The inquest jury had barely settled back into their seats when the foreman rose to deliver the verdict. The courtroom at Bracebridge had been packed for days, the public benches crowded with the curious and the young women who had come to gawk at the two handsome men at the center of the proceedings. Now, after deliberations that seemed too short for the weight of the matter, the verdict was announced: open. There was insufficient evidence to show whether Christina Kettlewell had met her end by foul means or not.
The question of what had occurred at Seven Falls, north of Toronto, on that sunny spring day in 1947, remained an unsolved mystery. The case had begun eight days after Christina’s wedding. On the 21st of May, her family received devastating news: she had been found dead at Dinner Time Rapids, drowned in nine inches of water at the river’s edge, just 150 yards from the cottage called River Villa. The cottage itself had burned to the ground.
Her widowed husband, Jack Kettlewell, lay in a hospital in Orillia, apparently suffering from narcotic poisoning and a cut to his head. His friend, Ronald Barry, had rescued him but had been unable to find Christina. Some hours later, a local boatman named Melville Sweet discovered her body, searching with a flashlight through the gathering dark. The story of how the three of them came to be at that isolated cottage began four days before the honeymoon, when Jack Kettlewell and Christina Mokon were married on the 12th of May, 1947.
The wedding had been a hurried affair, driven by the couple’s fear that Christina’s family might try to prevent it. Christina’s family disliked Jack, and they disliked his close friend, Ronnie Barry, even more. Ronnie was ubiquitous—everywhere Jack went, he went—and the couple went nowhere without him. Christina had once expressed her reservations to a friend: if she married Jack, she’d get Ronnie, too.
And no woman wants two husbands. Christina was 22, born in Mimico, a suburb of Toronto, to strict Polish Catholic parents. She worked as a clerk at the Bank of Nova Scotia, where she was well regarded by her employers. Her parents had hoped she would marry Eddie Skura, a boyfriend to whom she was engaged for about a year, but she preferred the handsome, if somewhat reserved, Jack Kettlewell.
She had first met Jack in 1942, when she was sixteen, and the two had dated off and on since then. It was no grand passion, but they were understood to be a couple—or a trio, if you counted Ronnie, which you usually did. Jack was born John Rae Kettlewell in 1921, also in Mimico. As a child, he formed a close attachment to an Italian boy two years his senior called Ronald Barry.
When the war came, Jack was drafted into the army in 1943, serving in the Royal Dental Corps and rising to the rank of sergeant before his demobilization in June 1946. While he was away, Jack corresponded with both Ronnie and Christina. Ronnie often took Chris to the cinema and dances in Jack’s absence, on the understanding that the two were merely friends. Ronnie was an outgoing boy with quick, native intelligence, born Rinaldo Giuffo in 1919 in Naples, Italy.
In 1926, the family left Italy for Canada, settling in Toronto, where Rinaldo changed his name to the more Anglo-sounding Ronald Eugene Barry. He stood six feet one inch tall, with dark hair and green eyes, and was known as a teller of tall tales; people generally took what he said with a large grain of salt. He had various talents—an excellent ballroom dancer, he had taught dancing for a while, trained as a stenographer, worked for a time selling insurance, and after the war became involved in real estate, contracting for the building of homes to supply the post-war boom. He employed his friend Jack as a house painter after his service ended.
His future looked reasonably secure, but by late 1946 he had overextended his finances. He had a couple of houses built up to the roofline but found himself without the funds to complete them. To make matters worse, in the summer of 1946, he had bought the cottage at Dinner Time Rapids for $3,500, laying down a $500 deposit and carrying a mortgage of around $3,000. He now had the property valued at $6,000, and against this he borrowed from a Mrs.
Emma Barger, a woman of his acquaintance, sums amounting to almost $3,000. He seems to have done this with other people, also, with predictable results. Although this got Ronnie out of his immediate financial difficulties, his situation worsened when he was unable to service these multiple loans. His construction business floundered, and in 1947, he earned nothing in the first five months.
By late April 1947, after a five-year dilatory courtship, the couple decided they would marry. Ronnie was enthusiastic and made all the arrangements, acting as best man. On the 20th of May, at around 11:00 a. m.
, Ronnie claimed he discovered Jack lying on the sofa at River Villa, apparently comatose, and Chris staring out of the window. He couldn’t rouse Jack, and realizing he had been drugged, thought, “My god, here we go again. ” According to Ronnie, while he was attempting to awaken Jack, Christina set about writing a letter to Mrs. Edith Thomas, their landlady.
She asked him the date, and he obliged by telling her it was the 19th of May; he said it was only later he realized his mistake, and that it was in fact the 20th. He then went out to do some sunbathing, returning to the cottage occasionally to check on his comatose friend. He lay outside sunning himself all afternoon, and when he returned at about 6:30 p. m.
, he found Jack still lying on the sofa and Chris sitting in a chair in the living room, but he noticed blood on Jack’s pillow—he had a cut on his head. He asked Chris what had happened, but she didn’t reply. He decided to carry Jack outside, and as he was taking care of him, he looked back at the cottage and saw smoke coming from it. The cottage was on fire.
He could not find Christina and only managed to rescue a bag from near the door which had papers in it. About twenty or thirty minutes later, a boat arrived with Major Lawrence Scardefield, the nearest neighbor, who had come over on seeing smoke rising from the direction of the cottage. They had tried to tackle the fire using water drawn from the river, but it was hopeless—the cottage was largely of wooden construction and burned to the ground in little more than an hour. Scardefield took Ronnie and Jack downstream to Seven Falls, where Ronnie had left his car, and from there Ronnie drove his friend to the Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Orillia before informing the police of the incident.
The autopsy was carried out by Dr. C. E. Fielden, who determined that Christina had died of asphyxiation caused by drowning.
There were no signs of violence to her body. Her feet, which had been bare when she was found, were unblemished apart from a small cut on the upper side of one toe. Samples were sent to Professor Jocelyn Rogers for analysis. Tests revealed a small quantity of codeine in the stomach contents, indicating that an indeterminate amount of the drug had been consumed prior to her death.
Although Professor Rogers declared it was not possible to determine how much codeine had been consumed, as codeine is processed quickly by the body, he noted that it was eminently possible that she had taken a much larger quantity than was discovered in her system. The police were unable to interview Jack initially as he lay unconscious in hospital, but when he did make a statement to Inspector Thomas R. Wright, he said he had been mostly unconscious from around 11:00 a. m.
on the 20th of May up until the time at which he recovered in hospital. Ronnie Barry was more forthcoming, and he had a strange, in fact a bizarre, story to tell. He said that in July 1946, Chris had asked him to lend her $2,000. She would not tell him what she wanted such a large sum for—she earned just $25 per week at the bank—but on being pressed, she told him she was being blackmailed over a sexual assault she suffered at the hands of four men at a church hall dance.
He loaned her the $2,000 and thereafter gave her $2,000 a month, he said, to pay her blackmailers up until Christmas, by which time he had loaned her a staggering total of $12,000 Canadian dollars. He said that on the 28th of April 1947, Chris arrived at 110 Tyndall Avenue, where he and Jack were staying, and gave him an envelope containing $10,000, saying her blackmailers had agreed to help her. She offered to deposit this money in the Bank of Nova Scotia for him, and he readily accepted, also giving her a further $5,000 he had in his possession at that moment. She had therefore taken $15,000 of his money to the bank to deposit for him.
The following day, he found both Jack and Chris unconscious in the apartment. He tried for two hours to rouse them without success. Then he noticed an unsealed envelope addressed to him on the table. It said she had tried to kill Jack and commit suicide herself by poisoning them both.
It read: “Dear Ronnie, I guess when you read this letter, things will be kind of changed some. You stopped me from doing anything the last time, but this time you won’t know anything about it until it’s all over. I hate to do this to you as I know the spot it will place you in and the explanations that will no doubt have to be made. No kidding.
I feel like a heel placing you in such a predicament as you’ve been better than a brother to me, but what can I do? When you love someone, you really love them, and I know that there is no one for me but Jack. And if I can’t have him, I don’t want anyone else to. I have waited years, you might say, in the hope that Jack would ask me to marry him, but I now realize I am just a passing fancy where he is concerned.
And as I said many times to you, if I can’t have him, no one else is going to have him. I just couldn’t bear the thought of another girl being Mrs. Kettlewell. Jack is in the bedroom asleep, little knowing what is coming.
I hope you won’t judge me too harshly, but you know what I told you would happen if Jack threw me aside. Please say goodbye to Mrs. Thomas and all the others for me. I guess there is not much more to say.
Thanks for everything. I really wish things could have been different, but such is life, I guess. Don’t blame yourself for anything. It certainly isn’t your fault that things didn’t turn out.
Thanks again, Chris. ”
It was an odd letter, rather mild considering that she appeared to be contemplating murder, but it told him the story of what had happened. It was, he said, the second such letter she had written threatening suicide. He spent the remainder of the day and night trying to revive both Christina and Jack.
The following morning, succeeding in getting both to vomit by administering a mustard and salt water emetic. By midday, both were recovering. Concerned that Chris’s family would be worried by her absence, he said, “Jack seemed to think that maybe if we send a telegram saying they were married, it would keep her people from worrying too much. ” They did this, and later, apparently at Chris’s own insistence, Ronnie telephoned her sister Helen to tell her this, too.
By Thursday morning, the 1st of May, both Jack and Christina were feeling much better. Later that morning, Chris confessed to Ronnie she had not banked the $15,000 for him at all. He didn’t tell Jack or anyone else about the money, he said, at Chris’s request. The three of them went up to the cottage for a week, returning to Toronto on the 7th of May.
The couple decided to get married anyway, as they had already told her family this story. Barry went to see a priest, Father Louis Markel, to make arrangements. He didn’t get an opportunity to ask Chris about the missing $15,000 until Sunday, the 11th of May. This time, she told him she had given the whole $15,000 back to the blackmailers.
The following day, Chris left the house early at 7:30 a. m. , and Barry called out of the window to ask where she was going. She said she was going for a walk, but a little later that morning, they learned she had gone to visit her old fiancé, Eddie Skura.
That evening, Chris’s sisters, Helen and Sophie, came by to try to prevent her from marrying Jack. There was a scene. Barry demanded she make her mind up, and Chris chose Jack, after which Jack and Chris left. Sophie accused the men of kidnapping Chris, and Helen went to the police, reporting that her sister was being drugged and forced to marry.
Police Chief Fred Herman said that as Chris was 22, there was little he could do in respect of whom she chose to marry. Arrangements for the wedding had been made for Tuesday, the 13th of May, but in view of developments, they decided to press ahead immediately and called on a surprised but willing Father Markel, who performed the ceremony there and then. Now the inquest had delivered its open verdict. The coroner had heard evidence of the autopsy, of the presence of codeine in the stomach contents, and of Jack’s wound and illness from Dr.
R. C. Wade, who had attended him at the hospital. It heard from the boatman and others who had been called to the scene.
But its two principal witnesses were Jack Kettlewell and Ronnie Barry, both subjected to the most intense grilling by Crown Attorney C. P. Hope. Jack, clearly embarrassed, admitted he and Ronnie Barry had been in a sexual relationship since their teenage years.
He also said in response to questioning that he was certain that Christina knew nothing of this. Ronnie Barry denied that his relationship with Jack was a sexual one, but under pressure, he conceded that there had been one, saying it had been of short duration and not since 1939. Mr. and Mrs.
Thomas, the former being the person whose tablets were suspected of being the source of the codeine found in Christina’s body, gave telling evidence. Mr. Thomas said he was missing those tablets, but that as they were in a plain box, Christina would hardly have known what they were. Interestingly, he said that Ronnie Barry had collected his prescription for him and therefore knew exactly what they were.
He also told the inquest Chris was frightened and feared that if Ronnie went on their honeymoon with them, something would happen. He described Ronnie Barry as a speculator and manipulator who spoke of money in a grandiose manner. Asked who Kettlewell was to Barry, he replied, “Barry’s boyfriend. ” And contrary to Barry’s claim that Chris owed him $15,000, Mr.
Thomas said Chris had told him Barry had $200 of hers. Helen, Chris’s sister, told the inquest of her fears Chris had been drugged, said that Chris herself had told her she had twice found herself drugged after eating something at Ronnie and Jack’s apartment, that she was afraid of the two men, and that Chris had confided in her that Jack and Ronnie were a bunch of crooks. A friend told the court that Chris had been distressed to have awoken confused and naked at Ronnie and Jack’s place, having been unconscious for a period. The doctor who treated Jack at the hospital gave interesting evidence.
He said Jack’s condition was normal when he was examined on arrival at Orillia. His blood pressure was a little low, but there was no indication that he was suffering from poisoning, nor could the cut to his head have impaired his consciousness in any way, being of an entirely superficial nature. He seemed to be suffering from some form of shock, he said. Asked specifically by Crown Attorney Hope, he said it would be possible for Jack to have feigned his illness.
Hope summed up for the jury, pointing to the many difficulties presented by the conflicting evidence. Regarding the preposterous nature of Ronnie Barry’s testimony, he called Ronnie a liar of the most blatant kind, one whose purpose and design are shrouded in mystery. After the jury retired, they returned an open verdict. The evidence pointing to the involvement of Ronnie Barry and Jack Kettlewell, especially the former, in Chris’s death, although circumstantially compelling, was counterbalanced by the evidence which suggested suicide.
The sudden enthusiasm for marriage after a five-year dilatory courtship. Why had it become so important that Jack marry Chris that April, a woman he showed little sign of loving? Why did Chris write the letters to Ronnie suggesting suicide? And was it chance alone that caused him to rescue these letters from the fire?
Why did he not inform Jack his life was in danger following the first occasion on which he was allegedly poisoned? And why did Jack not realize he had been poisoned when he came round under Ronnie’s administrations on April the 29th? Yet for all this, he still wished to marry Chris. Three suicide notes had been written, two to Ronnie and one to Mrs.
Thomas, but in Ronnie’s possession too. Curiously enough, these three letters, which alone supported the notion that Chris was suicidal or had murderous intention towards Jack, were all rescued by Ronnie from the fire. Without these, there was nothing except Ronnie’s say-so to suggest that Chris had ever entertained any thoughts of harm towards herself or anyone else. A handwriting expert had attested that he was certain the letters had all been written by Christina Kettlewell.
The story of blackmail did not stand up to scrutiny. Although a letter alluded to her having encountered “four sex maniacs” at the church dance, the context and wording hardly suggested a criminal assault of a serious kind had occurred. Barry could not offer any proof as to where he had obtained such a large sum as $12,000 to give to Chris. He was known to be struggling financially himself and in constant debt.
The promissory note for $15,000 signed by Chris appeared to have been secured by deception in some way. Her feet showed no signs of cuts or any indication that she could have walked 150 yards barefooted over rough stony ground, brambles, and brush. One single small cut on a toe was on the upper surface and did not suggest it was caused as a result of such a walk. It appeared to detectives quite impossible that she could have walked to the river.
And then there was the matter of insurance. Just three weeks before the cottage burned down, Barry had paid a premium of $95. 50 for fire and theft insurance on the cottage and its contents, his old policy having lapsed. He told police he had $500 in cash in the cottage and Jack had $200 there.
The insurance on the cottage and its contents stood to net him around $8,000. Of even greater interest was the fact that Barry had taken out or arranged insurance policies on both Jack and Chris’s lives with a double indemnity clause, which would double the payout if death occurred to either by means of an accident. The insurance on Chris’s life was given as $5,000, or $10,000 if caused by an accident and the double indemnity clause was invoked. The beneficiary in either case would be the surviving spouse.
In the case of Christina’s death, that meant Jack Kettlewell stood to gain a small fortune. A psychiatrist’s assessment of Ronnie during the inquest was that he was a pathological liar, a man who preferred to tell a lie even when a truth would not incriminate him. During observation throughout the proceedings, Ronnie was enjoying every minute of them. Neither he nor Jack seemed to resent the press attention.
They arrived at court together and signed autographs for the inevitable followers of dubious celebrity. The inescapable conclusion of the circumstances, for those who examined them closely, was that murder was the purpose, murder for financial gain based on an insurance fraud. And yet, against the overwhelming flow of this narrative, stood the absolute stop provided by the three letters. If these three letters were written by Chris, then there could never have been a successful prosecution against Ronald Barry.
And they appear to be genuine. There is no suggestion whatsoever, outside of these letters, that Chris intended suicide or had ever intended suicide, nor that she had ever intended Jack harm. The letters and their contents do not appear to reflect any known aspect of Christina’s character. She is described as the life and soul of the party, a lovely girl.
The boatman commented on her, so did the postmaster. Yet from the letters, we are expected to believe she twice tried to murder Jack, and that on the final occasion she planned to burn down the cottage whose owner had, in her letter, she particularly thanked for his kindness to her. The letters themselves read not of despair, but are quiet, subdued expressions of persuasion. They are internal musings.
“But what can I do? ” she asks—a rhetorical rumination of puzzlement, rather than a fixed expression of purpose. The internal problems of the letters, their inherent implausibility, the peculiar circumstances that all three were found in Ronald Barry’s possession, preserved from the fire whilst everything else, including $700 in cash, had burned—all counts for nothing if she wrote the letters. And she did.
What happened up at Seven Falls that late spring day in 1947 can never be known in precise terms. Ronnie Barry needed money because his business had stalled. He had borrowed money he could not repay. The insurance on the cottage covering fire and theft had been personally renewed by him earlier that month.
He had worked in insurance; he knew what was required. There must be no loopholes. He stood to make $8,000 from the cottage fire and its destroyed contents, but it wasn’t enough. But he had another means of boosting his winnings by making a simultaneous claim on life insurance taken out on Chris.
Christina’s lost week, when she went missing from home, was a device employed to ensure her marriage to Jack took place. Barry rang her family to say they were married to prevent them from worrying, he claimed. But the objective here was to coerce Christina into marriage by having her conspicuously spend several days at the apartment with Jack. This practice was common in parts of Southern Italy and is known by the Sicilian term “fuitina,” or sudden escape—something Ronnie would probably be familiar with from his Neapolitan heritage.
Chris was obviously drugged heavily during her stay to achieve her detention. Her waking naked a day or two later, with no recollection, filled her with guilt and shame, a sense of her own unworthiness, and an obligation to her abusers. She told her friend tearfully that she awoke naked and had lost two days. She showed her a bruise on her abdomen.
From April onwards, the two men were determined Chris should marry Jack. Great efforts were made to secure this end. Chris was drugged. She was compromised.
To a decent girl of her upbringing in 1940s Canada, the only means of salvaging her reputation was marrying Jack. She had misgivings still. He and Ronnie were crooks. There was something unsettling about them.
But she was compromised. Ronnie contrived by some means to persuade her to write the letters about Jack. He pressed on her the urgency of her doing so, prompted her to threaten suicide as a means of persuasion even. In any case, by whatever means it was done, it was done.
Chris wrote the letters, and in doing so, she signed her own death warrant. Chris wrote the final letter on Ronnie’s prompting, not to him, of course, but to Mrs. Thomas. She did that on the 19th of May because that was the date on the letter.
But something happened to prevent the plan from going ahead on that day. We know this because Ronnie had arranged to return to Toronto on the 19th but told the boatman he would delay until the 20th. His work was not yet done. In any case, something caused a delay.
The letter was banked for the following day. The intention was surely for Chris to die in the cottage fire, but Chris either escaped the cottage in a drug-sodden haze, or else she was not in it at the time the fire was lit. Any attempt subsequently to place Christina in the burning cottage would be futile—the fire quickly raged out of control, its timber superstructure burning like kindling. They could not get near to it.
Things had not worked out as planned. It became necessary to improvise. Chris was now carried to the river and drowned. Her drugged state ensured she did not struggle.
But it was not ideal for her killers. They had introduced an unplanned element. Chris’s death was now a separate event from that of the fire, unaccountable. Her feet had no marks of the walk she would have to have taken down the steep stony path to the river.
It lent the story its most bizarre feature. Nevertheless, Ronnie had the three suicide notes, all rescued by him from the fire. It was upon this story of the troubled girl and her desire to kill herself and her husband that everything now rested. Afterwards, Jack was afraid.
He hadn’t Ronnie Barry’s nerve, his willingness to brass it out. After Chris had been killed and the cottage had been set on fire, he panicked. His role was only a passive one. Ronnie would do the heavy lifting.
Jack would pretend to be unconscious, himself drugged. A minor cut on his head may have been deliberately inflicted—superficial, never intended to wound. His memory loss was a mere convenience. It made his explanations to police so much easier.
He knew nothing about the fire and nothing about Chris’s death. Jack was never drugged. The doctor found nothing wrong with him apart from shock and fright on his arrival at hospital. After the inquest closed, suspicions remained about the fire and about the death.
But murder cases are not built on suspicions, and although the case remained an open investigation, it was acknowledged by Christmas of that year that it was an unsolved case. Questions were asked in the House of Commons concerning the bobby soxers and autograph-hunting girls who swamped the two handsome principals in the case, two young men who seemed to thoroughly enjoy their dubious celebrity, whose photographs were in every newspaper. One newspaper advocated the punishment of these girls but asked rhetorically who was to do it when their parents were inside the court indulging themselves in the scandalous proceedings on offer within. Although strong suspicions remained with police, and Christina’s family were quite certain that the happy, smiling girl they knew had been murdered by the two men, the case was closed.
In May 1948, Ronnie Barry filed a claim for $8,671 in respect of the various insurance claims. Presumably, he felt he had earned it. It is not known if Jack filed a similar claim in respect of the double indemnity insurance on Chris; no record of it exists. Jack and Ronnie remained close for the next two years and then drifted apart.
In January 1950, Ronnie went to Staten Island, New York, as had long been his intention. But he had difficulties here. On the reverse of his immigration card is an official note: “Subject is a sexual pervert. Should be referred to board of special inquiry.
” Jack remained in Toronto, where he worked as a house painter. In 1951, he married again and had two children. According to his son, he last saw Ronnie Barry in 1956, when Ronnie gave the son his Pekingese dog and finally moved to New York permanently. He was never heard of again.
Jack subsequently separated from his second wife but was never divorced from her. In the 1990s, his two children discovered by chance about the events at Seven Falls involving their father and his friend Ronnie Barry five decades earlier. It was a terrific shock to them. They never brought the matter up with him.
By then he was old, somewhat reserved in nature. What thoughts, what regrets he may have had of the matter, he kept to himself. He died at the age of 76 in 1998, some 50 years after the death of Christina Mokon, who had been his wife once for eight days.
