My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  Like all good detectives of the day, he was only as good as his network of snitches and Kelly had an enviable network of informants, including crims happy to dob on their competitors. He was as much at ease mixing with the underworld hoods as he was with politicians, celebrities and racketeers, and counted the vice queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh among his friends. Kelly had formed part of the bodyguard for Queen Elizabeth II on her 1954 tour of Australia.

  Hazel never felt the slightest bit intimidated by this 63-year-old tough-as-nails career cop. When he met her at the airport, he was on his way to being promoted to inspector after leading the manhunt for escapees Kevin ‘Simmo’ Simmonds and Leslie Newcombe who had escaped from Long Bay jail. On the run, they beat to death a warder at Emu Plains Prison Farm and stole his gun. Newcombe was arrested two weeks later but it took another three weeks, a Navy helicopter, patrol cars, German shepherd tracker dogs, 500 armed police and Ray Kelly to corner Simmo in the bush near Kurri Kurri in the Hunter region where he surrendered and was later jailed for life.

  Kelly and his offsider, Sergeant John Palmer, known as Jack, saw a slender, poised young woman walk down the stairs from the aircraft, and Hazel and Kelly hit it off immediately. He couldn’t abide whingers and admired Hazel’s courage. To him, she was a detective’s dream. She was like a tape recorder when she started talking as she remembered amazing details. After bottling it all up inside her for years, Hazel wasn’t at all tired of telling the story again. She felt the ghosts of three dead people looking over her shoulder. Not for a moment did she feel guilty about dobbing in Dulcie, whom she had long ago stopped thinking of as her mother.

  The officers booked Hazel into a motel under a false name for the first couple of days and to tell the truth, Hazel thought it quite exciting. Kelly and Palmer spent a long time interviewing her and getting it all down on paper with the help of their state-of-the-art Olympia typewriter. Hazel told them there was no way she could go back to Wilcannia. It had hurt her to walk away from Allan and the twins with no explanation but she couldn’t risk them knowing what she was doing and where she was. It was safer for them as well as for her. Bill had told them all, including Dulcie, that Hazel had had a breakdown and the doctors had told her to get away from everything. Hazel thought that if Dulcie got even a whiff of the truth, her own death would quickly follow.

  Ray Kelly was already one step ahead of her. He introduced Hazel to the twilight world of what he called witness protection. In those days it was a bit ad hoc, not the well-oiled machine it is now with entire police departments devoted to keeping vulnerable witnesses safe, but to Hazel it was no less secretive. Hazel had to walk away from her old life at least until they could secure her safety. Kelly told her she couldn’t go home or talk to anyone from home, not even Connie. She didn’t have to change her name but she was told not to mention her real surname. Her new home wasn’t a fortress, but that is what the anonymous-looking federation house in the suburb of Bexley might as well have been when she was dropped off by Kelly and Palmer.

  Not that she wasn’t made to feel at home. The elderly couple who were paid by the police to let her live with them could not have been more welcoming. She had her own bedroom with a big wooden wardrobe and a chest of drawers that she knew was called a lowboy, as opposed to a tallboy. After living under the bright skies of a bush town, it took her a while to get used to the darkness of the house with its small windows and the smell of mothballs.

  The couple was very polite, sometimes to the point of being annoying, Hazel thought. They were devout Plymouth Brethren and lived a simple, frugal life. The house was always cold and they were careful with the power, turning off the lights when they left a room. The meals were plain and filling, usually meat and two veg. Never three veg. The woman was squat, wore dark clothes and her hair in a grey bun. Her husband looked a bit like her — but without the bun. They never knew her surname and never asked. When Ray Kelly rang, as he often did to update Hazel on his investigation and check on her welfare, he simply asked for her by her Christian name. It wasn’t the first time the couple had been involved in this cloak and dagger witness protection, Hazel thought.

  The man who would help put Dulcie away for murder knew it wouldn’t be easy. The case wasn’t straightforward; Hazel had no direct evidence — so far it was all hearsay and circumstantial — but all police know that a circumstantial case can sometimes be more persuasive before a jury than a witness, a body and a confession. Kelly was at the starting gate but building up to a gallop.

  He had a lot of work to do and he began tracking down the people whose names Hazel had given him to line them up for interviews. He was going to have to get copies of the inquest findings into the deaths of Tregenza and Overton and may have to get orders for all three bodies to be exhumed. The crucial forty-eight hours after the discovery of any body had long ago expired and he told Hazel that she had to be patient. She had waited this long.

  Meanwhile, murderers are no respecters of police time and resources and Kelly had a dozen other cases to solve.

  But Hazel was missing Bill and her siblings. She had never lived so far away from her family, either in physical distance or mentally. It was quite liberating, but while she was brave on the outside, there were times when she was still feeling conflicted about dobbing in Dulcie. Hazel suffered bouts of depression, sometimes unable to stop crying as she walked down the street. Her days were long, lonely and scary.

  One day she went to see a doctor, a middle-aged man who asked her what was wrong. Hazel blurted out her problems, told him she was frightened of her mother and scared she would find her.

  ‘Your mother killed your father? Do the police know?’ the doctor asked from his side of the desk.

  Hazel said that the police did know and when the doctor followed up asking whether her mother was in jail, Hazel said she wasn’t.

  ‘So you tell me that your mother killed your father and the police know and she’s not in jail?’ The doctor stood up and walked around the desk.

  ‘I don’t believe you. I think you are delusional and I could have you committed for such serious accusations. I could send you to Callan Park.’

  Callan Park was a notorious mental asylum left over from the last century. Hazel fled the doctor’s rooms. Just as it was getting easier for her to talk about the truth, and just as she thought people were believing her, the doctor’s reaction knocked the wind out of her sails.

  Bill had never gone back to work at the aerodrome after he broke his ankle. Apart from the police, he was the only person who knew where Hazel was and he missed her as much as she missed him. They hadn’t been able to write to each other because while he was scared someone would read the address after he posted a letter, she was afraid someone would see the postmark on letters from her. He had been able to call her from a public telephone box but she couldn’t ring him because their home didn’t have a phone.

  After a month of this loneliness, Bill packed up what he could carry and got a friend to give him a lift to Broken Hill where he caught the train to Sydney. As the train swayed from side to side for over fourteen hours across the flat dry plains, he had plenty of time to think about what the future would be for him and his young wife. It certainly wouldn’t be dull. He had put their Wilcannia house on the market and left all their furniture behind, figuring it would end up on the rubbish tip where it had come from. The house sold for 300 pounds and they tripled their investment. For the next nine months he lived in the Bexley house with Hazel who he now looked upon with fresh eyes as being the most courageous person he had ever met.

  Kelly thought it would be safe for Hazel to move further afield than Bexley and have a look around Sydney and the couple rented a flat. Dulcie had so far steered clear of big cities and they figured she wasn’t likely to be walking around Sydney. Hazel was relieved but she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder wherever she went. She was scared that Dulcie would smell a rat and come looking for her.

  Until then, the biggest shop
Hazel had seen was Knox and Downs in Wilcannia. In Sydney, she was in awe of upmarket Grace Brothers, David Jones, Mark Foy’s and Farmers Exclusive Furniture, although she had no money to buy anything. She never complained about having no money just as she didn’t like it when people who had money bragged about it. Bill quickly got a job as an offsider on a furniture delivery van with Farmers. Once he knew his way around the city, he graduated to a driver. Having worked as a nurse’s aide at Wilcannia, Hazel decided to use her time in Sydney to qualify as a nurse, which at the time was done on the job and not at university. So the couple settled into their new little life.

  In Wilcannia, Tommy Tregenza’s death was the catalyst for more changes. The six years Dulcie had been in town was the most settled time she had ever had in her life but, like always, she was never contented. She was bitter that she had ended up with almost nothing from Tommy’s will, even blaming poor old Tommy for it. She had a fight with the owner of the Court House Hotel over something that years later no one could recall but Dulcie blamed the owner for starting it. She stopped paying him rent for the family’s cottage after she lost her job and they were kicked out of their home.

  Dulcie and Harry, the twins and their little half-brother moved into a cottage at the aerodrome where Harry still worked. Dulcie found that she could still be important around town with her wedding teas and party catering. The work brought in some extra money but, just as importantly, it meant she was still shown some respect. No one could bake like Dulcie.

  Without his sister to rely on, Allan left home. Bill had confided in him where the couple was living and he joined them in Sydney for Easter. He later had an accident in Broken Hill when a horse rolled on him and he ended up working as a station hand on Kangaroo Island, about as far away as he could get from Dulcie.

  That gypsy urge to move on again had crept up on Dulcie along with the fact that the family hadn’t been able to pay all their bills. She owed money all over town. Although everyone knew her, Dulcie never developed the skills to form deep relationships that led to friendship. She only ever had fleeting acquaintances. One night, Dulcie and Harry packed up the old trailer behind the Nash and sneaked out of town for good with Margaret and her half-brother. They did an old-fashioned midnight flit.

  Jim had got a lift back into town after a week working on Duntroon Station way outside Wilcannia to find the house empty and the car gone. Dulcie hadn’t even waited to say goodbye. He was fourteen. One of the locals pulled up his ute alongside Jim as the youngster was walking along the main street and asked him what was up. ‘Mum’s gone,’ was all Jim could say. One of the guesthouses put him up for the night for free and the next day he began his working life as a roustabout in the shearing sheds.

  In Sydney, Hazel took a deep breath. She was homesick for the bush, homesick for Wilcannia, even homesick for the red earth and the snakes and the muddy Darling River. She broached the possibility of returning home with Ray Kelly and she wouldn’t have gone if he had said it was too dangerous. But he figured that with Dulcie having left town under a cloud, she wouldn’t dare go back. If she did, Hazel was to go straight to the police.

  After almost a year in the wilderness of Sydney, the timing was perfect for Bill and Hazel to return. One of Bill’s brothers had bought a spread up in Queensland where he wanted to run cattle and he needed to sell the café he had been running in Wilcannia. The couple moved in with Bill’s mum in the family’s house in town — with its six bedrooms and six sleepouts to accommodate the whole family when needed — for a month before taking over the Cosy Corner Café with its attached furnished house.

  They had been away for almost a year and everyone in town was very welcoming on their return. Hazel felt guilty because she had missed Connie’s wedding and she looked with longing at the little fibro cottage she and Bill had once made their own. A white fella and a black girl had bought it and were keeping it nice.

  Hazel had inherited Dulcie’s baking skills and she was up by 4 am every day baking pies and sausage rolls, which were great sellers. The café was a local institution which had been advertising ‘A Long Cool Refreshing Drink . . . Confectionary and Fruit . . . Fresh Fruits in Season . . . served at Keen Prices with Prompt Courteous Service’ in the local paper for decades and was a bit of a general store. It was beside the art deco-style Plaza Cinema and stayed open until 11 pm on Wednesday and Saturday nights when they did big business, especially when John Wayne movies were showing. The café was so busy that Bill and Hazel had a local woman helping them, Shirley. She was what Hazel called a rough diamond with a million vices of which swearing and smoking were two.

  Jim had fallen in love with one of Bill’s sisters, Alma, who sometimes helped out in the café.

  Hazel relaxed so much being safely away from Dulcie that she became pregnant and their daughter was born at Wilcannia Hospital in 1960. Sadly, three miscarriages followed, all of them boys, over the next three years. There was no IVF in those days but the doctors told Hazel that her hormones were out of balance and she began hormone treatment.

  She would never forget the story Dulcie had told her about dumping three of the children from her first marriage — three of Hazel’s half-siblings — at orphanages to grow up without a mum and dad. Hazel had done it tough herself and she knew how lonely and scared you can be when your life is in turmoil. When she learnt that some of the church homes closed for Christmas and needed the children cared for, she and Bill put their names down. The first two children they fostered were sisters Wendy and Betty, aged ten and twelve. They came to Wilcannia from a Presbyterian home in Sydney for the six weeks over Christmas, and Hazel and Bill made sure it was a loving and special time for the sisters.

  Still desperate for another child of their own, they spoke to the welfare officer in Broken Hill who had arranged the foster care of Wendy and Betty and he approved them to adopt. He told them not to get their hopes up because it would probably be a couple of years before a child became available.

  Hazel was torn between two lives. One was that of a mother and wife seemingly without a care in the world. The other was that of a person living on tenterhooks for the call from Inspector Kelly to say that Dulcie had been arrested. Sometimes she felt she was barely keeping her balance. While things appeared to settle down, Hazel was still scared that Dulcie would discover that she had been found out, as she put it to Bill. She was lucky that she didn’t crack under the pressure.

  The Cosy Corner Café had the luxury of its own telephone line so Ray Kelly was able to keep in touch. When Hazel asked the inspector why the investigation was taking so long, he explained that there could be no mistakes. They would have only one chance to get it right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MR AND MRS PILL

  THE BREAKTHROUGH IN THE POLICE INVESTIGATION CAME IN Adelaide on a morning at the tail end of spring in 1964.

  A police team under Detective Inspector Ray Kelly had been meticulously retracing Dulcie’s steps going back to even before Ted Baron’s body was pulled out of the Murray River. In Wilcannia alone they interviewed sixty-one people, including Sam Overton’s in-laws from Netallie Station, the McClures, as well as Madge Fitzgerald and her daughter Lin from Burragan Station. They had spoken to Allan Baron, who was working as a shearer on Kangaroo Island where he had invited his brother Jim to join him.

  Bob Wighton was a young detective senior constable at Broken Hill in October 1964 when he was told to meet Kelly at the airport and drive him to Wilcannia. The CIB golden boy’s legend had — as always — preceded Kelly, but all the same, Wighton was surprised by his appearance. Wighton was six feet four inches and even though Kelly was a few inches shorter than him at six feet, he made Wighton feel small. The first thing Wighton noticed was Kelly’s huge hands, then his solid, imposing eighty-kilogram frame kept trim by surfing, and the way he walked down the steps from the aircraft with a swagger.

  He was huge in stature as well as by nature and Wighton was in awe of this man who was totally in control.


  Among police, war stories grew like Chinese whispers and by then, word had got around the Broken Hill and Wilcannia police departments that Dulcie Bodsworth had killed five men. According to the murmurings, she had brazenly pushed her late husband into the Murray River in his wheelchair; she had blasted someone’s arm off with a shotgun; and when she left Wilcannia aerodrome, she had poisoned the garden around the cottage and nothing would ever grow again in that patch of land.

  Kelly put Wighton right as they drove in the Ford Falcon to Wilcannia. It was three deaths they were investigating, and that was enough.

  Kelly’s reason for the trip to Wilcannia was to get the lie of the land. He wanted to see where Tommy Tregenza had been killed. Incredibly, out the back of the Court House Hotel, the charred mattress, which had been retrieved from the Darling River where Dulcie said she had thrown it to extinguish the flames, was still there. Wilcannia was the sort of place where an old mattress could lie undisturbed. Kelly knelt down to smell it.

  ‘Geez, mate, get a smell of that,’ he said. He reckoned the mattress still reeked of kerosene, which had been poured on it by Dulcie before she put the match to it and set Tregenza on fire. Forensic examination was not what it is now and Kelly didn’t have the mattress sealed up to take back to Sydney. Instead he ripped out a sample and put it in an evidence bag.

  Most of the physical evidence against Dulcie, however, lay underground, buried in cemeteries across New South Wales and South Australia. A few weeks after Kelly’s visit to Wilcannia, the police made their move.

  First thing on 26 November 1964 at Adelaide’s largest cemetery, Centennial Park, Albert Hermann ‘Bert’ Brinkworth joined the New South Wales government medical officer Dr John Laing, Detective Sergeant John Palmer and another Sydney detective from Kelly’s team as they walked to plot number 262A in the Catholic section A just off the main roadway. That Thursday morning at 5.30 am, Brinkworth, the cemetery superintendent, led them to the grave where Sam Overton had been resting since his interment on 21 April 1956. It had been over eight years but the gentleman farmer was going to have to be disturbed. They would make it as quick and as dignified as possible.