by Hazel Baron
Three days after the Court of Criminal Appeal handed down its ruling, Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker escaped from Pentridge jail only to be captured by Ray Kelly and the indomitable Del Fricker in Sydney after nineteen days on the run. Hazel, a paperholic and news-aholic, read every word in the newspapers about the woman who had become one of her heroes. She felt proud to know her.
Hazel and Bill along with their daughter and adopted son had somewhat reluctantly settled into life in Broken Hill. The city would never be as busy as it was around that time when its population reached a high of around 30,000. Their three-bedroom single-storey house in Bagot Street felt like it was in suburbia compared to the openness of Wilcannia. The house was typical of the town at that time, a ‘starter’ home built in 1945 in neat rows by the government as part of its deal with the mining company Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd (which became the ‘Big Australian’ BHP) to develop the town and support the local industry. It had been added on to since then, with a car port and such, and the first thing Hazel did was fill the garden beds with her favourite zinnias.
Hazel’s reluctance was because although she loved the desolate landscape — the clear blue skies that went on forever, the smell of the desert and life in the bush — she never felt at ease with the way the unions ran the town. It seemed like a hardworking laid-back sort of place but it was very territorial. Hazel wasn’t political at all but she did appreciate all the unions had done to make the inherently dangerous business of mining much safer and how they had fought for eight-hour days instead of 72-hour weeks. But she did not like bullies — bullies who could ruin the business of a popular local butcher just because he had bought his meat from the ‘wrong’ farmer. Camaraderie and mateship were all to the good but it was not fair that in 1965, anyone who bought from a black banned business could expect to be frozen out and even lose their job. She wished she had been as brave as one of her friends who had walked through the picket line into that butcher’s shop, telling them they could all ‘fuck off’, and bought meat from him. That woman could be brave: her husband didn’t work at the mines, and her gesture wouldn’t affect his livelihood.
Hazel was once again able to love making her house into a home so she could wrap her little family in it like a blanket to keep them safe in a way that she had never felt while growing up. She couldn’t have worked even if she wanted to because she saw how jobs were given to men and single women first, and married women pite a proud history of backing their men during the years of devastating industrial battles — were expected to stay home. She did a few shifts helping at the local hospital when they were shorthanded and took on a bit of house cleaning for extra money.
While Hazel and her brothers were fretting about whether they had to give evidence again in the retrial for the murder of their father, the news arrived that Dulcie and Harry were going to plead not guilty to murder but they would plead guilty to the manslaughter of Ted Baron in a deal with the prosecution to avoid another trial. Bill Knight agreed to the course of action and on 1 March 1966, the couple was back in the dock at Court Five.
Justice John Henry ‘Jock’ McClemens had spent fifteen years sitting on some of the toughest civil and criminal trials and appeals in the state and was known for sometimes showing too much sympathy towards defendants. But this case had him floored.
‘The circumstances are without parallel,’ he said.
‘All the circumstances surrounding this are so bizarre. Here is a woman with eight children with two men, one her husband. Then she enters into an agreement with Bodsworth to kill her husband by whom she had had four children. Bosworth was twenty-two and she was thirty-seven.’ (Still no one had picked up on Dulcie’s real age.)
‘Then they have thirteen years of married life together and another child.’
The judge said he was under no illusion who was the instigator of the killing. Despite Dulcie’s denials to have known nothing about her lover’s evil plan, the judge knew who wore the pants in their relationship.
‘I have read statements made by both of these people and have formed the impression that Bodsworth was under the domination of Mrs Baron,’ Justice McClemens said, which seemed to belie the prosecution’s decision to accept the couple’s plea of guilty to manslaughter instead of pressing ahead with a murder trial.
He said that so much disturbed him about the case that he refused to pass sentence without a ‘complete psychiatric report’. He adjourned the appeal for three weeks.
In the dock and still in love with the woman who was the most exciting person he had ever met even if she had ruined his life, Harry demonstrated once more that he did not mind being ‘dominated’. He tenderly held his wife’s left hand, and as she rose to leave the court, he stepped forward and kissed her full on the lips. Justice McClemens granted a request for them to see each other in the cells below the court before they were taken back to jail.
Hazel couldn’t believe the schmaltz when she read it in the next day’s newspapers. She wanted to vomit.
Psychiatric reports again found that neither of them had any mental problems. When the Bodsworths came back before the judge on 24 March, speaking up for them was the former Baptist minister from Hopetoun, the Reverend WG Embury, who described the couple as ‘highly respected’. What a shock the Reverend Embury got when he heard the whole truth.
‘This matter has caused me grave concern because the case is so unusual,’ Justice McClemens told Dulcie and Harry, who had by then become a laughing stock among the reporters as they persisted in holding hands in the dock while sitting with pathetic looks on their faces.
‘A man has died because he stood in the way of your association. His only crime was that he was in your way.’
Again the judge singled out Dulcie.
‘Baron used to take sleeping tablets and slept very soundly. She walked away while Bodsworth carried Baron to the river and pushed him in,’ he said.
‘On any showing, this is a very serious crime and the lowest sentence I can impose is five years.’
Justice McClemens said he had taken into account their age and that it appeared they had spent many years happily together and were useful members of the community, although he acknowledged Dulcie was facing other murder charges.
Five years. The detectives thought that both Dulcie and Harry had got off easy and worried how it would affect Hazel. ‘Saw mother today and she got five’, Kelly said in the latest telegram to her.
Hazel was furious. What had happened to life behind bars? She thought about the word ‘manslaughter’ and realised it could be broken down into two words: mans-laughter. She had done the right thing going to the police but the justice system had let her down, let her father down. Dulcie must be laughing at putting one over on them. Ted Baron’s life was worth only five years. It was a joke in her eyes. Dulcie and Harry had killed her father and she vowed to herself to do her best to get her mother convicted of murder next time.
As Dulcie’s trial for the murder of Tommy Tregenza approached, Hazel put herself through the wringer. There were times when she blamed herself for the old man’s death. She had had no control over her father’s drowning nor the poisoning of Sam Overton but should she have alerted Tommy and the police when she saw the same warning signs?
Dulcie had given indications of her sinister plan before Overton’s murder, talking about him drinking heavily. Then she had almost predicted Tommy’s death, voicing her ‘worries’ about him smoking in bed and falling asleep in one of his drunken stupors and setting himself on fire. Hazel had also feared that her mother was putting sleeping tablets in Tommy’s soup at dinner. If only she had had the guts to tell someone, but who would have listened to her? She felt she would have been treated as little more than a kid and kids make up stories — that’s what they would have put it down to. The what-ifs caused Hazel a lot of despair.
She had known that Tommy was a loner, but when the police told her that he had had no choice because he had actually been all alone, with no family, Hazel cr
ied. She realised that was one of the reasons he liked a drink because when you are drinking in a bar, no one is alone and everyone is your friend.
*
The weather always seemed harder in Sydney. The harsh grey of the buildings made it appear hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. On a miserable overcast Thursday in the late winter of 1966, Hazel and Jim were back in Court Five to face their mother yet again. When she heard the trial for Tommy’s murder was set down for August, Hazel had prayed it would be over before 30 August, the anniversary of her father’s death. It was. The trial only took two days, 18 and 19 August. Despite her misgivings, it seemed to fly past. Now, they just needed to await the verdict.
Jim told Hazel that he was moving to Broken Hill where he had secured a job at the North Mine, and that he and Alma were planning on getting married in the same church in Wilcannia where Hazel and Bill had wed.
Allan and Joan were also leaving Kangaroo Island and moving to Olary Station, a sheep property outside the small settlement of Olary way up in the north of South Australia, right next to the state’s eastern boundary and close to where Joan came from. He was going to work again as a station hand. Hazel’s head was spinning and she was delighted at the news that all the family, except for Margaret, would be close together again.
Ray Kelly had retired from the police in February that year with a massive farewell dinner at Sydney’s ritzy Chevron Hotel. In Potts Point, it had been hailed as the city’s ‘First International Hotel’ when it opened in 1960, hosting glamorous guests of the calibre of Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Bassey and the Bee Gees. It banned the Beatles because of the ‘annoying’ screaming crowds the Fab Four attracted everywhere they went. Kelly was going to go out with a bang as spectacular as his career and there were reportedly 874 guests at five pounds a head, which included a table of food and all they could drink. The New South Wales Premier of the day, Robert Askin, described him as a close personal friend and told the packed room that no fictional detective could hold a candle to his mate. In 1975, Kelly was awarded the MBE after successful lobbying by Askin.
The prosecution case in Tommy Tregenza’s trial had been much more straightforward than it had been in Ted Baron’s. There was no dispute over Tommy’s cause of death and the jury heard that the former jockey had suffered burns to a horrifying seventy-two per cent of his body. The stalwart prosecutor Bill Knight declared the motive was financial because Tregenza had left Dulcie 600 pounds in his will — all he had in the world.
Despite his retirement, Kelly was at court to support Hazel and also to give evidence about the confession Dulcie had made to police at Melbourne police headquarters in Russell Street almost two years earlier. It was one of his few cases still unresolved since leaving the force.
Dulcie’s damning police interview was read to the jury.
Kelly: ‘Did you have anything to do with the death of Tommy Tregenza?’
Dulcie: ‘Yes, I did, I burnt him. I put a match on his bed.’
Kelly: ‘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: ‘Yes, methylated spirits.’
Kelly: ‘Where did you get the methylated spirits from?’
Dulcie: ‘I had it in my bedroom; I always rub my legs with it.’
Hazel felt it easier to give evidence against her mother this time. She felt an icy calmness as she looked up at her from the witness box. Dulcie was wearing that same green suit which Hazel had come to think of as her ‘court uniform’. Jim once again took it all in his stride and both siblings gave the same evidence that they had done at the committal hearing.
Dulcie’s new barrister, John Atwill, was the total opposite of the Chihuahua-like Vizzard. Unlike the diminutive public defender, Atwill, whose name in full was the grand-sounding Milton John Napier Atwill, was just as he was described in newspapers of the time: ‘tall, handsome and poised’. Looking back, Hazel thought he resembled George Clooney. His style of cross-examination was no less thorough than that of Vizzard but he acted without the sarcasm, possibly because he came from the private bar and not all of his work was in the cut-throat business of criminal trials. The self-assured Atwill went on to become the federal president of the Liberal Party and in 1978 he became Sir Milton John Napier Atwill after being knighted by the Queen.
Hazel and Jim had flown into Sydney on the Wednesday and were on their way home before Sergeant Eric Madden and Constable Max Salisbury and Stan Davis, the former licensee of Wilcannia’s Club House Hotel where Tommy had stayed before Dulcie got her claws into him, gave evidence.
Once again, after being advised against going into the witness box by her barrister, Dulcie chose to remain in ‘coward’s castle’ and make a safe statement from the dock. She had no one’s hand to hold this time, being all alone, but the detectives thought she had grown in confidence after her win in overturning her earlier murder conviction. She stood and told the jury that she had been in bed with her husband on the night Tregenza died. Her husband had woken her up and said there was something glaring on the window. He had jumped out of bed and run outside, saw that Tregenza’s bedroom was on fire and asked Dulcie to go for help.
She said she had never ‘done the old man any harm’ and, indeed, on a former occasion had found him asleep in an armchair with a pillow burning and had woken him up.
‘At no time did I ever wish Tregenza any harm or do such a thing,’ she said.
‘Regarding the will, the old chap brought in a piece of paper and asked me to sign my name on it, which I did, and he left immediately afterwards.’
Dulcie said that she had offered Tregenza a bowl of soup for supper that night but he had declined, then he had ‘got some drink in a bottle’ and it was the last time she had seen him.
Dulcie did not deny her confession to police but explained it away by saying that she had been so distressed at that time that she would have told them anything.
Usually juries are just seen, and only heard when they raise questions after retiring to consider their verdict. But as Atwill closed the defence case and Dulcie sat down, the foreman of the jury rose to his feet. The lawyers looked at each other, the detectives shuffled in their seats. This was almost unheard of. No one had any idea what the man was going to ask.
He raised the elephant in the room — where was Harry? He said the jury wanted to know why Harry hadn’t been called to give evidence: ‘Is there any reasonable explanation why there has been no statement from the husband or any evidence from the husband?’
The prosecution couldn’t call Harry because a husband could not be compelled to give evidence against his wife. While it was open to the defence to call him, his evidence would not have helped them — he had been there when Dulcie admitted to having set Tommy’s bed on fire. Furthermore, putting him in the witness box would have opened him up to being cross-examined by the Crown.
When it came to summing up the case for the jury, the trial judge, Justice PH Allen, explained Harry’s absence in simple, straightforward terms. He told the jury that if the defence had not called the husband, then the defence was entitled to explain why not.
‘[And] if no explanation is offered and none given, it is an inference open to a jury that the testimony of that witness could probably not assist the party who fails to call such a witness, and I should add that there is no rule of law which prevents an accused woman from calling as a witness her own husband on any aspect of the case if it wished to do so,’ Justice Allen said.
But, as had Justice Isaacs in the earlier trial involving Ted Baron, Justice Allen had got it wrong. He realised not long after the words were out of his mouth that he had made a mistake.
The law was that the failure of an accused person, or the wife or husband of an accused person, to give evidence could never be made the subject of any comment by the judge or by either the prosecution or the defence. Justice Allen tried to correct his error by tell
ing the jury that he withdrew what he had said earlier and they should ‘completely disabuse their minds’ of his remarks. It was like telling them to forget that someone had admitted to murder.
When the jury had retired to consider the verdict, the judge offered to discharge the jury and start again. Bill Knight said he would ‘not object’ to that course of action but Atwill said he had consulted with his client and they had decided not to apply for the jury to be discharged. These were all tactical steps designed to give them appeal points should the jury return a guilty verdict.
Which it did. In those days it was usual for juries to continue deliberations in the jury room after the court’s usual sitting hours ended at 4 pm. This Friday night, the court sat back. After deliberating for a couple of hours, the jury returned with its verdict. Dulcie Bodsworth was guilty of murdering Tommy Tregenza. The judge did not hesitate to sentence her to life.
Ray Kelly’s telegram reached Hazel the next day: ‘Saw mother today. It seems like a lifetime.’
But Hazel’s relief was once again short-lived. Dulcie appealed and her conviction was overturned because of the judge’s mistake. It was telling, however, that the Court of Criminal Appeal did so reluctantly, saying the law was old-fashioned regarding husbands and wives giving evidence against each other: ‘I say this with some regret because a new trial of criminal proceedings should be avoided where possible. There should be an end to criminal litigation and it is in the interests of justice that this should be so but when the court is faced with an appeal such as Mr Atwill has made to set aside this verdict of guilty, we cannot do other than accede to it.’
Hazel and Jim never even made it into the witness box when the retrial was held in February the following year, 1967. Atwill, who was again representing Dulcie, objected to Ray Kelly reading out her police record of interview, arguing it had not been made ‘freely and voluntarily’ because she had been ‘coerced’ by Harry. The latest judge, the highly respected Justice Robert Taylor, rejected the tender of the police statement and directed the jury to acquit Dulcie. They did so, and that was that. Hazel felt as though the justice system had let her and Tommy down.