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planned to stand bail for his sister-in-law and get her out of police custody. The reporter had not yet divulged that Bert Massey was dead. He immediately offered to accompany the distraught man downtown. The two men disappeared into the February dark—but not before the man from the Tely had asked Maud to lend him a photograph of Carrie which he knew his editor would publish in the next edition. On the following day, after Carrie’s appearance in the Women’s Court, it appeared next to the Tely ’s scoop—the most informative account of the murder so far, under the headline “News of What Had Happened a Cruel Blow to a Little East End Household.”
    Carrie, an uneducated eighteen-year-old who had taken a man’s life, had barely uttered a word on the day of her first court appearance. Over the course of the next three weeks, her own words would be recorded on only three occasions. A century later, those remarks are all we have in her voice on which to base speculation on her state of mind: she left no diary or letters that reveal what she was thinking or feeling. We know her reactions to events only if they were noted in others’ accounts or newspaper articles. However, observers have always been happy to project their own assumptions onto her. In 1915, she was on her way to becoming a lightning rod for the fears and prejudices swirling around Canada’s largest English-speaking city.

{ C HAPTER 3 }
    The Corpse in the Morgue
    T UESDAY , F EBRUARY 9
    P ARADE OF 4,000 S OLDIERS THROUGH CITY
    Mounted rifles swing into Queen Street at the foot of University Avenue .
    B RITISH L OSSES T OTAL 104,000
    Premier Asquith speaking in the [British] House of Commons to-day said that British casualties in all ranks in the western arena of the war, from the beginning of hostilities to February 4, amounted to approximately 104,000 men. This includes killed, wounded and missing .
    —Globe , Tuesday, February 9, 1915
    Mr. Frederick Massey … said that he had viewed the body in the morgue, and recognized it as that of Charles A. Massey, whom he knew intimately .
    —Toronto Daily Star , Wednesday, February 10, 1915
     
     
     
     
     

O nce Colonel Denison had closed the Women’s Court proceedings, Miss Minty marched her prisoner through the spectators gathered at the courtroom door, round to the other side of City Hall’s second floor, and waited for the elevator to rattle up in its metal cage from the ground floor. When its doors opened, a group of self-assured women in smart hats and fur coats bustled out. Carrie shrank back, but nobody took any notice of the shabby domestic: these women had other concerns. The members of Toronto’s Local Council of Women were on a mission to persuade Mayor Thomas Langton Church and the Board of Control that the Women’s Court must not fall prey to government cuts. Once these women had stomped off, Carrie and Miss Minty stepped into the elevator for the creaky ascent to the third floor. There, the policewoman escorted her charge to the police office, where Carrie would begin the ordeal of being admitted, on remand, to the notorious Toronto Jail, better known as “the Don.”
    Carrie was told to remove her hat and coat. First, she was photographed from the front and both sides. Next, a police clerk bustled up to her, wielding a pair of steel calipers. Carrie’s eyes widened with alarm, but Miss Minty reassured her. There followed a lengthy procedure in which twenty-five dimensions of Carrie’s body were measured, including her height, head length, left foot, left little finger, right ear, nose size and shape, ear lobe, chin, teeth, and the width and tilt of herforehead. All these measurements, plus her birthplace, occupation, and hair colour, were noted down in a big, brown leather-bound volume: the Toronto police force’s “Bertillon” register.
    The Bertillon system of identification had been invented forty years earlier by Alphonse Bertillon, a pale-faced, misanthropic records clerk in