that Cook Teets was innocent of the crime for which he had been hanged.

As I delved into the lives of Rosannah and Cook, a missing link persisted – someone who might have been the source of that report in the Telegram. It was to fill this need that Leonard Babington, his Chronicle, and Kathleen Fiztgerald came into being. Their presence enabled me to set the story of Rosannah and Cook against the broader panorama of frontier Ontario and Victorian Canada at the approach of the twentieth century. I have jockeyed names, dates and places to fit the plot.

I was fortunate to find a descendant of Rosannah Leppard. April Bell lives in British Columbia and I thank her for giving me a connection to her great-great aunt. My historical sources include the Ontario Archives, the Grey Roots Museum, the South Grey Museum, and staff of the Owen Sound Provincial Jail (since closed). At Library and Archives Canada I found the official transcript of the trial. Public libraries in Owen Sound and Flesherton also held valuable information. I borrowed stories from the Flesherton Advance for the fictional Vandeleur Chronicle, and some pieces I have attributed to Leonard while at the Evening Telegram come from the files of that paper. The notice on the appointment of Leonard Babington as City Editor has been adapted from a memo by John Ross Robertson, cited in Ron Poulton’s book, The Paper Tyrant.

Rosannah Leppard’s mother was also named Rosannah, but to avoid confusion I have called her Molly, the Irish pet form of Mary. The Teets family, disgraced by the murder trial, sold up and left Vandeleur shortly after Cook was hanged.

The real Vandeleur thrived as a small community in Grey County well into the 1890s, when it began to decline in the face of a great migration of Grey and Bruce County settlers to the more fertile plains of Western Canada. Vandeleur’s only remaining structures are an Orange Hall and the former Public School No. 11, a brick building erected in 1892 on the site of the original one-room school in which Leonard Babington would have taught.

Besides Rosannah and Cook, many historical characters have roles in this book. Mr. Justice John Douglas Armour returned to his home, Calcutt, in Cobourg, Ontario after the trial. He later served as Chief Justice of Ontario and, in the year before his death in 1903, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. His portrait hangs in the Old Bailey-style courtroom of Victoria Hall in Cobourg. James Masson, who defended Cook Teets, represented Grey North in the House of Commons from 1887 to 1896. Dr. Thomas Sproule served in Parliament until 1915, the last four years as Speaker of the House under Prime Minister Robert Borden. Goldwin Smith produced a prodigious number of articles and books and died in Toronto in 1910. A well-known anti-Semite, he nevertheless coined a phrase, “Above all nations is humanity,” that has been adopted as the motto of several universities around the world. Prosecutor Alfred Frost became mayor of Owen Sound and died from pneumonia after an ice fishing accident. His large house was converted into an orphanage. The County Court Building, erected in 1853, no longer serves that purpose and despite its historical and architectural significance, faces an uncertain future.

Dr. Daniel Clark headed the Toronto Asylum for the Insane until 1905, gaining a reputation as a free-thinking if quirky caretaker of the mentally ill. According to The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Clark participated in the debates of his time, notably on the relationship between insanity and masturbation, on the connection between gynecological problems and insanity in women, and on the use of physical restraint, which he claimed to have ended at Toronto in 1883.” He testified at the trial of Louis Riel in 1885, declaring that he thought Riel was insane “for thinking he could come into the Saskatchewan and gather a force that would make him a monarch.”

John Ross Robertson led a legendary life as proprietor of the Evening Telegram, dying in 1918. Owen Staples was an outstanding painter and an illustrator for Robertson’s newspaper. He died in 1949. I had the privilege of knowing his daughter Madge Staples when we both worked at the Telegram before its demise in 1971.

I had the support of many people in writing this book. James Lockyer, founder of Innocence Canada -formerly the Association in Aid of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), encouraged me from the beginning. Genni Gunn and Jeanette Lynes read early drafts and gave me valuable suggestions. Barbara Kyle and Tom Taylor offered helpful advice. I appreciated the assistance of medical and legal experts: Dr. Margaret Thompson, Medical Director of the Ontario Poison Centre; Dr. Peter Kopplin of Toronto; and Judge Robert J. Sharpe of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. My Sherlockian friend, Hartley Nathan, gave me an expert’s view of author Conan Doyle’s approach to crime solving. I am grateful to my daughter, Sharon Argyle, for having created the map of Victorian Ontario at the front of the book.

My thanks go to Matthew Goody and his entire team at Mosaic Press who have so enthusiastically supported the publication of this book.

I also thank my partner Deborah Windsor for her everlasting support.