My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  The police had never spoken to the kids but even if they had, it was doubtful the siblings would have thought to mention what they had heard. Yet, once heard, they could never unhear those words.

  The four kids went back to school but Buronga wasn’t going to be their home for much longer. Hazel heard her mum tell Harry that because the drowning had been in all the Victorian newspapers, she thought they had better move on because Ted’s relatives would be looking for them.

  Hazel had stopped loving her mum after her dad’s body was retrieved, once his death was confirmed and he was never coming home from any hospital again. She didn’t actually tell her mum that in so many words but she became much quieter than she had been. On the other hand, Dulcie seemed to need her oldest daughter even more. Harry replaced ‘your dad’ as the person Hazel was to keep secrets from. Before they left Buronga, Dulcie casually dropped one more secret into a conversation with Hazel. It seemed that she needed someone to talk to and young Hazel was that person.

  She had been married before Ted, she said, but she had never told him. Dulcie and her first husband had had four children but she had no idea where her husband or the children were. Hazel thought her mum looked sad. Dulcie said that someone had to know the truth in case anything happened to her but she did not tell Hazel what to do with the information. Looking back, Hazel thought this was another instance of Dulcie’s selfishness — she needed to unburden herself so she dumped the secret on her daughter.

  The bombshell was followed by the customary warning, slightly altered: ‘Don’t tell Harry.’

  Hazel knew she would never call Dulcie her mother again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DULCIE AND HARRY

  HAZEL WASN’T THE FIRST OF DULCIE’S DAUGHTERS TO BE GIVEN that name. Dulcie had called one of the two daughters from her first marriage Hazel as well. When Hazel Baron found that out, it was like getting second prize, or being second-hand. Knowing that she wasn’t the ‘first choice’ hurt even more than having two half-sisters and two half-brothers she had never met. She knew Dulcie liked to stretch the truth — but her story about having had a secret family before meeting Ted Baron was true.

  Dulcie was born in the amusingly named Victorian town of Korumburra — amusing because it is said to be an Aboriginal word for maggot. As well as the big fat earthworms that gave the town its name, Korumburra was home in 1909 to miner Charles Ray Ramage, known as Jack, and his wife Dulcie. Their daughter Hazel Dulcie Ramage was born on 12 June that year, an only child.

  It would be more than twenty years until Korumburra got a hospital and like almost all the babies until then, Dulcie was born at home, one of the hundreds of babies delivered by the town’s much-loved midwife, Irish-born Nora Walmsley. For over fifty years, the nurse — better known by townsfolk as ‘Grannie’ — had been there day and night for the mothers giving birth. It was said that she turned no one down. Like Dulcie, her mother had little time for officialdom and Dulcie’s birth was never registered, which was not unusual for the time. Dulcie kept her real age quiet all her life and it was not until she died that Hazel discovered it through the information Dulcie had given to Centrelink.

  Korumburra was a real pioneering East Gippsland town, built on coal and timber mills and, by the time Dulcie was born, the dairy industry. Now it’s just a 90-minute drive from Melbourne, 105 kilometres northwest, but in 1909, a train trip on the railroad that passed through town was much more comfortable than going by horse and cart — if you could afford the fare.

  There were a couple of banks, churches, a post office and businesses like coach-builders and bakeries that kept the population of around 2000 well catered for. Mrs Henderson’s 22-room ‘coffee palace’ provided much-needed accommodation. Visitors from Melbourne noted the absence of snobbery and it was true that there were few local families who were affluent in those days before dairy and agriculture brought the area its wealth.

  At the community’s heart were waves of European migrants but Dulcie’s mother was second-generation Australian. Hazel never knew whereabouts on the other side of the world the family was originally from because Dulcie rarely talked about her own mother. She had taken off while Dulcie was still young, abandoning her daughter. The Ramage family described her as ‘flighty’, a polite way to explain why a young woman — who was probably bored and craving adventures beyond a dusty Victorian town — had just up and left.

  Hazel met her maternal grandmother only once but she left an indelible impression for all the wrong reasons. It was after her father died and Hazel was eleven or twelve when Dulcie took her to visit her grandmother, who was living on the outskirts of Melbourne. She may have been good-looking forty years earlier but by that time she had well and truly let herself go. She was a fat, squat, formless woman with black hair tied in a scruffy ponytail and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, living in an old dark house that stank of cigarette smoke and urine. Hazel couldn’t wait to get away from her.

  As a result of her mother’s leaving, young Dulcie was passed around among relatives, of which there were plenty in town including Uncle John, who was the local baker, and his wife, Aunt Agnes. She grew up in many households, none of which she really called ‘home’. Hazel always thought that it was her mother’s lack of a solid upbringing which sowed the seeds of her restless nature, the reason why she grew up a bit of a gypsy, never being able to settle too long in one place or even with one person. She was also as careless with her own children as her own mother had been with her. Then again, perhaps like the mother who abandoned her, she was also always searching for something better.

  Another factor that may have contributed to Dulcie’s character was a history of mental illness in the family — one of her grandmothers had died in the notorious Ararat Lunatic Asylum. While Dulcie was never diagnosed with a mental illness herself, Hazel wondered if there was something genetic that caused her mother’s selfishness, her lack of empathy that allowed her to live her life doing what she wanted without showing signs of guilt or even feeling any remorse.

  Dulcie didn’t have much formal education although she did attend the school in Korumburra, which had over 300 pupils. Like most girls in those days in her social class, her basic talents were knowing how to sew and cook and keep house. Most children left school at fifteen in those days and at that age Dulcie headed off to travel, finding work doing what she did best, cooking and cleaning.

  On her travels, she met the man who would become her first husband, Edward Cavanagh, known as Ted (like her second husband). He came from the Victorian town of Terang, southwest of Melbourne and about 330 kilometres away from Korumburra. Dulcie always had an escape route, a plan B, throughout her life. Ted Cavanagh was her first — she married him to escape the confines of her home town.

  A child of 1911, he was two years younger than Dulcie but, unlike with the men later in her life, she could never boss him around. Ted was a man who liked to take charge. Like her, he was a bit wild. He loved women and never really liked hard work.

  *

  When Dulcie was marrying Cavanagh, Henry William Bodsworth was just a baby. He was born on 20 July 1928 in Hopetoun, 400 kilometres northwest of Melbourne in the heart of the Southern Mallee. Known as Harry from the day he was born, he was the third eldest in a traditionally big family of nine children with six brothers and two sisters. His father worked as a milkman but, like Dulcie, Harry was brought up in a broken home. His parents split up in 1939, when he was eleven and his mother Louisa was thirty-two. He went to live with his mum.

  Harry left school at thirteen and worked as a farm labourer on various properties around Victoria, going where there was work even at such a young age. On 22 March 1946, at the age of seventeen, he did what many young men did and lied to join the military, putting his age up by a year when he enlisted for World War II at Watsonia, in Melbourne’s northeast, the closest office to where he was working at the time. His war record for service number VX501363 shows his year of birth as 1927 and his nationality as Brit
ish, his parents’ home country. His mother had married again and was then Louisa Pill, living with Harry’s stepfather in Victoria Street, Altona, on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  Harry spent over two years as a member of the Australian Infantry Force working as a signalman, six of those months with the occupation forces in Japan, but he never really saw action. His only injury while in the army wasn’t at the hands of the enemy. It happened while he was based with American and British forces at 1 Base Signal Park, Warwick Farm, which is now Warwick Racecourse. At dusk on 12 February 1947, Harry was walking along the Great Western Highway towards Penrith on Sydney’s western outskirts when he was knocked down by a civilian vehicle and woke up in Nepean District Hospital. The accident left him with a small wound on the right side of his scalp but he was back fit for duty just five days later.

  He was honourably discharged in April 1948, a month after arriving back from the port of Kure, at the entrance to Hiroshima Bay, on the HMAS Kanimbla.

  Like too many servicemen and women, his skills counted for next to nothing when he returned to civilian life but Harry at least found one of the few jobs that were always available at the time. He became a rabbit trapper. Rabbit meat and skins were big business and the trappers also helped homeowners and farmers trying to keep in check the pest that had become a plague since being introduced into Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. As he had before his stint in the forces, Harry went where work took him throughout Victoria until he got a job as a transport driver in early 1949.

  In April that year, he was almost killed. Harry was changing a tyre on his semi-trailer when the rim blew off the wheel and smashed into his forehead. He was rushed to Wangaratta Base Hospital in Victoria’s northeast where he was unconscious for three hours and treated for a depressed compound fracture of the skull. It took six weeks before doctors thought he was well enough to leave. However, not long after his discharge from hospital, Harry dived into a river and fractured his skull again. This time it took him a week to seek any medical treatment and, back in the same hospital, the doctors put a plate into his skull. Harry always said that apart from occasional headaches, he suffered no ill-effects from the two fractures; but Hazel always thought his injuries were why he giggled the whole time, and could have been the reason he didn’t seem particularly smart.

  Harry didn’t go back to driving as a job and instead got work with the Country Roads Board of Victoria and, at the age of twenty-two, went back to live with his mother and stepfather who had made their home in the free camping area at Wangaratta.

  Until then, Harry Bodsworth’s life had been quite unremarkable. He had not been in any trouble, had no criminal convictions and not even in his wildest imagination could he have thought he would become a murderer. But in March 1950, his mum and stepfather had pitched their tent next to a woman with a sick husband and four children — Dulcie Baron. At five feet ten inches tall, with his fair hair and blue eyes, Harry soon caught Dulcie’s eye.

  *

  Dulcie was forty-one and before she met Harry she had already lived a life and a half. She and Cavanagh had been so young when they married that she and Ted, or Old Ted as he became known, had grown up together. A rough diamond who liked a drink, he could be a real charmer. He wasn’t a bad man and initially she thought he was fun as they made a living from seasonal work, picking peas or potatoes depending which was in season, sometimes just stealing them for food. Ted also trapped rabbits but unlike Harry, who sold them to factories, Ted set up by the side of the road and sold them for a few shillings.

  Cavanagh and Dulcie never considered themselves out of work because they always scraped a living. Technology had arrived and the middle-class families started to invest in top-loading washing machines the size of cement mixers and new-fangled vacuum cleaners but Dulcie only saw such luxuries when she got work as a domestic in their homes. She picked up on what was happening around the world from the snippets she was able to read in the newspapers while working in shops but the growing talk of feminism passed her by. It was not because she wouldn’t have supported it but she didn’t have time to think about it. Dulcie always knew that women were superior to men and that they had to be even tougher to get on in life. If that meant using and abusing the men to do it, so be it. On top of that, she had four children before she was twenty-five.

  She was still young, still attractive and kept herself clean and tidy but, unlike her, Old Ted had no ambitions to be anything else in life than a labourer living off the land and Dulcie was getting restless. In the late 1930s, before the outbreak of war, the family was living in a caravan in rural Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. There were the girls Hazel and Ruby, who was born in 1934, and the boys Edward, who was known as Billy, born May 1929 in the Goulburn Valley town of Tatura, and Ronnie, born in May 1933 in Violet Town in northeastern Victoria. Little is known about where Hazel and Ruby were born because their histories were lost as, along with their brothers, they were cast aside when Dulcie decided she was going to look for a better life. This time her escape route was Ted Baron, who had a proper house and whose parents had a farm. Dulcie took the kids and left Old Ted.

  Years later Dulcie would tell the police that she had left the boys with their dad but that wasn’t true. She had got to know a couple who ran a local general store, one of those that sold everything from fresh vegetables to nails and mops. They were in their forties and had never been able to have children. Dulcie conned them with a cock and bull story about having to go into hospital and have surgery and asked if they would look after Hazel Cavanagh for her until she was well again. Hazel was just nine months old and while the couple must have been suspicious, they didn’t ask too many questions. Dulcie never went back and they brought Hazel Cavanagh up as their own daughter. Dulcie never told anyone the couple’s names and Hazel Cavanagh probably never knew who her real parents were.

  Ted Cavanagh had taught Dulcie to drive and, leaving the boys with a friend, Dulcie drove to a local orphanage. She walked in holding little Ruby’s hand in hers and told the nuns the same story about needing surgery and asked would they look after her daughter. It was a common story in those days used by women who were too young or too poor to have children and who wanted a better life for them, but while the nuns had heard it all before, it was rare for them to see mothers in their twenties like Dulcie. They never turned anyone away and agreed to take Ruby in. Dulcie never returned and Ruby grew up in the orphanage where the nuns changed her name to Shirley Teresa. But she never forgot her real name — or her mother — and always preferred to be called Ruby. She also never forgot her surname was Cavanagh. It would be decades before she saw her mother again.

  While Hazel and Ruby grew up alone, at least the boys had each other. Dulcie left them at an orphanage at Goulburn, using the same excuse of needing surgery. She kissed them goodbye and said she would be back for them but they never saw her again. They were only aged seven and three but the boys were like peas in a pod and kept in touch with each other their whole lives, dying within five weeks of each other. They never forgot ‘Little Ruby’ and tried to track her down but it took a long time before they found one another again.

  Ted Cavanagh easily moved on from his wife leaving with his children although his family remembers him having one soft spot — his daughter Ruby. Like his two sons, he tried to look for her, but without knowing her new name of Shirley Teresa, he didn’t have much luck. He also didn’t know that she had met Gilbert McGloin while still at the orphanage and married him as soon as she left at the age of eighteen. McGloin was a local boy who had been courting Ruby while working as a storeman in Wagga Wagga since leaving the army in 1949.

  Ted Cavanagh moved on with fifteen-year-old Greta and at her urging they moved to the now-trendy Sydney suburb of Paddington. In July 1941, he signed up for the army and became a driver, assigned to the General Duties Depot, and marched over 300 kilometres to the prisoner of war camp at Cowra.

  Less than a month after joining the army, he was in hospit
al. Seven months later he was back in Sydney having reported sick or been in hospital no fewer than sixteen times with a number of complaints. During this time he contracted rheumatic fever. The autoimmune disease led to him developing serious heart problems which cut short his army career — but didn’t stop him having nine children with Greta.

  After some months in the new Yaralla Military Hospital on the banks of the Parramatta River in Concord, in March 1942 Ted Cavanagh was discharged medically unfit for service, his record showing it was ‘not occasioned by his own default’. Less than eight months after he signed up, he was demobbed and moved his growing family to Colac in southwest Victoria.

  The same big wet of the winter of 1950 that swelled the Murray River before Ted Baron died in its cold and muddy waters also flooded the Cavanagh family home on the shores of Lake Colac and they lost all their personal possessions. Five years later, Greta had to write to the army to get copies of her husband’s discharge papers so he could go into a military hospital after he collapsed with heart problems.

  ‘I’m truly desperate,’ she wrote. ‘My husband has completely collapsed and his heart mussels [sic] are gone and he is to be in hospital from three to nine months.’

  The whole family was living in a caravan and only their oldest, at sixteen, had left home to fend for himself. Greta wrote that they also needed Ted’s discharge papers to apply for his pension. With no fixed income, they were living on what she and one of their daughters could earn from pea picking which ‘may terminate at any moment’. The army was happy to help and sent the family the papers they needed.

  Like Dulcie’s second husband, Ted Cavanagh would be an invalid for the rest of his life. Unlike Ted Baron, he had a loving and devoted wife to care for him.

  *

  With Ted Baron unable to work, their savings exhausted and no money for the rent, the Baron family had no choice but to pack up their belongings in a trailer, leave their lovely house in Beechworth and move forty kilometres down the road to the caravan at Wangaratta. Ted Baron was back in hospital with his worsening arthritis. Dulcie knew the reality of her life was once again as dull as dishwater but she would never let anyone know the truth. She liked to portray the image of a dedicated spouse, and people saw her as she wanted them to — a selfless wife, a caring mother. But she was sick of being married to a cripple, as she saw him.