For decades, Acadian singers would open a long, mournful ballad with those words in the song called “Le Meurtre de Timothy McCarthy,” which means “The Murder of Timothy McCarthy.”
The first public hint that something had happened to Timothy McCarthy appeared in a classified ad taken out by his brother in Moncton’s lone, four-page-long weekly newspaper on November 3, 1877, that read:
“MISSING MAN — TIMOTHY MCCARTHY, Tavern Keeper, of Moncton, left his house Friday, the 12th of October, drove his own horse to Shediac, put up at Weldon House, left the horse there, and disappeared… He had some money on him at the time… Any information would be gladly received by his wife or his brother. — Edward McCarthy”
Nearly a month later, that newspaper’s editor and only reporter, George Sumner, wrote: “It has now been twenty-five days since Mr. McCarthy’s disappearance. Enquiries have been made in every direction, but no tidings have been received … His family, relatives, and friends … fear that he has been the victim of foul play.”
Today, Moncton’s slogan is Resurgo, Latin for “I rise again.” This was the time it was rising from. In 1877, Moncton was a struggling ghost town of barely 600 people, filled with empty buildings, a shadow of what it had been before the collapse of its wooden shipbuilding industry.
With nobody else around to take the lead, that lone reporter decided he’d investigate the case by himself. He summarised for readers what was known about the missing man: “Timothy McCarthy… kept a tavern and hotel on Main Street… a buff, hearty man, well-calculated to make and retain friends… It is well known that Mr. McCarthy… drove a thriving business, making money rapidly.”
The reporter began retracing McCarthy’s steps before he disappeared. He learned Timothy was going to Shediac before continuing on to Prince Edward Island. So George Sumner saddled up.
Shediac lay only 26 kilometres away, but it took hours by horse. When Sumner arrived, he discovered McCarthy’s movements that day were more mysterious than first believed. McCarthy had gone to Shediac by train, found the ferry delayed by a storm, took the train back to Moncton, harnessed up his horse, and driven back to Shediac again, despite the darkness and pouring rain.
Seemingly suspecting there was more to the story, George Sumner stopped summarizing his findings for readers and began reporting word-for-word the interviews he conducted.
He went to Weldon House, the elegant white hotel overlooking Shediac harbour. In the stables, the hostler William Richards told him: “About 9:30 o’clock… Mr. McCarthy drove into the yard. It was a very dark night and raining very hard… He said he would be back and went to a bar… I did not see him after.”
Inside the hotel, bartender Harry Osborne — son of the hotel’s owner — insisted McCarthy never drank at all: “He was alone, he got nothing to drink… I saw him go from the bar room to the front door and go out. I did not see him after.”
The owner, John Osborne, claimed illness kept him largely unaware: “I was sick in my bed with typhoid fever… I slept that night.”
John’s daughter (and Harry’s sister), Eliza Osborne, however, painted a more vivid picture. She described McCarthy talking nervously about his wife, who he believed was following him: “He said his wife was … watching him … He said that if she could catch him after he got over [to the Island] then she would be pretty smart.”
Implying he was drunk, Eliza said that Timothy McCarthy had left Weldon House at 10 o’clock, and never returned.
The reporter noticed a teenage servant girl, Annie Parker, scrubbing the floor. Eliza dismissed her as knowing nothing more, so Sumner didn’t interview her.
The reporter went back to Moncton to talk to the missing man’s wife, who Eliza had said was following him. The wife refused to speak to him.
That refusal set the reporter digging again. He visited the Point-du-Chêne ferry, where workers recounted that Mrs. McCarthy had confronted her husband at the wharf. After an argument, she stormed away. But Timothy McCarthy never boarded the ferry. Passenger lists proved it.
Sumner learned the wife hadn’t returned, but had stayed with her friend, Mrs. Brown. Brown had no qualms about sharing all the McCarthy’s dirty laundry with the reporter, telling him: “She told me there were difficulties between her and her husband … involving women, money, and gambling … He had taken a large sum of their money to go to The Island to bet on the horses.”
That seemed to settle it. Monctonians concluded that McCarthy had run off on his wife. Everyone, even George Sumner, accepted it.
Everyone, that is, except Edward McCarthy. In December, nearly two months after the disappearance, the missing man’s brother returned to Shediac once more. A local man handed him a black felt hat, saying: “I found it on the river … near what is known as Oak Point.”
Edward recognized it instantly: it was Timothy McCarthy’s hat.
Searchers dragged the icy Scoudouc River. Two days later, they pulled up a body. It was tied to a rope, fastened to a rock. They recognized the body: Timothy McCarthy. They recognized the rock: it was the doorstop from the bar at Weldon House.
A magistrate was dispatched from Fredericton. Reviewing Sumner’s meticulous work, he noticed one glaring omission: the servant girl had never been interviewed.
On December 4, 17-year-old Annie Parker finally spoke. She said that everything had proceeded as the Osbornes had said. But, at midnight, she heard a man return to Weldon House. “I am almost certain it was Timothy McCarthy.”
She heard voices until the early morning hours. “Between 2 and 3 o’clock, I heard Mrs. Osborne tell Harry to go put horses on the wagon.”
At 3 a.m., Annie rose and looked out her window. “I saw the wagon driving away… I knew the horse and wagon — it was Osborne’s… I saw something in the back of the wagon.”
Shortly after giving that statement, Annie Parker disappeared from Weldon House…
Edward McCarthy — the brother who had never stopped searching for his sibling, Moncton barowner Timothy McCarthy in 1877 — was awoken by a knock at his door. He opened it to find a teenage girl standing in the dark. She said she had walked the entire way from Shediac to Moncton. Alone. At night.
She said her name was Annie Parker and her employers, the Osborne family that owned Weldon House hotel and bar in Shediac, had just tried to kill her.
- This is Part Two of the story. Find Part One here
She explained that earlier that day, she had testified to the magistrate, incriminating information alluding (but not outright accusing) the Osbornes of having murdered Timothy McCarthy. But she hadn’t told him everything.
Annie Parker explained that Harry Osborne had made her swear an oath on the Bible to reveal anything beyond what the Osbornes had already told the authorities. She had kept her end of the bargain — and then watched Martha Osborne mix a white powder into a drink and hand it to her.
She had pretended to drink it. Then she ran.
As far as Annie Parker was concerned, an oath on the Bible was rendered null and void by someone attempting to murder you.
She was ready to tell everything.
The next day, she returned to the Magistrate. This time, she held nothing back, revealing that, around midnight, Timothy McCarthy had returned to Weldon House. Annie had crept downstairs and peered into the bar room, where she found all three Osbornes — Martha, the mother, and brother and sister Eliza and Harry — gathered with him.
She watched Martha Osborne mix a white powder into a glass of pale brandy and hand it to McCarthy. “After he drank it,” Annie recounted, “he grew stupid. … while in this condition, he was robbed of his money by the Osbornes and soon after struck in the head with a hatchet by Harry Osborne, acting by his mother’s orders, until he was dead, two blows being necessary to produce death.”
They then took his roll of money, stripped his coat, tied a cord around his neck, and attached a heavy stone to the other end. Martha and Eliza took his shoulders. Harry took his legs. They carried the body to the wagon, and Harry took it away.
Martha Osborne told Annie Parker to clean up the blood.
George Sumner, the lone reporter at Moncton’s four-page-long Daily Times newspaper, urged readers to “give careful consideration to what she said.”
The authorities did. At eleven o’clock that same night, a Judge issued arrest warrants for the entire Osborne family.
A team of Marshals were deputized. They rode through the dark from Moncton along the rough road to Shediac. They arrived well before dawn to find the Osbornes loading furniture onto wagons.
Inside Weldon House, the Marshals noted the bar room’s floorboards were recently replaced. The bar itself, which Annie said had been dented by the force of Harry’s blows, was gone entirely. The floorboards of the wagon she had described were also new. In a back room, they found a rope with a piece cut from it, matching the one that had been tied to Timothy McCarthy’s body at the bottom of the Scoudouc River.
The Osbornes were taken into custody without incident.
What followed was one of the most sensational and drawn-out court cases in the history of the Maritimes. Not one trial, but three — back to back to back, spanning three full years. Each day’s proceedings landed on front pages from Halifax to Montreal to Boston.
The Osbornes hired two expensive lawyers from Toronto, and openly bragged in court that they were sure to get off since they’d paid them the eyewatering sum of $5000.
The Toronto lawyers announced that Annie Parker was Acadian. The anglophone jurors were well aware — she had a heavy accent — but the lawyers focused on stirring up anti-Acadian sentiment.
She had been born Ann Pelletier, the lawyers announced, and was from Dalhousie.
It was true. She’d changed her name to find work in an era rife with discrimination against Acadians. The lawyers insisted on calling her Ann Pelletier throughout the proceedings, even as the judges, the newspapers, and virtually everyone else continued to call her Annie Parker.
Acadians, however, were awed by the teen’s grace and dignity in the face of the unrelenting personal attacks on her, with Le Moniteur Acadien newspaper writing: “Nothing disconcerts her, nothing embarrasses her, nothing surprises her … for every question she has a response ready.”
Readers of English newspapers found her words credible and precise. But in a courtroom, to a jury of English-speaking men hearing those same words in an Acadian accent, as they were being nudged toward suspicion by two lawyers from Toronto, was different.
The first trial ended in a hung jury. So did the second. After two long, expensive, and increasingly ugly proceedings, the prosecution dropped the charges.
Then the Osbornes sued Annie Parker for slander.
Though the lawsuit was swiftly thrown out, the audacity provoked outrage across the Maritimes and beyond, even among readers in New England and Ontario who had been following the case.
It solidified the view that somehow the three-year legal ordeal had turned into a trial of Annie Parker for simply being Acadian.
Now that it was finally over, she cashed in using the very thing she’d been attacked for. Annie Parker launched a lucrative speaking tour — in English. She drew large crowds to upscale hotel ballrooms, charging fifty cents a ticket.
As for the Osbornes, they faced no legal consequences, nor any karmic ones either — when a catastrophic fire tore through Shediac and burned much of the town to the ground, Weldon House was left completely undamaged.
The story might have faded entirely were it not for an Acadian blacksmith named Honoré Leblanc, from Memramcook, who turned it into the folk song: Le Meurtre de Timothy McCarthy. Forty-nine lines long, passed orally from one musician to the next, it spread through Acadian communities.
The song ends by telling the listener to avoid the Weldon House bar and inn because if you stay there, the same thing that happened to Timothy McCarthy could happen to you, too.
