The Murder of Dennis Summers 1855

Earliest records in the City of St. John's Directory show the building as a concrete warehouse owned by the Baine Johnston Company General Merchandise. Between this time and 1925 the building was converted as a bank by the Canadian Bank of Commerce.

Sometimes an old crime record gives you almost everything you need to become curious and almost nothing you need to solve the mystery.

On October 8, 1855, a 20-year-old St. John's man named Dennis Summers was stabbed in the heart.

The location was particularly interesting: behind Baine Johnston, one of the major mercantile firms operating in St. John's at the time. The primary historic headquarters of Baine, Johnston & Co. was located along Water Street on property known historically as "Horton's Plantation," situated between Baird's Cove and Ayre's Cove in downtown St. John's.

The surviving coroner's record is brutally simple. It identifies Summers as a 20-year-old man whose father, Patrick Summers, was a butcher, and records the cause of death as being stabbed in the heart behind Baine Johnston.

And that's where the historical trail becomes frustratingly thin.

There is no detailed story in the surviving coroner's entry explaining who stabbed him, what led to the confrontation, or whether anyone was ultimately convicted.

But think about the St. John's of 1855.

This was a busy commercial town. Water Street and the surrounding streets were crowded with merchants, sailors, labourers and tradesmen. Behind one of the city's major commercial establishments, a young man was fatally stabbed.

What happened between Summers and his killer?

Was it a drunken confrontation?

A personal dispute?

A robbery?

Or something that began as an ordinary disagreement and ended with a knife through the heart?

We don't know.

And that uncertainty is part of what makes historical crime so compelling.

Today, we expect investigators to reconstruct a crime through fingerprints, DNA, cameras and digital records. In 1855, much of the evidence disappeared with the witnesses.

Dennis Summers was only 20 years old.

His death was recorded in a few lines.

But behind those lines was a young man whose life ended violently in the middle of nineteenth-century St. John's.

Sometimes history gives us the crime.

The tragedy.

The location.

And the victim.

But it leaves us searching for the rest of the story.