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Preface. Do You Think I Did It?

The Florence Kinrade case has been on my mind for a long time. Since January 1987, in fact, when I picked up the phone to call her nephew, Ken Kinrade, who was wintering in Clearwater, Florida.

“Ken Kinrade?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” came back a harsh, raspy voice. I half-expected Kinrade, then in his seventies, to rebuff me. People, I’ve found, are generally not eager to discuss a murder in the family, even a long-ago one. But the voice was deceptive. Kinrade, I found when I met him on his return to Hamilton, Ontario in the spring, was a kindly, even timid man, happy to share what he knew about that shocking 1909 crime that had made the family’s name notorious.

Now it’s been thirty years since I made that phone call. Ken is long dead, as are several of the people who helped me reconstruct the lives of Florence, her sister, Ethel, and their well-to-do parents. The Rev. Graham Cotter, a nephew of Florence’s fiancé, Monty Wright, and a long-retired Anglican clergyman whose letter to me led me to the most important revelations of all, has been unfailingly patient as he waited for the story to be finally told. My manuscript languished on a shelf at the University of Toronto Press for several years. And then, like so many neglected projects, it continued languishing.

But the murder of Ethel Kinrade that snowy day in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1909 deserves our attention because it uncovers a rich vein of social history. It tells us a lot about the obstacles an ambitious young singer from an upper-class family faced in seeking a career in – horrors! – vaudeville. It tells us about a forgotten underclass – the thousands of tramps who rode the rails of North America in that era and who were often the first to be suspected when a crime occurred. It tells too of the sometimes-odd practices of the psychiatric profession in that pre-Freudian time. And it also tells the story of a formidable woman who was as resilient as she was devious and was, quite simply Canada’s Lizzie Borden.

The parallels with the notorious 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts case in which Lizzie was suspected of the axe murder of her father and stepmother, are uncanny. In giving her testimony at the inquest into the death of her parents, Lizzie has been described as, “circling, evading, contradicting, revising her story as she went along, scorning the badgering of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton.”

The description could just as easily have applied to Florence who, from the first hours after she ran into the street crying that Ethel had been shot – six times – told different and contradictory versions of the murder of her sister. Ultimately, the newspaper-reading public followed with fascination her epic duel with one of the great counsel of the day, George T. Blackstock Q.C. at an inquest which was described by Coroner Dr. James Anderson, as, “unparalleled in the history of Canada, not only for the interest it has aroused throughout the whole country, but by reason of the legal points raised.” Dr. Charles Kirk (C.K.) Clarke ‘the father of Canadian psychiatry,’ who watched Florence throughout and interviewed her several times, said of her testimony, “a more startling and complex psychological study has rarely been offered.”

Edmund Lester Pearson, America’s pre-eminent crime essayist of his era, wrote that the Lizzie Borden case “is without parallel in the criminal history of America. It is the most interesting, and perhaps the most puzzling murder which has occurred in this country.” The same can be said of the Kinrade mystery – up north in Canada.

Pearson suggested that the Borden case had retained its fascination because it involved a class of people not normally involved in bloody crime, because it was purely a problem of murder, uncomplicated by sexual passion, and because it divided national opinion on the guilt or innocence of Lizzie Borden (who was subsequently but never convincingly judged innocent at her trial). The parallels hold. The Kinrade case too involved a well-off family; it was a ‘pure’ murder and one of shocking violence; it was, and remains, a mystery as to motivation, and it divided the public on the question of Florence Kinrade’s guilt or innocence.

So why hasn’t the Kinrade case caught the public’s imagination until now – say on a Lizzie Borden scale? Of course, there was a coroner’s inquest that went on for many weeks that was reported verbatim in the newspapers. Day after day, Florence was tested ruthlessly in the witness box by Blackstock, the Crown’s lawyer. In addition, reporters interviewed everyone with the remotest connection with the case in Canada and in Virginia, where Florence led a clandestine existence. Without a transcript of the inquest, I compared the multiple newspaper accounts of the coroner’s inquest. Particularly in the moments of high courtroom drama, I found Kit Watkins, Canada’s first female war correspondent, an invaluable mood and scene-setter whose reports I have made generous use of. By a stroke of luck, we also have the detailed psychiatric notes of Dr. C.K. Clarke.

The facts were laid shockingly bare. But Florence was never charged with murder. The inquest did not lead to a trial, meaning there was no official transcript to frame an account. And while she was still alive (she died in 1977), any careless accusation of guilt might have invited a civil suit.

All that the Kinrade mystery seems to have lacked in securing its place in history is the nursery rhyme factor: Lizzie Borden’s fame was enshrined with a rhyme chanted by generations of American children:

Lizzie Borden took an axe,

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Nevertheless, Florence’s life following that period of high notoriety in 1909 was full of interest and surprises. Against all odds, she did achieve a career in vaudeville, endured years of misfortune and then, still singing the songs of her golden years, died at an advanced age and was buried in the Hollywood Cemetery alongside some of the film capital’s greats. A puzzle was Florence Kinrade; an enigma, larger-than-life woman who in her last encounter with her daughter asked provocatively, “Do you think I did it?”

— Frank Jones, 2019

1. He Shot Poor Ethel

February 25, 1909. The city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is wrapped in silence. Only the clanking of cars shunting in the Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo Railway yards, the occasional steam train whistle, and the regular clang of a passing streetcar intrude on the hush of Herkimer Street. Falling snow muffles footsteps and the sound of hooves. It is ten degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.

Shortly after lunch, Thomas L. Kinrade, a tall, heavily built man, emerges from number 105, closing the bevelled glass door behind him, careful not to slip on the fresh snow. At this time, Hamilton, a steel town at the western end of Lake Ontario, bills itself, ‘the ambitious city.’ It is a seething boomtown, the working class East End one vast construction site in the frantic race to build houses for immigrant workers flocking to the metals industries. Kinrade, a prominent educator, also has an eye to business: he has constructed some thirty houses, the rents from which are collected weekly by his daughters, Ethel and Florence.

He turns in the direction of the Cannon Street public school, one of four schools over which he is principal. A few minutes later, the Kinrades’ youngest daughter, Gertrude, sixteen, leaves for school. She turns the corner, and Herkimer Street is once again empty and silent. For the next two hours, as far as anyone is aware, nobody comes or goes. In a front upstairs room across the street from the Kinrade house, Mrs. Frank Hickey is busy sewing for her little ones. She notices nothing. Next door to the Kinrades, Mrs. William Acres sits in the front room, reading a novel. Perhaps it is exciting, because she too notices nothing.

At around 3:25 p.m., by her own count, the front door of number 105 opens and Mrs. Thomas Kinrade (whose first name was Isabelle, or ‘Bella’), snug in her fur coat, emerges and waddles off down the street in the direction of downtown Hamilton like a rotund beaver, going about her business. Time passes, measured by the slow progress up and down the street of a carriage driven by Henry Woodridge. Waiting for his mistress, who is making a social call, Woodridge, wrapped in a blanket, is keeping the horse moving so that it doesn’t get cold.

It is exactly 3:57 p.m. – he is quite sure he is on time – when Ernie Stone, driving his electric streetcar along Herkimer Street at a stately five or six miles an hour, sees a young woman run down the steps of number 105. He is preparing to stop, thinking she is trying to catch a ride, but she doesn’t seem to notice the streetcar, and runs right in front of it. He brakes hard. The steel wheels screech and luckily he manages to avoid hitting her. All he can do is shake his head and wonder at ‘the recklessness of young women today.’ She runs across the tracks and through the side gate of the house opposite. Tom Roach, the streetcar conductor whose responsibility it is to keep the stove alight and the interior snug, also sees the young woman. He notices that she is dressed for the outdoors, wearing a broad-brimmed hat. A moment later, Mrs. Hickey, busy sewing, hears her name called from downstairs. “Mrs. Hickey! Mrs. Hickey!” Florence Kinrade is lying sobbing at the foot of the stairs. “Mrs. Hickey, Ethel is shot!”

“Oh, surely not!” the woman says, hurrying down the stairs and lifting the prostrate girl.

“It’s true! Ethel is shot six times.” A tramp, she insists, has burst into the house and shot her older sister, Ethel. Mrs. Hickey notices there is foam around Florence’s mouth and her voice sounds thick.

“Stay here, dear,” says Mrs. Hickey, “I’ll run next door and have them telephone the police station.”

At police headquarters, Mrs. Hickey’s frantic message that a vagrant has shot a young woman, Ethel Kinrade, on Herkimer Street is transmitted immediately to Inspector of Detective Bernard McMahon. In his many years of service, the Irish-born cop has rarely heard anything so surprising. Because, shortly before, he was taking a complaint from Mrs. Kinrade that tramps had been bothering the family night and day. Something, she had insisted, had to be done to stop them. They were dangerous.

After leaving the police station, Mrs. Kinrade crosses the street to the Bethel Mission where some seventy-five men, many of them tramps, sleep each night. She is sitting in the mission parlour, talking to the proprietor when he notices the police patrol wagon leave the station on an emergency call – to Herkimer Street, it turns out. After appealing to the proprietor to be more circumspect in the tramps he directs to her door, Mrs. Kinrade leaves with a book of meal and bed tickets to hand out to transients.

Back on Herkimer Street, while Mrs. Hickey is calling the police, Florence, who is twenty-three and a gifted soprano popular at concerts throughout the region, again emerges, and hurries down the street to the corner grocery and butcher shop. “There’s a man in our house,” she tells the proprietor, L.M. Brown, between sobs, “and he’s shot poor Ethel. He’s acting like a maniac. Poor Ethel!”

Meanwhile, Dr. W.J. McNichol, a coroner and general practitioner, is about to leave his office at Herkimer and Bay Streets on calls when he receives a telephone message to go to the Kinrade house where Ethel Kinrade has been shot. His buggy is at the door, he jumps in and is at the Kinrade door in minutes.

Brown, prudently armed with two meat cleavers, encounters Dr. McNichol at the house. The two men, the grocer brandishing his cleavers, step gingerly through the double front doors, both of which are open to the frigid winter air. The parlour window, opening on the side of the house, is half open, and snow drifts in. “Miss Kinrade!” the doctor calls. There is no sound. In the dining room, at the foot of the servants’ back stairway leading up to the second floor, the doctor finds Ethel’s body. A woman of twenty-five, she is dressed for the outdoors in her coat, hat and veil; her ermine stole is on the table, which is pushed to one side, and her mink muff is on the floor. There is, Dr. McNichol will say later, a strong smell of powder fumes and smoke in the room. He can find no pulse, and notes that Ethel’s hands are cool to the touch. The doctor also notices two bullet wounds in her lower lip. Opening her coat, he finds three more bullet wounds on the left side of her chest. The clothing is burned to the skin; the shots, he conjectures, were fired at close range. He would say that Ethel had been dead anywhere from fifteen minutes to possibly an hour-and-a-half. “No medical man can say for sure,” is his opinion. Informed by Mrs. Hickey that Florence is across the street at her home, Dr. McNichol finds Florence nervous and distraught on a sofa in the back room and his observation is that, “… she was helpless and seemed to be unable to think let alone talk about the terrible affair. I gave her some sedatives, and shortly after she became calmer, and I asked her to tell me about it and to give me a description of the one who did the crime. I wanted to get this for the police so that they might get to work as she alone could describe the man who had murdered her sister.”

“It was a tramp,” she tells him. “He was wearing a slouch hat. He forced his way into the house. He had a gun. He shot Ethel.”

“Did you see him do it?”

“Yes, I was there. I saw him.”

Across the street, the police wagon arrives with Detective John W. Bleakley, a slim Irishman with a brush moustache and military bearing, and his colleague, Detective Coulter. The call to the police station had mentioned the tramp was still in the house. Bleakley and Coulter search the home from cellar to attic without finding anybody. There is no sign of the murder weapon. The place is chilly from several sashes being left open, and the policemen also notice a smell of smoke. Turning his attention to the body on the dining room floor, Bleakley (apparently aware that Dr. McNichol has already ascertained that Ethel is dead) is surprised to see no blood at all.

A horse-drawn ambulance pulls up in front of 105 Herkimer Street, and a stretcher is brought in to remove the body. Then Bleakley gets his explanation for the apparent lack of blood. As attendants lift the body and place it on the stretcher, a large pool of blood measuring about eighteen inches by six or seven inches is revealed. It corresponds to the small of Ethel’s back although, curiously, no bullets penetrated at that point. Studying the crime scene, the careful detective notes a dining room chair beside the body. If Ethel had been sitting in the chair when she was shot in the head, he decides, she would have tumbled forward, her head ending up where the blood had collected on the floor. The conclusion is unavoidable: the body has been moved.

Stooping down, his face almost touching the floor, Bleakley picks up two small items from the pool of congealing blood: a small-calibre bullet and a broken tooth. It confirms his belief that when Ethel was shot in the mouth, her head had fallen where the blood was found. He finds another flattened bullet at her feet along with a piece of bone or tooth.

It is 4:30 in the afternoon. A hackney carriage arrives carrying Tom Kinrade. He had been leaving for home at 4:10 when one of the teachers, Miss Simpson, called to him from the steps of the school. There was an urgent phone call for him. When he picked up the receiver, Brown, the grocer, told him, “A tramp has broken into your house and shot your daughter and she is dead.”

When he arrives home there is a crowd outside the house. He hands the school caretaker, who has accompanied him, a dollar bill, walks up the steps into the house and throws himself into an armchair in the parlour.

“Oh, my God! This is awful!” he exclaims. “Why should this happen in our home?”

Detective Bleakley is surprised at the father’s first words to him: “I have just expected something like this would happen.”

Kinrade follows the policeman into the dining room where the body remains on a stretcher. The father gets down on his knees and lifts back the oilcloth covering her face. She is still wearing her hat, her veil drawn across her forehead. “It’s Ethel!” he remarks in surprise. He kisses her.

As he steps back, the two ambulance attendants, one at the head, one at the feet, pick up the stretcher carrying Ethel’s body and make to carry it out of the back door.

“Where are you going with her?” demands the father. “What are you going to do?” They ignore him and carry Ethel away. In response to his query, he is told that his wife and Florence are across the street at Mrs. Hickey’s. It was supposedly at her husband’s prompting that Bella Kinrade that afternoon had walked the mile down the hill to the police station. She had been in a state of nerves. Tramps had rung their doorbell after dark the previous evening, and that morning the family had noticed a chip hacked out of the windowsill near the front door. Mrs. Kinrade, busy telling the charity people only to send the most respectable-seeming tramps to her door, did not notice the police wagon leave following the call from Herkimer Street. It is only as she is going home on the streetcar that she notices a crowd of people in front of her door and asks to be let off on the spot. Mistaking the ambulance for a hearse, she cries, “Oh, Earl’s dead, and they’ve brought his body home!” Her nineteen-year-old son had sent a message from Montreal, where he works in a bank, to say he was quite ill. Mrs. Hickey heads her off at the front door of 105, and urges her to come across the street, where the mother swoons into the arms of Daniel Lawlor, a Hamilton Herald reporter. He carries her into the Hickey house and lays her on a couch.

The sequence that follows demands our close attention: Tom Kinrade finds Florence at Mrs. Hickey’s. His wife, he is told, is in a faint in the front room and he had best leave her there. Florence’s first words when he put his arm around her shoulder were, her father later testified, “Oh, Papa, you must keep up. I will keep up if you will, Papa. And, you know it could have been worse. He said he would shoot me too.” He thanked God, Kinrade would say, that he had not lost both daughters.

Do father and daughter exchange further words out of the hearing of reporters as he leads her back across the street to be interviewed by the police? Or is a suspicion forming in Thomas Kinrade’s mind? At any rate, he is obviously feeling put out when Detective Bleakley insists on interviewing Florence alone.

In her first account to police of the afternoon’s tragedy, she tells the detective that she and Ethel had been upstairs getting ready to go out for a walk when the doorbell rang. A man she describes as a tramp was at the door asking for something to eat. She turned to fetch some food when he pushed open the door, saying if she had any money, he would take that too. She ran upstairs to fetch ten dollars she had saved and, passing the door of Ethel’s room, called to her to lock her door. She received no reply. She opened her bedroom window intending to step out on the balcony and give the alarm, she says, but then changed her mind. At that point, she says, she heard a scream and “bang, bang, bang.” She got the ten dollars, went down the front stairs, and gave the man the money. She ran through into the kitchen, apparently not noticing Ethel’s body in the dining room, and out into the back yard. She had intended climbing the fence, but then changed her mind and returned to the house. The man, still there, pointed a gun at her and said, “If you make any noise, I will shoot you too.” She threw up her arm to try to grab the revolver, and then fled through the front door to Mrs. Hickey’s. The man, she tells Bleakley, is about thirty-five years of age, height five-foot-seven or -eight, with a medium dark complexion and a long, droopy dark brown moustache. He was wearing a dark suit, dark overcoat and black slouch hat pulled down over his eyes.

Florence is visibly upset and any further questions Bleakley might have are cut short by the intervention of her father. He does not wish his daughter interviewed in this manner, he declares. His own words would be: “I bolted up and I said, ‘I won’t let her stay alone with you nor any other man.’’’ With his daughter’s blood still staining the dining room floor, it seems an odd moment for Kinrade to insist on the social proprieties, but Bleakley, conscious of Tom Kinrade’s prestige in the community, meekly surrenders his witness. He would not resume his interview until the following day.

Police put a watch on the railway stations for anyone leaving town who might match Florence’s description of the murderer. Acting on the description of the tramp-murderer, police from Buffalo, across the American border, to Toronto and out into the hinterland for hundreds of miles around are soon hunting for the tramp with the droopy moustache. The Toronto World reports on February 26 that police have interviewed everyone in the neighborhood and no one reports seeing a tramp of that description.

But there is more to Florence’s tramp story. And, oddly enough, Tom Kinrade evidently sees nothing wrong with his daughter sharing the details with a reporter from The Toronto Daily Star at Mrs. Hickey’s shortly afterwards.

It was not the first time she had seen the intruder, she relates. He had first appeared the previous Sunday when the Kinrades had just returned from church. “We noticed him peeping through the dining room window,” she says. When his eyes met theirs, he disappeared. The night before the murder, Wednesday, he had turned up at the door again asking for a meal ticket. Because of the lateness of the hour and his suspicious appearance, she says, her mother had told him to go away. Hearing his wife’s concerns, her father had armed himself with a poker, says Florence, and walked down the road to meet her and Ethel as they came home from a birthday party at their brother, Ernest’s house.

During the night, Florence relates, “I was awakened by a grating noise.”

2. Tramp Panic

The editor of The Hamilton Spectator could be forgiven if, as details of the murder on Herkimer Street trickled into his office that afternoon of February 25, 1909, he experienced not just feelings of sadness and shock, but also the thrill of vindication. In the depths of the winter season, with Hamilton experiencing its usual seasonal influx of vagrants or ‘vags,’ as they were called, he had, the week before, assigned a reporter to write a major series of articles on the tramp menace. The articles were already written and ready for the presses when the Kinrade murder seemed to provide proof absolute of the seriousness of the threat. In the following days, The Spectator pounded home its advantage in what is a textbook example of a media attempt to inspire panic.

It was a time when Hamilton was at the very pinnacle of its success. “The decades preceding and following the turn of the century,” according to a local history, Steel City, “were the most exciting in the history of Hamilton because they marked a remarkable outpouring of human energy and innovative initiatives.” The city’s population doubled to 100,000 between 1906 and 1913 providing a wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurs like Kinrade. His little rental empire would crumble in the wake of the murder, but his name lives on in Kinrade Avenue, an undistinguished street in the East End.

But while thousands of immigrants flocked to Hamilton seeking work principally in the steel industry, the city was also a Mecca for men of a different sort. They arrived each winter looking simply for a cozy billet and free meals, most of them with no intention of working at all. The tramps or hobos were an unforeseen consequence of the railway age. As the railroad companies spread their cobweb of tracks across the continent in the nineteenth century, suddenly young men with an itch to travel – or a simple aversion to work – were free to roam; jumping boxcars, riding the rails from town to town, sleeping rough and cooking their meals over campfires in hobo jungles on the fringes of town. The tramps tended to see themselves as rebels and rugged individualists, outlaws who often fought rearguard battles against railway and city police forces. Instead of waiting on street corners, they canvassed the best neighborhoods, knocking on doors and leaving their own secret marks on fences or gates to indicate a good touch or a house to be avoided.

According to a hobo interviewed by a Toronto Globe reporter in 1881, tramping was an enjoyable experience in the summer. He slept outdoors in fine weather and in barns or empty houses when it rained. It was safer in Canada than the United States. As he put it, “There’s no shooting or anything of that kind.” He continued: “Last night, I slept out in a ravine behind Rosedale (the city’s poshest neighborhood), me and another man lookin’ for work. He had a chicken which a storekeeper had given him – so he said – an’ I got half a loaf at a house nearby an’ we built a roaring fire an’ were as jolly as sandboys.”

Winter was a different matter, and Hamilton, served by two railways and strategically located at the western end of Lake Ontario not far from the American border, was a natural magnet for the travelling clan. “It is a well-known fact among men engaged in charity work here,” reported The Hamilton Times, that “Hamilton is the headquarters in winter of hobos from all over the country. Some of these characters have frankly confessed to Relief Officer McMenemy and officers of charitable societies that this city is the softest place they ever struck, that they voice the fact abroad and that many flock here year after year when the cold weather comes.”

While some householders felt vulnerable and intimidated by these scruffy men knocking at their doors, others were sympathetic and responded generously. Even policemen, charged with arresting tramps for vagrancy often showed sympathy, especially in getting them into a shelter or a cell in the coldest weather.

But tramps, with their easy-going ways, were a profound affront to middle-class values, a view expressed in extreme form by the Reverend Francis Wayland, Dean of the Yale Law School, in an 1877 speech: “And as we utter the word ‘tramp,’ there arises straightaway before us the spectacle of the lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage. He fears not God, neither regards man. Indeed he seems to have lost all the better instincts and attitudes of manhood. He will outrage an unprotected female, or rob a defenseless child, or burn an isolated barn, or girdle fruit trees, or wreck a railway train, or set fire to a railway bridge, or murder a cripple, or pilfer an umbrella with equal indifference, if reasonably sure of equal impunity. Having no moral sense, he knows no gradation of crime…. Practically he has come to consider himself at war with society and all social institutions.”

Between murdering cripples and pilfering umbrellas, there really wasn’t much your average tramp wasn’t capable of, according to this less-than-charitable Christian gentleman. Not surprisingly, starting in the 1880s, both the U.S. and Canada experienced periodic tramp panics, usually in the aftermath of some spectacular crime – whether or not a man of the road was ultimately found to blame.

In southern Ontario, conditions were already ripe for a panic. In Stratford, 65 miles west of Hamilton, five months before the Kinrade murder a farmer, William Peah, returning home from work, found the farmhouse silent and with no sign of his wife. He discovered her bloodied body in the basement where she had been raped and murdered. Beside her, drunk and asleep, lay “a Negro tramp named Frank Roughmond, 32, his hands, face and clothing spattered with blood.” Neighbouring farmers were considering lynching Roughmond when he was saved by the arrival of a constable and the local police chief.

Two weeks later, under a headline, “Assailed by a Tramp” The Toronto World reported that Mrs. William Charlton had been choked and beaten by a tramp in her home near Brockville, Ontario. She had agreed to give the man breakfast, but when she brought him into the kitchen, he demanded money, then attacked her, leaving her unconscious before making his escape.

Hamilton newspapers were quick to pick up the cue. “No crime in recent years,” The Hamilton Times reported on February 26, 1909, the day after the Kinrade murder, “… has created such a tremendous sensation as this brutal murder… The affair instilled fear into the hearts of many who have been troubled by tramps and who have been in the habit of meeting their demands for assistance. Many of these shiftless characters who appealed last night for help had the doors rudely slammed in their faces.”

Later in the same Times article, the writer speaks of the need “to rid the city of this class of leaches.”

But it was The Spectator that really went to town. A huge black streamer headline across the top of the front page asked: “Who Shot Ethel Kinrade?” Tucked beneath it on the left side of the page was the story of the murder, on the other another large headline: “A Rendezvous for Tramps and Bums” with a deck headline, “Undesirable Characters Flock to Hamilton From Other Places Where Authorities Are More Active.” The theme of The Spectator campaign would be that the Hamilton authorities were soft on tramps and bums, leaving citizens open to being cheated, assaulted, or even murdered. “Many professional bums have found Hamilton a safe retreat,” editorialized The Spec, and the newspaper’s research only strengthened local belief that Ethel Kinrade had been murdered by a tramp.

The reporter had visited three out of a number of lodging houses that, in addition to a police shelter, catered to transients: the Bethel Mission, where Bella Kinrade had called the afternoon of the murder, the People’s Lodging House, and the Workman’s Home. He found conditions varying from the decent to the deplorable. Of more interest to the citizenry, the reporter discovered that the proprietors of the lodging houses conspired with their clients to work a racket on unsuspecting householders.

The proprietors supplied tramps with blank meal tickets, an idea that appealed to the public because, ostensibly, the tickets could only be used for food or a bed rather than booze. The People’s Lodging House ticket, for instance, was headed, “Help those who cannot help themselves,” and mentioned prices of five cents for a bowl of soup, ten cents for a full meal (usually hash), and fifteen cents for a bed. Householders were encouraged to fill in an amount and sign the ticket, the money being collected from them later by the lodging house proprietor. At the bottom is a biblical text about good works, and the promise, “This cannot be sold, commuted or transferred.”

What donors were not aware of, according to The Spec story, was that tramps, after being directed to the better sections of town, including Herkimer Street, by the lodging house keepers, would go door to door getting a number of coupons signed. As they had no need for more than one meal and bed a night, the proprietors would turn a deceitful penny by buying back surplus coupons at a discount – providing the transients with spending money for the saloon – then charge the householders full face price.

By the second day of The Spectator campaign, Edward Leonard, proprietor of the People’s Lodging House, had been charged with keeping his several premises “in a filthy and unsanitary condition,” and one of them, at 72 York Street, was ordered closed by the city board of health.

But it was the tramps, and not the people making a tidy living from them, that attracted the newspaper’s attention. “Clear Them Out” was the headline on an editorial the first day: “In the presence of so horrible an outrage as occurred yesterday afternoon at the home of T.L. Kinrade, the citizens of Hamilton may well stand aghast. That an unknown tramp should be able to enter a residence on a thickly populated and constantly traveled street in mid-afternoon, rob one young woman and foully slay another, getting away from the place without anyone being the wiser, seems inconceivable…. That the murder was committed by one of the hundreds of roaming tramps who have during the whole winter infested the city, making their living easily by begging from the citizens, there seems little reason to doubt. Herkimer Street homes have for weeks been regarded as easy pickings by these men…. For many reasons Hamilton has long been regarded as an ‘easy’ town by the idle and shiftless population of the country. Hamilton citizens are notoriously sympathetic, and a distress cry at the door seldom goes unheeded…. The kitchen door that has in the past been freely opened to admit the wandering beggar for a hot meal will in future be barred…. The appeal for assistance will go unheeded…. Moreover, the police authorities would be well-advised if they undertook a roundup of the inhabitants of the cheap lodging houses and ordered out of the city, every man whose excuse for his presence here is regarded as flimsy. This is a section of our population that we can well afford to be rid of, and the sooner the better.”

Big Spectator headlines continued to hammer home the attack: “How Down and Outs Impose on the Public” appeared in the February 27, 1909 issue, and on March 1, “Ways of Getting Rid of the Tramp Nuisance” with columns of type devoted to the issue. The Monday after the murder, The Spectator could report with satisfaction: “According to information from police headquarters, there has been a great shift the last couple of days among the hundreds of tramps in the city, and one officer stated yesterday that the bums were leaving the city in bunches as a result of the feeling aroused by the Kinrade murder and the tramp articles in the Spectator…. There has been a general exodus since Friday, and at the present rate, followed by a little action by the police, a good part of this element will be cleaned out for the time being.”

It couldn’t happen too fast for The Spectator. When, later that week, a policeman and a citizen were wounded by a gun-toting burglar caught red-handed, even though there was nothing to suggest the assailant was a tramp, the newspaper was at it again next day with an editorial headed, “Round Them Up.” “And why, if the invitation to move along is not accepted instanter should (the police) not arrest every man of them? Better that the jails should be filled up and that we should have to pay for the keep of these birds of passage in custody than that we should be terrorized by them roaming at large, a daily and nightly terror and menace to both life and property.”

Kit Watkins, columnist for The Toronto Mail and Empire and Canada’s most famous woman journalist of the time, tried to throw a cloak of warm sentimentality over the issue: “It is hardly to be wondered at that the whole City of Hamilton became hysterical in the matter of the Kinrade murder mystery. The thought of the place, the hour, the victim – poor young girl! – of the tragedy, the first wild outcry against the tramps, set every woman locking her doors and refusing to answer a ring or knock. To many an unfortunate man or boy during the winter you had handed out meat and money. Few, if any, were refused. It does not appear seemly for you in your warm house, after your pleasant meal, to refuse to help some poor wanderer standing shivering in thin clothes on your doorstep. Perhaps your tramp may smell of drink, but if your heart is bigger than a walnut shell, you will excuse him, remembering that five cents will buy him a warming drink, but very little beyond a dry loaf in the way of food; remembering, too, that misery seems uplifting or oblivion, that we are humans, not angels, and that to a miserable outcast, a drop of whiskey seems a foretaste of Heaven.”

Her words seem to have melted few hearts in Hamilton. The same day, The Spectator reported that the city’s mayor, John Inglis McLaren, was asking the police for a roundup of vagrants. A Toronto Daily Star reporter, walking the streets at one a.m., found that two thirds of the houses in the Queen and Herkimer Streets area had their living room lights blazing to frighten away intruders.

On March 10, 1909 The Spectator, under a front page headline, “Vags Sentenced to Three Months,” reported that two tramps, Gladstone Davies and Fred Thompson, picked up while begging, were sentenced to three months in jail by the magistrate. Davies, when searched, had clasp knives and a dinner knife on him – the requisite tools, one would have thought, for eating on the wild side.

But if the Hamilton authorities were hustling the tramps out of town, where were they to go? The tramp panic in the wake of the Kinrade murder stretched far and wide. In Toronto, in the days following the murder, the police were receiving many calls from worried householders about suspicious characters, and a roundup of the unemployed was being considered. An unfortunate Polish transient named Michael Steffin was picked up by the Buffalo police on suspicion of being the Kinrade murderer the day after the killing, even though an officer admitted he bore no resemblance to the man Florence had described. Steffin, described as a professional tramp, said he had walked from Chicago via Hamilton and when arrested on the International Bridge was wearing two overcoats, the pockets of each stuffed with food and toilet articles. The Hamilton Herald reported ominously, “He is being put through the third degree this morning in the expectation that, if he is the guilty man, the Buffalo police will know it by noon.” The paper was able to report later that Steffin had come through the grilling “with flying colours,” and had been released. Tramps were similarly arrested in several other communities in southwestern Ontario, but were soon released. And no wonder. Because almost from the beginning, police detectives were voicing doubts about Florence Kinrade’s tramp story.