MacRobbie grandchild delighted 100-year-old cold case unearthed
She has lived in the U.S. many years, the past 13 in Florida, but Willa Fitzpatrick always checks thespec.com for news back home, including obituaries.
A recent headline offered an obituary of sorts, and it gave her a jolt: “Murder most foul: The strange case of Dr. Douglas MacRobbie.”
Fitzpatrick is MacRobbie’s granddaughter.
The 4,000-word crime story took her back to a dark chapter of family history that was rarely discussed.
MacRobbie’s body was found in the upstairs office of Crescent Oil on Cannon Street near Bay — 100 years ago — the night of Aug. 19, 1917, in a pool of blood and with blood splattered on the walls.
The building is still there, and so is Crescent Oil. Some believe the building is haunted.
Doctors a century ago determined the 42-year-old Hamilton physician was bludgeoned to death.
Three men who had been with him were charged with manslaughter, along with a fourth, the night watchman. But the trial judge took the case away from the jury, citing lack of evidence.
“It was exciting to discover the article,” said Fitzpatrick, who recently turned 77. “We always wondered what happened to him. … It was always so hush-hush. But I never asked many questions; as a child you don’t ask.”
But there was one theory on his death that her mother, one of MacRobbie’s two daughters, passed along. And Fitzpatrick will never forget it: that he was murdered because he had refused to perform an abortion.
Nothing in coverage by Hamilton’s three daily newspapers in 1917 mentioned abortion as a motive — or any motive, apart from speculation that MacRobbie may have won a large sum of money gambling with the men he had been with.
Fitzpatrick concedes her mother may have been just telling a story, but wonders why she would have told them that, when she rarely said a word about it.
Hamilton police files on the case have long been destroyed.
The picture The Spectator recently published of MacRobbie — taken from a 1917 edition of the paper — is the first time she had ever laid eyes on her grandfather. She thinks photos of him were destroyed by basement flooding long ago.
MacRobbie’s two daughters were Jean Valentine (so named because she was born on Valentine’s Day), who is Fitzpatrick’s mother; and Helen Douglas MacRobbie, who went by the name “Doug” (nicknamed “Dee”) her entire adult life, no doubt in tribute to her slain father.
(Douglas was a name given to girls in north England in the 17th and 18th centuries; the MacRobbie family originated in Scotland.)
After MacRobbie was killed, his widow — who was named Catherine in news reports, but whose real name was Nellie Jane, says Fitzpatrick — took in boarders at 56 Hess St. N.
“Granny” MacRobbie lived for a time with her daughter Jean and granddaughters Willa and Jane, in Burlington. She lived into her 90s. Helen Douglas, meanwhile, never married and followed in her father’s footsteps into the medical field, including working as the superintendent of nursesat West Lincoln Hospital.
Fitzpatrick added she is grateful that Hamilton’s Aaron Blake, who has researched the case, asked Hamilton Cemetery officials to unearth MacRobbie’s grave stone, which had been overgrown with grass.
As for the belief that the Crescent Oil building is haunted by MacRobbie’s restless ghost, Blake, who is a territory manager for the company, has invited a psychic medium to come Saturday on the 100th anniversary of MacRobbie’s death to perform a “supernatural investigation.”
Fitzpatrick’s niece, who lives in the Barrie area and who has an interest in the paranormal, is planning to attend the session, and visit for the first time the room where her great-great-grandfather was killed.