Fit to Be Tied: Ontario's Murderous Past

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Terry Boyle has exhumed the remains of eight murder cases drawn from
vaults sealed between 1830 and 1935. In seven cases, the six men and one
woman convicted of murder were hanged.

Sydney Murrell paid the price after a jury found him guilty of shooting
Russell Campbell during the course of a chaotic attempt to rob the Home
Bank of Melbourne in April 1921. Cornelius Burleigh hung in 1830 for the
murder of a London police officer. He survived the first drop—when the
rotten rope snapped—but not the second, when a length secured from a
nearby merchant stood the test. (A phrenologist who secured the right to
examine Burleigh’s skull subsequently declared him innocent.)
Elizabeth Tilford, who administered arsenic to her husbands in order to
inherit their estates, paid the ultimate price in 1935. Others were hung
for having murdered in the course or cause of seduction, a scam, or
flight after a train robbery. The sole survivor, Joseph Hooper, was
acquitted by a jury in Port Hope, Ontario, on a charge of poisoning his
wife, but sentenced to a prison term by a Quebec court for having
attempted to drown her.

As history, Fit to Be Tied is seriously flawed by the absence of
context. Most of the information is drawn from newspaper files, with no
indication that the author consulted the substantial academic literature
on crime and the justice system. The questions of how, when, and where
are addressed, but beyond the rudiments we learn little about “why.”