The Way of Transgressors

Fifteen murderers buried in the yard of the jail where they were hanged. A detective haunted by their crimes. The facts are true. Their stories might be.

The miscreants and murderers who live in the underworld of 19th century Toronto said that George Porter has a heart as black as a sweep’s face. Even his colleagues at the Toronto Detective Force considered him a hard case. He hadn’t started out that way. He had been an eighteen-year-old constable, full of idealism until he brushed the dirt from the face of a newborn babe, buried alive. How does that not change a man? Over the years, he’s recorded the faces of the guilty in pen and ink, sketching them as compulsively as he investigated their crimes. After the murderers were hanged, their skulls were split open with a bone saw and their brains autopsied, then their bodies were unceremoniously discarded.

In September 2007, a backhoe uncovered a mass grave while excavating what had been the exercise yard of the old Toronto Don Jail. A total of fifteen bodies were discovered, the remains of inmates hanged on the prison’s gallows between 1872 and 1930. Mysteries to be solved, lives to be imagined, crimes to be dissected.