My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  One day as the shooting party was leaving, Dulcie took Allan aside: ‘Allan, while youse are out shooting, could you accidentally shoot Sam on the other side of the swamp?’

  Allan thought she was joking and didn’t take it seriously but when the men all came back safe that afternoon, Dulcie said: ‘Well, at least you could have done it, Allan.’ He thought she sounded a bit put out.

  Netallie Station was close enough to Wilcannia for Hazel to cycle there and every fortnight she rode out to give Dulcie her wages. Allan told her during one visit how much he loved going out shooting with the men. He also confided in her about their mother’s comment regarding shooting Sam. Like him, Hazel was not sure if it had been a joke.

  Hazel had never met Mrs Overton but she wasn’t surprised that Dulcie didn’t like her. Allan told her about one conversation he had had with Dulcie. She told him: ‘If Sam wasn’t here, that woman wouldn’t be visiting and we would take over. Harry would have the manager’s job and we would be in the main house instead of being stuck in the shearers’ quarters.’

  Even Hazel had no idea how far her mother would go this time.

  *

  Meanwhile, Hazel had fallen in love; or rather, she had fallen in comfort. Love was to come later but come it did and last the rest of her life.

  The patient in the bed in the corner of the men’s ward at Wilcannia Hospital had been admitted to have his appendix out. Bill was aged twenty, one of a family of twelve siblings, and his family owned 65,000 acres at White Cliffs west of Wilcannia. Hazel was drawn to him because he was such a gentle man, which was even better than a gentleman — although he was one of those as well. He was a truly gentle soul. Just what she needed. That he was young and handsome also helped.

  Hazel was a bit bossy, as a good nurse’s aide had to be, but she found herself fussing about Bill more than her other patients. She made sure she kept him cool by hanging wet towels over the fan in his ward. Hazel was fifteen and didn’t know what love was, but Bill was in hospital for six weeks and had enough time to start to court her. Hazel thought she was ugly — tall, skinny, with freckles and curly hair. No one had ever told her she looked beautiful but a beautiful young woman is what Bill saw when he looked at her. He was her first boyfriend and she was his first girlfriend. When he was discharged from hospital and went back to his parents’ station, they wrote to each other and Hazel confided in Connie that she really liked him. She even told Dulcie because she knew she would find out anyway. Dulcie told Hazel there might be a vacancy coming up on Netallie which Bill could have, saying: ‘Sam probably won’t be here for very long.’

  Dulcie, Harry, Allan and the kids were the only ones, apart from Overton, living on Netallie until shearer Daniel English arrived with his team of men on 10 April 1956, to help with the crutching. The shearing sheds and the sheep dip were close to the shearers’ quarters, about fourteen and a half kilometres from the homestead. After the sheep had the wool cut from around their tail and between their rear legs, they were plunged into a wooden sheep dip filled with water mixed with arsenic, which killed the lice and protected against the blowflies which like to lay their eggs in the moist area under the sheep’s tail. The poison was something you couldn’t play around with and Overton made sure the station hands knew that. Even the dogs were kept clear when the sheep were being dipped. On Netallie they used a white powder product called Calarsenite, which contained about fifty per cent arsenic.

  Dulcie had never heard of Calarsenite before she moved to Netallie but now she knew where to find it. The powder was kept in packets in boxes inside a wooden crate with the name ‘Elliott’s Calarsenite’ written on the side and the initials of the town supplied stamped next to it: ‘K and D Wilcannia’, Knox and Downs. The crate was on the shelves among the tins and boxes inside the skin shed, which was used for storing chemicals and the skins of sheep that had been slaughtered. Dulcie took a cup full of the powder up to the house.

  That Saturday, 14 April, Daniel took Overton into Wilcannia in the Jeep to pick up some supplies but when he called around to the main house the next day to take him up to the shearing sheds, he found the boss in agony. ‘I’ll lay down for a while. I’ll go up when it cools off. I’ve never felt like this before,’ Overton told him.

  He felt so sick that he said: ‘A man would be better off dead.’

  Three days later, Hazel was on duty on 17 April when Sam Overton was admitted to Wilcannia Hospital, looking as sick as a dog. He hadn’t even wanted to wait for an ambulance and Allan and Harry helped him into the back of a ute where he lay on a mattress as Harry drove him to town. He was taken down from the ute and carried into the hospital and put into bed. He was conscious but he couldn’t sit up. Dr Potts was called and Hazel and the nurses tried to make the patient as comfortable as possible.

  The doctor, Overton’s shooting companion, had been out to see him at Wilcannia the previous day after he was telephoned by Dulcie. When he had arrived, she had her ‘work face’ on, the mask full of sympathy and concern but with a bit of a bite. Overton was in bed and before she took Dr Potts to see him, she drew him aside and spoke of her worry that her boss had been drinking too much. She had found empty wine and beer bottles; and also, he hadn’t been eating and he had lost weight. He had been neglecting himself, she said, and she had been doing her best to try to help him.

  Dr Potts found his friend as sick as he had ever seen anyone. The last time he had seen him was just a couple of weeks earlier and Overton had been his usual fit and healthy self. He tried to persuade Overton that hospital was the best place for him but the man was stubborn. He was sweating and told the doctor he had never felt so crook in his life. He had taken sick soon after crutching and it had only got worse. According to his notes, which he would come to rely on in a few years’ time, Dr Potts diagnosed acute gastroenteritis and gave him an injection of Chloromycetin, a broad-based antibiotic, which was meant to knock the problem on the head. On the dresser in the bedroom, he left some capsules of a sedative, an antacid tablet and some vitamin tablets, which he told Dulcie she could administer over the next couple of days if they were needed.

  But that next day when he saw Overton in hospital, Dr Potts became really worried. He immediately started intravenous infusion, inserting the catheter through Overton’s leg. Overton was sweating profusely, his blood pressure had plummeted and he was in what the doctor called a ‘moderately shocked’ condition. He had developed severe diarrhoea, and was vomiting and convulsing. His wife was notified in Adelaide and she immediately set off to be with him. Overton was placed in a private room for his own comfort and in case he had anything that might be contagious.

  After she ended her shift that evening, Hazel went to see Overton. She pulled up the chair next to his bed and spoke words of comfort to him, telling him he would be fine. He looked up from the pillow and said: ‘Hazel, your mother is so kind to me. You are lucky to have her.’

  A shiver went through her and the hairs on her arms stood up. In her room at the nurses’ quarters, Hazel didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t know what her mother had done but she feared her hand was behind this somehow.

  When Hazel reported for duty the next morning, she learnt that Dr Potts had been called at 4.30 am when Overton had tried to get out of bed and had collapsed on the floor. The hospital notes showed the doctor injected him with the stimulant nikethamide, known then by its trade name Coramine, to get his heart rate up. He was put on oxygen and given other treatments. The nurses had him under 24-hour observation and Dr Potts was in and out of his room all day. Overton seemed to improve somewhat and Mrs Overton arrived at the hospital about 9 pm, having driven nonstop from Adelaide because there were no flights available at the right time. Hazel clocked off duty feeling more positive.

  When she got back the next morning, she headed for Overton’s room to see how he was but Connie Paterson grabbed her arm and stopped her from going in. The registered nurse said he had died during the night. He had collapsed suddenly at 10.45 p
m and despite Dr Potts being called, Overton had died soon after. He was forty-two. Mrs Overton had been taken back to Netallie Station and some of her relatives were on their way from Adelaide to be with her.

  Hazel felt numb. She was desperate to see her brother Allan because while she didn’t want to believe it, she just knew her mother had got away with another murder. She was seething but also questioned herself: was there anything she could have done to stop it and save Overton’s life? She felt sick. It was an awful predicament to be in at the age of fifteen.

  There was no autopsy because Dr Potts was sure that Overton had died of natural causes and on the death certificate, he recorded two reasons — toxic myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the myocardium, the middle layer of the heart wall, and which reduces the heart’s ability to pump blood around the body, and acute gastroenteritis. There was nothing suspicious about Overton’s death at the time to merit the coroner getting involved, and the law was that the coroner was not automatically notified because Overton had seen a doctor shortly before his death. No one was looking for anyone to blame.

  It was two days before Allan could get a lift into Wilcannia to talk to Hazel. They went through all the hints Dulcie had given that she had something bad on her mind. She had told Allan to see if he could ‘accidentally’ shoot Sam. Then there were the comments that Sam wasn’t going to be around for long. It was all stuff they could put down to their mother thinking she could rule the roost again. But there was something else Allan had to tell his big sister.

  During the first days that Overton was sick, Allan had walked into the kitchen and seen Dulcie preparing what she said was Sam’s ‘medicine’.

  ‘It was some capsules that were open on the sink,’ he told his big sister. ‘She had them spread apart on the sink on some paper and I asked what they were.’

  Allan paused as if not wanting to know the answer himself.

  ‘She said that Sam wouldn’t eat and they had to feed him through the capsules,’ he said.

  Hazel wanted to know what Dulcie was putting into the capsules but all Allan knew was that it was a white powder which he thought looked like powdered milk.

  It was some days before Dr Potts had been called out to see Overton but at the time Allan hadn’t thought too much about it. Now he told Hazel that it may have been Calarsenite. In the light of Overton’s death, it was a chilling observation. They feared Dulcie may have poisoned him. Neither of them needed to remind the other that their mother had already killed once: their father.

  They were sure she was responsible but they discussed the fact that they had no evidence to go to the police with, just a gut feeling. No one who had seen Dulcie with her mask on would have believed them. Everyone liked her. The brother and sister were scared of what Dulcie would do if they spoke up, especially Allan who was still living with his mother and stepfather. They even feared that she might poison Allan. Beneath the pleasant façade, she was a harsh, tough and cruel woman.

  Meanwhile, Overton’s body had been released for burial and was on its way to Adelaide by train via Broken Hill in a sealed zinc-lined casket. There was no refrigeration in those days so a zinc coffin was the only way to move bodies long distance, even though it made the caskets heavy and costly to freight.

  Hazel and Allan thought they were alone in suspecting foul play; if only they had known that the McClure family also ‘smelled a rat’, as they would later describe it. Dulcie was furious when back at Netallie Station the day after her husband died, Margaret Overton outright accused her of poisoning him. She said he had never been sick in his life and that Dulcie must have known what had happened. Why hadn’t Dulcie called her as soon as he became ill? Dulcie remained outwardly calm as she told Mrs Overton that she understood she was distressed but denied having anything to do with her husband’s death. She then went outside and told Harry to drive her into town to Wilcannia police station.

  Dulcie thought she would get one up on Mrs Overton, cut her off in her tracks. On her way out, Dulcie picked up a bottle of powder with a purple label from the kitchen. When she entered the police station she handed it over the counter to Sergeant Fred Marshall.

  ‘I found this poison in the office at Netallie Station. I would like you to take it as I am afraid some of my children might get poisoned,’ she told the officer, concern washing over her face. He told her that it looked like strychnine. She said she was shocked, and pleased she had taken it to the police.

  When Dulcie and Harry got back to Netallie, they found that Mrs Overton had left to accompany her husband’s body to Adelaide. Two of her brothers, Jim and Lance McClure, arrived at Netallie on 21 April to take charge. Margaret had told them what she thought of Dulcie, and the brothers decided to tread lightly.

  Jim McClure went into the bedroom to look at Overton’s personal effects and couldn’t find his best shoes or any riding boots. The good slacks Overton liked to wear had also gone. Overton had always carried a fair bit of cash with him but there was no money in his wallet. He asked Dulcie where the clothing had gone and she said nothing was missing as far as she knew.

  ‘These here are the only ones I noticed,’ she said.

  Then she started fingering the sports coats.

  ‘Do you think Mrs Overton would let me have these sports coats? I feel they would fit my husband,’ she asked him.

  He knew what his sister would think — over her dead body. ‘Oh no, I don’t think so, Mrs Bodsworth,’ he told her.

  Dulcie continued to try to put the blame onto Overton for his own death. She told the brothers that he had been drinking heavily before he got sick and that the alcohol may have had something to do with his illness. Jim and Lance knew Overton liked a drink at a party and perhaps at a hotel on a Saturday afternoon but he never drank at home and could hardly be considered a heavy drinker.

  Dulcie had them follow her to the dining room off the kitchen where she opened a cupboard and waved her right hand in triumph, indicating Overton’s ‘stash’. There was a total of four empty beer bottles and two empty wine bottles. The brothers scoffed.

  ‘Even if a man drank all that, all in one day, he wouldn’t be sick for more than a day or two at the most, so it couldn’t have been the drinking,’ Jim said.

  Dulcie did not like being outsmarted.

  The next morning, Harry walked over from the cottage to see what the brothers wanted him to do. They thought Harry seemed a bit simple and that he might tell them the truth so they engaged him in conversation about what had happened to Overton.

  Then they heard a yell from the cottage and looked up to see Mrs Bodsworth at the door holding a shotgun. They knew enough about guns to know that they were too far away to be hurt but she was pointing it in their direction and seemed pretty bloody intimidating all the same.

  ‘Get away from them, Harry, get away from them,’ she shouted as she waved the gun around. Her husband appeared more afraid of his wife than the brothers were.

  They called the police and Sergeant Marshall was one of the two officers who came from Wilcannia. There were only three officers stationed in the town and one of them was on a day off, so it was more or less their full strength. The officers disappeared into the cottage for about thirty minutes and when they finally emerged, the brothers could hear the officers thanking Dulcie for the tea and scones.

  The brothers asked if the officers had taken the gun off her.

  ‘No, no, she’s just a bit upset,’ Sergeant Marshall said. ‘She’s a good woman; no need to worry about her.’

  What may have passed for ‘upset’ in Wilcannia was not what they ever wanted to see again and the brothers told Dulcie and Harry to leave. The couple dragged out their departure, borrowing a truck to move their furniture into town where Dulcie left the key in the ignition and the engine running when they brought it back so the battery would run down — just out of spite.

  The McClures also discovered nails had been hammered into the rainwater tanks, as Dulcie had decided to ‘bugger their lives u
p’ before she left. The next generation of McClure children who holidayed at Netallie would be told tales of Mrs Bodsworth. She became like a bogeyman, or rather bogeywoman. They called the deserted cottage where she had lived ‘Bodsworthville’ and scared each other so much that they were too terrified to open the door and venture inside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TOMMY TREGENZA

  TWO THOUSAND POUNDS. AS SOON AS DULCIE HEARD TOMMY Tregenza saying he had two thousand pounds in the bank, the town drunk suddenly morphed into someone who needed a friend like Dulcie Bodsworth.

  Thomas Tregenza had a little ditty he liked to repeat: ‘By Tre, Pol and Pen, you shall know the Cornishmen.’ It was a version of an old rhyming couplet about the unique prefixes that were an integral part of place names and surnames in Cornwall. Tommy, as he was known, was very proud of his heritage and told people his descendants had come from Cornwall as part of the convict muster. They may well have, but Tregenza was born in Naracoorte in May 1887. In the early decades of the 1900s, the town barely had a population of 1500. Dulcie had left four dead babies there, two of them buried under a clothes line. She was also suspected by some people of killing Sam Overton, who had owned a farm there. If Tregenza had known about the curse of Naracoorte, he would have done well to stay clear of Mrs Bodsworth.

  As well as his Cornish heritage, he was proud of what he had achieved in his own past even though he lived from hand to mouth in the present and had long ago written off the future.

  His only real luck in life was his size: Tregenza was just over five feet in the old measurement and had always been wiry in build. He was the ideal size and shape to be a jockey and he loved horses, admiring their intelligence and beauty. He began his career in the saddle as an apprentice with one of the local stables. It was at the time when Australians were experimenting with the riding style where the jockeys crouched on short stirrups and Tregenza found it made racing easier. He was a natural. He raced in Victoria and New South Wales as well as South Australia. He never raced in the Adelaide Cup but at the same time, he never had a ‘run-of-the-mill’ victory — every time he was first past the post seemed like the first time. He revelled in the adoration of the crowd when he rode a winner. He wasn’t famous but every time he won, he was a minor celebrity. In the so-called sport of kings, he felt like a king.