Night of Horror: Almira Bates Turns an Axe on Her Own Children

By Caryssa Whittingham, Community Contributor and Co-op Student

117 years ago, on January 12, 1907, Almira Bates, aged 66, attacked her two children, Hattie and William Bates, aged 21 and 18, in the middle of the night with the back of an axe in their home in Woodstock, Ontario. She severely injured them but luckily the attack was not fatal.

Hattie Bates came home before her brother on January 12, at around 1:00 p.m. after work at Hotel Oxford. When night came, Hattie fell asleep in her mother's room; however, she was later woken up due to a heavy blow to her head. The last thing she remembers before she fell back unconscious was her blood trailing down her head. When Hattie later regained consciousness, she awoke to her mother cleaning up the blood, throwing the bloody water out into the snow, and wrapping up her head wound. When Almira left, Hattie slowly got up and walked over to her brother's room so they could go and get help. Unfortunately, when William was trying to change his clothes, he fell over and lost consciousness due to the blood he lost from his own head wound.

Almira came into the room soon after William passed out and when she did, Hattie started to scream at her. Her mother covered her mouth, and the last thing that Hattie Bates saw before she too passed out because of blood loss was an axe behind her mother's back. Fortunately, this isn’t where either of Hattie’s or William’s stories end.

By some miracle, Hattie Bates woke up the morning after and rushed out of the house to her place of work, where she told her boss, Charles A. Pyne, about what happened only a few hours earlier. After she was done telling the story, Mr. Pyne sent for Dr. Parke. When Dr. Parke arrived, he looked at Hattie’s wound and said that the cut was so deep that it went straight to her skull. When he was finished doing what he could for her wound with the medical supplies that the hotel had and the tools on his person, he sent her over to his office where Dr. Hall was waiting for her, while he was going to head over to the Bates residence. When Dr. Parke got to the home, he first cleaned up William’s wound which was, thankfully, not as bad as his sister's, but he still sent him over to his office to wait with Dr. Hall and Hattie.

While Dr. Parke was waiting for the police to arrive, he decided to do his own investigation. When he asked Mrs. Almira Bates how her children got their wounds, she responded by saying that Hattie fell against her bed and William came home and was intoxicated by an opiate with a cut on his head and an abrasion on the side of his face. However, Dr. Parke didn’t believe her, as when he was looking at her children's wounds, he firmly believed that they got their injuries from the back of an axe. And then he started to look around. First, he saw an axe in the shed, but with not even a drip of blood on it. Then he went to the bedrooms, where he found that the bed sheet was missing. The only thing he did find that would show evidence that there was any attack at all was a poor attempt at fresh snow covering up the bloody snow that Hattie said would be there.

The police arrived with a warrant and arrested her right away. Almira was held there for 59 days when she was sentenced to 2 years at the Kingston Penitentiary for attempting to murder William Bates; however, she was innocent on any account of attempting to murder her daughter, Hattie Bates, due to the lack of evidence. Eventually, she was admitted to the asylum in Hamilton, Ontario, where she died in 1915.