It’s twelve o’clock on Saturday, November 14, 2014. My youngest son, Ben, and his South Muskoka Bears Major Midget hockey team have just finished their first game of a tournament in London, Ontario. They won their game and Ben scored a nice goal, so I’m happy. But the team’s next game isn’t until three o’clock that afternoon, so we’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around until an hour or so before the next game. Ben, understandably, wants to hang out with his friends on the team during this interval, which means he’s going to park himself at the arena. Consequently, I now find myself alone with three hours on my hands to fill. It occurs to me that I’m not that far from the Roman Line, maybe a thirty-minute drive. I’ve always wanted to go there, as somewhere on that stretch of roadway sits the property upon which the Donnelly story played out. The infamous Donnelly children were raised on that lot of land and four members of the family were murdered there on a cold February night in 1880.

Despite being taught nothing of this bit of southern Ontario history in school, when I first learned about the Donnellys, their story gripped me like few stories have (before or since). Indeed, some thirty years previously, during my second year of university, a roommate had invited me to spend a weekend at his parents’ home in Mitchell, Ontario. During the course of meeting his parents, we sat down at the family table to eat. Some small talk was exchanged and then I posed a question that I thought would be a good icebreaker: “How far away is Lucan?” His father, a lawyer in town, answered, “Oh, about half an hour. Not far. Are you interested in going to Lucan?” “Definitely!” I replied enthusiastically. “Why?” he asked. “I understand that’s where the Donnellys were killed,” I replied. Although my statement was wrong (i.e., the Donnellys were killed within their farmhouse on the Roman Line in Biddulph — not Lucan, which is about three and a quarter-miles to the northeast of the town), my enthusiasm was obvious. But then a look fell over the father’s face that immediately let me know I would not be going to Lucan. “We don’t talk about that here,” he said. And the table fell quiet until someone introduced a subject that was evidently far less contentious. I never forgot that, and the father’s attitude only served to further fan the flames of my nascent curiosity.