Somber Sunday - 7 June 1899 - Vancouver BC Canada

For Sombre Sunday, I post deaths from British Columbia, Canada from the first Sunday of each month as published in a selected newspaper or other source.


Today, two sad stories which were published in Victoria, British Columbia's Daily Colonist newspaper, 7 June 1899, although both events occurred in Vancouver, BC.

First, "A Murderer Let Suicide"

Donald Perrier, convicted of stabbing to death his mistress, Jennie Anderson (aka Rogers)1, in New Westminster, 30 November 1898, tried to kill himself on 6th of June with a pen-knife. Perrier had been granted a month's reprieve while doctors decided if he was sane or not. The newspaper reported that the knife he used "which was evidently smuggled in" to his cell was new.

He had claimed the killing was in self defence. According to the paper, Jennie Anderson had refused to continue as his mistress and he had followed her from Vancouver to New Westminster where she was stabbed in her room "in a house of ill fame".2

Perrier did recover, and was executed 30 June 1899 at New Westminster.


Second "A Sad Experience"

Another chapter is chronicled in the checkered life of Peter Deville, the famous French Pete, Klondike King and discoverer of the Treadwell mines. Deville is over 60 years old...." On visiting Paris where he was born he had fallen "in love with the daughter of an old friend of bygone days. The girl was but 20, very beautiful and highly cultured....Deville asked her to share his millions and become his bride."

Married six weeks before, they had just arrived in Vancouver when Deville's bride became ill and died. Deville "says he would give up all his wealth and become a beggar if it would bring back his wife."

Mina Deville died in hospital 6 June 1899 and was buried in Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery.

This post was written for Somber Sunday, or, as we spell it here in Canada, Sombre Sunday, which is a day to post obituaries or sad stories - the idea of Brenda Kay Wolfgram Moore who writes at Day-ly Genealogy Blogposts .




Notes

Note 1 The Canadian Death Penalty Index shows the victim as Annie Anderson but the death registration and all the newspaper articles I have seen call her 'Jennie'.

Note 2 This one quotation is from the Victoria Daily Colonist, 14 April, 1899, p. 8. All others are from the paper, 7 June, 1899. Located at The British Colonist Online Edition, 1858-1910</span>