A new CBC radio documentary produced by a Carleton University journalism student has rekindled the debate over whether Centretown’s most famous murder – the 1868 assassination of Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee – resulted in the execution of his true killer or an innocent scapegoat.
The circumstances surrounding the shooting death of McGee – a fiery Quebec politician and a leading advocate for a united Canada – are truly ambiguous. For generations, historians have debated the verdict of an Ottawa court that found the miserable Irish-Canadian agitator Patrick James Whelan guilty of shooting McGee in the back of the head with his Smith & Wesson .32-calibre revolver.
But the new documentary aired in early March has offers compelling arguments that Canada’s only federal political assassination might have been committed by someone else.
“Shadows on Sparks Street” retraces the events following the murder of McGee and the highly publicized trial of Whelan that followed.
“It is, I think, the greatest murder mystery in Canadian history,” says Toronto-based historian David Wilson, whose research is explored in the documentary. “One of the most gifted politicians that Canada has ever had was shot in circumstances that remain mysterious.”
Just a few blocks from Parliament Hill, Sparks Street was the place where McGee took his last breath on April 7, 1868. The gunman attacked McGee as he was about to enter the door to his home along what today is Ottawa’s main pedestrian shopping promenade.
Historians have described McGee as a reformed Irish radical, who fled Ireland because of his political activities but went on to become one of Canada’s most prominent MPs and supporters of Confederation.
Documentary maker Sarah Boothroyd, a Masters student at the Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication, spent countless hours gathering information from primary sources, interviewing historians such as Wilson and considering the facts of Whelan’s case.
The results, she said, were illuminating but inconclusive.
“I found that while I was researching this, from day to day and month to month, I would find myself swaying to one side and then, like a pendulum, swaying to the other side,” says Boothroyd. “But I needed to keep an open mind.”
The one-hour documentary offers two perspectives on the case, one that proclaims Whelan’s innocence and the other that is certain on his guilt.
“This is a conviction that should not have taken place; it is certainly a black mark on Canadian history,” said Lawrence Greenspon, an Ottawa-based defence lawyer who represented Orleans terrorism suspect Momin Khawaja and other many other high-profile clients over the years.
“They wanted desperately to find somebody and Whelan fit a profile,” Greenspon said. “He is of Irish descent and the greatest travesties of justice and wrongful convictions in history have all involved the accused persons of a specific profile that happen to fit the public hysteria to a scapegoat,” Greenspon said in the documentary.
Just 28 years old, Whelan was hanged after a week-long trial and a year of failed appeals. Wilson is convinced that justice was served and the correct man was charged for the heinous crime.
“We know that he had a history of threatening McGee,” said Wilson. “We know that he had the motivation, that he had the opportunity and the means in the form of the gun. There is considerable evidence to suggest that Whelan was, indeed, the assassin.”
But David Shanahan, a second historian featured in the documentary, rejects Wilson’s claims. “We’ve got a mysterious eye-witness testimony that doesn’t add up,” said Shanahan. “We’ve got witnesses disappearing. We’ve got shadowy figures… It goes beyond fiction.”
“The Canadian government decided this man, [Whelan] was going to hang,” said Shanahan. “You look at the trial and you look at the evidence. It’s just a farce.”