Rogues and Heroes
by Paul Butler and Maura Hanrahan

The Last Woman Hanged—Catherine Snow

She advanced with a firm step and met her fate with remarkable composure,” read the Newfoundlander. The crowds below were hushed as they watched her body drop. They had come from all over the city to see this, and from Torbay and Petty Harbour, too. There was a sob here and there, an angry cry or two. But most were silent. Many believed it would not come to this. But it had. Now her body, black-clad, in the clothes of the dead, swung in the warm summer breeze. Catherine Mandeville Snow was dead—the last woman to be hanged in Newfoundland.

Snow was born in the late 1700s, probably between 1790 and 1793 in Harbour Grace, Conception Bay. At the time of her birth, the fishery seemed to be in rapid decline, having failed for a number of years. But the Harbour Grace of her youth remained a bustling town, the centre of the bay, the locus of all tradespeople and major shops and industry. She may have learned to read, at least to a rudimentary level, but she probably could not write; this was not an unusual combination in those days.

As a young woman, she moved to Salmon Cove near Port de Grave, also in Conception Bay. There, Catherine took up residence with John William Snow. He was a planter, a fisherman who owned land; a native of Bareneed, he was born around 1793. Well off, he even had servants who used the back stairs. He and Catherine didn’t marry at first, but they had children. Eventually they would have seven. After the first three or four, they went to the church and finally tied the knot on October 30, 1828—the day before Hallowe’en.

Despite their little boys and girls and their lack of financial woes, theirs was not a happy union. Researcher Kay Anonsen told the Newfoundland Herald in 2001, “They fought all the time, but she fought back. They’d roar away at each other, according to reports, and she would throw things at him, like an iron. Nobody ‘reported’ him hitting her (though).”

Then, on the night of August 31, 1833, John Snow disappeared. The days passed, and his neighbours on the south side of Port de Grave began to wonder quietly and then out loud if he had committed suicide—or if he had been murdered. Magistrate Robert Pinsent wondered, too, and he launched an investigation. He became very suspicious when he found dried blood on John Snow’s fishing stage; he immediately knew there had been foul play.

When asked by the magistrate, Catherine Snow insisted she knew nothing of her husband’s whereabouts. But Pinsent was not convinced. He was also suspicious of Tobias Mandeville, Catherine’s first cousin, who kept the books for Snow and who was disgruntled with his wages. Besides, Mandeville was said to be having an affair with Catherine. Magistrate Pinsent had another eye on Arthur Springer, one of Snow’s indentured servants; according to one account, it was he who was having an affair with Catherine. Both men were considerably younger than the Snows; Mandeville was twenty-four at the time of John Snow’s disappearance, while Springer was twenty-seven.

The police brought both men in for questioning and then eavesdropped on them. They heard Springer speak of a conspiracy between the two men and Snow herself. They had shot John Snow, tied him to an anchor, and dumped him in shark-infested waters. When they realized the police knew what had happened, the murderers owned up to it. But Springer maintained Mandeville had shot John Snow, while Mandeville insisted Springer had killed him.

Catherine Snow, meanwhile, had run away to the woods. She hid there, contemplating her options. She must have decided they were few, for she soon decided she had to face the music. She made her way to the new courthouse in Harbour Grace and turned herself in.

According to the confessions, John Snow had been shot while going from his boat to his stagehead, but his body was not to be found. On one occasion, Port de Grave harbour was dragged by fifty men in ten boats, but John Snow’s watery grave would not give him up.

The trial of Catherine Snow, Tobias Mandeville and Arthur Springer opened in the dead of a St. John’s winter on January 10, 1834. Despite the men’s confessions, all three pleaded not guilty. Snow and Mandeville were represented by George Henry Emerson, while Springer’s lawyer was Bryan Robinson. The attorney-general told the all-male jury, “I can’t prove which one fired the shot, but both were present for the murder. As to Catherine Snow, there is no direct or positive evidence of her guilt. But I have a chain of circumstantial evidence to prove her guilt.”

The trial was one of the most eventful in Newfoundland history. It lasted twelve hours, during which it was claimed that Snow supplied Springer and Mandeville with her husband’s shotgun. The men’s testimony, from their confessions, against her was recanted. Then Emerson announced that Snow was pregnant, and she professed that she was entirely innocent of the crime with which she was charged. Not one to put up with any nonsense, Judge Boulton appointed a jury of matrons to confirm the pregnancy. Snow was indeed expecting her eighth child.

The jury returned their verdict in a mere thirty minutes: all three were guilty. There was no question of appeal in those days. The only sentence for their crime was death.

On January 31, 1834, Arthur Springer and Tobias Mandeville were hanged. It was a rare double hanging that drew many spectators from all around the city and beyond. The Public Ledger wrote of their deaths in great detail: “Mandeville made his exit from this world but with very little struggling and passed into eternity. His miserable companion endured a strike with human nature of nearly three minutes before animal life became extinct, and after hanging for the space of half an hour, both bodies were taken down and committed to their coffins. It is intended that they be gibbeted again at Spectacle Hill in the neighbourhood of the place where the murder was committed as a salutary warning of the awful consequences of crime.”

Many in Newfoundland, especially St. John’s, were determined that Snow not meet the same fate. Bishop Michael Fleming, the colourful Catholic leader with a habit of turning every issue into a sectarian one, made Snow a cause célèbre. Under his leadership, the Catholic clergy circulated a petition that claimed too many Catholics were being hanged, and that Judge Boulton was particularly prejudiced against them. Governor Cochrane ignored the petition, but allowed Snow’s hanging to be delayed until her baby was born.

Meanwhile, Snow languished in jail. She was visited regularly by Father Waldron, who prayed with her, heard her Confession and gave her Holy Communion.

In the early summer of 1834, in the first years of Representative Government, she gave birth to her last child. Then a platform was erected from a second-storey window of a building just east of the present courthouse on Duckworth Street. (The building was later destroyed in one of many fires to strike the city.)

On July 21, crowds gathered on Duckworth Street, waiting with bated breath for the hanging. Some hoped it would not go ahead. Inside Snow’s cell, Bishop Fleming celebrated Mass and, more than likely, he and Waldron administered the Last Rites to the doomed woman. She was dressed in her burial clothes, and reportedly screamed and became delirious when she saw herself in the mirror.

Afterwards, she composed herself and walked out on the platform. Her last words were, “I was a wretched woman, but I am as innocent of any participation in the crime of murder as an unborn child.” The platform was hauled in, Snow’s body dropped into the summer air, and she met her death. According to the Public Ledger, “The unhappy woman, after a few brief struggles, passed into another world.”

Snow was about forty years old and left eight orphaned children back in Port de Grave. Her body was interred in consecrated ground in the Catholic cemetery at the bottom of Long’s Hill, St. John’s. The extension of such a gesture to an executed criminal was highly unusual.

It was said that for the next fifty years Snow haunted the courthouse in St. John’s. A rock in Port de Grave near where John Snow was shot remained red for many decades.

Snow was the last woman hanged in Newfoundland, and the second-last person subjected to a public hanging—although those convicted of capital crimes were executed in private until the 1940s.