Alan Hynd - Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

So what did MacGregor do but move back to Michigan with Ida and ask the Governor to appoint him prison physician. The Governor complied. The inmates loved him and greeted him with cheers and applause when he re-appeared. Yes, he was back in the slammer, but this time he could come and go as he pleased.

But what exactly did happen to the Sparlings and who really was responsible for their deaths? Why did the governor grant a full pardon without offering evidence of his decision to the people?

As the years went by, more than a few people who lived in rural Huron County managed to take a backward glance at the MacGregor murder case. And long after all the principals had gone from this earth, an odd perspective fell into place.

Back in 1912, remember, Prosecutor Boomhower dropped the charges against Carrie Sparling, due to insufficient evidence. Mrs. Sparling and her surviving son, Ray, then moved to Port Huron to escape the relentless speculation of her involvement in the deaths of her husband and three sons. Carrie Sparling lived comfortably for another two decades, then died in 1933.

That left Ray. Resilient, innocent Ray, who was the last son standing when Boomhower took Dr. MacGregor to court and prison. It was funny about Ray…

The first to die had been his father, John Wesley. Peter, the next oldest male then died, followed by Albert who fell in line by age behind Peter. But if the killer had been following a pattern by murdering the oldest male Sparling down to the youngest, to put forth a theory, Ray should have been next. Yet, he wasn’t. Scyrel, instead, met his Maker.

Odd.

You see, if Dr. MacGregor was indeed innocent as he always insisted, and his only crime falling in love with Carrie Sparling, who then, had poisoned the Sparling men? Had the sheriff and the town and the prosecutor been so busy looking at Dr. MacGregor and Mrs. Sparling that they failed to look at someone, anyone, who had something to gain?

What, if anything, could be gained? A farm, perhaps?

Little is mentioned of Ray Sparling in the various contemporary accounts of the case. No allegations have ever been made against Ray, the last surviving male Sparling. And none will be made here.

It is interesting to note, however, a particular document on file at the Huron County courthouse. After Mrs. Carrie Sparling held the auction on November 10, 1911, to sell her house and farm wares, she deeded her Bingham Township property on December 18, 1911, to Ray Sparling.

Following the paper trail, a deed dated March 21, 1917, shows Ray Sparling sold the 40-acre farm to Mr. William Elliot for the hefty sum of $4000. Not bad pocket change for the times: equivalent to about $100,000 in 2014 dollars.

Ray, by the way, lived to a ripe old age, passing away in 1971 at the age of 81. He was probably the last person who knew the full account of what transpired at the Sparling farm early in the Twentieth Century. But if he knew, he never told anyone, and the secrets of his mother, Dr. Macgregor and the deaths of his three brothers, passed away with him.

…in which a doctor leads two lives, both incredible…

It would have seemed, back in the year of 1923, that the future was a cloudless one for Doctor Pierre Bougrat. The good doctor was lucratively engaged as a general practitioner in the provincial town of Aix, some 30 kilometers north of Marseilles. A smallish, quick-moving man of 32, with a pale, square face, a brush moustache, and a pompadour, he was married to a bleak-featured aristocratic woman who didn’t believe in children or the means to that end.

Still, the doctor felt he was indebted to her. And he was. Madame Bougrat’s father, a wealthy industrialist, had bought the Aix practice for Bougrat after the doctor had achieved distinction as a captain in the Medical Corps in the First World War. The doctor had been awarded both the Military Cross and the Legion of Honor during WWI, two of France’s highest military honors. Impressive stuff, considering the pounding the French had taken in the Great War.

After the end of the war, Bougrat set up a small practice in Marseille in addition to the practice in Aix. In Marseilles, he showed great empathy for the down and out ex-soldiers, the prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and drug traffickers; he often provided his services without charge.

Dr. Bougrat had a fine bedside manner, and as he buzzed through the streets of the ancient town of Aix in a little blue roadster, he received grateful nods from the citizenry. Many a despairing patient, entering the doctor’s office on the ground-floor front of his home, a crumbling but fashionable two-story stone house on the Rue Lenas, left walking on air after being treated with a few cheering words and a slap on the back.

Perhaps the future was too cloudless… and too dull for the doctor. For it was in the cards that Bougrat, the soul of respectability, was about to carve a niche of his own in the hall of infamy. Motivated by an age-old reason, the doctor apparently was to embrace the notion of murder for profit and to make such a success of the enterprise that for decades afterwards retired veterans of the Marseilles Sûreté muttered in their beards when they so much as thought of Doctor Bougrat.

The whole baleful business had its genesis in the fact that the doctor was married to a woman who was not an enthusiastic performer on the connubial couch. In the beginning this had not caused the physician any particular concern. He was usually so tuckered out after ministering to the lame, the halt and the blind that when night closed in he was ready for a bottle, a bird and an early bed.

Then, one foggy winter night, after a day at his office in the tumultuous port city of Marseilles, the doctor was ready to hit the road for home when the devil whispered in his ear. So instead of driving northward, he headed over to the wicked Marseilles waterfront. He eyed the dives that huddled together in the mists along the dark, mean streets, and presently his gaze fell on a theater that featured a sort of poor man’s Folies Bergère.

He bought a ticket.

Hunched down in a front-row seat, hoping nobody would recognize him, Bougrat soon realized he was looking at a show that was a show. The chorines didn’t wear so much as G-strings. One of them gave the doctor the old eye, and Bougrat, deciding at long last to live it up, winked back.

After the show, the doctor and the lady got together. As he chugged home that night in the little roadster, Bougrat realized that a whole new world had opened up to him.

During the months following, Doctor Bougrat, giving his wife one excuse after another for his absence from home until the small hours, made a habit of frequenting the dives along the Marseilles waterfront. So far as he could see, Madame Bougrat seemed unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Seemed, that is, until the morning, when he was returning home shortly before dawn, that he found her sitting up for him with fire in her eyes.

“Well,” she demanded, “what’s the excuse this time?”

“Oh,” said the doctor calmly, “a colleague of mine in Marseilles has a complicated case and he called me in for a consultation.”

“In a whore house, Pierre?”

It developed that Madame Bougrat, suspicious at last, had hired a private eye to tail her husband. Spying Doc going into what is known delicately as a maison des chattes , the dick had sped back to his client with the dreadful news, reaching Aix a couple of hours ahead of Bougrat.

Luckily for the doctor, his wife was not in a position to do much while her father was alive. The old boy doted on his war-hero son-in-law, and the daughter feared that if she divulged the truth the shock might kill him. Consequently, she agreed that as long as her father was alive they would put on a show of living in connubial bliss. Actually, he could go his way and she would go hers. Thinking it over, Bougrat realized he was lucky in the way his wife took the shock of her discovery. But presently he began to worry about his colleagues. If the news ever got around how he was spending his nights, his professional reputation would be badly disfigured. And increasingly, he was hooked into the nightlife of Marseilles: the women, the gambling and the booze.