Interpretations

After having surveyed the documents and images on this site, you will no doubt be curious what conclusions other contemporary researchers have arrived at. Not only have our team members offered their own perspectives, but we have solicited the views of some prominent Thomson researchers, including a re-assessment of Thomson’s cause of death from Ontario’s Chief Forensic Pathologist.

Each of these reports deals with different aspects of the Thomson mystery. Enjoy!

Gregory Klages, Research Director for this site, is a historian, art critic, and practicing artist. He is the author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction (Dundurn 2016).

Neil Lehto is an American lawyer and author of Algonquin Elegy: Tom Thomson’s Last Spring (2005) a hybrid fiction/history book, dealing in part with the death of Tom Thomson.

Joan Murray has written a number of books dealing with Tom Thomson, including Tom Thomson: The Last Spring (1994). She has a long history of work with prominent Canadian art galleries, including the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg). Murray is a member of the Order of Ontario.

Dr. Michael Pollanen is Chief Forensic Pathologist for the Province of Ontario. He has produced guidelines for Ontario pathologists conducting autopsies in homicide and criminally suspicious cases. Dr. Pollanen is a consultant to the Bermuda Police Force, has been an expert forensic consultant for such countries as East Timor, West Timor, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan; and teaches at University of Toronto, where he is associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology, as well as forensic science.

Caroline Verner and Karen Fernandes are York University graduate students who assisted in digitizing and proofreading the documents that make up this site.

Teachers can request access to the experts' interpretations of the mysteries that have been created for each site. We have made this section password-protected to encourage students to come up with their own interpretations of primary documents, rather than relying on other people's analyses. To access the Interpretations just fill in our online registration form and await your password.

Access the interpretationsUse the user-name "tomthomson", not "thomson". Old documentation may be incorrect. The password remains unchanged.