My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  Armed with a warrant to exhume the body, pathologist Dr Laing carried with him twenty-three specimen jars, which had been sterilised two days earlier and stored in a locked safe at the Adelaide City Coroner’s office. Everything was done by the book because they wanted to leave nothing for the defence to challenge in court about the evidence they feared they would find.

  The first jar was filled with soil taken from 200 feet away from the grave — a test sample. More soil samples went into the jars at various depths beneath the headstone as the grave was dug up, until the wooden casket was exposed at its depth of six feet nine inches. Every step was photographed, every move logged. The nails holding the nameplate bearing the inscription ‘Samuel Overton aged 44 years’ next to a simple wooden cross on top of the casket containing the coffin were removed. More soil samples were taken from around the casket and placed in the specimen jars.

  Before the morning could get much hotter, the coffin inside the casket was raised from the ground. As the ropes around it hauled it up, gallons of brownish fluid poured from the right corner at the head of the coffin. The bodily fluids filled a four gallon container and some of it was collected in three specimen jars. More soil samples were taken from the moist ground beneath the coffin. The coffin was lifted onto the back of a ute and taken to the Adelaide City Mortuary with a police escort.

  By 8.45 am, Sam Overton’s coffin was lying on a metal table in the morgue. Inside the coffin was a sealed zinc lining and Dr Laing prised the top off. He wasn’t surprised to find the body was still ‘well preserved’ because the protection of the zinc had delayed the process of decay. To others it would be a macabre sight; to Dr Laing it was another day at the office. Unlike the bodies of Baron and Tregenza, there had never been a postmortem carried out on Sam Overton because his death was put down to natural causes.

  His body was dressed in blue and white striped pyjamas and there was still brown hair on the head and a moustache on the upper lip. The pathologist took samples from them, sealing them in more specimen jars. The nails on the hands and the feet were still intact and specimens of them were taken along with some teeth, muscle from his right thigh and portions of bones. Samples were also cut out of the pyjamas.

  Significantly, Dr Laing found no evidence of any injury to Overton’s body, nor any signs of illness such as a ruptured gastric ulcer that could have caused his death.

  When the postmortem was finished, all the specimen jars and envelopes containing other evidence like the clipping from the pyjamas were sealed with sealing wax and placed in two wooden boxes, which were nailed shut to protect the chain of evidence. The boxes were taken to Sydney where it was up to the forensic examiners to uncover their secrets.

  Brinkworth, a religious man who had studied at Bible college, had taken it upon himself to clean up the grubby metal nameplate from the casket as a mark of respect to Overton but it was never reattached. It was retained as evidence they had opened the correct coffin. Overton’s body was placed in a new coffin with a new nameplate and re-buried that same day.

  The police didn’t need the permission of Overton’s family to exhume the body but they worked closely with his widow Margaret who gave them her backing because she wanted to know the truth. If only Hazel had known all those years earlier that Mrs Overton shared the suspicions that her husband had not died of gastroenteritis but had been poisoned.

  ‘But I never wanted to believe it,’ she told journalists who spoke to her after news of the exhumation became public.

  In Sydney, detectives personally delivered the wooden box containing the specimens to the government analysts where chemist John Newhaus examined them with remarkable results.

  In the liver, kidneys, small intestine and stomach he found traces of arsenic. In the thigh muscle, the nails, the upper part of Overton’s right tibia and his teeth — arsenic. In the wood from the casket, in the pyjamas, in the liquid that had leaked from the coffin there was more arsenic. The report to Dr Laing confirmed what they had feared — altogether there was more than enough arsenic to kill one man. In fact, there was enough to kill a few people.

  If Dulcie was going to be charged, it was with all three murders and Inspector Kelly had to decide whether to exhume the bodies of Ted Baron and Tommy Tregenza. Their deaths had been for more obvious reasons than that of Overton’s and postmortems and inquests had been held to determine the cause and manner of death, albeit it without the extra information the police had now. It was decided not to exhume Tregenza’s body but when Kelly spoke to Hazel, she was happy for her father’s body to be exhumed.

  The fresh postmortem on Ted Baron’s body uncovered no more clues to add to what they already knew — he had been alive when he went into the water as the government medical officer Dr Morris had concluded at the time. Baron’s air passages were full of fluid. All the witnesses who had given evidence at Baron’s inquest were re-interviewed.

  It was time to find out what Dulcie and Harry had to say for themselves.

  The detectives had been working out of the old CIB headquarters above the police station in Central Lane behind where Sydney’s Central Local Court still stands. When the time came to plan the arrests, they had moved into what became known as ‘The Old Hat Factory’ on the corner of Smith and Campbell Streets, Surry Hills — so named because of the detectives’ head attire. Kelly liked to play things close to his chest but it had become time to show his hand.

  He had put out an all-states message looking for Dulcie Bodsworth, described as a ‘middle-aged woman’, and for her husband who was described as having a ‘smiling face’. Police across Australia were told they had a son and a dog and that they used a number of aliases including the surname Pill.

  In the general duties room, the journalists gathered as they did every morning, smoking, joking, jostling in their competitive camaraderie that lasted only until one of them got an exclusive and all bets were off. That Tuesday morning, 1 December 1964, news had started to filter out of Adelaide about the exhumation of a body. The reporters all knew something big was up and were waiting for their briefing. An astute player of the media, Kelly knew he couldn’t keep the breaking news quiet for much longer so he decided to tell them all, off the record with no quotes to be attributed to him. It was the best way to make sure the police controlled what got out and Kelly knew how just a few facts could easily fill a 500-word story and make headlines.

  ‘Now, boys, here’s the story . . .’ he began as he always did.

  Within hours it was all over the front pages of the papers. ‘MURDER. WOMAN HUNTED; GRAVE OPENED.’ ‘3 DEAD MEN. CIB REOPEN CASES.’ ‘HUNT FOR WOMAN; THREE KILLED.’

  At the Cosy Corner Café, Hazel was enjoying being pregnant again. Amazingly, not long after she and Bill were told they had been approved to adopt a baby, she discovered she was pregnant with their second child thanks to the hormone treatment. The day before he told the reporters, Kelly had called the café to let Hazel know the police were going public and that it was only a matter of time before they arrested her mother. She had been waiting for this moment for years and she knew it would come but she hadn’t realised how it would feel. It was like being hit by a ton of bricks. She was talking nineteen to the dozen until Shirley got a word in.

  ‘Shut up and have a smoke’ was Shirley’s solution to everything. The dangers of smoking and pregnancy were not public knowledge in those days.

  The café sold cigarettes and Shirley took down a packet of Ascot smokes, which came in fat packs of forty-five. They were nowhere as smooth as portrayed by the beautiful girl who smoked them on a yacht in the advertisement at the cinema. Hazel spluttered and choked but kept at it and didn’t stop smoking for another forty years. She did think that Dulcie, who abhorred smoking, would have been horrified. Bill wasn’t very happy either.

  Over the next three days, the hunt for Dulcie took on a life of its own. The Sydney papers didn’t make it to Wilcannia until the afternoon and although she had set all this in motion, Hazel found it difficu
lt to read about it in black and white. In the café, Shirley tried to deflect attention from Hazel when the locals came in to buy the papers because by then, people had figured out that the police were looking for Hazel’s mother, the woman who had at one time or another cooked most of them a meal at the Court House Hotel.

  ‘Drowned, burned, poisoned. THREE MEN MURDERED! WOMAN HUNTED; GRAVE OPENED,’ one paper screamed. ‘Police are on the trail of a woman who is believed to have murdered three men. Money is believed to have been the motive for all three murders which occurred in remote districts of NSW over an eight-year-period between 1950 and 1958.’

  The Sun in Sydney said: ‘Sydney CIB has asked detectives in Victoria and South Australia to help them in a search for a woman who disappeared from Wilcannia about six years ago.’

  The Daily Telegraph countered with: ‘CIB detectives investigating the mystery deaths of two men at Wilcannia and another man at Mildura are expected to make fresh moves early next week.’

  The Daily Mirror, The Sun’s competition as another Sydney afternoon paper, headlined: ‘Triple murder. HUNT FOR WOMAN. Three fatal friendships. Police are seeking a middle-aged woman they believe can help them in their inquiries into the deaths of three men. She worked as a domestic in the country districts where the men died.’

  ‘Exhumation of the body of a man last week followed 15 months of secret inquiries into the deaths of three NSW men,’ yet another newspaper article said. ‘Police investigations, which started 12 years after the death of the first man, are now believed to indicate that the deaths are linked. At the time the three men died and were buried there was no suspicion that death was not due to natural causes.’

  Overnight, Dulcie Bodsworth became the most wanted woman in the country. She appeared to be the only person oblivious to the fact the police were after her.

  Dulcie and Harry had drifted back to his home town of Hopetoun in Victoria where Harry still had some family although his milkman father had died four years earlier of peritonitis. Dulcie was working as a cleaner again but was starting to earn a reputation around town as a cook to hire for parties and other events. Harry worked as a labourer on the railways. Dulcie and Harry’s son was fourteen and at school. Margaret, at nineteen, had left home but still lived in Hopetoun. Jim had heard nothing from them since they had sneaked out of Wilcannia leaving him behind. Dulcie had never tried to get back in touch with either Hazel or her brothers. It was as if they didn’t exist.

  After being so open about her real identity at Wilcannia, Dulcie had reverted to her secret self in Hopetoun. Once they had crossed the border from New South Wales, she and Harry stopped to cut up all their old identification papers, including their driver’s licences.

  Dulcie had once more erected walls that blocked out her past, as she had done with her first marriage and with her first four children. She wasn’t hiding from the police, because she thought they would never come after her. It was the last thing on her mind. She had almost wiped the deaths of Overton and Tregenza from her mind. And as for Harry, well, he had helped to kill Ted Baron and tried to get rid of Bill but he had no idea what his wife was really capable of even after thirteen years of marriage. The family reinvented themselves again, taking on the surname of Harry’s mother, Pill. The ‘Pill’ family lived in a rented weatherboard cottage in Dennys Street, one of the rural town’s older addresses. They became regulars at a local Baptist church where they both taught about the Bible at Sunday School without a hint of irony.

  Happy-go-lucky as ever, Harry was glad to be home and to see his brothers and sisters again, although what he told them about the reasons for taking their mother’s name is not known.

  The Swinging Sixties hadn’t quite reached Hopetoun. No one could have missed the fact that the biggest band in the world, the Beatles, had toured Australia earlier that year but Dulcie had no idea that it was one of Sam Overton’s relatives, the dashing war ace, Kym Bonython, who had welcomed them to Adelaide. Despite her racy past, Dulcie remained conservative with a small ‘c’. She was fifty-five in an era before fifty was the new thirty and even though it was summer, she still liked to dress properly in a hat and gloves. She could no longer play the ingénue but if she read the newspapers at all, she would have hated the ‘middle-aged’ tag they put on her. She refused to let herself go and dress like a frump. After all, her husband was still nineteen years her junior and she had to keep up appearances.

  That Thursday afternoon, 3 December, she was by herself shopping for groceries as she walked along Hopetoun’s main thoroughfare, Lascelles Street, when two police officers in uniform stopped her and asked if she was Mrs Pill. They said they would like her to accompany them to the police station, which she did with a smile. She didn’t think they were going to ask her to bake some scones but she was still hoping this was not about what she thought it was.

  Before the arrest, Hopetoun police had been in touch with Sydney. Ray Kelly was already on a plane to Melbourne and Senior Detective Angus Ritchie, an experienced homicide investigator from Melbourne, had that morning driven the four and a half hours up the highway.

  In Wilcannia, Hazel had received the phone call from Kelly she both welcomed and dreaded.

  ‘We’ve got her, Hazel. Sit tight. I’ll let you know what happens from here,’ he said.

  Hazel had to indeed sit down. The sun was still shining, there were people in the café, everything looked normal, but Hazel felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her world. Her head felt as though it was full of cotton wool.

  She was going to go to tell Bill when the phone rang again with another call that would change her and Bill’s lives just as profoundly. Amazingly, there was a baby boy waiting for them at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital. Later, she always said that the news about the baby protected her sanity.

  It was a good two days’ drive to Sydney and another two days back on a dirt road from Broken Hill as far as Cobar. Bill’s parents would look after the couple’s four-year-old daughter, and Shirley, puffing away on her Ascots, said she could take control of the café. Hazel and Bill got ready to leave, deciding to drive straight through. There were few motels at that time for travellers and although they could have spent the night in a hotel, they wanted to get there and back as soon as they could. They felt safe in their home at Wilcannia.

  At 3 pm in Hopetoun, Dulcie was led into an interview room at the police station and told that Harry had also been brought in. He was in another room for the time being. For the first time in her life, Dulcie Bodsworth was almost lost for words. She knew this meant they were in serious trouble but she still had no idea that her oldest daughter was behind it.

  She was given a glimmer of hope when Detective Ritchie handed her a provisional warrant issued out of Sydney for her arrest — not for murder but for arson. She was charged with burning down the homestead and the woolshed at Burragan belonging to that miserable old Madge Fitzgerald and her pathetic daughter Lin. That liverish mother and sad daughter had always had it in for her even though Dulcie knew they had no evidence. She had even convinced herself that she had never done it. They had just accused her out of spite.

  Dulcie was taken before a Justice of the Peace under her real name, Bodsworth, and remanded to the Court of Petty Sessions, as the Magistrates Court was then called, in Melbourne the next day. Harry wasn’t charged and he agreed to accompany his wife to Melbourne. At 8.30 that evening, they got into the back seat of the police Ford Falcon with Ritchie in the front passenger seat and a colleague of his driving. Although they had only been separated for a short time, Dulcie and Harry had had no chance to talk. There was always an officer within earshot.

  Ray Kelly and John Palmer were driving up from Melbourne and met up with them at Ararat Police Station. It was 10.45 pm and Dulcie and Harry had had no rest. It was of course all carefully staged by Kelly. He could have waited for them in Melbourne and allowed them to have a night’s sleep. But he wanted them kept on edge. Ararat was chosen simply because it was
around halfway between Hopetoun and Melbourne. Kelly didn’t know that one of Dulcie’s grandmothers had once been locked up and died in the town’s hellish psychiatric hospital, known as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, which had housed the mentally ill for 140 years.

  Even without the insight provided by Hazel into her mother and stepfather, Kelly would have known immediately that Harry was the weak link. He was just so meek and so willing to help. If he hadn’t known that Harry had helped drown Ted Baron, Kelly would have thought he was just a down-to-earth hardworking country bloke. As for Dulcie, the officer could see no family resemblance between her and Hazel. They were like the proverbial chalk and cheese in looks as well as behaviour. She was trying to be ‘ladylike’ but he thought she was as hard as nails.

  Kelly liked nothing better than the thrill of the chase and that included getting his suspects to talk. He was known for being ruthless but he was charming and manipulative at the same time — like any good detective. He once said that when he became a detective, he realised that he had to understand people. He read Freud and picked up tips from watching psychiatrists giving evidence in court: ‘In this job you must know how much to use a person — and when to stop. I became a student of psychology.’

  There was going to be no rest for Dulcie and Harry. Kelly and Palmer spent until 4.15 am talking to them in separate, bare interview rooms during which the couple was left in no doubt that their situation was dire. In records of the interviews, Harry denied killing Ted Baron and Dulcie denied murdering Baron, Overton and Tregenza. There was no food, just cups of tea. At 4.30 am, they were put in separate cars and driven to Melbourne. The Bodsworths were exhausted. Kelly, Palmer and Ritchie were just getting into their stride.