Making a Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario

In late nineteenth-century Canada, the life insurance industry expanded impressively, offering policy-holders a greater sense of security. However, insurance fraud quickly followed in the footsteps of this boom, with murder sometimes being a deadly outcome.

Making a Killing examines six legal cases in 1890s Ontario, where the Crown alleged that the accused had resorted to committing murder to obtain life insurance payouts. The scenarios varied widely, from a staged logging accident to conceal a murder, to a farmer’s wife who allegedly sought to collect the insurance on her husband by putting arsenic in the rhubarb she fed him. Newspapers eagerly reported these and other sensational crimes. Whether farmers or city dwellers, prosperous or poor, all the alleged perpetrators latched onto the quick money promised by the murder of an insured person.

Legal historian Ian Radforth mines legal records and newspaper reports to reconstruct these alleged insurance murders and situate them in their Victorian contexts. Together, the fascinating cases reveal how insurance fraud emerged as a prominent public concern in Ontario and beyond.