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

Ian Radforth, Making a Killing: Murder and Life Insurance in 1890s Ontario, published with the University of Toronto Press.

In late nineteenth-century Canada, the life insurance industry expanded impressively, offering policyholders a sense of greater security, but insurance fraud accompanied the expansion with murder sometimes being a deadly outcome. Radforth examines six legal cases in 1890s Ontario in which the Crown alleged men or women had murdered for the life insurance payouts. This book uses principally legal records and newspaper reports to reconstruct these alleged insurance murders and situate them in their late Victorian context. Together these fascinating cases reveal how insurance fraud emerged as a prominent public concern in Ontario.