Joe Davidson was a farmer who lived on the 12th of Peel, about a mile-and-a-half from Alma. On the evening of Aug. 14, 1921 he worked late completing some farm work, and came in for a plate of supper at about 9pm.
Shortly before 10pm a couple of strangers knocked at his door. Their car was in the ditch, the men explained, and they needed a horse to pull it out of the mud and back onto the road. Davidson explained that he didn’t have a horse available. One of the men pulled out a gun and covered Davidson while the other ransacked the house. Their loot consisted of a dollar bill and Davidson’s gold watch.
They then took Davidson’s boots, and left the house with the instruction that if Davidson went outside within the next half hour they would shoot him. The robbers then made off across the farm to their car, which they had parked on a nearby sideroad.
One of the men was named George Dickson. Shortly after the Peel robbery, Dickson continued his crime spree when he took some tools from the Beatty Brothers plant in Fergus. This time he was not so lucky. He was caught and sentenced to a term in the Guelph jail as a guest of the county.
In jail he was either foolishly boastful or suddenly repentant. He told fellow prisoners and the guard about the robbery of farmer Davidson, and showed the watch he had stolen to reinforce his point. He also implicated his partner in crime, Otto Nesbitt, who lived in Fergus.
With the new key pieces of information the police resumed their investigation of the case. Armed robberies of this sort were rare events in Wellington County, and there was public pressure to solve the case.
Provincial Constable Melville took a statement from Dickson, and completed the investigation begun earlier by the Ontario Provincial Police. He had Dickson arrested on a charge of armed robbery. Dickson remained in jail awaiting a hearing, which was hurriedly set up at the end of September 1921.
The preliminary hearing took place in Fergus with Magistrate Hellyer presiding. The courtroom was packed. Many local people were familiar with the accused men, who had been living and working in the Fergus area. As well, the charges of armed robbery were unusual in rural Ontario, and had brought much publicity and a degree of notoriety to the accused.
First to testify was Joe Davidson. He relayed the events of the evening of Aug. 14. The questioning did not go smoothly for the crown. Davidson told the court that he knew Dickson but he could not initially pick him out in the courtroom, and he was unable to describe his clothing on the night of the robbery except to say that Dickson wore a straw hat.
Davidson said that he called County Constable Green to report the robbery, but waited until the next morning to make the call. By then, of course, an effective pursuit was impossible.
George Dickson was the next to take the stand. He told the court that the gun was a sawed off .22 rifle. It had been purchased in Fergus by a friend of his, Jim Quinn, who worked on a farm near Elora. Quinn had been attempting to secure a job with one of the threshing crews at work in the area.
Otto Nesbitt, the man named by Dickson as his accomplice, seems to have had some money. He engaged an expensive and high-powered Toronto lawyer named Morphy to conduct his defence. Morphy attempted to get Davidson to admit that it was Quinn, not Nesbitt, who accompanied him when he robbed Davidson. Morphy argued that Davidson and Quinn were old friends, and it was natural that they should attempt to shield one another and cast the blame on Nesbitt. But Davidson stuck to his original story.
Morphy’s arguments and tactics did not impress Magistrate Hellyer. He was convinced that Otto Nesbitt took part in the robbery, and ordered him sent to the Guelph jail to await trial. The magistrate refused to grant bail. Nesbitt’s ploy of getting the best lawyer he could find got him nowhere.
In any case, Nesbitt and Dickson did not have long to wait for their day in court. Judge Anson Spotton heard the case on October 3 in Guelph. Dickson entered a plea of guilty, and was told to wait until the following Monday morning for sentencing. Nesbitt’s plea was “not guilty.” He chose trial by jury, and Judge Spotton ordered him held in custody, refusing a request for bail. He would have a wait of almost a month for the jury sessions to be scheduled. He claimed loudly that he had nothing to do with the robbery.
Dickson attempted to secure the sympathy of the court. He told the judge that his downfall had been due to his selection of bad companions. By then the court was aware that he had something of a criminal record, and was, at the time, on bail and awaiting trial at Cooksville for stealing chickens. He claimed that he now had seen the error of his ways, and was determined to follow a lawful course in future.
Judge Spotton had heard it all before. He was an experienced and wise judge, and placed little faith in such displays of contrition. Spotton simply advised him that if he continued his present course he would end his days on the gallows.
As scheduled, George Dickson returned to court two days later, on Oct. 5. Judge Spotton took time to explain the sentence, stating that he was taking into account the seriousness of the crime, which had involved firearms, and the fact that this was not Dickson’s first brush with the law. On the other side, he was taking into account Dickson’s youth (he was only 21), and the fact that he seemed sincere in his desire to reform himself.
For those reasons he would not send Dickson to the Kingston Reformatory to serve his sentence. “The penitentiary is no place for a 21-year-old boy,” Judge Spotton told the court. Dickson would serve one year determinate and a year indeterminate at the Ontario Reformatory on the outskirts of Guelph.
Otto Nesbitt’s case came up later in the year. By then he had served more than two months in jail. His attempts to absolve himself failed miserably; there was no doubt that he was Dickson’s accomplice in the robbery at Joe Davidson’s farm. He received a similar sentence to that awarded to his accomplice George Dickson.
This case occurred at a time when gangsterism, fueled in large part by the illicit liquor trade, dominated many American cities and was spilling over at times into the larger cities north of the border. Canadian courts were determined that the casual use of firearms in crime would not become common here. Dickson and Nesbitt were very unwise in using a firearm in their robbery at the Davidson farm.
For the public, the case was an unpleasant reminder that the use of guns in criminal activity was not only an American phenomenon. Indeed, there was much sentiment that Dickson and Nesbitt got off lightly. Spotton’s sentence, though, seems to have been effective. Neither man appears to have had another brush with the law.