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Article Excerpt
The sandy ridges on the landscape south of Delta Marsh provide ideal growing conditions for bur oak, Manitoba's only native oak tree. While thousands of these bur oaks grow throughout the area, a lone oak, visible for miles, is unique. The "Murder Oak," as it has come to be known, grows near a dirt road some three miles west of a modest farm that was very typical of those on the Portage Plains in the 1940s.
Among the many murder trials in Manitoba's past, the "Murder Oak" case of September 1945 stands out. Not only does it illustrate the workings of the criminal justice system of the 1940s, it deals with a case based largely on circumstantial evidence that progressed remarkably rapidly from arrest to conviction to hanging. It took an unusual turn when an attempt was made at racial profiling to defend the accused.
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The farm that brought the people involved in these events together belonged to Douglas L. Campbell, who had moved to Winnipeg to serve as the provincial Minister of Agriculture. He rented the farm to Wesley Owens and his wife Maxine, who lived there during the summers of 1943 to 1945. The Owens had two young children, a hired girl to help with housework, and a hired man to help with the farm chores. All lived together in the two storey house, with the Owens family using the bedroom on the main floor. The hired girl and hired man each had a bedroom upstairs. The help had every Saturday night and every other weekend off, so on most weekends the Owens family had the house to themselves.
The hired girl was sixteen year-old Pearl Dell from Portage la Prairie. She looked older than her years and spoke often of a boyfriend named Nick, who she had met at a dance earlier that summer and had gone out with several times. Pearl often spent weekends in Portage, either at her parent's home or with her older sister, who was married with her own home nearby. The hired man was 48-year-old Baldwin "Baldy" Jonasson, a bachelor born in Iceland who at the age of two arrived at the Lake Manitoba Narrows with his parents. In winter, Baldy fished on Lake Manitoba and in summer he worked at farms in the Portage area. Unlike most Icelanders of the day, who prided themselves on their ability to read and write, Baldy was illiterate. However, he did own a car, which was more than most farm hands could afford, and he had a good reputation as a reliable farm hand. Few knew that, in 1927, Baldy had been convicted for assaulting a young girl.
Baldy and Pearl appeared to get along well through the summer of 1945. He frequently gave her a ride to Portage for the weekend and back to the farm on Sunday evening. It was one such Sunday night, 9 September, that Baldy went to Pearl's sister's house to give her a ride back to the Owens farm. Monday was washday, and when she had left for the weekend, Pearl assured Mrs. Owens that she would be back by Monday morning to help with the wash. Monday came and went, but there was no sign of Pearl or Baldy.
On Tuesday morning, 11 September, Jim Wilkinson, a neighbour, was leaving his yard in a horse-drawn wagon and saw something lying on the roadside. He drove up and discovered that it was Baldy, who was very weak and could barely speak. He had a blood-soaked bandage on his neck and a cut across his left wrist. Jim returned home to get his brother Art, who had a car. When Art arrived, Baldy said that he had an accident and his car was stuck in the ditch further down the road. They picked Baldy up and placed him in the back seat. Weak from loss of blood, he hoarsely whispered to Jim that Pearl was in his car dead. Art drove to a nearby farm, which had a telephone, to summon the police. The Wilkinson brothers then took Baldy to the Portage Hospital.
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Later, an RCMP officer heard Jonasson's version of events. He claimed that an accident had occurred west of where his car had been found. It had rained hard on Sunday and the roads were slippery. He had taken a corner too sharply and hit a culvert. Pearl's head had gone through the windshield, as had his own head. He removed a piece of windshield glass from her neck and...
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