The last execution in Hamilton
There's a plaque on a big boulder beside Canfield Cemetery in Haldimand County that celebrates a vibrant community of African-Americans who escaped slavery in the U.S. many years before.
Beginning in the 1830s, they rode the Underground Railroad to freedom in the Niagara area and headed down the Indiana Trail to the village that had nearly 140 Black settlers by mid century.
One of the descendants of the settlement is buried a few hundred metres from the memorial.
His name was Harry Lee. And while his grave is unmarked, the controversy of his death very much lingers.
On Feb. 3, 1953, 68 years ago this week, Lee, 37, was the last person to be executed in Hamilton. He was convicted of murdering his 38-year-old love interest, Mary Rosenblatt, who was white and married with two children.
The Crown argued he shot her to death and then tried to kill himself with the same rifle. Lee claimed they were abducted by a couple of thugs who were responsible for the shootings. The jury didn't buy it and he went to the gallows at the Barton Street Jail with 500 people gathered outside.
I bear the marks of shame on my chest, but of this crime, so help me God, I'm innocent," he said just before the trap door opened.
Many believed him. There had been all kinds of calls for clemency from Canfield residents and others, amid failed attempts by his lawyers to have the sentence commuted. And there are suspicions that racism played a role in the outcome.
In the 1950s in Ontario, it was clearly not socially acceptable for a Black man to be going around with a married white woman. That was abnormal and pretty shocking. It was something that caught people off guard about the case," says Canfield filmmaker Graeme Bachiu, who is working on a documentary about Lee.
I would say, based on my reading, he was a target because of that. I would be surprised if he wasn't prejudiced against."
Bachiu took me to Lee's unmarked grave in the corner of the cemetery, off Raglan Street. Lee grew up in Canfield, but as a young man moved to Hamilton.
Using a cemetery map, he showed me that Lee's grave is by a gravestone that remembers his parents, Adieline S. Lee (1891-1975) and Isaac Lee (1888-1975), but not him.
Behind the stone, the map says that Harry is here, directly behind his mom," Bachiu says as he pointed to the ground. His sister Connie is beside him, behind Isaac. Neither Harry nor Connie is on the stone."
Author Allison Gowling remembers his mother talking about gravediggers suddenly showing up at the cemetery the evening before the hanging. She could guess why they were there and it became a memory that haunted her the rest of her life.
The general consensus was, I remember my mother talking about it, is that he (Harry) did not do it. He was set up ... " Gowling told The Spectator in 2013.
I talked to Aileen Duncan, administrator of Stewart Memorial Church in Hamilton. Her family descends from slaves who lived in Canfield. And she remembers older relatives discussing the Harry Lee case as well.
From what I understand, from some of my relatives who were teenagers or young men and women at that time, they feel he was given a raw deal," she says. There was a lot of racial discrimination going on at the time."
In 1990, Spectator crime reporter Paul Legall interviewed Baptist church pastor E. Sidney Kerr, who walked with Lee to the gallows.
All who were involved were clearly of one mind. Harry Lee was an innocent man. It was a dreadful mistake and it should never be duplicated. Harry's colour did not help," said Kerr.
The case began at 1 a.m. on June 2, 1952, when Lee pulled his 1939 Chevrolet sedan into the parking lot of a motorcycle repair shop on Highway 8 in Sheffield. He beeped his horn several times and eventually owner Harry Davidson came outside to see what was going on.
He found Lee behind the steering wheel covered in blood, gasping that he had been shot and his wife' was dead in the passenger seat after being shot twice.
Lee was barely alive and rushed to Galt Hospital for life-saving treatment.
Ballistics testing determined that a .22-calibre rifle that Lee carried in his car was the weapon used in the shootings. Rosenblatt had bruises on her wrists and ankles that suggested she was likely tied up at some point.
Lee told court a bizarre story of being forced off the road by two strangers. Later, in his testimony, the story was modified to say it all started at his Cannon Street home when the assailants forced their way into his apartment.
The judge noted that in Lee's twisted tale of abduction in the countryside outside of Hamilton, he had several chances to escape and seek help. But yet, he didn't. The other thing that worked against Lee was that he refused a Crown offer to plead guilty to manslaughter, which would have meant prison time but not capital punishment.
All these years later, it's troubling that calls to commute the death sentence didn't gain any traction. A total of eight people were hanged at Hamilton's Barton Street jail for murder from 1876 to 1953, amid many dozens of homicides over that period of time. And Lee was on the cusp of an era that would see moratoriums and the eventual formal abolition of the death penalty in Canada in 1976.
Is it possible he didn't do it? Would life imprisonment have been a wiser sentence?