This is the conclusion of the case of William Harvey, the general manager of J.W. Lyon’s World Publishing Company in Guelph. Charged by Lyon with embezzling about $1,000 in 1888 and 1889, Harvey purchased a pistol, murdered his wife and two daughters, then set out for Toronto to add his son to the list. He was arrested in Toronto on March 26, 1889, and brought back to Guelph.
George Murton, a Wyndham Street tailor, was foreman of the jury for the inquest, and took a leading part in the questioning, along with Crown Attorney Peterson. Rev. George Harvey, the curate at St. George’s Church, followed the police chief on the stand. He helped to reconstruct the movements of the prisoner before and after the murders.
Dr. Herod adjourned the inquest, to meet again at 9am the following morning, March 28. He hinted he wanted all relevant facts to come out at the hearing. A succession of witness testified that day, and the next, including the Toronto police officers who had arrested Harvey.
Dr. Herod adjourned the inquest on Friday afternoon. He was not yet finished. He called the next session for the following Tuesday. After two and a half days of hearings,he scheduled a final session of his inquest into the deaths of Matilda Harvey and her two daughters for the evening of April 2, 1889. That session was to accommodate two witnesses unable to testify earlier.
Peterson co-operated with the doctor in those sessions. In fact, they had more of the character of a preliminary hearing. The witnesses did not deal only with the deaths, but with William Harvey’s activities in Guelph and Toronto in the hours after the shootings. The coroner’s jury ruled the three women were murdered, and the evidence pointed to William Harvey as perpetrator. He was held in custody on three charges of murder until the fall assizes, scheduled to be held in Guelph beginning on Oct. 30.
During his summer in the Guelph jail William Harvey lost weight, and allowed his beard to grow. Otherwise, he seemed resigned to his fate. Dr. Stephen Lett, medical superintendent of the Homewood Sanitarium, put together his defence strategy. His close relationship to the case has never been explained. He was not, he said, a close friend of Harvey, having spoken to him perhaps a half dozen times in total before the murders.
Nevertheless, Harvey called upon the Doctor to supply bail on his initial arrest for embezzlement, and Dr. Lett readily put up $2,000, equal to three or four times a working man’s annual wages, and devoted a significant amount of his time to the case.
The Doctor considered that the best defence would be a plea of temporary insanity. He brought in two of the best lawyers in Toronto, William Lount and G.W. Lindsay. Presumably he covered their fees: William Harvey had little money and few assets. To support the plea he enlisted the best mental health specialists in the country.
Leading the list was Dr. Joseph Workman, then 84, and the founder of the treatment of mental health in Canada. The others were Dr. Daniel Clark, for 14 years the superintendent of the Toronto Asylum, Dr. W. B. Aitkens, of Toronto, who had treated mental patients for 40 years, and Dr. Charles K. Clarke, who was then in charge of the Kingston Asylum. Dr. Lett, himself a noted authority, also planned to testify.
Crown Attorney Henry Peterson had intended to lead the prosecution, but it appears that the provincial government intervened. It sent in the Deputy Attorney General, E.F.B. Johnston, who had formerly practiced law in Guelph. He was a rising star in Ontario legal circles, and had a particular skill in cross-examinations. Peterson assisted with the prosecution.
Over the course of the summer, Harvey gave Dr. Lett a power of attorney. He wanted what was remaining of his assets to be sold and the proceeds given to his son. That action would eventually help undermine the defence strategy as it suggested that Harvey was perfectly sane.
Interest in the case waned over the spring and summer, but was back at fever pitch with the opening of the court session on Oct. 30 before Justice Street. Reporters elbowed members of the public to gain a seat or a place to stand in the hallway. The Toronto newspapers all had reporters present, as did many other newspapers. The Harvey case was unquestionably the biggest Guelph news story of the latter part of the 19th century. Hundreds of people milled about outside, unable to get into the building.
In cases where Henry Peterson led the prosecution there were few surprises: he preferred to replicate what had been stated at the preliminary hearing. This time there were unanticipated developments. J.W. Lyon, Harvey’s former employer, was the first witness. He explained his discovery of the embezzlement and his subsequent actions to E.F.B. Johnston. In the cross-examination there was some sparring with defence attorney William Lount, and Lyon became enraged at the suggestion that he had promised Harvey not to prosecute. That initial performance, combined with other actions by Lount, made him appear domineering and unsympathetic.
A new piece of information was that a couple of weeks before the murders Harvey had been treated for erysipelas, an infectious and inflammatory disease of the skin and mucous membranes. He had been off work for several days, and the defence suggested that the ailment had affected Harvey’s mental processes. He was still suffering from it at the time of the murders.
Lount spent much time getting the various experts to discuss the concept of “homicidal mania,” which he suggested was the cause of Harvey’s actions. Their explanations were both overly technical and rambling.
The prosecution carefully outlined the sequence of events before and after the murders, but Johnston was at his best in the cross-examination of the five mental health experts, which occupied a significant portion of the proceedings. Johnston continually expressed doubt that a man could be insane one minute and perfectly sound a few moments later. He was able to trip up the doctors in contradictions, and he made much of the fact that they seemed to be at odds with one another.
Murder trials in the late 19th century usually took only a day or two. In the Harvey case it was the morning of the fourth day when Judge Street delivered his charge to the jury. He outlined the case, and discussed the evidence, inconclusive and contradictory as it was, for W.H. Harvey’s sanity. His address took more than two hours.
Less that an hour after retiring, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty on the murder charges. They rejected the explanation of temporary insanity. Considering the time they were in deliberation, they seem to have rejected the defence arguments out-of-hand. In retrospect, it was obvious that the defence would have done better with one, or at most, two mental health experts, rather than five.
With a touch of sarcasm in his voice, Justice Street thanked them for their careful consideration of the case. He then told Harvey that he had no choice in the matter of the sentence. Harvey would hang on the morning of Nov. 29.
Local controversy did not end with the trial and verdict. Some people still found it difficult to believe that such a mild-mannered and gracious man as W.H. Harvey could murder anyone, let alone the family he seemed to value above all else. Others blamed J.W. Lyon, claiming that the initial charges of embezzlement had driven Harvey over the edge.
As the date of the execution approached, Harvey’s lawyers applied to the federal Minister of Justice to have the sentence commuted. Supporting the appeal were petitions from across Canada, and a campaign by the Toronto Globe to save Harvey’s life. The minister denied the request without providing reasons. Controversy flared again when Archdeacon Dixon, of St. George’s Anglican Church, published letters pleading for Harvey’s life, and denouncing the jury as a bunch of ignorant illiterates. James Staples, of Harriston, chairman of the jury, responded in defence of the verdict and sentence, as did several members of St. George’s congregation.
All the fuss did nothing to save W.H. Harvey, who spent his last days on earth writing letters. He remained indifferent to his fate, and appeared to be perfectly sane, according the his guards. Archdeacon Dixon spent much time with Harvey during his last hours.
Sheriff McKim hired a man from Toronto to carry out the execution, which would take place in the walled yard of the Guelph jail. He had no experience. Rather than a gallows with a trap door, this one used the dropping of a heavy weight at one end of the rope over a pulley to swing the condemned man aloft at the other.
Canada had abolished public hangings 20 years earlier, but about 75 people assembled to witness this one, including jail and court officials and a group of reporters. A few members of the public tried to watch, perched on the tops of nearby windows and even in trees that offered a view of the jail yard.
According to witnesses, the hangman bungled his task. When he released the rope holding the weight, Harvey swung aloft, but the jolt was insufficient to break his neck. Emitting groans and gurgling sounds, he struggled to free himself for more than 10 minutes. Some of the spectators on nearby roofs laughed and shouted catcalls. The display made several of those present physically ill.
Dr. Herod did not declare William H. Harvey dead until 15 minutes after he swung aloft. His was the fifth execution at Guelph. There would be two more, both in the 20th century.
In answer to requests from members of St. George’s Church, where Harvey had been a popular Sunday School superintendent, he was not buried in the jail yard, but with the rest of his family at Woodlawn Cemetery.
The Harvey residence, at Edwin and Woolwich Streets, survived until the 1960s, when it was demolished to make way for a service station. When it came down there were a few elderly residents who clearly remembered the murders and the trial of 1889.