The Massey Murder

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Book: Read The Massey Murder for Free Online
Authors: Charlotte Gray
result of dazed terror or hard-boiled criminality? The Evening Telegram portrayed her as young and guileless: “a rather short, fair-haired girl, of eighteen, whose blue-grey eyes looked as though they had wept most of the night … More like a mild and gentle Sunday School pupil did she look, and very subdued and sorrowful this morning.” The Toronto Daily Star took a very different line: “The heaviness over her eyebrows resembles the Slavic type more than the English, and her mouth is strong, showing capacity for resentment out of all keeping with a round, childish chin.”
    As spectators streamed out of the courtroom, each made her own judgment as to whether Carrie Davies was subdued Sunday school pupil or resentful, aggressive immigrant. That evening, readers of the Evening Telegram were able to glean more about the young girl now accused of murder. A day earlier, soon after Bert Massey had been killed, a Tely reporter named Archie Fisher who had been at City Hall when she was brought in had discovered that Carrie Davies had a sister living in the distant east end of Toronto. Fisher had hurried along Gerrard Street for six kilometres until he reached Morley Avenue, where a jumble of wooden telegraph poles and tiny brick houses, many single-storey and all squatting on small lots, lined a soggy gravel thoroughfare just south of the train tracks. Cursing the darkness, he stumbled north, up an incline, until he found number 326. A woman came to the door after he knocked, and looked at this stranger with surprise.
    The reporter realized he had got there before the police. “Are you Maud Fairchild, Carrie Davies’s sister?” he demanded in a voice sombre with authority. Maud Fairchild said she was, and immediately asked, “What has happened to Carrie?” The reporter continued to grill her as Maud’s husband, Ed Fairchild, emerged from the kitchen with a baby in his arms. “Does your sister work for Mr. Massey?” Maud looked anxious. “Yes. Tell us what is the matter.” The reporter stepped importantly through the door into an ill-lit, narrow hall and announced that Carrie had shot her employer.
    The Fairchilds were devastated. As Ed asked, “Was Mr. Massey badly hurt?” his wife gasped, “Poor Carrie.” By now the reporter had manoeuvred them into the tiny parlour: Maud sank into a chair and a toddler immediately ran to her and clung to her skirts. Neither Ed nor Maud could believe that Carrie would do such a thing: she was such a shy little thing, she could barely kill a fly. She had worked for the Masseys for two years, and always said the Masseys were good to her. She had been taken poorly the previous summer, Maud stuttered, while she was with the Masseys at their summer cottage, and they had looked after her so well. She had been her normal, quiet self when she spent Sunday afternoon with the Fairchilds.
    Then Ed remembered something. When Carrie was with them on Sunday, the Fairchilds had friends visiting, so she hadn’t been able to talk much to her sister. However, she had taken her brother-in-law aside in the kitchen and whispered to him that Mr. Massey had tried to kiss her the previous day, when she was cleaning up after a dinner party. Ed insisted that Carrie hadn’t seemed particularly upset. “I told her not to think about it too much about that,” said Ed. “Probably he was feeling a little good and he would forget about it. She said that she guessed he would be ashamed of himself.” As Carrie was leaving at the end of the evening, Ed had mentioned Mr. Massey’s behaviour to his wife. Maud was concerned, but she didn’t stop her sister returning to Walmer Road.Now, a day later, she recalled telling her sister that if anything should happen, to run right out of the house and rush into a neighbour’s house, “no matter whether she was fully dressed or not.”
    But now Carrie was in real trouble. Ed Fairchild grabbed his coat and insisted he must leave immediately and get downtown: he

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