Justice for Catherine Snow
Mock retrial revives doubts about the court that sent a Newfoundland widow to the gallows in 1834
A sip of mulled wine past her lips, Catherine Snow let out a piercing cry as prison guards arrived with her grave garb in hand, a sign that her final hour was near.
After months spent languishing in a St. John’s, Nfld., prison cell, the middle-aged woman found guilty of her husband’s murder was moments from death, her neck soon to slip through a carefully tied noose suspended from the second floor of the Newfoundland Courthouse.
The mother of eight uttered her final prayers just before 9 a.m. on July 21, 1834. She was a “wretched sinful woman” but innocent of murder, she said, her final words captured in The Newfoundland Patriot.
And then she was gone, her children without a mother and her disputed guilt left to fester on the minds of Newfoundlanders for generations. Was there enough evidence to condemn Catherine Snow?
The Protestant-dominated court system of the time thought as much, condemning the Irish Catholic immigrant to death in a mere half-hour. But Thursday night, 178 years too late, a mock retrial of the woman’s case in a St. John’s auditorium found otherwise. Guided by Newfoundland Supreme Court judges Carl Thompson and Seamus O’reagan and lawyer Rosellen Sullivan, the jury of nearly 500 people from across the province came to a near-unanimous decision that the court of1834 simply did not have enough evidence to convict Snow of murder.
No more than 10 people thought she was guilty, according to Fred Smith, the Newfoundland Historical Society’s vice-president, who organized the event.
“There’s a whole culture out there that believes she was innocent and she was treated poorly, that she was a victim. It’s always been something that people love to talk about,” Smith said.
Though accounts of her demise vary, newspapers of the day painted Catherine Snow as an Irish Catholic wife whose guilt in murdering her husband was made certain at the hands of a prejudiced Protestant court, despite circumstantial evidence.
It’s said that on the night of Aug. 31, 1833, Snow and husband John, a wealthy Protestant landowner and fisherman, were inside their home in Bareneed, near Port de Grave. At some point that night, John disappeared.
Snow and two young Irishmen, her cousin Tobias Mandeville and Arthur Springer, one of her servants, were charged with her husband’s murder after police found blood on a fishing stage near the family home. John’s body was never found, and it’s been said the collected evidence may have been fish blood.
Some say Snow, who vanished for a short time after police learned of her husband’s disappearance, conspired with Springer and Mandeville to kill her allegedly abusive husband. Newspaper accounts said the men probably shot John and dumped his body in the sea.
“There’s a whole culture out there that believes she was innocent and she was treated poorly, that she was a victim.” FRED SMITH NEWFOUNDLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Both men turned themselves in and Spring allegedly told police that Snow and Mandeville were having an affair and wanted to run away together.
All three went to trial on Jan. 10, 1834, under Chief Justice Henry John Boulton, and both Mandeville and Spring pleaded guilty. Snow maintained her innocence, but the jury found all three guilty after just a half-hour of deliberation. The Irishmen were hanged three weeks later.
Snow was granted a temporary reprieve after the court discovered she was pregnant, and she spent her pregnancy in prison. In that time, a community of supporters, including Roman Catholic bishop Michael Fleming, rallied behind her. It’s said a petition with hundreds of signatures was brought to court to appeal her conviction. But the petition mattered little. According to John Greene, author of Between Damnation and Starvation, a heavy-handed and staunchly Protestant Boulton “dragged his feet” and stymied all efforts to save the Catholic woman’s neck. “The Catholic community was deeply saddened. The sight of Snow’s body and eight little children engendered intense bitter feelings toward Boulton,” Greene wrote. Many viewed Boulton as a “devilish hanging judge bent on persecuting Catholics.” Nellie Strowbridge, a Newfoundland author who penned a novel, Catherine Snow, based on true events, said a combination of “religion, racial bigotry and politics” prevented Catherine from receiving a fair trial. “There was a lot of prejudice against Catholics at the time,” she said. “It was a justice system without conscience; it impeded justice.” Strowbridge said her research on the case has her “convinced” Snow was innocent, and she hopes fellow Newfoundlanders change their opinions of the woman. It’s a feeling shared by Jim Snow, a New Jersey librarian, and his sister Mary Snow, a CNN correspondent, both of whom are great-great-greatgrandchildren of Catherine Snow’s firstborn son. They said they welcomed the retrial for their condemned ancestor. “I was excited to hear that the mock trial had been organized,” Jim said. “I believe that she was a devoted mother . . . in the absence of convincing evidence, especially the lack of testimony by reliable eyewitnesses, I believe that the guilty verdict was not warranted.”