On the afternoon of Saturday, September 4, 1976, a man from Cooksville was walking through the bush near Enterprise Hill, looking for mushrooms. The spot was on the east side of Highway 115, north of Newcastle and about 60 miles east of Toronto. He came upon two garbage bags and ripped one open. Then he went to the Ontario Provincial Police.
The bags held the upper and lower parts of a man’s body. Late that afternoon, the middle section was still missing. Constable Paul McNeil came from Peterborough with Scott, a recently graduated German shepherd tracking dog. Scott found the third bag more than 100 feet away, tucked under a stump.
The coroner, Dr. D. K. Mosienko, was notified, and the remains were taken to the Forensic Laboratory in Toronto. The Canadian Statesman noted that it was the third body found in that area in ten years.
On Labour Day, police identified the dead man from fingerprints on file with the RCMP. He had a criminal record. He was Carmen Noel Allgrove, formerly of London, Ontario, and more recently of Toronto.
“It is rather gruesome, and we are looking upon this as a homicide,” Det. Insp. Athol Smith of the OPP told the Toronto Star. Smith said Allgrove had been dead at least four days. He described him as a single man with “no definite fixed place of abode.” The Star’s headline called him a “Toronto transient.” The papers gave his age as 38 or 39.
Investigators worked mainly in Toronto, on the theory that he had been killed and cut up there. On September 23, a 27-year-old man went to police headquarters with his lawyer and was arrested. Joseph Patrick Donoghue lived on King Street East. He was charged with murder.
Donoghue went on trial for second-degree murder on Monday, March 14, 1977, before Mr. Justice Edson Haines of the Ontario Supreme Court. The Star described him as a part-time university student. It described Allgrove as “an alcoholic homosexual.”
Crown attorney Mike Lynch had rejected 48 women as potential jurors. In his opening, he told the all-male jury that if they wondered why no women had been selected, “I’m confident you will see why” as the trial unfolded.
Lynch called the case “a very brutal and gruesome matter.” He said Allgrove had been stabbed more than 30 times and died of stab wounds to the heart. The body had been cut into four pieces with a knife and a hacksaw. The Crown said the bags were carried to the field in the trunk of a car Donoghue had rented.
Defence counsel Geoff Adair admitted on Donoghue’s behalf that he had caused Allgrove’s death. He said it was self-defence. He made no admission about the cutting up of the body.
Staff Sgt. Bernie Nadeau of the Metro homicide squad testified that Donoghue told him, “I don’t know (and) the doctors don’t know” why he cut up the body.
On March 16, Dr. Jerry Cooper, chief of psychiatry at York-Finch General Hospital, testified that Donoghue was likely insane at the time of the killing. Cooper said Donoghue may have been in a “homosexual rage” because Allgrove rejected his sexual advances. A homosexual spurned by his “lover,” Cooper said, “can go into an explosive rage.” The Globe and Mail reported that he said Donoghue had “worked himself up into a frenzy.”
Cooper quoted Donoghue on Allgrove: “There was a certain magnetism about him.” He said he detected no remorse in Donoghue, only concern for his own legal situation. Donoghue had never known his parents and had grown up in several foster homes.
The next day, Donoghue took the stand. About three dozen people listened in silence for an hour as he testified, in tears.
He said he picked up Allgrove in a church park and took him back to his apartment for a beer. Allgrove had just been put out of a home for men with drinking problems. Donoghue said he thought they were going to have sex. He took the active role in what he called “necking.” Allgrove first responded, he said, then “suddenly turned off.”
Donoghue said he had asked Allgrove to stay the night, then changed his mind and asked him to leave. Allgrove refused. When Donoghue’s back was turned, he said, Allgrove took a hunting knife from the kitchen and came after him, saying he had been used. Donoghue gave Allgrove’s words as: “You … are all alike. All you’re interested in is your own satisfaction and I’m going to stick you.” In the version Cooper had relayed the day before, the word was “queer.”
Donoghue described a struggle for the knife on the bed. He said he ended up on top with the knife in his hand and began stabbing. He said he clearly remembered only one blow, then his arm going up and down. “Somehow I thought if you stabbed a body it would be very hard, but I remember something very soft.” He said the knife broke.
He said Allgrove staggered from the bedroom, groping for a way out, and collapsed in a pool of blood in the hallway. The next thing Donoghue said he remembered was kneeling in the kitchen, sawing off a leg, “like it wasn’t Carmen.” He remembered mopping up the blood. “It seemed to be mopping forever.”
He woke the next morning feeling as if he had had a nightmare. “I think I would have been happy to die right there,” he said. He rented a car, put the bags in the trunk and drove with no destination in mind. When he saw a wooded area off the highway, he said, he thought: “I can hide it there and nobody will ever find it.”
Reporting his testimony, the Star described Allgrove as a man who “exhibited homosexual tendencies only when he was drinking.” The Globe and Mail described Donoghue as “soft-spoken, well-educated.”
On March 21, psychiatrist Dr. Basil Orchard testified that Donoghue was probably “terrorized or very, very frightened” and in a state of lowered consciousness. “I don’t think he could do it in a normal state.” Orchard said he interviewed Donoghue a few days after the killing and found him depressed and very anxious. He said Donoghue was “not particularly aggressive” and had “come to terms with his homosexuality and is quite comfortable with it.”
The next day, psychologist Dan Paitich testified that Donoghue was in good control of his emotions and would not have reacted violently to sexual rejection.
The Crown called a psychologist and a psychiatrist. The defence called a psychologist and three psychiatrists. The Globe and Mail’s Michael Keating wrote that the jury was left with a “welter of conflicting opinions.” Both sides agreed that after the stabbing, Donoghue went into what psychiatrists call a “dissociated state.” Keating offered his own explanation for the difficulty: “The circumstances were complicated because it was a homosexual murder.”
In closing, Adair called it a clear case of self-defence. Lynch said the only account of the night was Donoghue’s, and that he was “cunning, manipulative.” “He says he’s repeated this story 300 times,” Lynch told the jury. “He doesn’t cry every time, but he sure cried for you.” He argued that hiding the body and waiting a month to come forward did not fit a story of self-defence.
Lynch’s theory was that Donoghue felt he had been “hustled” for a few drinks and a bed. Faced with “rejection of his sexual advances,” Lynch said, he flew into a rage and killed Allgrove.
Both versions of the killing began with sex. In the defence’s account, Allgrove attacked because he felt used. In the Crown’s, Donoghue attacked because he was refused. The psychiatric evidence went further, and treated a gay man’s rejection as a cause of rage in itself.
The jury retired on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 23, and returned the next afternoon. It found Donoghue not guilty of second-degree murder and guilty of manslaughter. A murder conviction would have meant an automatic life sentence, with 10 to 25 years before parole.
On June 28, 1977, Haines sentenced Donoghue to seven years in penitentiary. He said Donoghue had killed Allgrove “in a homosexual frenzy,” and that his claim of self-defence was “probably concocted.” The Globe and Mail’s headline read “7-year term given for killing of homosexual.”
Donoghue appealed. On June 7, 1978, the Star reported that the Ontario Court of Appeal had upheld the conviction. Mr. Justice Charles Dubin dissented. He would have ordered a new trial, finding that Haines had failed to put the case for the accused to the jury as fully and fairly as the case for the Crown. Justices Arthur Jessup and Francis Weatherston held that if there were deficiencies in the charge, “no substantial wrong or miscarriage of justice resulted.” The Star’s headline read “Homosexual slayer’s conviction upheld.”
On June 21, 1978, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed Donoghue’s motion for leave to appeal.
Carmen Allgrove is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in London, Ontario.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Carmen Noel Allgrove (spelled Carman in the Canadian Statesman) |
| Born | 1936 |
| Age | 38, 39 or 40 |
| Gender | Male |
| Date of death | August 29, 1976 |
| Manner of death | Stabbed; multiple stab wounds to the heart |
| Location | Donoghue’s apartment, King Street East, Toronto; remains found near Enterprise Hill, Highway 115, north of Newcastle |
| Accused | Joseph Patrick Donoghue, 27 or 28, of King Street East |
| Charge | Second-degree murder |
| Defence counsel | Geoffrey Adair |
| Crown counsel | Michael Lynch |
| Judge | Mr. Justice Edson Haines |
| Verdict | Manslaughter, March 24, 1977 |
| Sentence | 7 years, June 28, 1977 |
Sources
- The Globe and Mail, September 7, 1976, p. 8 (Canadian Press)
- Toronto Star, September 7, 1976, p. A2
- The Canadian Statesman (Bowmanville), September 8, 1976, p. 1
- The Globe and Mail, September 25, 1976, p. 5
- Toronto Star, March 15, 1977, p. C2
- Toronto Star, March 17, 1977, p. B4
- Toronto Star, March 18, 1977, p. B2
- The Globe and Mail, March 18, 1977, p. 2
- Toronto Star, March 22, 1977, p. B2
- Toronto Star, March 23, 1977, p. B2
- The Globe and Mail, March 25, 1977, p. 5
- The Globe and Mail, June 29, 1977, p. 44
- Toronto Star, June 29, 1977, p. B2
- Toronto Star, June 7, 1978, p. A26
- R. v. Donoghue (1978), 23 N.R. 447 (S.C.C.)
- CanadaGenWeb’s Cemetery Project, St. Peter’s Cemetery, London, Ontario
- Photographs: The Canadian Statesman
Murder Village Map