THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AMBROSE SMALL: CASE CLOSED! is a brief summary of
the story behind the mysterious disappearance of Canadian theater tycoon Ambrose
Small in Toronto in 1919. This web page was originally created as a
television documentary proposal for History Television.
On December 2, 1919, on the day that Canadian theater tycoon Ambrose Small received a
check
for one million dollars, he vanished in the streets of downtown Toronto, leaving his
money behind safely deposited in a nearby bank.
Small's bizarre disappearance captured the imagination of the press worldwide and was at its time dubbed with the distinction "Crime of the Century." Headlines in London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago announced that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was to consult the investigation. Frustrated Toronto Police hired clairvoyants in their desperation. A $50,000 reward was offered for information about Small's disappearance, an extraordinary sum in those days. No trace of the vanished millionaire was ever found.
In Canada the mystery continued to capture headlines for years, culminating with an extraordinary Ontario Attorney-General's Special Inquiry in 1936, sixteen years after the disappearance.
Although the case was officially closed in 1960, police were still receiving and investigating letters purporting to disclose Ambrose Small's burial location forty-five years later. As late 1965, Toronto Police detectives inspected a possible grave site in Rosedale Valley.
By 1970, the story was reaching mythical proportions: the ghost of Ambrose Small was reported haunting one of his former properties, the Grand Theater in London, Ontario and is credited to have saved the theatre's most prominent architectural feature from unintentional demolition. The disappearance was still a big enough story in 1974, for the Toronto Sun tabloid to print a series of six full-page accounts of the case.
More recently the story of Ambrose Small's disappearance has resurfaced several times in literary form, including Michael Ondaatje's novel, In the Skin of the Lion, and in Fred McClement's The Strange Case of Ambrose Small, which forms the basis of Sleeping Dogs Lie - a 1999 Sullivan Productions made-for-TV movie.
The Ambrose Small mystery has remained unsolved--at least until now!
A document recently discovered by the producer, offers a compelling inside look into the case never made public before. Written in 1936 by OPP Inspector Edward L. Hammond, the lead Provincial investigator in the case, the document not only summarizes the inside story of the Ambrose Small investigation from start to finish, but also names for the first time publicly, the suspects and motives. More shockingly, Hammond convincingly accuses the lead Toronto Police detective in the case, Austin Mitchell, of orchestrating a deliberate cover up.
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  The opening page of Hammond's secret memorandum. |
Ambrose Small: Case Closed! explores what was arguably Canada's "Crime of the Century" in a definitive television documentary about the Ambrose Small Case--Canada's most enduring crime mystery.
The one-hour documentary focuses on the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Small and the decades of scandal and controversy that followed.
Ostensibly Ambrose and Theresa Small were leading socialites in Toronto with a house in the posh Rosedale neighborhood and memberships in the most exclusive clubs. Theresa was so powerful and well connected that police hesitated to call upon her as late as two weeks after her husband's rumored disappearance. The story of itself was kept hushed up from the press for over a month, until it was finally leaked to the Toronto Star in January 1920, sparking a press feeding frenzy of global scale.
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Every aspect of how Ambrose Small made his fortune was raked over by the newspapers, offering a compelling look into a shady world behind the walls of turn-of-the-century respectability in industrial age Canada. Small's fortune was made on what was the equivalent at the time of strip clubs and porno theaters: live theater plays with a very racy, unique and singular theme: the imagined sexuality of single working girls. Shows with titles like School for Scandal, Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model and Bertha the Sewing-Machine Girl, addressed an obsession in puritan Toronto with an influx of single girls coming to work in the city and often residing alone away from their families. After his disappearance, Ambrose Small was revealed to be every Victorian social reformer's worst nightmare. It was discovered he maintained a string of working class mistresses and built a specially designed secret sex room in Toronto's premier theater: the Grand Opera House--the crown jewel in Small's chain of theatre properties. This was exactly the "girl problem" that reformers moralized and warned about in the face of the massive feminization of Toronto's industrial labour force. |
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Small's wife, Theresa, whom Ambrose married after making his first fortune, was a Toronto socialite from the wealthy Kormann family. She was well educated, spoke several languages and was a formidable businesswoman in her own right. Described as a "paragon of virtue," she was a devout Roman Catholic passionately involved in raising funds for Catholic charities. Her funeral in 1935 was one of the largest in Ontario's history at the time, attended by Members of Parliament and of the Provincial Legislature, among other dignitaries and high officials of the church. Throughout her life, Theresa was a relentless donor to the church and willed her entire fortune to it. But she was also the silent but significant financial partner in her husband's shady dealings, unabashedly and shrewdly enjoying their profits. The fact that Theresa was Catholic but Ambrose a
Protestant, did not stand in the way of their marriage. It only
became an immense issue--if not the only one--after his
disappearance. The fortune that Theresa inherited from her husband, and
which she promised to will to the Catholic Church, became a subject of a
fifteen year public controversy and legal struggle in sectarian Ontario.
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In the end, the courts ruled that Theresa Small's reputation was beyond question and she successfully inherited and willed her estate to the Catholic Church. But even after her death in 1935, the issue of a possible role in her husband's disappearance sixteen years earlier was so intense, that the Ontario Attorney General held an extraordinary Special Inquiry into the fate of Ambrose Small. At its conclusion, the Inquiry publicly declared that Theresa Small was not linked in any manner to the disappearance, and historians since have written that both lead investigators from Toronto Police and Ontario Provincial Police, were unanimous in their conclusions that Theresa had nothing to do with the crime. The official report made no reference to Inspector Hammond's secret memorandum which so profoundly contradicts the Attorney General's final public pronouncement.
In its conclusion, Ambrose Small: Case Closed! will reveal for the first time to the public, a startling inside story of the case left behind by the lead provincial investigator. According to his final report, Hammond had collected a formidable array of information pointing to Theresa Small's role in her husband's disappearance but could do nothing about it. That Theresa Small was behind her husband's death was suspected by many and will not come as a surprise to most crime case aficionados, but that she might have been present at the scene of the murder and the motive proposed by Hammond, had never before been shared with the public.
Bitterly, Inspector Hammond also makes a grave and disturbing accusation: that the senior Toronto Police investigator in the case, Detective Inspector Austin Mitchell, deliberately covered-up the facts of the case by intimidating and threatening witnesses. To underscore the urgency of his accusation, Hammond appended to his report a sworn affidavit from a witness to Mitchell's actions, a document also discovered by the producer.
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Ambrose Small: Case Closed! while being a classic historic true
crime story, is also a portrait of a hidden social order during Canada's transition
from the 19th to the 20th century. The disappearance of Ambrose Small
is a fascinating mystery with twists and turns; a stage for a
remarkable look back at Canadian society emerging into the modern world. The documentary is
set in a dramatic panorama of Canadian personalities, issues, themes and institutions:
the press, the police, the occult, private clubs, gambling, high society,
the street mob, sectarian politics, theater, sex, pornography, conspiracy
and murder. It is a revealing look at Canadian society from inside the
belly of a beast--a dark tale of greed and vice in our passage through history
at a time when Toronto was known as "The Good."
Ambrose Small: Case Closed! will take a traditional documentary approach in telling the story. The Hammond Memorandum will brace the retelling of this famous episode in our history. The narration will be driven by readings from contemporary sources such as documents, court and police transcripts, letters, newspaper accounts, diaries and memoirs and by current commentary from various experts on the subject area. Some of these proposed experts, featured interviews and commentators are:
A series narrator bridge the remaining elements of the narrative voice-over. Original footage shot for the series will revisit the scenes where many of the events transpired. Remarkably, many of the locations remain today substantially as they were in 1919. Archival still photographs and computer animation will bring to life locations no longer existing. Posed period reenactments will be also be sparingly employed in crucial scenes. Period motion picture newsreel film archive material will round out the sources for moving images, while period paintings, illustrations, handbills, poster, newspaper images, courtroom sketches and magazine art will serve as a visual source for still images.
