Case Summary
On March 5, 1971, John Frederick Salmon was wrongfully convicted of manslaughter for the death of his common-law wife, Maxine Ditchfield.1
The sequence of events that led to Ditchfield’s death originated at a social evening that the couple spent with friends in September 1970. Salmon and Ditchfield had met their friends Don and Mary Claydon at a local hotel, where they drank some beers. Afterwards, the two couples went to the Claydon’s home, where they continued to drink and socialize. At one point during the evening, “Maxine slipped off her chair at the kitchen table and fell to the floor; John helped her back into her seat, and the two then agreed that they should go home.”2
The following day, Ditchfield told Salmon that she felt sick and did not know what was wrong. Salmon saw that Ditchfield had a black eye as well as bruising to her arm. Ditchfield spent the day resting; at the times that she got up from bed, Salmon observed that her movements were “weak and clumsy”.3 He attempted to assist her with personal care, but still she fell several more times, including one incident in the washroom where she “struck her head on either the basin or the bathtub.”4
The next day, Ditchfield’s condition seemed to have improved, so Salmon went out to do errands. Upon returning to their home, he found his partner unresponsive. Salmon called Ditchfield’s doctor for help; the doctor made a house call at once, and was unable to revive her. First responders took Ditchfield to the hospital, where she passed away without regaining consciousness on September 22, 1970.5
Salmon was arrested and charged with Ditchfield’s murder based on forensic evidence from her autopsy. The pathologist, Dr. Dietrich, found that Ditchfied had died as a result of blunt force head trauma that caused extensive injury to her brain.6 He opined that this damage had resulted from assault including “a terrific blow” to the head, “delivered with extreme force”.7
Salmon pled not guilty, asserting that the series of falls had caused Ditchfield’s death.8 At his trial, the Crown called Dr. Dietrich, whose expert evidence was central to the prosecution’s theory that Ditchfield had died of blunt-force trauma at her husband’s hands.9 Dr. Dietrich testified that her fatal injuries had resulted from being forcefully struck with “a fist, if the person were exceptionally strong . . . [or a] foot would be more likely.”10 In his opinion, it was “doubtful” and “unlikely” that such injuries could have resulted from a fall or series of falls.11
The Crown also called Ditchfield’s eight-year-old son as a witness at his trial. The boy testified that he had woken up to the sound of screaming and had seen Salmon hit Ditchfield during a fight outside their home, causing her to fall. He also described an event where Salmon had struck Ditchfield in the vicinity of the kitchen table, and she had again fallen. The boy made these statements for the first time at trial: there was nothing pertaining to domestic violence in his police statement or at Salmon’s preliminary hearing.12 Based on the layout of the home, there was no line of sight between the kitchen table area and the boy’s stated location on the sofa.13
The jury found Salmon guilty of manslaughter on March 5, 1971. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.14 Salmon served his sentence until the summer of 1974, when he was granted parole.15
By then, Salmon had unsuccessfully appealed his conviction and sentence. In November 1972, the Ontario Court of Appeal rejected his argument that the trial judge had made several errors, including: improperly admitting graphic photographs of Ditchfield’s body into evidence; permitting the jury to hear the testimony of Ditchfield’s young son; and inadequately instructing the jury in regards to the boy’s evidence.16
Salmon continued to maintain his innocence in the years after his unsuccessful appeal. In 2000, almost three decades after his manslaughter conviction, he contacted defence counsel James Lockyer of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada).17
Lockyer retained three experts in forensic pathology to review the evidence regarding Ditchfield’s cause of death. The experts concluded that her fatal injuries had been caused by one or more falls, not a brutal domestic assault.18 In 2012, Salmon sought and obtained permission from the Supreme Court of Canada to appeal the 1972 judgment upholding his conviction. The Supreme Court ordered that the Ontario Court of Appeal reconsider Salmon’s case in light of the fresh evidence establishing that Ditchfield’s death had not been a homicide.19
Accordingly, the Court of Appeal reviewed this fresh evidence, including a fourth expert opinion from a neuropathologist retained by the Crown.20 This expert likewise agreed that “Ditchfield’s injuries [were] . . . not caused by blunt force or violence; rather the injuries were consistent with a fall or series of falls.”21 More specifically, the fresh evidence established that Ditchfield’s death had resulted from a stroke that she had suffered after falling and striking the left side of her head. The experts found that the type of head injury that Ditchfield had sustained—i.e., “contre-coup contusion”, meaning that the site of brain injury is opposite to the site of impact—showed that she had fallen, not been struck. (Head injuries resulting from a blow would be expected to show the opposite pattern, that is, the site of impact and brain injury would be adjacent.)22
On June 22, 2015, the Ontario Court of Appeal granted the joint request of Salmon’s counsel (Lockyer and Marie Henein) and the Crown to set aside his conviction for manslaughter and acquit him.23 The Court expressed its “great regret that as a result of the comprehensive and unanimous medical evidence now before us it is clear that Mr. Salmon was wrongly convicted and spent more than three years in a penitentiary.”24
After his exoneration, Salmon filed a civil suit against the government of Ontario, seeking $7,000,000 in damages arising from his wrongful conviction and alleging negligence on the part of Dr. Dietrich. No public record has been discovered regarding the outcome of this lawsuit.25