Murky water laps gently on a secluded stretch of the Severn River bank where Christina Kettlewell’s floral pajama-clad body was found seven decades ago, lying facedown in a shallow pool.

Investigators suspect the Toronto woman was already dead by the time the final licks of fire sputtered out among the charred remains of her honeymoon cottage just up the hill. There were no burn marks or signs of violence on her body, a post-mortem later showed.

An inquest into the 22-year-old woman’s death unravelled a confounding tale of elopement, life insurance policies, a possible love triangle, suicide letters, and attempted murder.

Her husband, Jack, a war veteran stationed in the dental corps, and his friend, Ronald Barrie, escaped the blazing cottage alive on May 20, 1947. Now 70 years later, the death of Toronto’s “eight-day bride” is an echo in Severn Falls folklore and a suppressed memory for living Kettlewell family members who almost never knew she existed.

“It was just like a door opening into another world...I often wondered, why is this top secret?” said Richard Kettlewell.

His father Jack remarried three years after the incident, starting a family in the same Mimico home he once shared with Christina. Jack later moved his family to the home across the street, where his son Richard still lives with his wife, Sharon.

“I call it our JFK. The unsolved mystery. What really happened?” Sharon said.

The mystery began with Jack and Christina’s secret wedding on May 12, 1947, which came after a suspicious two-week disappearance from her family home.

Christina’s father, a Polish immigrant, initially opposed the marriage because the groom was not a Roman Catholic. Though the 26-year-old Jack Kettlewell converted, the couple’s elopement was unsettling for Christina’s family, who couldn’t understand the looming presence of his best friend, Ronald Barrie.

“When Jack and Christina got married, we thought it was very strange that Barrie went along on the honeymoon. That’s what made us wonder if Ronnie was also in love with Chris,” her sister Helen Mocon said at the time.

Barrie, formerly known as Ronnie Ciufo, came to Canada from northern Italy and tried to establish himself in the construction and insurance businesses, to little success.

The 28-year-old professional ballroom dancer owned a cottage in Severn Falls, about 40 kilometres north of Orillia, Ont., where he would later join the Kettlewells for their honeymoon.

The newlyweds spent the first few days of their honeymoon at an apartment on Tyndall Ave. in Toronto with Barrie before moving to the Severn Falls cottage on May 17, 1947.

Three days later, Christina’s lifeless body was found in nine inches of river water.

A dramatic inquest into her death began almost a month later on June 19, and drew large crowds to the courthouse in Bracebridge, Ont. Photos of the inquest show spectators sitting outside, unable to get a spot in the packed courtroom, and even lining up to get autographs of the two men. The interest came in part from sensational media coverage of the case, and it was splashed all over the front pages of the Toronto Daily Star.

C.P. Hope, the special Crown counsel at the inquest, zeroed in on Barrie’s shady presence from the outset. Hope called him, “a liar of the most blatant kind whose sinister figure permeates the whole of this tragedy, but whose purpose and design are shrouded in mystery.”

The inquest revealed a number of inexplicable and dubious money transactions connecting back to Barrie at a time when he was broke.

Barrie was named as the beneficiary on two separate $5,000 life insurance policies for Jack and Christina, taken out before they eloped. The policies carried a double indemnity provision, meaning two times the amount would be paid out to Barrie in the case of accidental death. When adjusted for today’s inflation, it would work out to $260,000.

He also purchased $5,000 of insurance on the cottage, or $65,000 today.

Jack turned over his wartime gratuities to his friend, and a ring he borrowed from a married friend to propose to Christina was never recovered after her death. It was worth about $13,000 in today’s dollars.

But why did Jack cut his family out of his will, hand earnings to Barrie, and let his friend tag along on his honeymoon?

Jack’s weak answers to these questions did not satisfy Crown lawyer Hope, but a statement he made to police after the fire offered a small window into a possible motivation: Love.

In this statement, entered as an exhibit in court, Jack admitted to a long-term affair with Barrie. But when faced with the exhibit, Jack testified that he was pressured into the admission, saying, “That is what the police were trying to make.”

Still, Hope was not convinced.

“When Kettlewell, after vigorous questioning, agreed with Mr. Hope’s repeated suggestion that he and Barrie were ‘male lovers,’ the fantastic triangle of twister and thwarted emotions took shape,” according to a June 20, 1947 story in the Star.

Wayne Turner, present co-owner of the Severn Falls Marina, said the men’s close relationship and frequent trips up north was talked about by the locals, including his uncle, who was 10-years-old when the inquest happened.

“Nobody in the family could figure out why the guy would want to get married,” Turner said.

Barrie was instrumental in helping the Kettlewells elope, the inquest heard.

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Could it be because he was also the keeper of Christina’s dark secret?

On April 6, Easter Sunday, a suicide letter revealed Christina had allegedly tried to kill herself by “poisoning,” the inquest heard.

Jack said his fiancée was ill that day, but what he did not know is that she had written a suicide letter addressed to Barrie detailing her uncertainty of receiving a proposal, according to his testimony.

“This will be the best way out, as I cannot bear to see another girl have him,” the note said. An RCMP handwriting expert testified that the suicide notes were “undoubtedly” written by Christina.

At the end of April, she made an attempt on both her life and Jack’s, as per the suicide notes.

“When you love someone you really love him, and I know there is no one for me but Jack, and if I cannot have him, I do not intend anyone else to…I waited as you might say, in the hope that Jack would ask me to marry him, but I now realize I am just a passing fancy,” she wrote in another letter to Barrie.

The final letter was written the day before her death and addressed to Mrs. Thomas, the woman who owned the home in Mimico where she briefly stayed with Jack. Christina asked Barrie to mail it.

“Ronnie is in the boat outside somewhere,” the note said. “By the time he gets back everything will be all over with. He must have been afraid something would happen because he is staying an extra day, to make sure we go back to Toronto with him.”

Barrie saved suicide notes from the fire, and did not tell Jack about Christina’s disturbing behaviour until it came out in the inquest.

Jack suggested his tall, dark-haired best friend was operating in the shadows to protect him.

But Jack’s son Richard and his wife, Sharon, don’t believe it.

The couple says Jack was an easygoing person who actively avoided any situation where he had to assert himself. This meant always going with the flow: avoiding confrontation, never returning items he bought from the store even if they were defective, and leaving things like unevenly spaced tiles just as they were despite his second wife’s protests.

With his quiet and reserved personality, Richard and Sharon think the senior Kettlewell, who passed away in 1998, could have been strung along on a grand scheme.

“I think this Barrie guy sort of manipulated my dad, just dominated him,” Richard said.

What they don’t understand to this day is why Jack never told them.

Sharon, an amateur archivist with a passion for family history, was scrolling through microfilm of a local newspaper called The Advertiser at Richview Library one day in 1992. That’s when she saw it.

“In the library, when somebody finds something…you’ll hear all of a sudden somebody go ‘Oh!’” She said, slamming her hands on the table.

The couple never brought it up to the senior Kettlewell, whose health was in steady decline. His second wife, from whom he separated in 1969 but never divorced, passed away last August.

Barrie disappeared to New York in 1956, leaving behind a Pekingese dog named Ling for Jack’s then two-year-old son, Richard said. The family never heard from him again.

A coroner determined the official cause of Christina Kettlewell’s death as drowning. There were traces of codeine found in her stomach.

Because of this, and “the suspicious fact that she was found drowned in nine inches of water,” the jury delivered an open verdict in the case, unable to agree on whether foul play was involved in Christina’s death.

Not 200 metres up the hill from where she was found, a red-roofed cottage is now perched in a half-halo of trees, replacing the structure that burned to the ground on the Toronto bride’s short-lived honeymoon. The exposed brick base of the original cottage appears to have been preserved in the remodelling.

“I remember when I was a kid…there was a stone chimney that stayed up there,” the marina-owner Turner said. “Everybody used to say it was haunted, but it was just one of those stories, right?”

It will always be a story with no conclusive ending for the living Kettlewells, like Jack’s son, Richard.

“My parents went to their grave saying nothing.”