“Slasher Given 2 Years For Wounding His Pal,” The Globe and Mail. August 30, 1939. Page 21.
---
Trenton, Aug. 29 (Special). - Pleading that his mind had been a blank at the time, Russell Wilson was convicted of slashing Clarence Gosleigh with intent to do grievous bodily harm on July 28, at Trenton. He was sentenced today by Magistrate J. Ambrose Shea of Kingston.
Gosleigh, according to medical evidence of Dr. E. A. McQuaide, missed death by a slight margin. ‘I don’t know why the man is alive today,’ Dr. McQuaide testified. ‘Both his external jugular veins were severe and he had lost considerable blood from a nasty throat wound about six inches long. I believe if Gosleigh had not exercised presence of mind in holding own jugular veins he would have died from loss of blood,’ Dr. McQuaide concluded.
Clarence Gosleigh, recovered after more than two weeks in Belleville Hospital, testified Wilson had slashed him across the throat with a sharp jack knife after a supposedly ‘friendly’ scuffle between Wilson and Manley Tripp in which Gosleigh had intervened. All three had been drinking wine prior to the affray, evidence showed.
‘After the scuffle,’ Gosleigh testified, ‘Wilson and I shook hands and I thought we had all settled down. Wilson called to me to come to the cabin door, and as I got to him, he slashed me across the throat. I grabbed my veins with both hands, because I knew I was bleeding to death and couldn’t last more than a few minutes, and ran for help.
Testifying on his own behalf, Wilson declared he had helped Manley Tripp, owner of the waterfront cabin on the Trenton Bay shore, consume two bottles of wine on the same day. ‘It hit me suddenly,’ Wilson said, ‘and during the scuffle I was hit on the head and everything went blank. I don’t remember anything more until some one told me I had slashed a man.’
Chief of Police William Bain testified he had apprehended Wilson outside the Tripp cabin, while Gosleigh was still lying on the shore.
The accused admitted he had slashed Gosleigh, the police chief said, ‘and when I asked him for the weapon, he produced the jack knife while still carried small specks of blood on the blade, although it apparently had been shoved into the earth.’
In defense, Counsel Howard Graham, K.C., contended Wilson was stupefied at the time, and did not know what he was doing.
Crown Attorney B. C. Donnan asked for a substantial penitentiary sentence on grounds that murder had been avoided by ‘the narrowest of all possible margins.’
‘This man,’ Mr. Donna said, ‘might today be facing possibility of execution for murder, but for the presence of mind shown by Mr. Gosleigh in seizing his own jugular veins and shutting off the flow of blood to some extent.’
[Wilson was 29, born in Michigan, immigrated in 1929, and had previously been in American jails and reformatories 5 times. He was a paper maker but had been unemployed for some time. He was convict #5742 at Kingston Penitentiary and worked in the mail bags. He was deported April 1941.]
