Canadian True Crime - Donnellys Debrief with author Nate Hendley

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

This is a conversation with Nate Hendley - who researched and wrote the episode, and criminologist Dr Lee Mellor. Also in this audio is me, Jordan from Nighttime, and Aaron from The Generation Why.Learn more about:Nate Hendley and his books Lee Mellor's podcast Murder Was the Case  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My name's John Weir. You don't know me, but you're gonna, because I know the people that have been watching you, learning about you. They know you've done well for yourself, that people like you and trust you. Trust you. Now imagine what they're gonna do with all that information that you've freely shared with the whole world. Now imagine what they're gonna do with all the information you have at it. Yeah, I'll be in touch. Radical starring Kiefer Sutherland. New series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. Hi everyone. Don't worry, the next episode is coming along as per the schedule, so this is just a little bonus.

I hope that you enjoyed the Donnellys. I've been getting a lot of good feedback about Nate Henley's research, and quite a few descendants of the family have also messaged me. It's been super interesting. I've also been hearing about some of the crazy stories that have morphed about this case throughout the years. Well, the decades. In any event, I first covered this case last summer as part of a live show I did in Toronto with some friends. We invited Nate Henley up to talk about some other things related to the case, and then we were joined by criminologist Lee Mellor, who joined us to talk about the case from his unique and educated perspective. Also in this audio, you'll hear me, Jordan from Nighttime, and Aaron from The Generation Y.

So enjoy this little bonus audio, and I'll see you soon with the next episode. It is one of the craziest and most complicated cases I've ever covered, and it will be a three-parter. See you soon. So you know this case inside of Nate. The first question I want to ask you is, every time I've ever heard of this story, I've heard it referred to as the Black Donnellys, but it looks as though in present day there's a move to refer to it simply as the Donnellys. What's the reason for the name change? Well, the name change, like there's been sort of this historic thing.

Part of it is just simply like the Donnellys is sort of, you know, a more descriptive, just simply this is the family, this is the Donnellys. The actual term, like there's an article here from London Free Press, 1880, and it talks about origin of the term Blackfeet, and it has a quote from here, a gentleman explained to me that the term Blackfeet is more applicable to the Donnellys themselves than to the vigilance committee, as one would suppose upon reading articles, blah, blah, blah. And then it talks about the Blackfeet and the Whitefeet and all this. I suspect to, and this is just speculation, one question that I used to get constantly

where people would say, well, does that mean they were Black? And I'd say, well, no, they were Irish. And it just sort of got into this sort of, you know, confusing kind of thing. There's also the term Black Irish, which is sort of a bit of an antiquated expression, which used to refer to Irish people with dark hair. And so it just sort of got a bit confusing that there was a time in history where it was common to refer to someone, you know, oh, the Black Joneses or the Black, you know, whatever, meaning sort of is a synonym for evil and bad.

And, you know, there's obviously sort of a move away from that. So that's sort of, that's a rather roundabout explanation, but I think that sort of, just shortening it to Donnellys, I think fits a more modern viewpoint, I guess. You could say. And also it really became about the family, right? So it was just, the Donnellys became their own entity. It wasn't about a gang anymore. It wasn't about which side they were.

It was the family. Right. It's somewhat like saying, you know, the evil Hell's Angels or something. You don't really need to, you know, you just say Hell's Angels. You don't really need to proceed it with evil. The hell part doesn't do that. That might be a hint. I just wanted to ask you both, Nate and Lee.

The massacre took place in 1880, and there's been plenty of other crimes from that period that have been completely forgotten. What is it about this particular case where it's like the big Canadian case? Why has it resonated with people over the years, over the decades? Well, I'll speak first to that. Lee has more of the history of, you know, mass murder, serial killer things. My perspective was that it lingered because it was such an out-of-place crime for the time that we tend to associate vigilanteism, vigilance committees, and basically lynching,

because that essentially is what happened to the Donnelly family. Some of the early newspaper coverage explicitly said they were lynched. We tend to associate that with United States, like Texas, New Mexico, Wild West, and we think of our own pioneer background. We always stress, you know, old amounties and these good, hearty pioneers who worked hard and kept their noses clean, so it seems so out of place for Southern Ontario. I think that is one reason it's resonated today, and I'll pass the conch to Lee. Yeah, and I think that's a bit of a misconception when you think of Canada.

Very much so. Historically, I mean, this has a brutal history in this country as well, and what I'd like to comment on, which I find particularly interesting about this case, is we have, there's now sort of three types of cultures, but I'll just refer to two. There's honor culture, and that's still prevalent in most of the world, this idea of honor culture. And then we have what is more of a 20th century beginning in the 19th century concept of dignity culture. Now, in the places where the Donnellys came from, like in Ireland and the countryside in Scotland and many other places, and particularly in the Wild West, like you're mentioning New Mexico,

Mexico, Texas, there wasn't really strong law enforcement and government control over these places. So people had to have a reputation. Like your honor meant something. Your reputation literally could ruin you or make you in a society. So people would take things like a little slight. I'll give you an example actually. This goes back to New York. You've probably heard of Alexander Hamilton and his famous duel that he was killed in.

This is 18th century people would duel over things like being called a rascal, right? That we're going to fight to the death because you called me a rascal, which just sounds absurd now because we live more in a dignity culture now where it's like sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But that was not the old way. And the idea that someone would refer to you as a rascal, it's like saying you cannot be trusted. You are not a man of your word. You're dishonorable.

And this would have real social repercussions for you. And so in places, this honor culture was pretty much the norm culture across the world. And it started to change around this time in the 19th century. But it was still very prevalent in the frontier, whether it was the United States or in Canada. And so you have people coming from Ireland, Scotland, places where there's already a kind of clannish honor culture and they're bringing it to a place where there is weak local law enforcement. And this is why this violence is kind of erupting there, is because it does matter, your reputation. And what I found really interesting is this idea that the Donnellys had this reputation for being worse than they were.

And we would think, well, that's a bad thing, but they probably in some ways really relished in that. And the reason is because it keeps people from screwing with you. We all know that you can even see little bits of it, remnants of it in day-to-day Canadian life. Maybe not so much in Toronto, but now go out to where I grew up. You've got that guy with the mullet who gets really pissed off at you because you bumped into him in a bar or something like that. You're just like, it's okay, just calm down. That's still that remnant of honor culture there. So I think that it was very much to the benefit of them to have that reputation.

And the funny thing is when they start to turn to the dignity culture, which is, you know what? We're going to let the law handle this. That's when they start to slip. That's when they start to seem vulnerable because it's not just the Black Donnellys in that community that have the honor culture values. It's everyone else in the community too. And then you go into where you're taking us to court. I think I smell weakness and what happens soon after. So I think that in one way, that's a way of interpreting what's happening there and why it happened.

But this transference during the 19th century in Canada from an honor culture to a dignity culture, which we arguably live in now. I won't get any deeper than that, but I think that that could be a reason why it lingers in the popular imagination is it actually marks a tangible cultural shift in Canadians. Yeah, Canada. And just to very quickly echo what Lee said, a reminder too that Canadian pioneer life was a lot more violent than it's typically portrayed in TV shows or school books and stuff. Obviously stuff like the Donnelly Massacre was pretty unusual,

but there was like plenty of fist fighting and drunken brawls and people shooting at each other. Even after, by the way, even after the Donnellys were murdered in 1880, they were still cases in that area of some pretty crazy stuff and not all involving the Donnellys. One thing I'm curious about is I have never heard really about modern-day ancestors and the locations that these stories have taken place. In your research, Nate, have you come across kind of modern-day descendants of the Donnellys? Well, interesting enough that you mentioned that. When I was looking into that, there was an article just this summer,

Barry Today Magazine or Barry Today Online, that there's a Donnelly Museum now. It's just a quickly backtrack. The town of Lucan for decades kind of kept a very tight lid on this story. They were not too eager to talk about it. So for years and years and years, it was kind of almost forgotten. There weren't really any full books on the story written until the 50s. So it was only very recently that the town of Lucan has kind of sort of realized, well, you know, maybe we can make a little money from this.

You know, people do visit the Tower of London and some terrible things took place there. So there's now a Donnelly Museum. And this article from June 21st of this year said, the Donnelly Museum has brought together descendants of the original Donnelly family. That they use this sort of as an excuse to get together. The great-grandchildren of the famous Black Donnellys, there they use the old name, including Mark Newman, great-great-grandson of Patrick Donnelly. And there's a few others who are named here that I won't go into.

Jim Cameron, who was a great-grandson of Will Donnelly, and they all got together at this museum just to sort of hang out. And many of them didn't know each other because I think when something this horrendous happens to your family, there's maybe a temptation not to have family reunions after that. I mean, well, seriously, I mean, not to be facetious, but obviously you could see how this could destroy a family long after the bodies were buried in the ground. So yes, there are still descendants around. I cannot name them all off the top of my head, but this was a very interesting piece,

just saying how this museum has brought back these descendants who all sort of decided to get together and for the first time sort of, wow, okay, let's all meet and talk with each other. So it's interesting how the resurgence of interest in the Donnelly murders has somehow sparked a renewal of the family members getting together. I know the people that have been watching you, learning about you. They know you've done well for yourself, that people like you and trust you. Now imagine what they're going to do with all that information that you freely shared with the whole world. Now imagine what they're going to do with all the information you have at it. Yeah, I'll be in touch.

Radical, starring Kiefer Sutherland. New series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus.