According to Sodeman’s story, the two struck up a conversation, then went for a walk.
Just as they passed her house on their return – with her oblivious family likely inside – Sodeman grabbed Wilson by the throat.
“I just seemed to be holding her a moment and she collapsed in my arms. I let her down on the ground and stood looking around,” he told police. “I seemed to be coming out of a trance. Something said, ‘there you are. You have done it again.’”
He then dragged her for a bit, and picked her up and carried her to the vacant lot, where he again bound and gagged her, then left her alone and went home to his family.
Although police recognized the similarities between the murders of both Griffiths and Wilson, they had very little to go on, and the homicide investigations in both cases stalled.
Meanwhile, Sodeman was at home, having anxiety attacks over what he had done.
“It was worrying me frightfully. (I) could sleep only in fits and starts. I seemed to realize I must be found out. I swore again and again to give up the drink,” he told police.
And for four years, his worrying did the trick.
The Sodemans moved to Leongatha, southeast of Melbourne in the foothills of the Strzelecki Hills mountain range, and Sodeman tried to stay away from alcohol. There were times, however, when he fell off the wagon and drank to excess.
His urge to kill returned, “but evidently. I found nobody,” he later told police. “There is no doubt that in those fits I went looking for someone but they wore off before I could find anyone.”
But on New Year’s Day, 1935, he pounced on his third victim.
Chapter 4: Ethel Belshaw - It could have been someone else
Ethel Belshaw, a cheerful girl with blond braids, was 12 years old when she went missing after buying an ice cream during a day trip to the beach community of Inverloch – not far from the Sodeman’s home - with her friend Margaret Knight, and Margaret’s parents.
Both Ethel and Margaret had gone to the shop for ice cream, but Ethel got hers first, and stepped outside to eat it. By the time Margaret had purchased her ice cream and left the store, Ethel was gone.
Police were notified, and bells rang out all day and night in hopes that the sound would guide the little girl back to the beach. A search party also set out to scour the area for the missing girl.
Ethel was found in a patch of scrub about a half-mile from the pier the next morning by a camper who was gathering firewood for his campsite.
She was covered with cuts and bruises, and a stocking was wrapped around her neck.
A neighbor reported hearing three screams at about 8:15 p.m. the night before, but through little of it because of the beachfront location and the holiday.
“It was not until she heard of news that Ethel Belshaw was missing that she associated the screams with the girl,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald.
The newspaper also said that given the holiday crowd at the beach, police had to stand guard over Ethel’s body for six hours, preventing a curious crowd from disturbing it. Detectives arrived at about 4 p.m. to remove Ethel from the beach.
An enemy in disguise
Little did anyone know that Ethel had been abducted by her next-door neighbor, a man whose wife and daughter often invited the young girl over for tea.
This time, however, there would be no tea, at least not for Ethel.
According to his later confession, Sodeman had encountered Belshaw after having drinks at the hotel, where he had already made several trips to ring in the holiday.
Like the Knights, he and his family were at the beach having a picnic for the holiday, but quality family time was not enough to keep him from his favorite vice.
During one trip between the two celebration sites, he ran into Belshaw, who followed him as she ate her ice cream.
“She knew me well,” he said. “We walked towards the jetty and on through the scrub. While walking up a narrow track towards the back beach something came over me and I took her by the throat. When I released her she sank to the ground. I thought she was dead.”
He then dragged her deeper into the brush, bound her and gagged her with her clothing as he had his previous two victims, then went back to the hotel for another drink.
“Then I went back and had tea with our party,” he calmly told investigators.
A killer’s chilling move
Because he was a neighbor, Sodeman was questioned by police after Ethel’s body was found, and he admitted that he had spoken to Ethel on the day she disappeared, but said she was alive the last time he had seen her. For some reason, investigators didn’t question him further.
On the night of her disappearance, before Ethel’s body was discovered by the camper, Sodeman had invited his distraught neighbors over for tea, to calm them over the disappearance of their daughter – and perhaps to throw them off his trail. Years later, Ethel’s niece talked about the cruel invite for tea, which she had learned about from her father, who was 15 at the time of his sister’s disappearance.
“He knew where she was all the time,” the niece said during a 2012 memorial for her murdered aunt. “How callous.”
Again, the wrong suspect
Instead, it was a teenage boy who gave conflicting statements about his whereabouts at the time of Belshaw’s disappearance who was arrested and charged in Wilson’s death, but again, since there was no evidence linking the boy to the crime, the case against him was dismissed and he was released after only a few nights behind bars.
If they had delved just a little bit deeper, however, and questioned some of Sodeman’s other family friends, they may have thought twice about letting him off the hook so easily.
Chapter 5: Another family friend, another ice cream
Maureen Lewis had gone to the beach with the Sodeman family on New Year’s Day in 1935, and like Ethel who had joined the Knight family, was with them for their picnic and swim at Inverloch’s popular South Gippsland beach.
During the picnic, she said, “Sodeman wanted to take me away for an ice cream, but Mrs. Sodeman wouldn't let him unless he took Joan, his daughter, as well.”
Lewis was glad not to go off with the neighbor who for some reason gave her goosebumps.
“He was a creep ... just a creep," Lewis told the Australian in 2012. “You’d turn around and he’d be behind you. He just gave us the creeps. I can't say why. But he just crept around. There was no noise...nothing. We had no idea he was a murderer, though.”
Since that would have put a real crimp in his plans for his first murder of the year, neither of the two girls got ice cream, and Sodeman wandered off.
“The first thing I said to Mum when I got home was, ‘Mr. Sodeman wanted to buy me an ice cream and Mrs. Sodeman wouldn’t let me go unless Joan went.’”
Later, after he had finally been arrested, Lewis was questioned by police about Sodeman, and she realized how lucky she had been that Bernice Sodeman had intervened, even if had only been to prevent her own daughter from feeling left out.
"It was lucky I didn't go with him," Lewis said. "It wasn't meant to be - my time wasn't up that day.”
That same day, however, after his plan for Maureen Lewis was thwarted, he ran into 12-year-old Ethel Belshaw. She was last seen, witnesses said, eating an ice cream.
Chapter 6: June Rushmer - The last little victim
Sodeman has again been drinking when he encountered six-year-old June Rushmer, and this particular murder would prove to be his undoing.
Earlier in the day, December 1, 1935, he had tried to lure June’s best friend, Shirley Steele, to go for a walk, but she worried that her mother would spank her if she did, so the 6-year-old stayed put, despite Sodeman’s promise of a bag of lollies if she went with him.
When she refused, he focused his lurid attention on Rushmer, who asked for a ride on Sodeman’s bicycle.
Steele would never see her friend again, and the image of Rushmer going off with Sodeman, riding on the handlebars of his bi
ke, haunted her until she died.
In his confession, the Schoolgirl Strangler admitted he knew Rushmer, who was the daughter of a coworker, and said that he decided to kill her after she asked him for that fateful ride on his bike.
He talked casually about his drinking that day, and referred to his regular trip to the bar as “tea.”
“After tea I went out and rode down Roughead Street. I did not know where I was going. I saw the little kid. She asked me for a ride, I said, ‘Where to?’ She said, ‘On anywhere.’ I got off my bike and she climbed onto the crossbars. We ride down the road. Just past the scrub, she said, ‘Oh, this is far enough.’
“She got off the bike and I got off and turned it round. I said, ‘You can walk home.’ I made a run towards her and she ran back into the bush. I ran after her and I caught her round the neck, and she started to scream. I held her by the neck and she went limp all of a sudden. I then took off her bloomers and jammed them into her mouth. .. I then left her there, and got on my bike. I realized I had done a dreadful act, and I went round to try and show I was away from the scene.”
Rushmer’s tiny body, bound and gagged with her own panties, was found a day later not far from her home in Leongatha, South Gippsland. She was lying face-down in a patch of sword grass, and had died from strangulation. A belt from her dress was tied over her mouth and around the back of her neck, and her hands were bound with another dress tie.
Steele, who died in 1991 at the age of 73, never forgot her close brush with death, her daughter, Toni Joyce, told the Melbourne Herald-Sun.
“I believe it haunted her all her life,” said Joyce, who hadn’t learned of the macabre events until her mother was on her deathbed.
“I think she wanted to get it off her chest,” Joyce said. “I think she felt guilty that she didn’t go with Sodeman, but June did.”
Finally, a connection
Sodeman likely through that he’d again gotten away with murder, but thanks to coworkers – and a few careless moves by the man who had now taken the lives of four little girls – the youngest of his victims would also be his last.
A coworker who worked with Sodeman on a crew repairing roadways made a joke and said he’d seen Sodeman near the crime scene, and Sodeman, who thought he’d gotten away without being seen, became enraged, arousing enough suspicion that the crew went to police. There, they informed officers that Sodeman had a bike similar to the one believed to have been used to take June to her death, based on the tracks in the sand along with eyewitness reports.
A week later, Sodeman was arrested at work and taken to the station for questioning.
It took 12 hours of grueling interrogation by police before Sodeman admitted not only his role in Rushmer’s murder, but also the three other unsolved killings – 12-year-old Mena Griffiths, 16-year-old Hazel Wilson and 12-year-old Ethel Belshaw.
His confession began: “I will be 36 years of age on Thursday, the 12th of November, 1935. I tell this story not with any hope of reward or in the hope of easing my position but because of the grip the mania has on me. When in this state thoughts would go through my mind concerning men, women and children whom I disliked. They were mostly men. I would feel the desire to even it up, not caring what happened to them; but I would shake it off. As soon as the liquor wore off I could reason properly and would wipe it all off.”
A previous crime averted
He calmly told police in great detail about the particularly horrific killing of the four girls, which came as a result of his desire to pay back in some way people he hated.
The girls, it seems, were stand-ins of sorts for the men in his life he felt had done him wrong.
“I always realize after what I have done. There is never any thought of sex or an erection,” Sodeman said matter-of-factly. “I cannot say I am satisfied. I just wake up. I do not think of doing these things when I am sober.”
He had carried with him those feelings of vengeance and desire to kill for a time, he added, as he confessed to two earlier attempts to kill, once a girl, another time a boy, both of which failed when he came out of his so-called fugue state and released them.
In the case of the boy, Sodeman had enticed him into a shed, but caught himself before he committed the horrific crime he had intended.
Sodeman fled the scene in a hurry, however, and a man passing by thought his speed seemed suspicious, so he chased him, tackled him to the ground and yelled for the police.
When the constable arrived, Sodeman told the officer he had been drinking and stopped to “relieve himself” in the yard, and ran away before he could be spotted by the home’s residents.
The police officer took down his name and other information including details of his story, and Sodeman was allowed to leave the scene.
Little did the policeman know that he was letting go a man who would become one of Australia’s most notorious child killers.
Chapter 7: A strange twist of events
After she married, Maureen Lewis – who had only escaped being killed by Sodeman because his wife stopped her from going with him for ice cream - moved into the house in Leongatha where June Rushmer had lived before her brutal murder, although she didn’t initially realize the connection.
She and her husband razed the home and built a new place down the block.
It wasn’t until years later that she learned of the gruesome connection to her chilling New Year’s Day brush with death.
When she was made aware, it chilled her to the bone, and she instantly was vaulted back to the day that she herself was almost led away by a madman she thought she knew, and would likely be dead if not for his wife stepping in.
Victims honored
After their daughters were murdered, the families of both June Rushmer and Ethel Belshaw didn’t have the money to place stones on their grave sites, so both remained unmarked for more than 75 years.
It wasn’t until 2012 that the victims of the Schoolgirl Strangler were finally given markers for their original makeshift graves.
Both girls had been killed within months of each other, and descendants of the girls attended the 2012 ceremony held in their honor.
The bronze plaques that were placed on their graves, June at Longatha Cemetery, Ethel at Tarwin Lower Cemetery, were donated by the Australian Funeral Directors Association and the Herald Sun.
The AFDA representative from Victoria, Tom Dooley, said the association was “moved to restore dignity and recognition of their lives” after learning the morbid way in which the girls had lost their lives. “By installing these plaques on their final resting places may the girls finally have public acknowledgement of their lives and places in the community. Your lives, we honor; your departures, we accept; and your memories, we cherish.”
Ethel’s niece, Bronwen Butler, expressed remorse that her father, who was 15 when his younger sister was murdered and rarely discussed her death with the family, wasn’t alive to see his sister’s memory.
“But I do remember him telling us of how Sodeman, who lived next door, invited the Belshaws over for tea on the night she’d disappeared,” Bronwen said. “He knew where she was all the time - how callous.”
Chapter 8: The making of a madman
Alcohol might seem like the real root of Sodeman’s evil, but there was more to the story than that.
While after he’d consumed a few drinks he clearly wasn’t himself, he wasn’t driven to kill every time he took a drink.
During his trial, his brother, Ernest, told the trial judge that his brother was often out of control after drinking alcohol.
“He does not seem to be responsible for his actions after he had three or four,” he told the judge. “He does not seem to be able to control himself.”
Still, there were more issues at play than Sodeman’s chronic alcoholism.
A long family history of mental illness compounded the problem of his alcoholic fugue states, and likely contributed to what he himself called his “mania.”
Sodeman’s
great-grandfather and great-grandfather’s brother both died from a brain disorder, and his father, who had brutally abused both Sodeman and his brother as well as his mother according to reports, also passed away in a mental institution.
“He had a long family history of questionable brain function,” said Ian A. Joblin, a Melbourne-based psychologist familiar with Sodeman’s past as the Schoolgirl Strangler, in 2012.
“An autopsy found that his brain had been diseased, quite deteriorating,” Joblin said.
In fact, the autopsy revealed he had suffered from chronic leptomeningitis, an inflammation of the tissue covering the brain. Symptoms of the disorder include fever, chills, facial flushing, bright eyes, pupil contraction, restlessness, hyperesthesia, muscle spasms, tenderness of the spinal column, urinary retention, paralysis, impaired reflexes and altered sensations.
Combined with the fairly extensive head injury from his fall from a horse and his consistent abuse of alcohol, it was unlikely that Sodeman would have lived out his days peacefully at home, even if he had not watched Mena Griffiths playing in the park that fateful day when he left the hotel bar on a mission that would take him down a hellish and horrible path.
“Each one of those may have contributed to his brain function,” Joblin said.
Newspaper reports of the day said, “The man, it would now appear, was foredoomed to be a burden to society. With leptomeningitis growing in his brain he could scarcely have been otherwise.
“Few will mourn Sodeman’s death,” the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser added in a story about Sodeman’s autopsy and the brain condition it revealed. “The passing of any mentally afflicted person is usually regarded by feelings of relief by a sober-minded society. But it is regrettable that the true state of his brain was not ascertained while the scales of Justice were being balanced.”
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 24