During the final hours of October 10, 1961, Everett Turpin murdered his wife Dorothy Turpin with an ax. The following morning he drove his Ford F-1 into town, parked in front of the police station, got out, had a cigarette, then turned himself in. However Everett Turpin would provide no further details about the crime except to say that it had happened.
It was up to the police to reconstruct the events that culminated in Dorothy Turpin’s death. The only thing they have said with any certainty is that Dorothy Turpin’s headless body lay on the floor where Everett had said it would be, a bloody ax still partially embedded in the stump of the neck.
To this day, her head has never been recovered.
The case was tried as homicide with Everett’s initial confession serving as the key piece of evidence. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers and sentenced to death by hanging. And that was all there was to the Turpin case. Or so it would seem until nearly half a century later new evidence was brought to light by the passing of Robert Cook.
Robert Cook was a beloved scholar of all things weird who spent his later years traveling the country to collect stories of ghosts, goblins, and anything that went bump in the Canadian wilderness. When Robert Cook died in 1990, nobody had any clue that one of Canada’s greatest true crime mysteries was about to be solved.
But before he was a beloved scholar, Cook was just another young man trying to find their place in the world. He worked many jobs as he searched for his place. One such job that Mr. Cook held was that of a guard in the Toronto Jail — during the Everett Turpin execution.
Cook’s library of esoteric and occultic texts was sold during an estate sale in 1992. It was several years after that sale before the purchaser (who would like his anonymity be maintained) stumbled upon a composition notebook stuck to the back of one of the dense volumes on Gnostism. Little was thought of the discovery until the signature on the final page revealed it to be handwritten by Everett Turpin.
At last, light could be shed on that cold October night so many years ago.
But the notebook has only raised more questions than it answered.
Chief among them was how the notebook came to be in Cook’s possession. Considering the contents, and Cook’s affable nature, it is this author’s belief that Cook befriended Turpin. Furthermore, I suspect that Cook was the one that convinced Turpin to write out his experience, as capturing these stories in the teller’s own words was such a crucial part of Cook’s later approach to studying folklore and the supernatural.
But if this were the case, why not make the notebook public?
Then again, what good would that have done?
Who but Cook would believe such a story?
Start at the beginning he says. But what beginning is that? The beginning of October 10th? There was a kind of beginning there. The kind that rises up out of an ending. But would you understand that day if I began there? Can you understand the war by starting a history on May 8, 1945?
No.
To understand October 10th, I need to tell you about the August beforehand.
Dorothy and me weren’t ever well off. Never had been, never expected to be, never had a problem with that. But when her father passed he left us an inheritance we used to fix up the barn out back and purchase a couple cows.
With what little we had left, we decided we’d take a vacation. Nothing fancy, just drive on down to the coast. Dorothy never seen the ocean before. She was like a little girl, the way her face lit up at the sight of it.
We stayed at a bed and breakfast right there on the beach. To this day, I can’t shake the feeling that’s where it all went wrong. The beach. If I had picked a place further away from the ocean maybe none of this would have happened.
But that’s me looking back at things with what I know now.
That first night there was wonderful. I was pretty exhausted from the long drive, and the sounds of them waves crashing nearby were like a lullaby. We woke up to watch the sun rise, just me and her sitting together on the sand. When it’s time for me to go, I hope that’s the last memory I see.
I had a harder time falling asleep that second night. I wish I could say it was filled with nightmares and premonitions of what were to come, but I’d be fibbing if I said it was anything at all. It was just another night away from home.
That morning I was stiff and sluggish. Dorothy suggested we go for a swim to help ease the tension out of my body but I didn’t feel up to it. I told her to go ahead and to enjoy herself. That was the last time I saw my wife. Or, at least the last time that my wife was Dorothy Turpin and not that thing that infested her.
Search crews spent the day searching the water. Police and citizens alike went up and down the coast hoping to find her washed in with the tide. Their numbers began to dwindle when the sun set until I was the only one left. I don’t remember returning to our room but I must have for I awoke there some hours later. It was still dark out but I felt certain that there was somebody in the room with me.
And I was right.
There, curled up like a cat at the end of the bed, was my Dorothy or what looked liked her. I wrapped her in my arms for what felt like hours, afraid that if I let go she would disappear again.
“Where were you?”
She told me that one minute she had been swimming. The next, it was night and she was alone on the beach. I called the police to tell them she had been found. A lone officer came by along with a couple paramedics. The officer took her statement while the paramedics checked her over, listened to her heartbeat, and pronounced her healthy. They said she suffered a concussion, but that there wasn’t anything to be done but to rest and recover.
We spent another day in our room before heading back home. I had expected we would spend plenty of time in bed together but not like that. Dorothy, she just seemed exhausted. Slept most of that day and the entire ride home. I’ve since come to suspect that exhaustion was some weird ruse. If I had known what it was I was bringing home, I would have left it there, and I think it understood that.
It saw through me with far greater ease then I did it.
Things started to seem off just about as soon as we got home. Little things, mostly, like Dorothy never seeming to be hungry. I couldn’t get her to sit down and share a meal with me. I never saw her eating. It seemed like I always just missed her having a bite by a minute or two.
I also got the impression that she wasn’t sleeping much. I never outright caught her tossing and turning or leaving the bed at night, nothing like that. But from the way she moved it was like she was half asleep. She wobbled more than walked.
Of course, I chalked that up to her experience of being lost at sea. Even if all that happened was she passed out and got washed up on the shore, that must have an effect on a person. Hell, maybe she was sick. Can’t be good for a woman her age to be out in the water all day. She seemed paler than before we went on vacation, despite all the sun she had soaked in, and wasn’t a lack of color a sign of illness? It was easy to chalk up all these little changes to illness. Though she always reassured me that she was feeling fine, I started to see this as her putting on a brave face.
Yet over the next month I started to feel like there was a stranger in my house. It wasn’t just the not eating or sleeping. Conversations with her were progressively more one-sided. I’d ask for her opinion on the cows we’d purchased and she’d just grunt. Sounded like a pig really. Just a single grunt and that was it.
It got me thinking again about the day she went missing. Was she really missing? I don’t consider myself a jealous man but I couldn’t stop wondering if she had had an affair that day instead. Went out for a swim, came out of the water somewhere down the coast, and met up with a younger, more attractive man.
I know that bit would be taken out of context by most people. Murders always seem to stem from some kind of jealousy. But I mean it when I say this was different. I would have been jealous and angry if she had herself another man but I would have been thankful for an answer as to why she was acting the way she was. I’m even willing to admit I probably would have responded with some violence, just nothing of the sort that was to come later.
But that jealousy did lead me to keeping a closer eye on her. I’d stay up in bed pretending to be asleep. Nothing ever came of it. Except for one odd thing. One night I was laying there beside her when I felt her get up. I thought the time had finally come to catch her at her game. Instead she went to the washroom, took off her clothes, and washed herself down with a towel.
In the time we had been back, we hadn’t laid with each other as man and wife, which explains my excitement at seeing her naked again. Unfortunately the sight that greeted me was far from attractive. Dorothy’s front half seemed normal, though quite pale. But from behind she had a reddish-purple tinge. It looked like one large bruise ran from her shoulders down her back, over her buttocks and as much of her legs as I could see from my position.
Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t act sooner. I don’t mean violently. I mean at all. Call a doctor at least. But I think that I knew my Dorothy was no longer mine. It wasn’t that she was having an affair. She simply wasn’t Dorothy anymore.
Just what was she? Even now after it’s been said and done… I don’t know if I can answer that question.
It was a couple days later when I woke to the sound of the cows screaming. I ain’t never heard a cow scream before. Didn’t know they could do it. But no other word conveys the fear and pain in the noises they were making. I was out of bed in an instant. Didn’t even grab my coat.
Dorothy was already in the barn when I got there. She, too, looked like she had just been startled awake. Behind her lay one of the cows. I’ve heard of animals having a go at a cow but I ain’t ever seen anything torn to pieces that way. Chunks of hide dotted the walls. Blood dripped down from the ceiling.
I asked Dorothy what happened but she said she’d woken to the same screams I had, tried to wake me, and came out alone when that failed. She looked at me wide-eyed. I could tell she wanted me to believe her story and that was odd because why should she want that if it was the truth? I nodded and told her we’d clean it up in the morning.
I can’t explain in words just what was happening inside my head. Dorothy was my world. But this wasn’t Dorothy. It just wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t but how can I express the strength of that conviction? Long after I die my legacy will be that of a wife-murderer.
I don’t know when I decided on my course of actions. It seemed like it was both building for weeks and instantaneous at the same time. A few nights later, the cows screamed again. Instead of heading out I waited in the darkness by the door until Dorothy returned.
When that door opened, I swung.
The ax caught her in the neck. It was a solid swing, but it only penetrated to the bone.
I didn’t swing again. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even pull the ax free.
She fell forward into the house. I backed away in tears. My stomach churned. My hands shook. And in that moment I knew I made a mistake, that it was just my Dorothy, my Dorothy lying dead there on the floor, dead by my own hands, those hands that were sworn to protect her in sickness and in health. She was so still. I couldn’t see her chest rising. There was no sound except for the spilling blood. I wanted to pick her up and hold her close. I reached out to stroke her hair.
But at that moment her body started to shake and convulse like she was having a seizure. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, all I could do was sit there and watch. The seizure seemed almost localized. It first started in her legs but moved up to her stomach and then it was only her head that shook. After a moment she stilled again and I thought it was over, her final death rattle.
Yet just as I felt I could take another breath, her head twisted to the side without the ax. I heard the bones in her neck snapping like pasta noddles underfoot. Then her head seemed to fall off. Though it didn’t hit the floor. It just dangled there beside her breast like some tendril of flesh still held firm.
Then I saw what was keeping it there.
Several long black shapes were protruding from the stump at the bottom of her head. These were anchored somewhere within her body so that the head was prevented from falling. Not only that but they were moving. They looked to be unfurling and I realized they were pulling themselves out from her insides.
The first extracted itself. It was impossible to tell what it was because it was drenched in gore. At first it looked like when a power line goes down in a storm, just chaotically twitching and spasming, but I realized it was cleaning itself off by flicking the gore off of itself like a dog come in from the rain.
It was joined by a second and third, each in turn going through the same cleaning process. Even after the first two, I didn’t understand what it was I was seeing. But then the third finished and I realized they were legs like a spider’s, only they were huge in comparison, and they were attached to my wife’s severed head.
I hadn’t said a word throughout the whole experience, my voice caught in my throat. But when I realized what was happening, as much as my brain would let me realize, I screamed and if I could have just one wish, for everything I’ve gone through in life, it would be to have kept my mouth shut. Because the moment I screamed, those legs righted themselves beneath Dorothy’s head so that she looked like a creature from a nightmare, some perverse collage of man and beast.
I fell backwards, my legs desperately trying to push me further away from that nightmare. Not that I need to. It had lost interest in me, instead scurrying out the open door and into the cold Canadian wilderness. The last thing I saw was it disappearing into the tree line at the edge of the property.
I don’t remember the night passing. The next thing I was aware of the sun was rising and I was on the road. Then I was telling the police what I had done. I said that I killed my wife. I told them where I lived, what to expect when they got there. Then I shut up. They made a big deal about how little I spoke to them but I had my reasons.
At some point during the drive I realized that one of two things must be true:
Either I am crazy and I murdered my Dorothy. Or, I am sane and what happened really did happen.
I can’t live with either of those. Just like I can’t live with what I see in those woods outside my cell window at night, that shape that visits me when the sun goes down as if it still had some memory of what we were to each other…
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