On Christmas night in 1824, a drunk and lonely elderly man stumbled through Halifax’s dark, cold and icy streets.
Edward Shea had come into the city from his hometown of Rawdon, NS, where he worked as a schoolteacher so he would not be alone that Christmas. By dawn he would be dead, casually murdered in cold blood.
Seventy-four years after his murder, a young historian named Harry Piers decided to examine the case again, noting that: “The story of this most mysterious case that at the time created the very greatest excitement in Halifax is now being lost in the forgotten past.”
Piers, then only 28 years old, found a publisher for his two-part article in New Brunswick Magazine in 1898. Its success enabled Piers to found the Nova Scotia Public Archives the following year.
Piers reconstructed the events through interviews with elderly Haligonians who still remembered the murder that happened on “Barrack Street, [which] was also appropriately nicknamed knock-me-down street.”
“Although physically the highest, it was morally the lowest quarter of the town, and even in the day-time few cared to risk themselves within its precincts,” Piers wrote. “Robberies and murders and riots, which had from time to time occur here, caused the place to be shunned by everyone of respectability. Such was the scene of this story at the period of which I write.”
Near Barrack Street were the quarters of the British officers stationed in Halifax, who were much respected and highly esteemed by the locals.
That sentiment, however, was not always reciprocated.
On that Boxing Day morning in 1824, one of those British officers, Edward Harlins, glanced out the window of the officer's quarters and spotted the dead body of an old man. Harlins went outside, examined the body, noted it was merely a local, and went back to bed.
Shortly afterwards a Private named Rogers walked past the body.
Piers wrote: “Rogers turned over the body and was shocked to find the poor fellow had been murdered.”
The coroner's report indicated that the victim had been stabbed right through the heart, and would have died within minutes.
On Christmas night, Edward Shea had become “somewhat intoxicated” in the rundown taverns of Barrack Street. At 1 am he had appeared at the home of Dr. Sterling, whom he knew in passing, and requested a place to sleep. The doctor’s servant, not knowing Shea, turned him away.
Shea wandered off towards the North Barracks where he was stopped by a guard who he asked if he could sleep in the Guard House.
“The soldier,” Piers wrote, “directed him toward the main guard, and the man stumbled off, but instead of going as directed he went through a turn-stile and approached the officer’s quarters…”
The following day word of the murder spread quickly through Halifax and an immense crowd gathered near the body.
James Crosskill, who was present that morning, later told Piers that he “traced small drops of blood on the snow, from close to the body to within three yards of the south door of the officer's quarters.”
“The case excited the most intense interest,” Crosskill noted “and was discussed from end to end of the town until it became almost the sole subject of conversation.”
Soon a swirl of highly specific rumours began to circulate in Halifax naming the alleged murderer.
Halifax newspaper The Acadian Reporter began digging into the mysterious rumours. They eventually identified their source: Maggie Hall. She claimed to have witnessed the murder, naming its perpetrator as British Officer Richard Cross.
The newspaper found her account credible. Claiming that other papers were refusing to publish her story because the alleged perpetrator was a British Officer, the Acadian Reporter printed Hall’s account and Cross’ name. The paper declared: “Our pen shall never be prostituted to introduce any novel distinction of person, contrary to the ends of justice.”
Harry Piers summarised Maggie Hall’s story, based on her testimony at the subsequent trial:
“On going downstairs [after a visit with an officer] she heard Mr. Cross ordering someone out of doors with the words, “Be off!” … Going a little lower she could see it was … [Officer Richard Cross] was standing in the entry with a strange man.” It was Shea, who had evidently disturbed the Officer’s sleep.
Hall watched Cross push Shay to the courtyard and “then push him to the ground. … Cross’s clout flew open” obscuring Hall’s view. “The man lay on the ground, his assailant looked at him for a few moments and then [walked back to his room].”
Pushed by the press and the public, in January of 1825 Richard Cross was charged with the murder of Edward Shea.
The trial became the word of an esteemed British Officer against that of a nineteen-year-old who, according to Piers “appearance caused a sensation.” Haligonians seemed startled at the trial to discover that Maggie Hall was only 19 years old; Black; a sex worker; and, only nine years after the end of the War of 1812; an American.
Maggie Hall’s steady and defiant appearance under questioning, and the way her recollection of the events of that night didn’t waver or fluctuate at all over the course of the four times she told it to authorities seemed to convince many Haligonians among the press and the public.
She did not convince the presiding judge, Justice Halliburton. According to Harry Piers, he told the jury: “Even if she was believed there was nevertheless not sufficient to convict.” Piers commented that the judge’s speech, “which lasted an hour, was thoroughly in favour of the prisoner.”
The jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. That night the officers held a great party to celebrate Richard Cross’ release. Soon after, he was promoted and moved to the West Indies.
The public opinion after the trial, however, was that a dashing and wealthy young British officer had murdered an old Nova Scotian schoolteacher, in cold blood, on Christmas Day, for no reason other than that he had woken him up by knocking on the door asking for somewhere to stay the night.
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