One of the strangers was cross-eyed, and, as described in a newspaper report, “a tough-looking character, a foreigner speaking poor English,” while the second man wore a straggly black beard and cryptic tattoos on his arms. Add the wear and tear of a 22-mile walk in fly season, and it is perhaps understandable that, during the evening of June 11, 1896, the two wayfarers were turned away at Christena Fry’s boarding house at Seguin Falls.
The dark-bearded man was James Mullen, from Allenwood, near Elmvale, Ontario; the other was Swedish-born Christian Hanson.
Mullen had come north by rail to Emsdale, in southeastern Parry Sound District, seeking employment. A native of Ireland and a manual labourer, he had to go wherever there was promise of work in order to support his family. This time, Mullen hoped to hire on with the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, then just being completed into Parry Sound. He left home, at daybreak on June 10, with $7.20 in his pocket and a flour bag “turkey” on his back.
Although it was June, the bag’s contents, mostly clothing made by his wife and daughters, included a pair of heavy woollen mitts. That was because his plan, should the railway job not pan out, was to find work in a lumber camp, a job that would keep him away from home throughout the following winter. As he bid goodbye to his wife, Mary Jane, and their eight children, Mullen promised that this would be the last time he would leave them alone for so long.
From Emsdale, Mullen set off walking toward Parry Sound, probably early on June 11. By the time he reached Bear Lake, 15 miles into his journey, he was observed travelling with Hanson. On reaching Seguin Falls, some seven miles further on, the pair inquired about lodging at Fry’s boarding house, and were turned away.
They then resorted to a common tactic of the day, and looked for a handy barn. Most tramps (and one newspaper described the pair ofs strangers as “having the appearance of tramps”) smoked, placing them up there with lightning and damp hay on the farmer’s list of threats to barns, so this would need to be done under the cover of darkness. Mullen and Hanson bedded down in the hayloft of Bannon’s barn, beside the Nipissing Colonization Road immediately south of Seguin Falls. (“Seguin Falls” then stood for the crossroads where the road linking Emsdale and Parry Sound intersected the Nipissing Road. When the railway came, the hamlet migrated a little over a mile south, to the tracks, taking the name with it. Later still, when the railway shut down, Seguin Falls ceased to exist other than as a ghost town on the Park-to-Park Trail.)
The following day, Hanson, now alone, turned up in and near Orrville on the Christie Road, several miles nearer Parry Sound. Harry Clark noticed the stranger on two occasions several hours apart. The second time, Clark came upon him as he finished repacking his valise after resting in some roadside bushes. The valise, Clark noted, was carried slung on the end of a staff balanced over his shoulder — a travelling stick that seemed overly large for a man five feet, four and one-half inches tall. When Hanson resumed walking in the direction of Parry Sound, he left a bloodstained handkerchief lying in the bushes. Clark, thinking he might use it himself, picked up the handkerchief and carried it home to his wife to wash.
Hanson was understandably tired following the 10-mile walk from Seguin Falls, for he had been busy the night before, back in Bannon’s barn.
As revealed in the story that unfolded in the Parry Sound courthouse, just over a month later, sometime during the night Hanson used his heavy carrying stick to smash in the left side of Mullen’s skull and jaw, killing him. The murderer tumbled the body out of the blood-soaked hayloft, dragged it under the barn’s raised thresh floor and loosely covered it with some of the straw and sheep manure that carpeted the ground.
Rural school kids of the day ranged freely at recess. Bannon’s barn, more or less across the road from the Seguin Falls schoolhouse, was a place pupils went to play. On Monday June 15, three days after the murder, two children hurried to the school bearing the news that there was a dead man lying in Bannon’s barn. Robert Fry, an older pupil, went to investigate, and discovered Mullen’s nearly naked body. Sheep sheltering beneath the thresh floor had partially uncovered the body as they crawled over it in the confined space.
Fry warned the teacher to call in the school kids. He then hurried off to tell the local constable, Henry Good, and some men working in a nearby mill, about the gruesome discovery.
Part-time constables appointed to keep the peace in rural communities like Seguin Falls seldom had to deal with crimes more serious than public drunkenness and allowing livestock to wander at large. Most such agents of the law would have been flummoxed when faced with a murder, but not Constable Good, who evidently measured up to his name.
Good quickly came up with a prime suspect. Christena Fry and her husband, Stewart, had seen the tattooed victim in the company of another man when they came seeking lodging. So did Percy and Jane Vigrass, the last witnesses to see Mullen alive. A federal election was coming up in 12 days, and two lumbermen, Liberal William Henry Pratt of Parry Sound and Conservative George McCormick of Orillia, were hotly engaged in a fight for the Muskoka-Parry Sound seat in the Commons. On June 11, political rallies were held in both the old and the new Seguin Falls. As they hurried from one venue to the other, the Vigrasses met or overtook the pair of strangers on the Nipissing Road.
Armed with a description of Mullen’s travelling companion, Good embarked on a manhunt. He recruited William Fleming, owner of the hotel in the new Seguin Falls, as an informal deputy, and, guessing that the suspect would have continued heading west, they boarded a train for Parry Sound.
At Rose Point, the railway depot serving the nearby town, the lawmen, along with the train’s conductor and brakeman, entered a boarding house formerly used by railway construction workers. They fanned out to search the rooms. When Fleming opened one door, he found Hanson standing, half dressed, among his possessions, some stowed in a carpetbag and some scattered about the room. In addition to the immediate needs of a knight of the road — a quantity of bread and cheese, and a tin pail — there were numerous articles of clothing, some of them bloodstained, and a stout stick. On the stick Fleming noticed a small spot of what looked like blood, and a larger area where the wood appeared to have been freshly scraped clean.
When Fleming asked how he got to Parry Sound, Hanson replied that it was by train, all the way from Emsdale. Bracken, the train conductor, said this could not be so. Scheduled passenger service on the OA&PS did not reach Parry Sound until six months later, in December 1896. Traffic would thus be limited to work trains, which usually included a passenger car like the one that brought Good and Fleming to Rose Point.
Hanson then changed his mind; he had walked. When Fleming, who obviously took his authority seriously, asked how blood got on the stick and the suspect suddenly ceased understanding English, Fleming, as he would later testify in court, advised Constable Good to arrest him. Good and Fleming put their man and the seized evidence aboard the train and returned to Seguin Falls. Hanson was kept overnight in Fleming’s hotel, then returned to Parry Sound and lodged in the district jail to await trial.
“The Seguin Falls murder is the topic of town talk,” exclaimed prominent Parry Sound citizen Duncan Fraser Macdonald in his diary entry for June 17. News of the cold-blooded killing, in an age when murders of any kind were rare, spread fast and far. The Barrie Northern Advance of June 25 summarized the killing and the arrest of Hanson, noting that the suspect “was wearing the dead man’s clothes and top boots. He had the club with which the crime was perpetrated….He had $4 in his pocket, which is believed was stolen from the dead man and was the object for which the crime was committed.”
The story concluded by saying that the murder victim was believed to have been a resident of the nearby Township of Flos, identification having been aided by marks, including Masonic Lodge symbols, tattooed on the dead man’s arms.
Hanson was tried in Parry Sound on July 15 before Justice Thomas Ferguson and a jury of six Parry Sound men. Testimony from several witnesses pieced together the story pretty much as the Barrie Advance had summarized it three weeks earlier. Mullen and Hanson were seen together around noon on June 11 at Bear Lake, and during the evening at Seguin Falls. A broken tobacco pipe, which Hanson had tried to get repaired in Emsdale, was found in the straw in Bannon’s barn, placing him at the murder scene. That oddly large stick Hanson carried had caught the notice of more than one witness. Samuel Weaver, who saw the defendant in Orrville around noon on June 12, testified, “I carried [a bag] many times myself…and I thought it was foolish for a man to carry such a big stick and carry his turkey on it.”
The star witness was James Mullen’s wife. Mary Jane Mullen took the stand with her six-week-old baby in her arms, and, one by one, identified articles found with Hanson.
“One of the sensations of [the] investigation,” reported the Barrie Examiner in its July 23 edition, “was when Detective Greer went into the box and produced an undershirt which he had, during the recess of the court, removed from the body of the prisoner.”
Also there was Mullen’s “tobacco knife,” well known to Mary Jane because “I have took it from my small little one often.” There were his “old gaiter boots,” his overalls, a shirt, stockings (knitted by Mullen’s daughter and dyed yellow by Mary Jane, using a certain weed she gathered in fence corners), and those winter mitts. Having made or mended most of the items, here and there applying personal touches such as bits of yarn and coloured cloth, Mary Jane had no difficulty convincing the jury that they had been taken from the dead man. And, Mary Jane affirmed, the bloody handkerchief that Harry Clark found where Hanson rested in the bushes near Orrville, was one of three she had packed for her husband.
Beyond denying his guilt, the defendant had nothing to say. (Later, in a jailhouse confession, Hanson would admit to killing Mullen, but accidentally, when the latter tried to take his stick from him.) Walter T. Haight, the defending lawyer, contended that Hanson was insane, and subject to epileptic fits. The jury found him guilty, and Hanson was sentenced to be hanged on October 16.
However, that failed to silence questions concerning Hanson’s sanity that arose from evidence given at the trial.
At Emsdale, where we first picked up his trail, Hanson already stood out as “different” due to the knee-length frock coat he wore. “[It is] not very often that you will see a railway navvy with a Prince Albert [coat] on,” remarked Alfred Paget, the clerk in D.S. Vincent’s store where Hanson tried to buy a replacement stem for his pipe.
When Hanson and Mullen stopped near Bear Lake, in the afternoon of June 11, for a drink of water and to inquire about work, a local citizen named Nels Oscar Nelson conversed with Hanson in Swedish. He remembered Hanson complaining about the lack of support for immigrants, how it was enough “to tempt a man to both steal and murder.” Nelson also recalled that Mullen, all the while, lay on the ground apparently suffering stomach pain, leading to conjecture that Hanson had already tried to poison him. A second man of Scandinavian origin, Peter Spenson, who had worked with Hanson in the past, testified that “sometimes he was not all right, he was like crazy.”
And what to make of a man who would commit murder, then walk away wearing his victim’s clothing?
An appeal for a review of the case, supported by, among others, Dr. James Appelbe, surgeon for the Parry Sound jail, and the Swedish consul, was made to the Privy Council in Ottawa.
In early October the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary. On October 7, when a scaffold would already be under construction in the Parry Sound jail, D.F. Macdonald wrote in his diary that “Sheriff [Samuel] Armstrong informed Christian Hanson that his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment,” but made no further comment.
The reaction of the Parry Sound Canadian, however, likely mirrored the local mood. “If [a] murderer happens to get caught all he has to do is play the insanity dodge and he will escape hanging.
There never was a murderer that more richly deserved the vengeance of the law than Hanson.” On October 16, the day Hanson would otherwise have been hanged, the Orillia Packet also attacked the decision by which “one more has been added to the list of failures of justice, which is bringing the administration of law in Canada into contempt.”
Christian Hanson passed away in the psychiatric ward of the Guelph Reformatory, in 1923. James Mullen is buried in Allenwood Methodist Cemetery, in Flos Township. Mary Jane Mullen remarried, and over time, the incident at Seguin Falls ceased to be mentioned in the family.
Murder on the Nipissing Road
Date: Feb 05, 2010
Vincent’s store in Emsdale where Christian Hanson tried to have his pipe repaired. The bowl of the pipe was later found at the murder scene.
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