Joseph Willoughby knew he was in trouble. His job, his reputation, his very freedom was at risk. Unless his lawyer could pull off a feat of legal legerdemain, Willoughby was going to prison. The prospect left the middle-aged man nearly faint.
Suddenly, Willoughby felt a long way from his childhood home in rural Bond Head, where life had seemed so simple.
There was nothing in Willoughby’s upbringing or early life that would have hinted he’d end up facing the long arm of the law. Born in 1875 on a farm just outside of Bond Head, he was raised by hard-working and God-fearing parents. The Willoughby family had been productive members of the community since Joseph’s great-grand father, Henry, had arrived from Northern Ireland and received a Crown grant in 1830. The farm passed down from father to son until it ended up in the hands of Joseph’s parents, John Wesley and Roxanna (Milligan) Willoughby.
Sometime during the 1890s, Willoughby, now a young man, found employment with the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). He must have been viewed favourably by his employers because by 1900, aged only 25, he was named station master at Bracebridge in Muskoka. The unassuming man was newly married to Mary Jane McConnell and had two young children.
Willoughby spent the next two decades as a respected member of the community and a trusted employee of the Grand Trunk. That all changed in 1920, when keen-eyed officials at the GTR noticed discrepancies in Willoughby’s station account book. These weren’t nickels and dimes, either, but rather a shortage approaching $5,000. The GTR had Willoughby arrested and brought up on charges of theft.
Naturally, Willoughby feigned ignorance and innocence. His lawyer, Redmond Thomas, grasped at straws when he suggested that the missing funds were a simple clerical error resulting from stress and extreme overwork. In other words, he tried to pass the blame onto the GTR. The prosecuting Crown attorney proceeded to rip this argument to shreds.
In an ironic twist of fate, the presiding judge, Arthur Arnold Mahaffy, had familial ties to Bond Head — his father, Dr. John Mahaffy, would have certainly known and likely even treated the Willoughby family.
Regardless, there was no hometown bias. Willoughby was found guilty as charged and sentenced to three years in the Kingston Penitentiary.
In the end, however, Joseph Willoughby only served a year of the sentence. He never returned to Bracebridge — he knew he’d never be welcomed there again — and spent the last two decades of his life in Toronto, where he died in 1942.
