My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  It had been decided that Ritchie should stick with Harry because they had already started building a rapport. It had been Ritchie who arranged for Harry’s mother Louisa, who lived in Geelong, to pick up Harry and Dulcie’s son in Hopetoun and look after him. While the officers continued to call Dulcie ‘Mrs Bodsworth’, Ritchie was calling Harry by his first name. In turn, Harry called him Mr Ritchie.

  At Melbourne, Dulcie got a shocking dose of reality when at 7 am she was booked into the City Watch House in Russell Street. The stone cells with their heavy black metal doors hadn’t changed since the watch house was built in 1909 and Dulcie was searched and locked up in a holding cell on the women’s side. At 10 am she was led into court where she faced the arson charges and was remanded in custody to be extradited to Sydney because the crimes had occurred in New South Wales.

  Then she had to face Kelly and Palmer again as they had another go at her with an interview that was recorded by Palmer on the typewriter.

  ‘Are you quite prepared to give us all the information that you can regarding Mr Overton’s death?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Dulcie replied, doing her little-girl-lost act.

  ‘Did it surprise you when Mr Overton suddenly took ill?’

  ‘Yes, it surprised us all.’

  ‘Have you ever been in the “skin shed” or the “killing pen” at Netallie Station?’

  ‘No, I have not.’

  ‘According to your son Allan, he overheard a conversation between you and Bodsworth at Netallie Station in which you said to Bodsworth “If Sam goes you will be all right here always”. Did you say that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it true that you were anxious to remove Overton from Netallie Station in order that your husband could get the position of manager?’

  ‘No, it is not.

  ‘On another occasion your son Allan declares that you requested him that whilst he was on a shooting expedition with Dr Potts and Sam Overton and your husband to accidentally shoot Overton while he was on the other side of the swamp and make it look like an accident. What do you say about that?’

  ‘I say never.’

  ‘According to your son Allan he told you not to be silly when you made such a statement. Do you remember that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your son Allan informs us that on another occasion you said to him “I have always got my revenge on people who have done things to me”. Did you say that?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  As Kelly questioned her about throwing boiling water on the poor old cook, pointing a shotgun at Jim and Lance McClure and telling the McClures that Sam had been drinking a lot before his death, it was sinking in to Dulcie that the police had not only done their homework but that Allan and possibly even Hazel were behind her arrest.

  When Kelly asked her about Hazel, Allan and Jim, Dulcie began to plant the seeds of doubt about what they had said.

  ‘I want you to tell us whether you ever had any violent quarrels with your daughter Hazel or your sons?’

  ‘The only arguments I have had with Hazel was because I would not say she was older than she was so that she could go to work.’

  ‘What about the boys?’

  ‘No, not really, but when they asked me for things I would not give them they would go crook on me.’

  ‘Do you believe that any one of those three children of yours would wilfully lie to do you an injury?’

  ‘Well, after what I have seen from you I could not say anything else but yes.’

  Meanwhile, Harry was taken by the nice ‘Mr Ritchie’ over the road to the Homicide Squad offices in the Russell Street Police Station where he was offered breakfast.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Ritchie. I do feel hungry. We never had time for tea last night,’ Harry said politely.

  At the Homicide Squad offices, he asked to use the phone to speak to the minister of the church the couple had been attending in Hopetoun. As he hung up, he broke down and cried.

  ‘You don’t know how I have worried about this for years. I knew you would catch up with us sooner or later and I am glad now,’ he told Ritchie.

  Harry said they had used the surname Pill because they didn’t want Hazel to know where they were, even though it meant them missing out on child endowment payments all those years. The truth was that they had changed their name to hide not from Hazel but from Wilcannia after their midnight flit. They owed so many people money.

  Ritchie asked him: ‘Did you tell Mr Kelly the truth last night?’

  Harry said that the statement he had made about Ted Baron at Mildura was not correct and he did ‘know something about the death’.

  Ritchie cautioned him that he did not need to say anything unless he wanted because anything he did say may be given in evidence in court. He bought Harry breakfast in the cafeteria at the police headquarters and then Harry asked if he could talk to his wife alone after she had appeared in court.

  It hadn’t taken long to break Harry Bodsworth. There were so many moving parts in this investigation and Kelly had decided to throw a few more into the mix. It was now time for Harry to learn some harsh home truths about Dulcie’s past.

  After all, a crime leaves no room for secrets.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RAY KELLY

  ‘YOU DIDN’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT CAVANAGH!’

  Harry stood with his back against the grubby wall of the interview room while Dulcie sat at the stained table, still with her hat on. The room stank of the thousands of cigarettes smoked in there; it also smelt of despair.

  Dulcie didn’t look up.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that the girl Ruby was your daughter, did you?’ he said.

  Dulcie’s head shot up. She realised the police had been doing their homework and now it seemed her husband knew her secrets. Taken totally by surprise, she could see no way to lie about it.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t tell me anything about getting three hundred pounds and two hundred pounds from Tommy Tregenza either, did you?’ Harry said, according to police notes of the conversation.

  ‘No, I didn’t get three hundred pounds from Tommy, I only got two hundred pounds,’ Dulcie said defiantly. As if the other one hundred pounds would have made any difference.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you got the two hundred pounds off Tommy Tregenza either did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This man here told me that you paid one hundred pounds to Knox and Downs store a few days before Tommy Tregenza died. You didn’t tell me about that either, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  Dulcie began to cry. When Hazel heard much later about the tears, she thought it was another remarkable performance from her mother. As far as she was aware, Dulcie never cried. She shed no tears when she dumped her four children, nor when she lost the other four to miscarriages. She could tell hard-luck stories until the cows came home but it was all for sympathy. Dulcie wasn’t the sort of person to feel sorry for herself. She had killed three men including her own husband without shedding a tear. She possessed no conscience. She was lethal.

  Hazel figured that like the stories, the tears were put on for pity. As an act, it didn’t work on the cops who just watched on patiently, but it worked on Harry even as he realised she had hidden half her life from him. He would still walk over hot coals for her.

  Dulcie’s faithful husband of thirteen years put his hands on the back of her chair. He really did love and care for her.

  ‘How much more haven’t you told me?’ he said.

  Dulcie kept silent.

  ‘Why don’t you tell the truth about everything? You would feel much better if you told the truth. I have told the truth now and I feel better already. If you had anything to do with the deaths of Tommy and Sam, why don’t you tell this man about it? Did you give Sam arsenic?’

  ‘Yes, I gave it to him on a chop for breakfast.’ Detectives Kelly, Palmer and Ritchie had been watching the confrontati
on but even they were surprised by her sudden admission. At this point, Kelly gave Dulcie the same warning that Harry had received. She did not have to answer questions unless she wanted as anything she said may be used in evidence. Dulcie sobbed that she understood.

  The police had choreographed it to perfection.

  It had begun that morning after Dulcie got back from court and Harry asked if he could talk to her alone. They had both denied anything to do with the deaths of Baron, Overton and Tregenza. Since police suspected both of them were involved in murdering Ted Baron, normally the detectives would keep the suspects apart but this wasn’t a normal case. Leaving the couple together in an interview room was a gamble they thought would work. It did. After about ten minutes behind the closed door, Harry walked out. ‘All right, Mr Ritchie, I am now prepared to tell you what happened at Mildura.’

  Detective Ritchie went into the room with Harry and asked him if he had discussed this with his wife.

  Dulcie’s performance reached new heights. Quick as a flash she said: ‘Believe me, it is a shock to me but I intend to stick to Harry. Baron was no good. He was very cruel to me, Mr Ritchie.’

  Harry was led away by the nice Mr Ritchie to make what was his second statement while Dulcie was left to stew for a bit longer. She had still only been charged with the two counts of arson.

  Ray Kelly moved into the picture to conduct the interview with Harry. This was it. After five years of investigation, they were getting to the truth. Kelly turned down the swagger because Harry Bodsworth wasn’t a crim whose face Kelly had to get into. He could sit back and play the nice guy because he just knew that Harry was the kind of person who would feel obliged to answer the questions. The veteran detective appeared relaxed but, like his colleagues, his mind was working hours ahead. Harry didn’t know how tough Kelly could get when he needed to.

  Kelly realised as soon as Harry began to talk that the couple had decided he would take the blame for Ted Baron’s death. Kelly let him say what he wanted. Harry couldn’t explain how the crippled Baron got onto the beach beside their tents but said that Baron had started an argument with him which turned into a struggle.

  ‘He called me a few mongrel bastards, Mr Kelly,’ Harry said. ‘And I said shut up, you rat, and I gave him a push and he fell back into the water.’

  He said Baron floated out and was carried away in the fast-flowing muddy water and disappeared.

  ‘Dulcie knew nothing about it, Mr Kelly. It was an accident,’ Harry said.

  His story was full of holes but it was as good a confession as any and Harry was charged with murder. Wasting no time, that evening, Kelly and Palmer accompanied by a senior Melbourne detective flew Harry to Mildura. At 6 am he led them down a trail from the main road to the beach on the banks of the Murray River and Harry pointed out where Baron had gone into the water. Times had changed so much in the past fourteen years that the only families camping along the river that December were those who liked a life on the road, or holidaymakers. Social security benefits meant people didn’t have to live rough unless they chose to.

  It was a different world but as the sun began its ascent, Harry could recall exactly where he had camped in 1950 with Dulcie and the kids. He pointed out the tent site and walked the police through the struggle he had had on the beach with Baron before the little group drove back to the airport and flew back to Melbourne.

  Back at Russell Street headquarters, it did not appear that the seriousness of the charge had sunk in for Harry — perhaps because of the metal plate in his head. He thought that in light of his statement to police and how open he had been with showing them what had happened at Mildura, the matter would be closed. When he was asked if he wanted to see a solicitor, he told the police: ‘No, I have given it a bit of thought and I will wait to see what happens.’

  Detective Ritchie had to explain to him in simple terms that Dulcie would be extradited to Sydney and he would be sent to Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison while the Victorian police carried out a full investigation including re-interviewing all witnesses because the Murray River was on their patch. Harry wanted to know how long he would be kept locked up and was told that would be up to the courts.

  Harry became very quiet.

  ‘Will you be talking to my wife about this?’

  Told that Dulcie would be interviewed again, Harry said: ‘Well, I might as well tell you the whole truth. It is no good doing things by half; you will only find out in the long run.’

  Ritchie made a note that Harry had ‘some moments of thoughtful pause’ before speaking again to tell Ritchie that when he and Dulcie had been allowed to talk privately the previous morning, they had decided that Harry would take the full blame for Baron’s death so she could look after their young son ‘but it doesn’t look as though that is going to happen’.

  The truth, said Harry this time, was that Dulcie had asked him to kill her husband. She had planned it three weeks before Baron had got back from the hospital so that she and Harry could get married with her husband out of the way. They had waited until Baron was snoring with his sleeping tablets: ‘I picked him up when he was asleep and carried him out to deep water and let him go. He just sank.’

  In his own handwriting, Harry wrote out his third and final version of what took place at Mildura on 30 and 31 August 1950.

  Hazel had been right about her suspicions even though she had been just nine years old. Not that she knew about Harry’s confessions. At the same time Harry and Dulcie’s world was falling around them, Hazel and Bill were on their way to Sydney to meet their newest family member even as they kept another secret close to them.

  Harry was hot and tired and Detective Ritchie arranged for him to have a shower and shave. As he towelled himself dry, he asked Ritchie how come the police knew so much about what had happened all those years ago. It was then that Ritchie told him that they had been talking to Hazel and her brother Allan. After consulting with Detective Kelly, Ritchie took Harry into the Homicide Squad’s general duties room where he was shown the statements from the siblings, which had been removed from the rest of the file. Ritchie told Harry more about the details of Dulcie’s first husband, Ted Cavanagh, and their children.

  It was all part of the choreography staged by the police. Harry was left spinning. He was shocked at first, then angry. He asked to talk to his wife again. As he and Ritchie joined Kelly and Palmer, who were talking to Dulcie in the interview room, Ritchie looked up at the clock and noted it was 6.45 pm. The officers later told a court that they didn’t know what was going to happen when they let Harry talk to Dulcie — but they had left nothing to chance.

  They watched in silence, with Ritchie taking notes.

  After Dulcie admitted to putting arsenic on Sam Overton’s breakfast chop, she said she didn’t know why she had done it. There was no mention of how she coveted the big house or measured up Overton’s clothes and boots for Harry.

  ‘Why did you poison Overton?’ Harry asked.

  ‘It is terrible, I don’t know why I did it,’ she said. ‘He never did anything to me. It is a terrible thing I did.’

  Dulcie said she had got the arsenic from the skin shed: ‘Sam told me to go to the skin shed and he told me to get a cup of arsenic and he told me how to mix it to poison the weeds and the ants around the garden.’

  ‘I always thought you might have had something to do with Tommy but I didn’t think you did anything to Sam. If you did anything to Tommy Tregenza tell this man about it because it doesn’t matter how many more you have done,’ Harry said, appearing deadly calm.

  When Dulcie did not answer, Kelly prompted her: ‘Did you have anything to do with the death of Tommy Tregenza?’

  ‘I did, I burnt him. I put a match on his bed,’ Dulcie admitted.

  Kelly said: ‘Bed clothes would not ignite in a way they did in this room unless there was some inflammable substance present. Did you place anything or pour anything in the bed?’

  Dulcie said she regularly used methylated sp
irits on her legs because it was supposedly good for aching muscles and she was usually on her feet all day cooking. The night Tommy died, she took the bottle from her bedroom and poured some of it on his bed before setting a match to it. She said he had gone to bed drunk and she didn’t think he would wake up.

  ‘It was really going when I got into the room. I thought there must have been something [an accelerant] there,’ Harry added.

  Dulcie said she was too upset to do a formal interview that night and was taken back to the cells.

  *

  Ray Kelly was used to crimes that propelled him into the headlines but even he had never arrested a multiple murderer before. The term serial killer was not coined until over a decade later by FBI veteran Robert K Ressler, the real-life Jack Crawford from The Silence of the Lambs and the man upon whom Agent Mulder from the TV series The X-Files was based. As a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s elite Behavioral Science Unit, Ressler devised the science of ‘criminal profiling’ but despite the advances in predicting the behaviour of violent criminals, he always said that profiles didn’t catch killers — cops on the beat did.

  Kelly knew that it was usually only with hindsight that murderers looked evil. If they looked like killers they would not have been able to lure their victims and ply their trade. Most murders are driven by greed, by sex, by hatred, by revenge, in panic, in a rage. Dulcie Bodsworth was the most unlikely serial killer. Middle-aged, mundane and appearing respectable, she killed because she wanted something and three men had got in her way. She did not even hate any of her victims. She never saw what she had done as wrong and even managed to justify her actions. Kelly wondered if she was a psychopath.

  Ressler had interviewed over 100 murderers in prison including most of the world’s notorious serial killers. But they were all men. The highly respected Ressler said that serial killers are mostly male, white and in their twenties or thirties at the time of the murders and the exceptions were so rare that he had never interviewed a female serial killer. He wrote that his extensive research had only come up with one female who was arrested and accused as a serial killer — Aileen Wuornos. Wuornos became known as America’s first female serial killer after she robbed and shot dead seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, claiming they had raped or tried to rape her while she worked as a prostitute. She was executed by lethal injection in 2002 aged forty-six.