The 24-year-old homemaker was found dead in the middle of a main intersection after a 1932 strawberry festival

At the Stratford-Perth Archives, we often stumble across interesting news stories while conducting our day-to-day work. This happened recently while staff were clipping an extra copy of the Listowel Banner newspaper from 1932 for subject files.

This tragic tale covered by the Banner, the Stratford Beacon-Herald and the Mitchell Advocate involved the mysterious unsolved death of a beloved young woman from Hibbert Township that initially stumped a team of experts assigned to the case from across Perth County, including the coroner brought in from Mitchell, the provincial police, the high county constable from Stratford and a physician from Dublin.

The circumstances surrounding Grace Stagg’s death were very puzzling to investigators and exacerbated by the fact there were no eyewitnesses to the event that led to her sudden death. The timeline of her death, as outlined in local newspapers, was the following:

Grace was attending a strawberry festival at the Cromarty Presbyterian Church on the evening of Wednesday, June 22, 1932. She had left her two-year-old son, Reginald Stagg, at the home of her parents with her father William Houghton, a local mail courier, because the toddler had not been feeling well. After attending the festival, she left the church around 9 p.m. to go see her son and father. It was only around 15 minutes later that Grace’s body was found by her brother, Leonard, lying in the middle of the main intersection. A photograph of the church, the last place Grace was seen alive, from the Stratford-Perth Archives is featured with this article.

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