MURDER, MARRIAGE AND A BIG SECRET
Sensational slaying creates a news problem: How to hide the death from the murderer’s wife?
Mrs. O’Donnell was madly in love with her husband and over the moon about the birth of their son. She was the luckiest of her married friends, she’d told a nurse after they visited her at the maternity home.
True, Harry hadn’t been to see her for a couple of days but he had the flu, the nurses told her. Still, he managed to send her a little note every day.
But the new mother’s elation was tempered by news of the brutal rape and murder of a young woman in the Gerrard St. ravine close to where she and Harry lived. The hospital was abuzz with talk of the gruesome details and the entire city, in fact, was in shock over the crime that happened two days after her baby was born.
“When they catch the man, I hope he gets his desserts,” a rattled Mrs. O’Donnell told staff.
She wanted to stay abreast of the latest developments but visitors wouldn’t bring her a newspaper and copies in the east-end maternity home had pages torn out, which was no help.
Certainly, there was no lack of coverage as reporters swarmed the neighbourhood and pestered police for days after the badly beaten body of Ruth Taylor was found among the leaves and mud of the ravine just east of Coxwell Ave.
The 20-year-old stenographer was, by all accounts, a kind and lovely young woman of unimpeachable character. “She never knew sin,” was her heartbroken widowed father’s tribute to his dead daughter.
Like many young women helping to support their families during the Depression years, Ruth worked long hours. That was the case when she boarded the streetcar home from King and Bay Sts. just after 11 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 4, 1935.
But while several women had been attacked in recent months in the city’s east end, she apparently wasn’t concerned. A few days before she had laughed at friends who feared passing the ravine at night, saying “there’s nothing to be afraid about in this city.”
The streetcar she took was a “hockey special” used for the Maple Leaf Gardens crowd and it didn’t go all the way to Norwood Rd. where she lived.
So she set off to walk the remaining mile in the rain and darkness. She didn’t get far. A “deranged attacker,” as the Toronto Daily Star reported, struck her on the head with a heavy object then dragged her 50 feet into the gully.
Her battered body with ripped clothing and skirt knotted around her chin was spotted by local residents the next morning. Police sprang into action, scouring the scene to leaving no stone unturned, including a jagged 4-lb. piece of concrete covered in blood. Clues led to a suspect whose Hollywood Cres. apartment yielded bloodstained clothing and wool fibres that matched Ruth’s blue sweater.
On Nov. 6, police arrested a 25-year-old service station attendant who worked a few streets away. His name was Harry O’Donnell.
“She has heard nothing about her husband and . . . nobody is going to tell her,” the head of the nursing home told a Toronto Star reporter. “If that girl lying right upstairs above you now with her baby hears about her husband she’ll go stark, staring mad.”
On Nov. 8, the day of Ruth’s funeral that was attended by thousands of mourners, a fretting Mrs. O’Donnell was finally given a copy of the newspaper. It was a special edition that eliminated every reference to her husband’s name, the murder charge against him and even mention of a suspect’s arrest.
“Mrs. O’Donnell doesn’t know it, but she is holding in her hands perhaps the only special edition of a Toronto newspaper ever printed solely for one individual,” the Toronto Star told readers on the front page of the real paper.
(Mrs. O’Donnell was never identified by her given name, as was the custom in those days.)
The special edition would satisfy the “loving wife and mother’s” growing hunger for news without arousing her suspicions, the Star explained.
The deception was repeated several more days as the “weakened woman” regained her strength after childbirth.
On one occasion, a cheerful group of friends visiting Mrs. O’Donnell watched as a nurse handed her a copy of the Star.
“They became still as death,” said the nurse. “They thought I was being careless and giving her a paper in which she would find out about her husband.”
Meanwhile, Harry O’Donnell maintained his innocence from the Don Jail where officials arranged for him to write daily notes to his wife to continue the illness ruse. He was just as smitten with his young family, according to his lawyer Frank Regan, who relayed O’Donnell’s sentiments to reporters: “When I saw my wife and newborn baby on that Monday evening, I was the happiest man in the world; I was planning for the future.”
Mrs. O’Donnell was finally told the horrible truth when she and her 2-week-old son were discharged from the maternity home and whisked to the country to stay with relatives.
The murder trial took place three months later in February 1936.
It took the jury just three hours to find O’Donnell guilty.
While awaiting execution, he confessed to the crime as well as several other attacks on women, which he blamed on “uncontrollable impulses.” In his handwritten confession, he recounted how he ran up behind Ruth Taylor, threw her to the ground, beat her with his fists then struck her with a nearby stone.
In his last meeting with his lawyer, the convicted killer declared, “I love my wife and my baby boy, too.”
Harry O’Donnell was hanged at 8 a.m. on May 5,1936. A sobbing Mrs. O’Donnell kept an overnight vigil outside the jail until the light in his cell went out.