One cool Monday morning of June 12, 1933, a woman with a pillow case filled with some personal items showed up at the Moorefield railway station, and talked the crew of the local freight train into taking her to Palmerston, seven miles up the line.
The train arrived about 9am. The woman strolled up to the main street and went into Best’s café, where she ordered a meal.
The waitress thought the woman was acting rather strangely, and her suspicion was confirmed when the woman told a convoluted story about men with dynamite coming to blow up her home.
While she was eating she asked the proprietor if she might hide in the basement. After she finished eating, she started to leave without paying. One of the waitresses called her back, which she did so agreeably, and paid the bill without question. She was rattled, she said, about the men with the dynamite.
Before she left she scribbled a note for the restaurant staff. It read, “Telephone Ed Lambkin. Tell everybody to be on hand at Jim’s house tonight and to be well armed and outside: 29 of them and three trunks of dynamite.” She told the proprietor that, because her brother’s farm was to be blown up, she was much safer in Palmerston.
The woman then left the restaurant and headed for the Hess Hotel, where she registered as Jess N. Abbott, RN, of Maryborough. The clerk, Sylvester “Fat” Dopfer, thought there was something very strange about the woman. She asked him to hide her, but he managed to get her into one of the hotel’s guest rooms.
When she was out of sight, “Fat” called Constable Oldfield of the Palmerston office of the Ontario Provincial Police. The description “Fats” gave him matched that of a woman being sought in Guelph for some months. She had been at the Homewood Sanitarium the previous November for an examination, but had walked out before the doctors saw her. The constable immediately got in touch with Chief Robert Wilson of the Palmerston force, and Doctors J.R. Riddell and J.C. Ross. Meanwhile, several people had noticed the woman sitting on the window sill of the second floor room, brandishing a pistol. Surprisingly, no one though it worthwhile to notify either hotel staff or the police.
About 11:30am the quartet of two constables and two doctors arrived at the Hess Hotel. “Fat” directed them to the second floor room occupied by Jess. They knocked, and she told them to go away. When they tried the door they found it had been locked from the inside. “Fat” Dopfer, who had been watching, quickly produced a key for the room. “I’ll soon get in,” he muttered. He had no problem unlocking the door, but when he tried to swing it open it was obvious that Jess had shoved the bureau against it.
“Fat” braced himself, put his shoulder to the door, and hefted his weight against it. The door moved a couple of inches. Suddenly a bullet smashed through the door, narrowly missing his head. Before he could move a second shot splintered through the door and smashed into his chest. He collapsed unconscious to the floor.
The constables carried “Fat” into a vacant bedroom, where the two doctors attended to the wound. Bravely, the police officers returned to the door and attempted again to push the door open. It would not budge. Jess, obviously, had strengthened the barricade.
Anticipating a siege, OPP Constable Oldfield called the Guelph detachment, explained the situation, and asked for reinforcements. They sent two men, armed with canisters of tear gas.
Before the additional officers arrived, Oldfield and Chief Wilson persuaded Jess to toss the gun out the window. Eventually she did so. It was a .38 calibre revolver, with bullets in four of the six chambers. She had carried the gun in a holster under her dress. One of the waitresses at Best’s café had seen the end of the gun sticking through her dress, but at the time had thought it was a bottle, not a gun. Women armed with handguns were not regular patrons of the restaurant.
The police officers borrowed a ladder, and used it to gain entrance to the room through the window. When they climbed in Jess seemed delirious, and put up no struggle when Oldfield arrested her. He took her to the lockup. By making a few phone calls he was able to piece her story together.
Jess Abbott, a woman in her mid-40s, was a nurse who had lived in Essex, near Windsor. She had returned to the Moorefield area in 1932. Her bizarre behaviour had resulted in her being taken for the mental examination to the Homewood the previous fall. When she walked out she had made her way to the farm of her brother, Jim Norton, on Maryborough Concession 10 near Moorefield.
She had been on the OPP’s “wanted” list since then, but the force did not have the manpower available to follow up on the case. There was no indication that she might be a threat to others or to herself. By June of 1933, her file was buried under those of more pressing cases. Jess was safely in the lockup when Constable Mennie arrived from Guelph, accompanied by a second officer and a carload of tear gas. That evening Mennie returned to Guelph with Jess as his prisoner. Rather than the jail, he took her to the Homewood Sanitarium, where the staff installed her in a secure room.
The next morning police retrieved Jess for an appearance before Magistrate Frederick Watt. He remanded the case for a week, to June 20, to give time for a full medical evaluation. Crown Attorney J.M. Kearns told reporters that he would ask for her to be sent to a mental institution, rather than jail.
At her second court appearance, Jess heard the unanimous conclusion of the doctors that she was unfit to stand trial. Their evidence even persuaded Magistrate Watt, who was an old-fashioned no-nonsense judge and usually placed little faith in arguments of mental instability. He sentenced her to be committed to the mental hospital in Hamilton for treatment. Meanwhile, “Fat” Dopfer’s condition improved. He was a very lucky man.
The bullet had entered his chest and passed very near his heart. Because he was bent over and pushing at the door when he was shot, the bullet had lodged in his right hip. It was a miracle that it had not, apparently, passed through any vital organs. A week after the shooting the bullet was still in his hip.
After examining x-rays carefully, the local doctors decided to wait until the patient improved before operating.
By the 1930s the treatment of the mentally ill had improved significantly since the 19th century, but patients could still slip through the cracks. Jess Abbott had been identified as having severe problems eight months before the shooting, but the authorities did not consider her escape from the Homewood as worth pursuing.
She was very lucky that “Fats” Dopfer did not die from the pistol shot. A manslaughter charge, rather than one of shooting with intent to do bodily harm, might not have been dealt with so sympathetically by courts of 75 years ago.