According to some reports, Arthur Lucas, a gangster from Detroit, came to Toronto in November 1961 with murderous intent. Some of his associates, and the police, fingered him for the gangland-style slaying of Therland Crater, who’d been scheduled to give evidence in a U.S. drug trial, and his girlfriend, Carolyn Ann Newman. In the early morning hours of November 17, both victims were found with their throats slashed. Crater had been shot four times for good measure. Lucas was tracked down in Detroit and brought back to Toronto for trial.
Murder had always been a hanging offence in Canada. In 1961, however, Canadian criminal law was amended to differentiate between two categories of murder. Capital murder, which included planned murder and killing an on-duty police or correctional officer, now carried the death sentence. Other types of murder were categorized as non-capital, which carried a sentence of life imprisonment.
Lucas stood accused of the capital offence of premeditated murder. In May 1962, he was tried for the slaying of Crater.
Photo from the March 2, 1962, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
The Crown built up a solid case against the defendant. Certain facts were irrefutable; for example, Lucas had visited Crater and Newman earlier on the morning of their murder, and he admitted that he was the owner of a blood-soaked gold ring found close to Newman’s body. But the case was based largely on circumstantial evidence, relying heavily on the testimony of an unreliable witness: addict and drug dealer Morris “Red” Thomas, who had no qualms about making damning and unproven accusations against a man he’d called friend.
Lucas’s lawyer, Ross MacKay, tried to instill doubt in the minds of the jury: Would a seasoned killer register at a hotel under his own name? Would a murderer pay a cordial visit to his victims before cold-bloodedly killing them? But MacKay had limited funds and scant time to prepare for the trial; the odds were stacked against his client. It did not help that the presiding judge, Chief Justice James Chalmers McRuer, also known as “Hanging Jim” and “Vinegar Jim,” proved to be exceptionally hostile.
On May 10, 1962, Lucas was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Appeals against his sentence wended their way right up to the Supreme Court of Canada. All were in vain — the death penalty would stand.
Just after midnight on December 11, 1962, Lucas was escorted to the execution chamber at the Don Jail in Toronto. He did not die alone. He was hanged back to back with Ronald Turpin, a small-time thief who had been sentenced to death for killing a police officer while making his getaway from a robbery in February 1962.
But troubling questions lingered. Lucas had been described as slow-witted and slow-moving. Could such a person have planned and carried out a double murder with the speed and precision of a trained assassin? Was this a case of wrongful conviction?
Enter journalist Betty Lee.
In 1959, the Australian-born Lee was features writer for the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail. She described her first assignment, covering the royal tour in 1959, as “a colossal bore.” “MURDER?” — Lee’s series of six articles on the Arthur Lucas case, published in the Globe in late 1963 — was anything but boring, and it would place her in the vanguard of an emerging band of gutsy truth seekers: Canadian investigative journalists.
In Behind the Headlines: A History of Investigative Journalism in Canada, professor and journalist Cecil
Cartoon from the December 11, 1962, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
Rosner characterizes investigative journalists as fierce and dedicated reformers whose mission is to expose wrongdoing: “They are often obsessed with information, data, documents, and proof.” They will probe a story for months or even years, risking personal and professional danger to discover the truth and hold wrongdoers to account.
There had long been investigative journalism of one kind or another in Canada — in fact, Rosner points to William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor, as arguably the country’s original investigative journalist, thanks to his establishment of a newspaper in 1835 to expose graft in the construction of the Welland Canal.
But, as a rule, up to the 1950s, Canadian journalism was pretty tame. The main aims of newspaper proprietors were to make money and, generally, to avoid stirring up trouble.
Author, journalist, and educator Walter Stewart began his career at the Toronto Telegram in 1953. This is how he described those early days: “What I learned about journalism was that it was a suspect craft, dominated by hypocrisy, exaggeration, and fakery. At the Te ely, we toadied to advertisers, eschewed investigative reporting, slanted our stories gleefully to fit the party line (Conservatives) and to appeal to the one man who counted — the publisher.”
It was not that sordid things weren’t happening in Canada; it was just that journalists were not delving beneath the surface to reveal them to the public.
However, a few interesting exceptions emerged in the 1950s. Capital punishment and, specifically, wrongful convictions were hot-button issues at the time, and an increasing number of politicians, activists, and journalists took up cudgels on behalf of individuals accused of murder, where a guilty verdict would trigger an automatic penalty of death by hanging. John Edward Belliveau (1956) and Jacques Hébert (1958 and 1963) both wrote books questioning the conviction and execution of Wilbert Coffin for the 1953 murder of bear hunter Richard Lindsey in Gaspé, Quebec. In 1966, writer and activist Isabel LeBourdais came out swinging in support of Steven Truscott, sentenced to death in 1959 as a 14-year-old for the rape and murder of classmate Lynne Harper. Betty Lee’s methodical exposé of the Lucas case would establish her as a superstar in this elite group.
With extensive input from Lucas’s appeal lawyer, Walter Williston, Lee walked Globe readers through the case from beginning to end. She made no attempt to gloss over Lucas’s nefarious background — she described him as a “pimp” with connections in the narcotics underworld. She noted that he had a slew of convictions for armed robbery, mail fraud, and pandering.
Photo from the May 11, 1962, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
Both Williston and Lee challenged much of the evidence presented at the trial. Some examples: Lucas had checked into a Toronto hotel on the day before the murder. He called the Crater number twice through the hotel switchboard — surely an experienced killer would have used a payphone instead to conceal his presence in Toronto? Lucas then visited Crater at his rooming house in the early hours of November 17, but hotel staff testified that he was back at his hotel to check out “some time after 6:00 am.” His manner, wrote Lee, seemed “perfectly normal,” and his clothes were “not bloodstained or in disarray.” This ran counter to the prosecution’s claim that Lucas had rummaged through Newman’s bloody bedding, vainly hunting for his ring. A fellow tenant at the Crater house reported hearing disturbing scuffling sounds at 6:20 a.m. Lucas claimed that, by 6:30, he was having breakfast at a café on Dundas Street. This alibi was never properly investigated. Then there was the gun, allegedly used to shoot Crater, that was found on the Burlington Skyway around 50 hours after the killing. Ballistics experts called by the Crown balked at positively identifying it as the murder weapon. “Red” Thomas was the only witness to testify that it belonged to Lucas, his so-called friend.
Lee described the appeals process, too, as flawed. As the appeal court accepted new evidence only if it applied to or expanded on testimony given at a trial, Williston’s attempts to have two entirely new pieces of evidence accepted in the Ontario Court of Appeal were frustrated — the first related to Lucas’s blood type, and the second proved that Lucas’s story had remained unchanged throughout, despite Crown Attorney Henry Bull’s claims that the defendant simply made up the whole thing during his trial. Williston protested that Bull had unfairly prejudiced the jury during the trial with attacks against Lucas’s “general character, morality and credibility,” and he had issues with the judge for making errors in his charge to the jury and not giving sufficient weight to the theory of the defence in his summing up. These objections were dismissed.
With the Supreme Court appeal, one of the judges dissented from the majority decision. As the Globe asked in an editorial: “Should capital punishment be executed when even one judge finds himself unconvinced that justice has been done?”
In the concluding article of her series, Lee wrote: “The evidence against Arthur Lucas was entirely circumstantial. No one saw him at or near the place of the murder at the time the deed was done. To the last moment of his life, the man protested his innocence. He varied his complicated story not a whit, even though the most damaging witness against him [Thomas] switched his testimony from questioning to questioning.”
While Lee’s investigations strongly suggest that this was a case of wrongful conviction, she claimed that her focus was less on guilt or innocence and more on whether justice had been served.
Photo from the December 11, 1962, issue of the Toronto Daily Star.
On this point, Lee was witheringly direct: the Canadian criminal-justice system had failed Lucas. Lee criticized the nature and extent of the legal aid he had received. A legal aid-official estimated that a total of $1,500 had gone to defending Lucas, while $30,000-plus had been spent by the Crown on prosecuting him. Lee questioned whether “details of a defendant’s life — unrelated to his crime — should be used against him by the prosecution” and whether it was time “to ponder the structure of the appeal system,” given that the appeal court would not permit the admission of new and possibly vital evidence.
In conclusion, she posed what she called “one vital question”: “In a country which advocates the noose, was this man served unquestionably and impeccably by the processes of law that lead to the ultimate [penalty]?”
The executions of Lucas and Turpin would be the last in Canada. From that date forward, all death sentences were commuted. The Canadian government formalized the situation with the abolition of the death penalty for civil crimes in 1976 and for military crimes in 1998. By the late 1970s, investigative journalism in print and other media was well established in Canada. Over the years, Lee herself wrote a number of important features for newspapers and magazines. In 1967, she won a National Newspaper Award and, in 1972, she became the first female Southam Journalism Fellow at Massey College. She was also a published author. Her professional impact was acknowledged after her death in 2015 at the age of 93: she was admiringly described as having been “fierce, rigorous and unconventional,” and a “comet in Canadian journalism.”
Sources: Behind the Headlines: A History of Investigative Journalism in Canada by Cecil Rosner (Oxford University Press, 2008); “The final hours of the last two men executed in Canada” by Alexander Ross (Maclean’s, 1965); The Globe and Mail editions of November 2, 1963, March 27 1967, March 23, 2015; “MURDER?” by Betty Lee (Globe and Mail October 28, 1963, October 29, 1963, October 30, 1963, October 31, 1963, November 1, 1963, and November 2, 1963; Toronto Daily Star edition of November 17, 1961.