Thomas S. Kimber's Six Days in Montreal, 1890

While Thomas Kimber appears to have embarked alone on the trans-Atlantic voyage, he, by all accounts, quickly made friends on board. The Montreal Daily Witness later reported that the steward and stewardess both agreed that Kimber was “a regular gentleman, who ought to have been a saloon passenger” instead of travelling second class. They further stated that he “did not drink to excess on the voyage” and that he passed most of his time writing, which they believed was for a newspaper. Then, somewhat ominously, the two housekeepers proffered that the youthful Exonian “had for his room mate a crazy fellow — with about two slates off his head — a fellow who used to take fits and do all sorts of crazy things”.

Thomas Kimber's luggage consisted of a large trunk and a portmanteau. He said he was travelling to the North-West. When informed of the fact that Kimber had gone missing in Montreal for over six weeks, one of the two stewards quickly and gratuitously volunteered that “he was not the fellow to commit suicide”.

Be all that as it may, Kimber arrived from Halifax at this city's Bonaventure Station on Saturday evening, April 5. In the company of three young men (perhaps including the one previously described as “a crazy fellow”) he had met on the Sarnia, he crossed the road and took a room at the Grand Central Hotel on St. James Street, at the corner of Cathedral. The guest house was run by one Thomas Styles and his wife. All four men registered at the desk around 7:00 P.M.

Not much is known about the period of time Kimber spent in Montreal. We do know, however, that he was the son of a successful grocer and former Exeter town councillor. La Presse advises us in its May 29, 1890, copy that the enterprising Englishman had money, and that he spent it freely. The broadsheet also reported that he drank heavily, which contradicts conspicuously with what was said about him when he was on the Sarnia. The immoderate imbibing must have been true, however, as Mrs. Styles recounts how she tried to discourage the intrepid voyager from consuming whiskey. The Witness as well recounted that young Kimber engaged in “a heavy bout of drinking” during his short stay in Montreal. It was also related in that same above-mentioned La Presse edition that Kimber had with him excellent references for several businesses in this city but that, ultimately, he visited only one “Hodgson Brothers, produce commission agents”. H.A. Hodgson, one of the brothers who ran that establishment, found the young man to be “considerably under the influence of liquor” on that occasion.

On Sunday, April 6, Thomas Kimber, in the company of the others, visited Mount Royal. They stumbled upon the reservoir and, later in the day, back at the hotel, Kimber asked Styles what purpose it served. According to Styles, Kimber, that same Sunday evening, accompanied his three fellow travellers to Bonaventure Station, where the trio left Montreal, each for their respective destination. The young man from Exeter was now, seemingly, alone in the city, where he said he intended to stay for a few more days before going on to Winnipeg.

On Wednesday, April 9, Kimber paid his board bill up to that point in his fateful stay. The tally came in at $4.

Two days later, the morning of April 11, Styles, who was working at the bar, saw Kimber come downstairs and quickly leave through the main entrance of the hotel. His coat collar was turned up. Styles, the proprietor of the establishment, had no doubt that the individual in question was his ill-omened guest from Exeter. It was the last time he would see him alive. Montreal weather that day: Fair and 19 degrees Celsius.

When Kimber failed to return that evening, the Styles decided to enter his room. To their horror, a significant amount of blood was found a little here, there, and everywhere. Nevertheless, the stupefied couple decided not to contact the police, with Styles instructing his wife not to clean the room as he intended to ask Kimber to do so when he came back to the hotel.

Eventually, when the young Englishman did not return, individuals began to talk and speculate. After being absent from sight for some 13 days, The Montreal Witness wrote of Kimber in its April 24 edition: “He was respectable looking, had a fair supply of baggage, and considerable ready money. He started at once to 'paint the town', and spent his money freely, not in the hotel, the proprietor was careful to say, but outside. On April 11, he disappeared, leaving his baggage behind him, and nothing has been heard of him since.”

In response to the many rumours circulating in the city, Detective John Robinson of the Montreal Police visited the hotel on the 24th of that same month. He was shown what was Kimber's room, which was still stained with blood, now thirteen days after the Exonian had left the guest house for the last time. When Robinson asked Styles why the expanse had not been cleaned, the owner of the facility tersely responded that he was certain that Kimber would soon return and straighten out the mess himself.

Styles' behaviour throughout this day was curious. When Robinson took Kimber's possessions to the Central Police Station, Styles followed him demanding that the luggage be left with him in order that he recover some of the money owed him by Kimber. He made such a savage scene at the precinct that he was arrested and put in a cell.

After an appreciable absence of some 47 days, many Montrealers began to muse about the young man's mysterious disappearance, with many suggesting that his corpse would, later in the spring, show up in the St. Lawrence River. Indeed, as reported in The Herald, an unidentified detective suggested just that as early as May 2. Well, in the fullness of time, his body did eventually show up in a body of water, only, as it turned out, the location was not that majestic waterway itself, but rather the Montreal reservoir, a full two kilometres, uphill, from the Grand Central Hotel!

The popular consensus amongst the population at large was that the Coroner's Enquiry, which followed the macabre finding, was altogether unsatisfactory. On May 29, The Montreal Gazette labelled the evidence to have been “circumstantial and minor”. Indeed, the sequence of events mirrored an investigation that was totally bungled from beginning to end. Within six hours of Kimber's discovery in the McTavish Reservoir on a rainy, late spring morning the verdict of suicide was rendered and this before an autopsy had actually been performed. Those six hours went something like this: body found floating in the reservoir at 6:00 A.M. by workman Antoine Berichon; remains transferred to the dilapidated and antiquated city morgue by 8:00 A.M.; jury quickly empanelled by 10:00 A.M.; disputed verdict of suicide rendered at noon. Needless to say, the medical community, and others, were incredulous at the thought of a judgment being issued before the requisite postmortem examination had been conventionally performed. Dr. Edward H. Trenholme went as far as calling the hasty ruling “disgraceful. It is a most unlikely story that a man should cut his throat at all badly and then walk up the steep hill and throw himself into the reservoir”.

“But, could he do so?” enquired The Star reporter.

“Well, that depends, of course, on the amount of blood he lost, and if the accounts are true as to there being a washbowl nearly full, he must have lost a great deal, and he never could have walked up there.”

Drs. Lapthorn Smith and Duncan Campbell MacCallum were also of the same opinion. It's worth noting that Montreal's coroner, Joseph Jones, was not a doctor, as is still so often the case today. Jones held the comfortless position from 1838 until his own death in 1894.

The empanelling of a Coroner's Jury at the time is also of some interest — the mandatory commission was composed essentially of workmen hurriedly gathered from the streets of the city by Sergeant Isaie Charbonneau! They were quickly brought before the putrefied corpse, the frightful stench from which many found they could not easily suffer.

Dr. E.P. Mount made a superficial examination of the remains and dutifully detailed the presence of several wounds about the face and neck, which he said were most likely self-inflicted. However, declared the good doctor, nothing could be certain without conducting a proper autopsy on the body. Although later that same day Mount changed his opinion, he too initially seemed to think that Kimber was the victim of some foul deed. About this matter The Montreal Star wrote that the practising physician

“could not undertake to explain how a man with a wound sufficient to cause death, if such was the case, and with the great loss of blood which would inevitably follow, could walk all the way from St. James street west to the reservoir, and there commit suicide by drowning, after passing over a high iron railing with heavy stones in his pocket”.

So later that same afternoon, at 2:30, and well after the Coroner's Jury had already proclaimed the death to be a suicide, Dr. Mount, along with Dr. Alfred T. Brosseau, conducted the postmortem examination on Kimber's remains. Both physicians confessed that their evaluative work was greatly complicated by the abhorrent malodor emanating from a cadaver that had spent six weeks festering in the reservoir, which I might add was the city's drinking supply! They had requested that the corpse be placed on ice but, for whatever reason, this was not done. So, in those horrid conditions, the doctors laboured for three hours and were paid a paltry $10 each.

Their report to the authorities equivocated somewhat. The critical issue was whether Kimber was alive when he precipitately entered the water or whether he was already dead. Dr. Mount (who drew up the report) dispassionately contended that the internal organs were in a state of advanced decomposition so great that it was almost impossible to answer that question, an assertion with which Drs. Fenwick and Brennan (both also present at the postmortem) concurred. Yet, in the next breath, Mount stated that there was no water to be found in either the stomach or the lungs, the presence of which would have been a clear sign that the young Englishman had drowned. This anatomical fact was repeated, on June 3, in the Exeter broadsheet The Western Times:

“A post-mortem examination led to the discovery that the lungs and stomach were perfectly dry; hence it is concluded that Kimber was dead before entering the water.”

Ultimately, in what was somewhat surprising given the above, Dr. Mount came down on the side of the adventuresome Exonian having died by drowning. He categorically rejected the claim of others, including some physicians, that Kimber had lost so much blood in his hotel room on that determining day that he could not possibly have walked the nearly two kilometres — uphill — to the Upper Water Reservoir of the City of Montreal, have climbed over a protective railing with heavy rocks in his pockets, and then have jumped into the icy water.

Mount's claim about blood loss is odd. T.L. Quimby, a reporter with The Montreal Star who was permitted to enter Kimber's hotel room, witnessed the sanguine carnage himself. He, the Styles' couple, and several other residents of the hotel “on the morning of his disappearance found a pool of lukewarm blood on the floor, the walls bespattered with gore, and the washbasin was half full of blood”.

In fact, most local newspapers rejected Mount's questionable interpretation as well, gravitating more towards the general idea that it was indeed murder. Detective J.A. Grose of the Canadian Secret Service Agency felt it was a clear case of murder and conveyed that feeling to the federal authorities for whom he worked. This belief was shared also by oversea broadsheets, including the Exeter Post, which, when reporting upon the fate of the Devonshire native in its May 31 copy, recounted:

“The theory of the police is that Kimber, of Topsham, was robbed and murdered and his body thrown into the reservoir.” One week later, this same Exeter journal published a missive from the Governor-General of Canada, Lord Stanley of Preston, to the Colonial Office in London in which he wrote: “Kimber's body found yesterday in Montreal reservoir, throat cut, towel round neck, stones tied to body. Detectives in charge of case express opinion that Kimber was murdered, though Coroner's jury returned verdict of suicide.”

On May 30, 1890, yet another Exeter newspaper, The Express and Echo, resurrected the vital question of Kimber's trans-Atlantic crossing on the Sarnia with this crisp comment: “No trace has yet been discovered of the 'eccentric chap,' Kimber's fellow-passenger on board the Sarnia, who is suspected of murdering him.” Earlier in that same paragraph, the English newspaper lamented “the unenviable reputation Canada is obtaining as a morgue for ambitious young Englishmen”. This provocative reference was to yet another violent death of a youthful English adventurer that took place in Canada, this one in February of 1890, only months before Kimber's own controversial demise. Frederick Cornwallis Benwell, age 24, was a native of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and was murdered in Woodstock, Ontario, by conman and fellow-countryman, John Reginald Birchall. Maintaining his innocence to the end, Birchall was, nevertheless, hanged for the killing in Woodstock, Ontario, on November 14, of the same year. Though it took place in another province of Canada, this grisly affair was, in the spring of 1890, very well-known to most Montrealers.

In so far as the Kimber tale is concerned, the next day, May 31, The Express and Echo also cited Montreal High Constable Adolphe Bissonette's belief that the luckless Exonian's death was as well a case of cold-blooded murder. Furthermore, on this side of the Atlantic, Sergeant Isaie Charbonneau, justifiably described as one of the shrewdest members of the Montreal police force, is quoted as having said: “The case is a mysterious one to me. I cannot imagine how a man with such wounds could go from the hotel to the reservoir, which is a long distance.” Mr. Saunders of St. George's Society (which, in the end, buried Kimber the following day) was greatly perturbed to learn, when he expressed interest in attending the gruesome proceedings, that they were actually all concluded.

Be all that as it may, Charbonneau's boss did not agree with him. Montreal Chief of Police George A. Hughes believed it was self-murder, arguing that

“the man had been drinking heavily for some time, and he got the delirium tremens and took it into his head to commit suicide. He slashed himself with a dull razor or some other implement, but did not have courage enough to cut his throat. Then he washed himself, wrapped the towel around his throat and went up to the reservoir and threw himself in. He had been there on the previous Sunday. The doctors say he did not lose half a pint of blood, and that he could easily have walked to the reservoir”.

Yet, no matter how hard certain individuals pushed in the direction of this alarming death being an act of self-destruction, many still believed that it was an occurrence of murder. In this regard, The Montreal Star remarked:

“The question which is being propounded on the street and is agitating the general public, who have followed the case, is how a man could possibly cut his throat to the extent of five inches, quietly leave Styles' hotel on St. James street, at eleven o'clock in the morning, with a bloody towel round his neck, weak with loss of blood, stagger up the streets that lead to the mountain, climb the steep hill to the reservoir, surmount the iron railings that surround it and plunge into the water. Even had his strength held out to perform this extraordinary feat, it is pointed out that the strange and ghastly appearance presented by the man must have attracted special attention from some of the number of persons that he must have passed on his journey.”

It is also interesting to note who was not invited to testify at that part of the May 28 inquest which took place after the verdict of suicide had already been unwisely rendered: Thomas Styles and his wife (who probably knew Kimber the most during his brief stay in the city) were not asked to appear, neither were Detectives Andrew Cullen and John Robinson, who had the case in hand before the remains were located.

Not inviting Styles was undoubtedly a major error on the part of Coroner Jones. By Styles own admission, his English boarder did not eat in the hotel the evening of the 10th nor did he take breakfast there the morning of the 11th. Because of this absence, Detectives Cullen and Robinson reasoned that Kimber had tried to kill himself during the twilight of 10th and, when he failed to do so, walked up to the mountain in the darkness of that evening and threw himself into reservoir. Implicit in this interpretation of the tragic happening was that Styles was greatly mistaken about whom he saw leave the hotel the morning of the 11th. Also, on this particular point, it was reported that, since April 1, a municipal employee had been “engaged in breaking stones near the upper-level reservoir and would have seen Kimber jump in, and that consequently Kimber, if he threw himself into the reservoir must have done so after six o'clock in the evening”.

Cullen and Robinson were also quick to point out that at the time of his disappearance Kimber was indigent. When his decomposing body was pulled from the municipal waterbody, only fifteen pennies were found in his pocket. All the money he had brought from England had been spent within five days of being in Montreal.

This issue, along with the ill-starred case in general, was also addressed by Kimber's father in a letter he carefully wrote on June 10 to Chief Detective Cullen:

“I must say emphatically that I or any of my friends do not believe in suicide. If he had been short of money he knew where to come for more, and his funds could not have run out in so short a time. We are not aware of his ever-having drunk to get delirium tremens. He may have been drugged to make him ill. I think the coroner's inquest a perfect farce and not conducted as they are here. Would you or me, if you were committing so rash an act, think of tying stones to our body. I have nothing more to add. This is a very painful and distressing affair. We are all in your hands and we must leave the whole to you and your office to do and act as you deem best.”

It was not the first time the heart-broken father had resolutely written to Cullen. On June 3rd he had penned:

“I am quite sure that suicide would never have entered his mind, and I cannot help thinking that the proprietor of the hotel has not told all he knew. My idea is some person believed he had a draft for a considerable amount, and he was robbed in his room, with murder as the result and carried out of the house a corpse. In my opinion suicide and getting into the reservoir is quite out of the question.” — C.W. Kimber

What's more, Mr. B.D. McConnell, who was the Superintendent of Montreal Water Works, patiently provided some historical background to the awful drama of Kimber's demise. According to McConnell, this was the only such death since the upper reservoir opened in 1875. The lower basin, which was inaugurated in 1856, also never knew such a tragedy. The city supervisor further stated that the upper reservoir had a fence surrounding it, which measured four feet, seven inches high on two sides and three feet seven inches on the other two. Then, in perhaps the understatement of the year, McConnell delicately volunteered: “It was certainly not a pleasant idea to reflect that a dead body had been lying in the reservoir from which drinking water was drawn and a strong wire netting might be stretched across the top.”

As an aside, the height of the protective railing seemed to make little difference in investigating the disagreeable circumstances surrounding Kimber's death, at least not to Percival W. St. George, Montreal's City Surveyor: “It is impossible to climb over the railing, the bars being so close together it is impossible to get one's foot between them.” On one occasion, he added, he had tried to climb over it himself and could not do it; the only way to do so, he maintained, was to vault over the barrier.

As for the reservoir itself, once Kimber's putrescent corpse was removed, the basin was emptied and sanitized by municipal labourers. The Board of Trade Council requested that a permanent patrol be established at the secluded site so that the dreadful act not be repeated, but it is uncertain if any such action was ever taken.

Briefly, the dissatisfaction was so great with the handling of the investigation by Coroner Jones' inquest that a second one was ordered in early June, essentially on directives from Governor-General Stanley and the Colonial Office. It was presided over by Justice Calixte Aimé Dugas of the Special Sessions and Police Courts in Montreal. Dugas brought the Styles' couple and both Robinson and Cullen before him to give their evidence. He also summoned one Maggie Courtney, a chambermaid at the Grand Central Hotel, and a man by the name of William Poland, age 39 and a moulder by profession, who lived near the hotel and had been out — most probably drinking — with Kimber a few nights before he disappeared. Dugas' probe, however, failed in any significant way to clarify the seemingly conflicting views and evidence inherent in the complex case.

As a result of this no-verdict special commission, a considerably frustrated Montreal Star reader, on August 22, took pen in hand and wrote to the newspaper:

“What has been the upshot of the judicial enquiry into this mysterious business? There seems no decision one way or the other, and the enquiry seems to have been entirely dropped. Knowing as I do the position of the reservoir, where the body was found floating, and having read all the details, I scouted the very idea of suicide: I now think it just possible Kimber may have destroyed himself, improbable as it may seem. In Whitaker's Almanack for 1890, page 349, I find it recorded that on November 11, 1889, 'A lady in Leeds cut her throat, then bound up the wound, and afterwards went three miles and drowned herself.' Almost identically what Kimber is supposed to have done; only, in the Leeds case we may conclude that the lady did not climb up a stiff hill, fill her pockets with stones, and scale a high fence. Why should Kimber take such trouble when the river and canal were so much more convenient? Is this mystery never to be cleared up?” — R.S.D.

That was indeed the burning question — why drown yourself in a body of water found two kilometres away, high at the end of a significant climb, when Kimber could have much more easily put himself under at the Peel Basin, but a short distance behind his hotel, with no prominence to ascend? The same argument might, of course, be made if he truly had been murdered. Why dispose of the body at such an awkward location when other venues, less challenging, were nearby?

It's interesting to note that no Montreal newspaper ever editorialised on the sensitive subject. However, The Ottawa Citizen did, and just a day after Kimber's remains were found. Unlike with various Montreal interests, their position was unequivocal:

“The announcement made yesterday by the police authorities of Montreal, that the body of young Kimber, had been found in a reservoir, not unnaturally created a widespread sensation, following so soon after the terrible Benwell tragedy. The throat of the unfortunate man was cut, and afterwards covered by a rough towel; stones were attached to the corpse to keep it from rising, and altogether evidence appeared sufficient to establish the commission of an atrocious murder. Kimber had been sent to Canada some weeks before, and a bill of exchange forwarded to meet him on his arrival in Montreal. He was seen about the city, cashed his draft, and one night suddenly disappeared. Many believed he had decamped, but the discovery of the remains, with the name of the ill-fated man stamped upon portions of the clothing, disposes of all problematic suppositions. Kimber was butchered by wretches who stole his money and destroyed their victim with the idea that so doing, all evidence was destroyed. There is but one thing to do now — namely, for the Federal as well as Quebec provincial authorities to spare neither time nor expenditure, in ferreting out the principals in this diabolical crime. Canada has enemies enough abroad who will use the foul deed to induce innocent people to believe that this country is the hot-bed for and nursery of ruffianism. Ontario has had its Benwell tragedy; Quebec has now the Kimber atrocity, and where the thing will end unless prompt and effective measures are adopted to discover and bring the perpetrators to justice, it would be vain to speculate.”

As it happens, one of the earliest newspaper references to this harrowing misadventure appeared in The Montreal Herald on April 24, 1890. Although it contained several factual errors, the source did open a train of possible investigation that does not appear to have been followed up by Montreal police authorities, or at least it was never mentioned again:

“A young swell some time ago arrived in this city and registered at the Grand Central hotel, St. James street, under the name of Thomas Kimber. He had a very respectable appearance, stated freely that he had lots of money and that he came from the States (sic) to Montreal simply to have a good time. Some evenings ago the youth disappeared from the hotel leaving his baggage behind him, and nothing has been heard of him since. The police authorities were notified, and so far it has been discovered that on the 11th inst. the young man was at a house on St. Constant street for a part of the evening, and that about midnight he left the house in company with a lady companion, who, for a couple of weeks previously (sic), had shown great friendship for him. The pair have not been heard of since, and it is thought that they have departed for the States by the first train on the next day. The proprietor of the Grand Central Hotel is now looking for his board bill. The trunks of the fugitives (sic) were opened, but were found to contain heavy packages of stones and nuggets, which were neither gold nor silver.”

It is important to note that in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, St. Constant Street (today Du Bullion) was the heart of Montreal's notorious Red-Light District. During that same period, there was a conservative estimate of there being some 2,000 prostitutes walking the streets of the city!

A few months later, The Herald published this heartrending report:

“Chief Detective Cullen was yesterday the recipient of a letter from Mr. C.W. Kimber, of Topsham, Exeter, England, under date of Sept. 13, the father of young Kimber whose body was found in the upper reservoir on April 15 (sic) last, in which he says: 'Please do what you like with the clothes, etc., of my poor boy for we do not want them. My wife and family would be terribly upset to receive them. I thank you for all the trouble you have taken in this unfortunate affair.'"
“Chief Cullen stated to a Herald reporter last evening that he would turn over the effects to the House of Refuge.”

Finally, it must be stated that this was not the first nor the last time a corpse was found in a municipal reservoir. On July 5, 1906, The Montreal Star related the following UK story to its readers:

“The decomposed body of a man in the reservoir at Bradford, is agitating the citizens of that town greatly. The cost of emptying the reservoir would be £8,721 and it appals the good people who are afraid of microbes.”

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi