On February 21, 1890, Detective John Wilson Murray of the Ontario Department of Criminal Investigation received word that two woodsmen had made a grisly discovery in Blenheim (now Benwell) Swamp, near Princeton: amid a tangle of briars, fallen logs, and dense brush, the body of a man with two bullet holes in the back of his head. 

As he tells us in his 1904 Memoirs of a Great Detective, Murray, also known by the moniker “Old Never-let-go,” immediately launched an investigation. The body was that of “a young man, smooth shaven, of refined appearance, and clearly a gentleman.” From the style and cut of his garments, even though all labels had been carefully removed, he was also, clearly, an Englishman. Photographs sent out Canada-wide failed to reveal his identity. 

A breakthrough came five days later, when a man and his wife arrived in Princeton asking to see the body, claiming that the victim had possibly been a shipboard acquaintance. Through Murray’s brilliant investigative efforts, the case was soon unravelled. 

The “suave, handsome” visitor was identified as a conman named John Reginald Birchall of London, England; his victim was Frederick Cornwallis Benwell of Cheltenham, who had shown interest in investing in Birchall’s purported horse farm in Ontario. 

Benwell and another potential investor, Douglas Raymond Pelly, had sailed across the Atlantic with Birchall to view the farm. Instead, Benwell was lured to the desolate swamp and killed. More by luck than skill, Pelly managed to avoid suffering a similar fate.

Birchall was arrested in Niagara Falls on March 2 and tried in Woodstock for murder.

There was no “smoking gun” in the case — in fact, no gun ever seems to have been unearthed — but a cascade of circumstantial evidence coalesced to doom the accused. 

After an eight-day trial, Birchall was found guilty and sentenced to hang, which was the mandatory penalty for murder at the time. He went to the gallows in Woodstock on November 14, 1890. 

What became known as the Blenheim Swamp Murder was an international sensation at the time. The reason, as noted by J.V. McAree in a 1940 Globe and Mail article entitled “Birchall’s shot was heard round the world,” resided not in the details of the case — a sordid story of theft and premeditated murder with an easily identifiable perpetrator. No, the trial was of importance because “the characters involved … were what is known in England as gentlemen … who do not murder each other except in fiction.” And, at a time when Canada was actively courting immigrants with means, “were there many like Birchall to swindle and eventually murder them?” Fortunately, there were not.

The case remained without question Murray’s most famous investigation.

Decades later, on the release of his memoirs, Murray was quizzed about his fateful first meeting with Birchall and Florence, his hapless wife. At the launch, Murray’s “collaborator” (possibly ghostwriter?) was revealed as Victor Speer, “a well-known newspaper and magazine writer.” 

The memoirs offer fascinating glimpses into Ontario society in the last quarter of the 19th century, when poverty was rife in rural areas, marauding gangs terrorized farming communities, and murders could be committed for very little gain: 80 cents, in one case. The book stretches to a whopping 450 pages; each of its 82 chapters is devoted to different episodes gleaned from Murray’s colourful past.

In the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Jim Phillips and Joel Fortune cast a skeptical eye on some of Murray’s anecdotes about his early life; as his memoirs “contain many misrepresentations about later events,” they write, “little reliance should be placed on them other than for details of birth and family.” What does seem to be without doubt is that he was born in June 1840 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and that his family emigrated to the United States when he was a young boy. After an education both in the States and in Scotland, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1857. 

Even with possible fabrications regarding his early life — such as his claims that he thwarted a Confederate attack against the ship on which he served during the Civil War and investigated counterfeiting for the Treasury Department after his discharge from the navy — and possible exaggerations regarding his professional life after moving to Canada and joining the Canada Southern Railway as a detective in 1873, Murray’s achievements may still be regarded as nothing less than extraordinary.

Murray received a formal tender of appointment from Attorney General Sir Oliver Mowat in 1875 to become the first (and, for nine years, the only) provincial detective of Ontario, with an annual salary of $1,500. 

At that time, the justice system was in transition. Underpinning the older model were largely untrained local constables and justices of the peace who were remunerated on a fee-for-service basis. County Crown attorneys relied for their prosecutions on information provided by the police. Detectives did not play a significant role, but, increasingly, a perception emerged that the poorly paid rural constables could be relied upon for the investigation of minor crimes only. 

Mowat stressed to his executive council that, given the growing sophistication and organization of criminals, a skilled man was required, one with “qualifications superior” to those of the ad-hoc detectives usually employed by the provincial government. 

Murray, who described himself as having “brought to his work a rich experience and rare training” and who had “schooled himself in the details of information of every class of crime,” was clearly the man for the job: to investigate, either in person or in a supervisory role, crimes throughout the province of Ontario — “its total area was 101,733 square miles, and its division was into eighty-four counties” — and also “to follow criminals to any place and run them down.” Wrongdoers, warned Old Never-let-go, “were to hear the tread of footsteps in pursuit, that never ceased until the pursued was dead or behind prison bars.” They would “realise that the old order of things had passed away.”

The value of this new order was demonstrated in Murray’s very first case as government detective: the murder of Ralph Findlay, a farmer in Lambton County. Summoned to the case by the county attorney, Murray discovered that the “countryside” believed that Findlay had been murdered by horse thieves after he had surprised them in his barn. Murray looked for a motive and, based on eyewitness information, found it in the amorous relationship between Mrs. Findlay and William Smith, a hired farmhand. Murray bullied the woman into confessing that she had egged on her lover to murder her husband. 

Murray had very definite views about crime and criminals. “Crime is a disease. It is hereditary, just as consumption is hereditary. It may skip a generation or even two or three generations. But it is an inherent, inherited weakness.” And forget about reforming criminals: “Once dishonest, always dishonest. That is the general rule. Reformation is the exception.” In 1880, by dint of dogged investigations that took him to multiple cities in the U.S. and Canada, he ran to ground the Johnson gang, a notorious multigenerational family of counterfeiters (father, sons, and daughters), who were said to have put over a million dollars in fake notes into circulation. Murray kept the plates, worth around $40,000, as souvenirs. 

He was also a strong believer in the value of circumstantial evidence. “I have found it surer than direct evidence in many cases … There are those who say that circumstances may combine in a false conclusion. This is far less apt to occur than the falsity of direct evidence given by a witness who lies point blank.” 

Although most of Murray’s efforts in bringing villains to justice consisted of interrogations, intercepted letters, pursuits over land and water, and the like, he was open to the adoption of newer techniques, such as the examination of footprints (in one case, he notes that he “marked the tracks carefully and arranged to have plaster casts made of them”), photography, autopsies, and forensic investigations. As early as 1876, analyses conducted at the School of Practical Science in Toronto had revealed that traces of blood and small bones were from a human being, not an animal, which helped to convict a wife murderer.

Murray’s easy manner endeared him to police and newshounds alike. He was even generally liked by the desperadoes who crossed paths — or swords — with him. 

And his sense of humour was legendary. He once told a Globe reporter of a time in court when a “little lad” had been charged with stealing several sticks of dynamite. On being asked by the judge what he had done with them, the boy, crying, took a couple of stick-like objects from his pocket and started to toss them onto the clerk’s desk. “I was near the judge’s bench when he threw the first one,” recalled Murray, “but I think I was half way down the street when the other one fell on the desk.” Fortunately for all, the dynamite failed to explode.

In 1906, after having served the people of Ontario for 31 years, now Chief Inspector Murray died of “a stroke of paralysis” in bed at his Toronto home. In an obituary in the Toronto Daily Star, he was praised for the “skill, logic, trained memory, and delicate intuition” that he had brought to the business of detection. 

But perhaps we should leave the last word to the man himself. The concluding sentence of his memoirs reads: “Well, Murray, you’ve done pretty well, after all.” 

Sources:

Globe editions of March 14, 1890, March 22, 1890, September 23, 1890, September 25, 1890, April 21, 1894, October 29, 1904, June 13, 1906, June 23, 1906

Globe and Mail editions of March 8, 1940, November 19, 1977

Murray, John Wilson. Memoirs of a Great Detective: Incidents in the Life of John Wilson Murray. Toronto: William Heinemann, 1904.

Phillips, Jim and Joel Fortune. “Murray, John Wilson.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, 1994.

Quebec Saturday Budget edition of November 15, 1890

Toronto Daily Star edition of June 13, 1906

Toronto World edition of November 15, 1890