As presented by Keedy, the evidence leaves an ambiguous impression. Sinnisiak and Uluksuk might have had larceny in their hearts and acted rashly, but no one could contradict the former’s testimony that the ill-tempered LeRoux had frightened and assaulted him. Yet the court—Chief Justice Horace Harvey—would have none of this. In his instructions to the six-man jury, Harvey drew an analogy to Germany’s discredited excuse for starting the Great War, which was still being fought at the time: that a country living in fear of being attacked could ethically strike first. This preventive style of self-defense, the court said, was “not under our law permissible.” Rather, self-defense “as it is known to our law” was “defence against attack, a defence against an assault of some sort.” Harvey went on to tell the jury that it was their “duty to find a verdict of murder.”

At first blush, it would seem that the chief justice had played fast and loose with the record. His instructions sloughed over Sinnisiak’s crucial assertions: that LeRoux had affirmed an intention to kill the Eskimos and that he had repeatedly pushed Sinnisiak. But thanks to another kind of selectivity—the prosecutor’s partitioning of the case—Sinnisiak was being tried for killing Rouvière, not LeRoux; and the kindly Rouvière hadn’t made any threats. Harvey concluded by trying to reassure the jurors. Given the defendant’s ignorance of white men’s customs, he, the court, would “consider it a crime that this man should be executed.”

As the jury retired to deliberate, Sinnisiak’s conviction seemed foregone. But just over an hour later, the jury came back with a shocking verdict: not guilty. According to Jenkins, some jurors believed the priests were as much at fault as the Eskimos, and one may have been swayed by anti-Catholic prejudice.

Now the cunning prosecutor, McCaul, made good on his hedged bet. He filed new charges—against both prisoners this time—for the murder of LeRoux. McCaul also asked for, and received, a change of venue to Calgary, 200 miles farther south. (McKay says that Keedy, who had become friendly with McCaul, considered this last maneuver likely to backfire and tried to talk him out of it, without success.) There, six days later, the second trial began, with Chief Justice Harvey again presiding but without Keedy looking on (for the rest of his account he relies on a transcript of the proceedings). Despite having a harder case to decide, the new jury proved to be more tractable. “We find the prisoners guilty of murder,” the foreman declared, “with the strongest possible recommendation to mercy that the Jury can give.”

Harvey sentenced both Sinnisiak and Uluksuk to death but predicted they would get off with prison terms. He instructed their interpreter to make sure they understood that, once back home, “they must let their people know that if any of them kill any person they will have to suffer death. They know now what our law is.”

As expected, the sentences were commuted. After two years of imprisonment and labor, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk went free in 1919. Five years later, Uluksuk was shot to death after quarreling with another Inuit over a dog. Sinnisiak was dead by 1930, of an unknown cause. In an epilogue to his book, Jenkins reports his findings during a 2002 visit to the “Copper Eskimos’” homeland: a people suffering from high rates of alcoholism, diabetes, and suicide, and a Catholic church that had been “closed for years.”

Despite the man’s prominence, however, the best we can do is make an educated guess as to what brought him to Edmonton in the summer of 1917. Schwartz portrayed Keedy as having “a connoisseur’s relish for dramatic trials that took him across half a continent to see an Eskimo primitive tried under the white man’s law for killing and eating a missionary.” If you overlook the hyperbole (“eating a missionary” makes it sound as if Sinnisiak and Uklusuk were gorging on flesh cooked in a pot rather than consuming part of one raw organ), this is as good an explanation as we are likely to get. Judging from the rest of Keedy’s career, more than likely he traveled several thousand miles north and west in the summer of 1917 for no other purpose than to observe Rex v. Sinnisiak, thus advancing his research into criminal procedure, much as he had done on visits to England in 1910 and Scotland in 1912. He later wrote a textbook in the field, Cases and Statutes on Administration of the Criminal Law (1928); and in 1931-32 he extended his reach by going to France, where he examined that country’s criminal-justice system. But in 1917, with the Great War raging, European travel was presumably out of the question. Canada might have been the best available place for Keedy to pursue his passion.

In the end, however, why Keedy attended those far-off sessions is less important than how he attended them: as an expert reporter—a “connoisseur,” as Schwartz would have it—taking the notes that bore fruit, thirty-odd years later, in “A Remarkable Murder Trial.” But what Keedy surely envisaged as a contribution to comparative criminal law became something different for McKay Jenkins: a sharp observer’s firsthand impressions, with learned commentary, of the culmination to a fateful series of cultural misunderstandings. Keedy was not oblivious to this aspect of the case, but his main interest lay elsewhere, in the workings of a foreign country’s criminal justice system as it extended its reach to the remotest corners of its jurisdiction.

In this way, Keedy’s article exemplifies the serendipity of scholarship: how a line of research that one pursues and commits to paper because it engages him and complements work he has already done can lie around for decades until someone dusts it off and puts it to a new use. Another legendary Penn figure, the great scholar of Old and Middle English Albert C. Baugh, made a similar point in an article I recall reading as a grad student but (having failed to track it down) can only paraphrase: that a scholar should do and publish the work that excites him, not worrying too much about its immediate relevance but trusting that eventually it will serve as a building block for someone else, perhaps in an unrelated field.

Almost a century after the underlying events and more than 50 years since its publication, “A Remarkable Murder Trial” is still a remarkable piece of work.

Dennis Drabelle G’66 L’69 is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World.