Did someone in Ottawa get away with murder?

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This article was published 15/10/2011 (5367 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — A new suspect has emerged in one of the most notorious crimes in Canadian history: the 1868 assassination of Irish-born Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

A just-published biography of the famed 19th-century MP from Montreal sheds fresh light on McGee’s murder 143 years ago in Ottawa, floating the theory that Patrick James Whelan — the man hanged for the crime — was merely part of a “hit squad” of Fenian radicals who targeted McGee, and may not actually have pulled the trigger.

Lingering doubts about Whelan’s guilt have made the McGee killing — Canada’s only political assassination — one of the country’s most enduring whodunits. And while McGee biographer David Wilson concludes that Whelan was certainly involved in the assassination, he argues that armchair cold-case sleuths should take a second look at Whelan’s friend and fellow Fenian James Kinsella, a “bit player” in the original investigation and trial but quite possibly the man who held the smoking gun over McGee’s dead body.

“Kinsella’s testimony at Whelan’s trial was vague and unconvincing,” the University of Toronto historian writes in the second volume of his two-part biography of McGee, which goes on sale later this month. “If Whelan was indeed covering up for someone, Kinsella is a possible candidate.”

McGee was shot to death on April 7, 1868, on the doorstep of his Ottawa rooming house on Sparks Street near Parliament Hill. The killing of the fiery orator — a former radical Irish nationalist who came to reject Fenian-style violence as a means to achieve the independence of his homeland from Britain — has prompted various theories over the years about whether Whelan was unjustly convicted and executed.

What’s generally agreed is that McGee was gunned down for his outspoken attacks on the Fenian Brotherhood, a stance that angered Irish-Canadian radicals with whom the Conservative MP once had much in common.

Other suspects apart from Whelan were arrested in McGee’s murder but later released. Kinsella, says Wilson, “was off the radar screen” as a serious suspect at the time of the killing, partly because Whelan and not Kinsella was fingered in a questionable “identity parade” before a supposed eyewitness to the murder.

Once the Crown prosecutors had “bought into” the theory that “Whelan, acting alone, had shot McGee, the possibility that Whelan was part of a hit squad was immediately foreclosed,” Wilson writes.

“But lots of things about Kinsella don’t quite add up when you look very closely,” Wilson said. “His alibi was very shaky.”

Kinsella was a well-known Fenian from Montreal who had become friends with Whelan at a popular watering hole called Scanlan’s Tavern.

There was evidence, in fact, that Kinsella was in Ottawa with Whelan in the hours before the shooting, watching McGee from the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons, even nodding at Whelan and patting his breast pocket “in a menacing gesture” during a speech by the soon-to-be-dead, 42-year-old MP.

But that information “was left on the sidelines” in prosecutors’ pursuit of the theory that McGee was killed by a lone gunman, the author states.

Wilson says the trial that led to Whelan’s conviction and execution in February 1869 would not stand up to modern notions of justice, a key reason why doubts about the verdict have persisted for more than a century.

Then-prime minister John A. Macdonald, McGee’s friend and political ally, “sat next to the judge during the trial proceedings,” Wilson points out. “By modern standards, that in itself is enough to invalidate the trial. But at the time, no one complained.”

Wilson, however, concludes that Whelan — despite the improper trial, his ludicrous denials of Fenian sympathies and his trumped-up expression of loyalty to Queen Victoria — “either shot McGee himself or was part of a hit squad that did.”

Yet there remains, notes Wilson, the matter of Whelan’s remarks to two police officials — just two days before his execution — that lend credence to the hit-squad theory and to the possibility that Kinsella or some other Fenian associate was, in fact, the triggerman.

“He said two things: ‘I know who killed McGee. And I was there when McGee was killed,'” Wilson said.

The author added that Whelan is also known to have told his wife that he knew a dark secret about McGee’s assassination, but “will take this to my grave” rather than betraying his friends as a police informer.

“All of which says to me,” Wilson notes, “that he was up to his neck in this” — but that someone else may have got away with murder.

— Postmedia News