Who Killed Jackie Bates? Murder and Mercy during the Great Depression (review)

On the surface at least, Who Killed Jackie Bates? is a book about the failed suicide of Ted and Rose Bates and the death of their nine-year-old son, Jackie. The Bates were English immigrants. In 1922, Ted settled into a butcher shop in Glidden, sk. In 1924, Rose arrived and, in 1925, Jackie was born. The Great Depression hit Glidden, 200 kilometres southwest of Saskatoon, hard. Rural incomes plummeted; butcher shop business suffered. The Bates family headed to Vancouver. More business failures followed. Relief officials in Vancouver sent the family back to Saskatchewan. In Saskatoon, Bates was told to take his family back to Glidden. Ted and Rose had had enough. A plan of family suicide was cooked up. A vehicle was rented and the family headed west out of Saskatoon. Eventually, Ted turned north on a rural road, parked the rented Chevrolet beside the barn at a country schoolhouse, and left it running. Carbon monoxide filled the car where Ted, Rose, and Jackie were huddled under a blanket. An hour passed; the car ran out of gas. Ted and Rose survived. Jackie – face yellow and lips blue – was dead. An autopsy and coroner’s inquest ruled death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Ted and Rose faced murder charges. A trial ended in March 1934 with a verdict of not guilty.

In Glidden, in the court of public opinion, Depression-era relief – not Ted and Rose – was put in the dock. The community gathered to support Ted and Rose: letters were written to R.B. Bennett; money was raised for a legal defence. Historians followed Glidden’s lead: the Bates case has been employed to condemn 1930s relief. In Who Killed Jackie Bates? Bill Waiser offers an alternative reading of the case.

Waiser has searched far and wide for sources. The records of the Bates trial were found at rcmp Headquarters, Ottawa. Saskatchewan Justice turned the Crown’s file on the case over to Waiser. Coroner’s records and the preliminary hearing transcript turned up in the basement of an old courthouse in Battleford. Interviews were undertaken and newspaper sources were sought out. With these sources, Waiser has constructed a detailed and suspense-filled account of the Bates case. Though he does not spare the realities of Depression-era Saskatchewan, or the unforgiving character of the province’s relief system, the focus here concerns ‘the troubled lives and desperate times of Ted and Rose Bates . . . [and] what drove them, as part of a double suicide, to murder their only child’ (177).

Waiser’s account goes ‘beyond a more traditional narrative approach in order to provide a better understanding and appreciation of the circumstances behind the sorry incident’ (177). His writing has the feel and texture of a novel. Scenes and dialogue are recreated, though Waiser asserts that every quotation was drawn from a verifiable source. The Great Depression serves as mise-en-scène for a lucid and compelling narrative in which the private world of Ted and Rose Bates serves as the central ground of explanation for the death of Jackie Bates. A denouement of inquiries and legal proceedings ends in a courtroom in Biggar, sk. Consistent with this approach, the book’s academic apparatus is kept to a minimum.

At the end of the book, Waiser argues that Ted and Rose Bates ‘were not simply helpless victims of the Depression, but flawed people with complex personalities’ (177). His micro-history of the Bates case yields portraits of two quite unattractive, even mysterious human beings. Waiser wonders how Ted Bates ‘evaded’ his duty to serve in the Great War (6). Bates’s arrival in the Glidden area ‘remains part of the mystery about the man’ (10). Waiser quotes Rose’s description of Ted as a ‘lazy, callous boor.’ At home in England, ‘most people found . . . [Rose Bates] high-strung and difficult to get along with,’ Waiser reports (12). While Ted was out gambling and drinking, Rose sat...