My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  The hotel had a large dining room at the back behind the bar where the guests all sat around a table about the size of a billiard table. Dulcie always had two choices for the evening meal. It started with soup — which was pea soup when Tommy was there — then there was always a meat pie on the menu plus either lamb chops or chicken depending on what the butcher had fresh that day, and a dessert, which was often apple pie with custard or cream. Dulcie’s meat pies and apple tarts were legendary.

  Dulcie was still a good-looking woman. She preferred the company of men to women and she was still a flirt. Men were, after all, the weaker sex. She had also realised that she could influence men much more easily than she could women, and over the road from the hotel were half a dozen of them, and in uniform to boot.

  Every morning she was up baking scones and slices, which she put on paper doilies in a couple of tins and took over the road to the police station just in time for the officers’ morning tea. For the cops it was manna from heaven; the police had never known it so good. Few of the officers stayed in the town for long; they were stationed to Wilcannia as part of their mandated stint in the bush. At the time, Constable Max Salisbury, who had moved into one of the police houses with his wife, was one of the least experienced men and he was often on the counter when Dulcie walked in. They always had a chat and sometimes his boss, Sergeant First Class Eric Madden, gave him a shout to invite her around the counter and into the big office they shared. Its walls were painted in a drab magnolia colour and the wooden desks had dark green leather insets on the top where she laid out the scones, hoisted herself up on the corner and turned on the charm.

  It was a beneficial relationship for the police — and not only because of the beautiful baking and the generosity of the cook. Working in the hotel, Dulcie heard a lot of gossip and, like police everywhere, the Wilcannia cops wanted to know everything that was going on. She loved to talk and it made her feel important that they were happy to listen. She could still turn on the wit and the cops enjoyed her tales from the hotel.

  In December 1957, Dulcie confided in them about her concerns for one of her regulars, Tommy Tregenza. The cops knew him well although he hadn’t spent a night in the cells because the locals looked after him when he was the worse for wear and helped him back to bed. A lot of drunken activity among the locals, whether black or white, was just part of life in Wilcannia in those days.

  Under Dulcie’s spell, Tommy had abandoned the Club Hotel and taken a ‘room’ at the Court House Hotel. It was nothing more than a shed out the back but it had two beds and shared a bathroom. With a small shake of her head indicating that she could do little about it, Dulcie told the police that she knew Tommy was smoking in bed and she was terrified that he would fall asleep in one of his drunken stupors and set himself on fire. Just like she had done with Sam Overton when she spoke of how he liked a drink, which may have led to his ‘gastro’ problems, Dulcie was planting the seeds of doubt about Tommy’s welfare. She even mentioned her concern for Tommy to other regulars at the hotel, always in a kind and caring way.

  Pea soup was on the menu again when Bill and Hazel had dinner at the hotel so they knew Tommy was back in town. Dulcie was serving the bowls as everyone took their seats around the big table but when Hazel sat down and picked up her spoon to start on the soup, Dulcie snatched the bowl away from her.

  ‘You can’t sit there, that’s Tommy’s,’ she said loudly.

  Hazel hadn’t known everyone to have ‘their seat’ before. Her heart started racing and she wondered for a moment if Dulcie had been slipping something into Tommy’s soup, poison or just something to make him sleep more soundly. Later she would feel like a coward for not speaking up as she never knew whether Tommy was being drugged. But she didn’t want to believe her mother would kill again so, despite the evidence, Hazel dismissed the thought. It couldn’t be.

  Tommy took ‘his’ seat and started on ‘his’ soup, which appeared to be exactly the same as everyone else’s and did not seem to do him any harm. Hazel calmed down. She thought that despite being a piss-wreck, he had lived a good life in his own way. It was written in his wrinkles. Like most alcoholics, he couldn’t handle big meals and ate little other than soup. But he always appeared to be contented. He never whinged about his lot, even though he didn’t have much. Hazel liked him.

  It was obvious that evening that Tommy loved Hazel’s mother.

  ‘I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for Dulcie,’ he told everyone at the table. ‘She’s a good woman, that one,’ he said as Dulcie fussed around, asking if he wanted his soup bowl refilled or if he needed more bread.

  Tommy stayed in town for the next seven weeks. Although it wasn’t strictly part of her duties, Dulcie made sure the sheets on his bed were the best the hotel had when Tommy was sleeping in it. She shook the dust out of his swag for him and hung it over the washing line to air it out.

  For those seven weeks he shared his room with Jim, one of the twins. Then thirteen, Jim was a bit of a wild kid, wagging school, but he enjoyed Tommy’s company. He knew that if Tommy couldn’t do you a good turn, he wouldn’t do you a bad turn. The teenager hung on Tommy’s tales of life as a shearer, living and working on the land. He quite fancied being a knockabout bloke like that himself. The only bad thing about Tommy was that when he had had a skinful, he snored.

  When he was on a bender, Tommy rarely left the hotel; he occasionally ventured out, but only as far as the next drinking hole. This time he moved only between his bed and the bar, never even leaving the hotel at all. Dulcie never strayed far, so every time he emerged from his drunken stupors, she was there to put the kettle on the stove for a cup of tea. After he moved hotels, he started leaving his bank book and cheque book with Dulcie for safekeeping. She always knew how much money he had.

  Looking back, Hazel could see her mother’s swagger return as 1957 ended with a burning hot summer. She seemed happier than she had been for a while. Not that Hazel could have known what was planned. Dulcie didn’t pick up a gun or a knife to signal that she was going to kill someone. She always had an agenda but she was much more underhanded than that.

  In the middle of January, Dulcie told young Jim to let Tommy have the room to himself. The hotel had a warehouse and she made Jim a room out of hay bales stacked up and roped off. Two nights later, on Friday, 17 January 1958, Jim woke in the early hours of the morning to the panicked sounds of yelling. He ran down the passageway to the hotel where he saw an orange glow coming from Tommy’s bedroom.

  Hazel was on the night shift at Wilcannia Hospital when a police car pulled up at the emergency entrance at about 3 am. The cops were always bringing in the black fellas when they got into a drunken fight and hurt each other, but this time Constable Max Salisbury carried the patient in from the back of the car wrapped in a blanket. It was Tommy, covered in horrendous burns and just clinging to life. It was all hands on deck as the nurses could see that his trousers and shirt had been almost burnt away and the exposed parts of his body were red raw after a fire had erupted in his bed at the hotel.

  Constable Salisbury told them how Dulcie had knocked on the door of the police house about 2.30 am, waking up him and his wife.

  ‘Come quickly, quickly. Poor old Tommy went to bed smoking and now he is on fire,’ she said.

  The officer ran to the hotel where he found Tommy still alive, lying on the floor of his room, which was full of steam and smoke. The wall behind the bed was scorched and black but the fire had been put out by Harry.

  Dulcie told the officer that she had been woken by the smell of smoke and found Tommy on fire. After grabbing the hose and pouring water on the fire, Harry had picked up a blanket and beaten out the flames that engulfed Tommy’s body. She had told Harry and Jim to throw the smouldering mattress in the river to make sure the fire was fully extinguished.

  Tommy was put on morphine for his excruciating pain and given fluids to replace those he had lost as part of the body’s response to burns. But the hospital wasn’t a sp
ecialist burns centre and Connie, as a registered nurse, was being realistic when she said she didn’t think Tommy would last the night. Hazel couldn’t look away from this frail elderly man. He died at 9 am that morning, aged seventy. Dear God, she thought, dear God. What has Dulcie done now?

  The town was buzzing with the news of the fire. Everyone was calling it a tragic accident. Old Tommy had fallen asleep in bed drunk with a lighted cigarette and whoosh, he had gone up in flames. Hazel had no evidence that it had happened any differently but it still did not sit right with her.

  Just as exciting to the gossips was the news that Tommy had left everything to Dulcie. Well, she had been so good to him and he didn’t have any family. Word soon got around how she caught up with Constable Salisbury in the main street at midday the same day Tommy died and handed him an envelope. On the back of it was written ‘The last will and contestant of Thomas Tregenza’. Salisbury knew it should have been ‘testament’ but figured Tommy had misheard the word and didn’t know any better. It looked official and Dulcie said Tommy had given it to her but she had never opened it and didn’t know what was in it.

  Salisbury put it in his pocket and opened it when he got to the station. It contained Tommy’s will, signed by him, witnessed by Dulcie and with her named as the executor. In it, he had left her everything he had in the bank, which turned out to be 600 pounds. It was a small fortune, equivalent to around $19,000 today. There would have been more but his bank book showed that on 5 December, 300 pounds had been withdrawn from his account and another 200 pounds had been withdrawn just two days before his death. The money was never found and the police figured it must have been destroyed in the fire.

  Unlike Ted Baron, there was enough money to give Tommy a funeral, as basic as it was, and he was buried in the local cemetery among the saltbush and gum trees. Like Ted Baron’s grave, there was no one to tend to it and, like Ted, he would have disappeared into obscurity had it not been for what later transpired.

  Seven days after Tommy died, the local magistrate opened the inquest into his death, which was never considered suspicious but rules dictated there be a hearing because it had been a sudden death and Tommy had not seen a doctor in so long that there were no medical records. For the second time, Dulcie was called to give evidence at an inquest.

  In the witness box of the Wilcannia courtroom, opposite the hotel where she gave the locals the best feed they had ever had and next to the police station where she had charmed the officers with her baking, Dulcie took the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She told the court that Tommy had been accustomed to smoking in bed and had given them a scare just a week before his death when he fell asleep in an old lounge chair and burnt himself. She said that the night before he died, she had offered him some soup but he declined and went off to bed, holding a bottle of spirits. The next thing she knew she was woken by the smell of burning. As Harry attacked the flames with a hose, she grabbed the smouldering mattress, pulled it to the riverbank and pushed it into the water to make sure the fire was out. Then she ran for Constable Salisbury.

  Besotted Harry Bodsworth was as naïve as ever. While other men would probably have started to suspect their wife and worry that they might be the next on her list, Harry blithely sailed through. He was totally bewitched and Dulcie was still coquettish around him both in public and more importantly in the bedroom. It got her the attention she loved.

  Harry told the inquest how Tommy’s mattress had been in flames and he had quickly picked up the shearer in his arms and laid him gently on the floor. Tommy had been totally in shock. ‘I’m all right, Harry. I’m all right,’ Harry heard him say.

  Constable Salisbury picked up the story from when he arrived at Tommy’s room. The late Sam Overton’s shooting mate, Dr Potts, as the head of the hospital, gave evidence about Tommy’s cause of death. On 29 January, the magistrate, sitting as a coroner, returned a verdict that Tommy had died from the effects of burns accidentally received.

  His death knocked the stuffing out of Hazel. She had been on duty when Sam Overton died and now Tommy. Not to mention sleeping metres away from where her father had drowned. She was sixteen, married and working as a nurse’s aide and in that part of her life she felt mature beyond her years. On the other hand, she was still only sixteen and right now she felt like a little girl, a scared little girl. The only time she had discussed the family’s secrets was with Allan. He was her eyes and ears inside Dulcie’s home.

  Hazel didn’t want to burden Bill with them but as the months went by and summer turned to winter, she needed to share her thoughts and talk through what had happened. The secrets were wearing her down. She felt exhausted.

  It must have shown because one evening Bill told her she looked worn out. Hazel took that as her cue. She decided to tell Bill what had happened. There wasn’t an easy way to tell your new husband that you thought your mother was a serial killer, but she did wait until after they had eaten dinner. The kerosene lamp cast a dim glow in the room as they sat on the only chairs they had, around the dining room table. She tried to tell him gently but it all came out in a rush. She started with what she thought had really happened to her dad. Until then, Bill knew only that Ted Baron had drowned. Hazel told him about finding her dad’s dog ‘missing’.

  She looked at Bill to see if he somehow disapproved of his new wife’s old life. Perhaps he wished he hadn’t married into a family of mad people when his family was so stable? She saw that he was looking at the ground. Hazel moved on to her suspicions that her mother had poisoned Sam Overton. She told Bill about how Allan had seen her mother filling capsules with white powder to give to the farmer. She said she believed Dulcie had probably drugged Tommy Tregenza so he wouldn’t wake up when she set him on fire.

  She got the reaction she had expected from Bill — he couldn’t believe her. Not that he thought she was lying but it was all so far outside his own experience that he couldn’t fathom those sorts of things happening as she said they had.

  Hazel didn’t get upset at what he said. She thought her husband was a real optimist: if you don’t talk about it, it will go away. It will never happen. Just ride it out and everything will be fine. She wished she could do that herself.

  When she told him that Dulcie had poisoned Sam Overton, Bill became animated.

  ‘How do you know that? How can you be sure? You weren’t there.’

  When she said she thought her mother had killed Tommy Tregenza, Bill questioned whether she was being a bit paranoid. Hazel had once wondered that herself.

  Hazel felt that she was behaving like a bitch, always thinking the worst, while Bill was so nice he didn’t like to cause any ripples. Contrary to the idiom that a trouble shared is a trouble halved, Hazel didn’t feel the burden fly off her after sharing her concerns with Bill, but it had helped a bit to finally talk to someone other than Allan. Unlike Bill, she knew it wasn’t going to go away.

  A couple of weeks later, Bill came home to their fibro shack from work at the aerodrome bruised and shaken after Harry had knocked him over with the scoop of a bulldozer. He told Hazel that Harry had apologised for the accident. No harm done, he said. Hazel made him sit down and take it easy.

  Just a few days after that, she was at work when Bill was brought in to the hospital. This time he had a broken ankle as well as more cuts and bruises. He had been knocked into a hole by the bulldozer driven by Harry. Bill said in what was a whisper only for her ears that he didn’t think it was an accident but that this time Harry had meant it. He was even starting to believe in Dulcie’s murderous past.

  Hazel went cold. She was too numb to take it all in.

  A few days later as Bill was at home with his leg up on one of the oil drums they used as stools, Hazel was chilled to the bone again when her brother Allan was brought into the hospital unconscious. Dr Potts examined him but was unable to make a firm diagnosis of the cause. What saved Allan’s life was an iron lung, which had been donated to the hospital by a former
patient, a wealthy benefactor, because in those days an iron lung cost as much as a house. It was a terrifying contraption to look at. It was an airtight cylinder in which the patient lay with only their head outside as pumps changed the pressure inside to push and pull air in and out of their lungs. Dulcie called in during visiting hours to sit by his side, trying to look like a concerned mother, but Hazel didn’t want to go home and leave Allan, especially with Dulcie hanging about. She stayed with him as much as she could while every moment expecting the worst. ‘Stay alive, whatever you do, stay alive,’ she urged him.

  With his head outside the iron lung, Allan could eat and Hazel fed him small amounts by hand. She washed his face for him and brushed his sandy hair. As he got better, Allan was able to talk and after three or four days, he was allowed out of the lung for periods of up to thirty minutes at a time to sit up and move his limbs. In some ways it was a special time for the brother and sister because they had had little chance to be together, just the two of them, since Hazel got married. That was not only because they no longer lived close to each other but also because Allan was still a bit cowed by his mother, who had made it clear that she did not like him spending time with Hazel and Bill. Dulcie had tried to prise them apart, telling Hazel that Allan was ‘being difficult’, and although she did not go into details — and Hazel knew enough not to ask in order to keep the conversation as short as possible — Hazel sensed that she was being blamed for Allan’s behaviour because the two of them were so close.

  Prior to his admission to hospital, Allan had been diagnosed with a chest cold and prescribed antibiotics in capsule form. He was still living at home and he told Hazel that he had noticed some of the capsules seemed loose and some were a slightly different colour, as if they had been tampered with. Now they wondered if Dulcie had been tampering with them. They had no reason to think that she would kill her own son, but by now they could be forgiven for feeling paranoid.

  As she looked after Allan in hospital, Hazel told him about Bill’s accidents at work and it was Allan’s blood that froze. He revealed to his sister that a few weeks earlier, he had heard Dulcie tell Harry that Hazel was getting out of control and that she needed to be ‘brought into line’. Dulcie had ‘suggested’ that Bill have an accident at work. Allan was horrified to think that Harry had actually taken her suggestion as an order and carried it out. He hadn’t warned Hazel at the time because he thought it had been one of Dulcie’s throwaway lines and never suspected that poor weak Harry would act on it. But Harry was deep under his wife’s spell.