When Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee was assassinated on Sparks Street, Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt was called in to gather evidence on “whodunnit,” as Randy Boswell explains in his weekly series marking the Ottawa Citizen’s 175th anniversary year.
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At 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday, April 7, 1868, Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt was awakened at his home near the corner of Wellington and Bay streets and rushed to a crime scene about one kilometre to the east, at the far end of Sparks Street.
As the oldest doctor in Ottawa, as well as his forensic supervisor for many years, the 63-year-old doctor was sometimes summoned to treat the sick, injured, dying or dead. From the noisy days of Backwoods Bytown to the hustle and bustle of the post-Confederacy capital, Van Cortlandt was the ultimate doctor from cradle to grave: a professional “birther” who helped give birth to several hundred souls and a qualified autopsy. specialist who pulled several hundred.
By the time Van Cortlandt arrived at Toronto House, the hotel and tavern operated through local businesswoman Mary Ann Trotter, a crowd had piled up around the victim of a brutal ambush, mendacity on the sidewalk in a pool of blood.
The physician’s healing skills would be needed; Van Cortlandt put on his forensic hat and took care of the body. This would be the most significant case in the doctor’s coronary career and one of the most notorious crimes in Canadian history.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a pivotal father of the Confederacy and the eloquent eloquent defender of a united Canada from coast to coast, killed a few hours after giving his last passionate speech to Parliament.
A former Irish radical, McGee had rejected the insurgent impulses of his young people and pursued one more policy, pointing out his loyalty to the British Crown and infuriating the Fenian extremists of North America fighting for an independent Ireland.
One of them had obviously murdered McGee at his boarding house door.
“There’s a giant amount of blood in the forums that goes from the mouth and neck to the ditch,” Van Cortlandt testified in an investigation by a police magistrate on April 9, where the alleged killer, Patrick James Whelan, arrested on the night of April 7 – made his first appearance in court.
“The loss of such blood alone would be enough for death, if no other cause had been discovered,” Van Cortlandt, quoted through a Citizen reporter at the time, said. “I discovered the wound, where it came from here, in the back of the head … on the right side of the column. The wound was a gunshot wound, caused by a gun bullet … The bullet was discovered and passed to me; it’s in my possession now.
Van Cortlandt not only owns the ball, he deformed long after passing through McGee’s head and crashing into Ms. Trotter’s heavy door. He also had McGee’s cane, hat, gloves and other clothing (the coat and collar of the blouse “pierced by a bullet and stained with blood around the holes”), as well as a cigar to half smoking and 3 Dentures from McGee, made of wood and blowing from the victim’s mouth through fatal blow.
There was a brief discussion about some of these articles until Van Cortlandt reluctantly agreed to hand them over to the Crown as evidence in the opposite case of Whelan. The maximum was the deformed ball; it was soon combined with the Smith-Wesson revolver discovered in Whelan, and which had been fired recently, and the missing cartridge was replaced suspiciously.
Whelan would later be tried and convicted of McGee’s murder; He was hanged and buried in early 1869 at Nicholas Street Prison, now a hostel and charm of Haunted Walk near the Rideau Center.
“Before leaving the box,” the citizen scribe covering the magistrate’s hearing noted, “the doctor said he would like, if possible, to have the bullet returned to him after the Court had ended with him because he wanted to leave it as a memory of the deceased.
On the same page where Citizen published Van Cortlandt’s presentation for a coroner’s memory, his publisher called McGee’s murder “the ultimate gruesome tragedy that has occurred in the country, or that has hit the hearts of our other people with sadness.”
We can safely climb “deaf” to Van Cortlandt’s list of non-urban traits. However, Ottawa’s top collector of curiosities, its famous non-public museum in the city and beyond, had publicly claimed a terrifying memory.
He never got the ball back. But he had recovered and stored the critical link link linking Whelan to McGee’s murder.
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The American audience has been drawn for decades through medical examiners, medical examiners, etc., who solve mysteries: men and scientists, strangely numb to death, eating snacks while dissecting corpses.
Think of the protagonists of Quincy, M.E. and Crossing Jordan, or the white characters in the morgue scenes of American blockbusters like CSI and NCIS.
CBC’s two most important drama series today, Coroner and Murdoch Mysteries, starring Dr. Jenny Cooper and Dr. Julia Ogden respectively, stick to Da Vinci’s Inquest and Wojeck as a remarkable Canadian edition of an old television trope.
But he believes in a cruise coroner that combines elements from other key figures (the researcher, the investigating prosecutor, the convincing opinion) and gets a broader concept of the physically powerful role Van Cortlandt might have played in a death for no reason in Victorian Ottawa.
It is hard to believe from a fashionable perspective, however, the 19th-century medical examiner in Canada was an amalgam of various purposes at a time when the formula of justice only gradually evolved from clearer divisions of labour before the adoption of the Penal Code in 1892.
At McGee, Van Cortlandt not only examined the victim and placed the crime scene, collecting key clues. He also ordered and supervised the autopsy in Ms. Trotter’s attic. He then presided over the coroner’s “inquisition,” as he was known, assembling and supervising the jury in a crowded committee room in the central tower of Parliament, dictating when the hearing would be open or closed to the public, calling and interviewing key witnesses. (including Trotter and his son, William), and despite all transmitting the jury’s verdict to begin the process. : shooting death “inflicted through one or more unknown persons”.
It is tempting to see Van Cortlandt as a relentless crime fighter who has never rested until justice has been done. This is not exactly the case, as observed through a Globe reporter covering McGee’s murder while Van Cortlandt waited in a Parliament corridor for his jury to finish his deliberations behind closed doors. It was expected to only take a few minutes, but it continued for hours.
“The coroner, who is one of the nicest and simplest men to live in,” the Globe correspondent wrote, “he spent his ten minutes on the windowsill in the hallway next door for the first time, but Array … at one point afterwards, the worthy coroner stretched to the full length of the window, snoring noisyly invariably maximum. He slept fortunately for about two hours … »
To be honest, it was a very long few days on the set of CSI: Bytown.
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Van Cortlandt’s paintings as a forensic investigator have not led to the guilt being located, of course.
When Anne Howard, from rural Fitzroy, west of Bytown, died in January 1844, there were rumors that the woman in poor health had been thrown into her grave for arsenic poisoning. Based on findings drawn through two doctors in the country under pressure from suspected locals, arrests were made and convictions for imminent homicide arose, until Van Cortlandt, the region’s best-trained physician, was called in to review the case.
Howard’s exhumed body and autopsy performed through Van Cortlandt, adding chemical evidence to the contents of the deceased woman’s abdomen, showed no evidence of poison and transparent symptoms that chronic ulcers and severe inflammation of the abdomen were the true cause of Howard’s death.
The prisoners were acquitted. And those who doubted Van Cortlandt’s findings were reminded through the doctor in a letter to the Bytown Gazette that the “hydrogen sulfide” used in the tests, which did not discover poison in Howard’s gut, “will stumble upon the millionth component of arsenic.”
Nearly 30 years later, and less than 18 months before his own death at the age of 70, Van Cortlandt was still serving as a medical examiner.
When the half-built Western Methodist Church collapsed in LeBreton Flats in November 1873, killing two members of the structure’s staff and seriously wounding another, Van Cortlandt conducted the coroner’s investigation into the tragedy. He concluded that “the deceased men died by a twist of fate and the negligence or negligence of the party or guilty portions of the building structure.”
The Citizen, outraged by the loss of life, said the investigation had shown that the incident “is a representation of how things combine in those days, the fragility of carpenter’s paintings and the disrespect that marketers position on human life.”
The Globe reprinted both the findings of the inquest and the Citizen’s commentary, presumably prompting greater scrutiny of construction sites well beyond Ottawa. The chief purpose of the coroner’s role — to “speak for the dead to protect the living” — had again been fulfilled.
This phrase, the official motto of Ontario forensics, is also widely used around the world to articulate the guiding precept of the profession. It is derived from a speech in 1862 through a passionate Canadian statesman about the importance of honoring the reminiscence of deceased ancestors through the facts in history: “The dead have their rights as the living have them: the injustice that opposes them is one of the worst bureaucracies of injustice.”
The speaker? Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
Randy Boswell is a professor of journalism and Ottawa at Carleton University. He wrote an e-book about Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt and his time in Ottawa in the 19th century.
Next: Discover and disturb an Aboriginal cemetery.
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