In 1909, Florence Kinrade is, by all appearances, the dutiful daughter of a wealthy Hamilton, Ontario land-owner, engaged to the parson's son. Intriguingly, she also leads a double life as a vaudeville showgirl in Richmond, Virginia. Holding many parallels with Lizzie Borden, another famous mystery involving a family murder and an inscrutable young woman, Florence becomes the central figure in a gruesome crime—the murder of her sister, Ethel. By digging deeply into contemporary accounts and the testimony from Florence's high-profile court inquest, Frank Jones' masterful narrative details the challenges of an upper-class woman seeking a showbiz career, reveals the racism and the little-known "tramp menace" feared by people of the era, and exposes Florence's mental diagnosis by a famous psychiatrist. Florence's adventures span the Canadian cities of Hamilton, Toronto, Calgary, and Lethbridge, Alberta, as well as the American locales of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Richmond, Virginia. In the book, we discover, for the first time, the secrets of Florence's inner life, suppressed emotions, and romantic escapades.
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Florence Kinrade
Lizzie Borden
of the North
Frank Jones
durvile imprint of durvile and uproute books
calgary, alberta, canada
Durvile Publications Ltd.
durvile imprint of durvile and uproute books
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
www.durvile.com
Copyright © 2019 Frank Jones
library and archives cataloguing in publications data
Florence Kinrade: Lizzie Borden of the North
Jones, Frank, author
Book Five in the True Cases Series
1. True Crimes | 2. Theatre 3. Canadian Law | 4. Canadian History
ISBN: 978-0-9952322-8-0 (e-book)
We would like to acknowledge the support of the
Alberta Government through the Alberta Media Fund.
Durvile is a member of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta (BPAA)
and Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP).
All rights reserved.
Dedication
To the memory of George Edward Hart
1914 – 2018,
neighbour and friend.
About the author, Frank Jones
Born in England, Frank Jones came to Canada in 1959 and worked as a journalist for The Winnipeg Tribune, The Toronto Telegram, and The Toronto Star. Jones worked at The Star for some thirty years, was Ottawa bureau chief, foreign correspondent, and columnist, winning a National Newspaper Award for his coverage of the 1973 Middle East War. He is the author of Trail of Blood, Master and Maid, White Collar Killers, Paid to Kill, Murderous Innocents, The Save Your Heart Wine Book, and, with Gordon Pape, Head Start. Jones also contributed a number of radio scripts to the CBC’s Scales of Justice series hosted by famed lawyer Edward L. Greenspan.
Contents
PHOTOGRAPHS
Preface. Do You Think I Did It?
1. He Shot Poor Ethel
2. Tramp Panic
3. The Kinrades
4. The Inquest
5. Florence’s Triumph
6. A Chink in the Armour
7. I Let Out An Awful Yell
8. The Pet of the Town
9. Escaping the Velvet Prison
10. King vs Kinrade
11. Pretty Inconsequent Butterfly
12. Love Letters to Jimmy
13. Tain’t That L’il Girl
14. Hollywood Terminus
15 . Mental Health Diagnosis
16. Western Days
17. No Lady Needs Algebra
18. Of Scarlett and Madness
19. A Murder for Ambition
Afterword. 105 Herkimer Street
Acknowledgments
PHOTOGRAPHS
Florence Kinrade. On the back of the photo, in
Florence’s own handwriting are the words,
“18 yrs old. How could anyone fall for me ???
Bella Kinrade
Ethel Kinrade
Centenary Methodist Church Choir.
Ethel 5th from the left, 2nd row. Florence 2nd from the right, 2nd row.
Floor plan of 105 Herkimer Street.
The Kinrade family home at 105 Herkimer Street, Hamilton, Ontario.It was here that Ethel Kinrade was shot and killed.
Florence’s brother Ernest.
Florence’s scholarly fiancé, Mr. C. Montrose Wright.
The Hamilton Spectator of Friday, February 24, 1909 puzzles, “Who Shot Ethel Kinrade?”
Intrepid newspaperwomen Kit Watkins, known as the first accredited woman foreign war correspondent.
George Tate Blackstock Q.C. who handled many prominent cases of the era.
Ottawa Journal of March 11, 1909.
Detail of Florence Wright performing with the Mildred Perkins’ Pantages Grand Opera Company.
In the early 1920s Florence, across Canada and US with Mildred Perkins’ Pantages Grand Opera Company.
Geraldine and Montrose Wright, she in Calgary, he in Trinidad.
Florence on the vaudeville circuit.
Florence Kinrade went on to lead a successful life, achieving many of her ambitions. Only she knew the answer to her secret.
Joan Wright, who changed her name to Joan Warner.
Florence in 1960 in California — always wearing a hat.
Demolition in 1967 of the Kinrade home at 105 Herkimer Street.
Ready to hear
the story?
Do You Think I Did It?
Preface. Do You Think I Did It?
The Florence Kinrade case has been on my mind for a long time. Since January 1987, in fact, when I picked up the phone to call her nephew, Ken Kinrade, who was wintering in Clearwater, Florida.
“Ken Kinrade?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” came back a harsh, raspy voice. I half-expected Kinrade, then in his seventies, to rebuff me. People, I’ve found, are generally not eager to discuss a murder in the family, even a long-ago one. But the voice was deceptive. Kinrade, I found when I met him on his return to Hamilton, Ontario in the spring, was a kindly, even timid man, happy to share what he knew about that shocking 1909 crime that had made the family’s name notorious.
Now it’s been thirty years since I made that phone call. Ken is long dead, as are several of the people who helped me reconstruct the lives of Florence, her sister, Ethel, and their well-to-do parents. The Rev. Graham Cotter, a nephew of Florence’s fiancé, Monty Wright, and a long-retired Anglican clergyman whose letter to me led me to the most important revelations of all, has been unfailingly patient as he waited for the story to be finally told. My manuscript languished on a shelf at the University of Toronto Press for several years. And then, like so many neglected projects, it continued languishing.
But the murder of Ethel Kinrade that snowy day in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1909 deserves our attention because it uncovers a rich vein of social history. It tells us a lot about the obstacles an ambitious young singer from an upper-class family faced in seeking a career in – horrors! – vaudeville. It tells us about a forgotten underclass – the thousands of tramps who rode the rails of North America in that era and who were often the first to be suspected when a crime occurred. It tells too of the sometimes-odd practices of the psychiatric profession in that pre-Freudian time. And it also tells the story of a formidable woman who was as resilient as she was devious and was, quite simply Canada’s Lizzie Borden.
The parallels with the notorious 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts case in which Lizzie was suspected of the axe murder of her father and stepmother, are uncanny. In giving her testimony at the inquest into the death of her parents, Lizzie has been described as, “circling, evading, contradicting, revising her story as she went along, scorning the badgering of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton.”
The description could just as easily have applied to Florence who, from the first hours after she ran into the street crying that Ethel had been shot – six times – told different and contradictory versions of the murder of her sister. Ultimately, the newspaper-reading public followed with fascination her epic duel with one of the great counsel of the day, George T. Blackstock Q.C. at an inquest which was described by Coroner Dr. James Anderson, as, “unparalleled in the history of Canada, not only for the interest it has aroused throughout the whole country, but by reason of the legal points raised.” Dr. Charles Kirk (C.K.) Clarke ‘the father of Canadian psychiatry,’ who watched Florence throughout and interviewed her several times, said of her testimony, “a more startling and complex psychological study has rarely been offered.”
Edmund Lester Pearson, America’s pre-eminent crime essayist of his era, wrote that the Lizzie Borden case “is without parallel in the criminal history of America. It is the most interesting, and perhaps the most puzzling murder which has occurred in this country.” The same can be said of the Kinrade mystery – up north in Canada.
Pearson suggested that the Borden case had retained its fascination because it involved a class of people not normally involved in bloody crime, because it was purely a problem of murder, uncomplicated by sexua...
Table of contents
- PHOTOGRAPHS