In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  But it was not simply Chrissie’s failure to reappear further along the road that had nagged at Jack. Later in the evening when his father came home, he asked: ‘I say, Dad, did you see anyone kicking about or dead down at the turn-off?’

  ‘No, don’t be silly, why?’

  ‘I heard a squeal down there.’

  And out it came, how Jack’s brother Tom, also ploughing the field, had heard it too, a terrible scream that sounded like a girl who had trodden on a snake ‘and got a fright’, or was reacting to a horse bolting along the road.

  ‘A pity you did not run down,’ Jack’s father remarked.

  Jack’s excuse was that he was waiting for another scream. He did not think it could be serious with only one scream. He told his brother that if it was a bolting horse they would have heard the cart rattle. He had listened again and when they heard nothing, he went back to his plough. ‘I didn’t think there was anything there to harm her.’

  On the same afternoon as Chrissie had disappeared, at about 6.20 p.m., Brodie had ridden his motorbike home along Arnoll Road. His friend and neighbour Gilbert Kennedy was behind him on the pillion. Brodie confirmed to Eva that neither he nor Gilbert had seen Chrissie. All agreed that Brodie must now drive to the post office and wire the constabulary at Ulverstone. At 7 p.m. the police received the message.

  The following morning a search party that included Brodie and his brothers Nigel and Joe fanned out along the potato and pea fields, converging into the gully. They looked all day without finding anything.

  The search resumed on Tuesday morning. At 11.30 a.m. a fettler called Charles Taylor, following Jack Hearps’s casual suggestion, approached a huge tree stump 40 yards above the road. The stump was nine feet high and burned around the base, and Taylor noticed that in several places the charcoal was crushed. He hoisted himself up by a sapling and as he neared the top he heard ‘the buzzing of a blow-fly’. The stump was hollow. Peering down, he saw, about six feet below him, a body thrust head-first into the cavity. The buttocks were naked and bruised, the legs had white stockings on and there were shoes still on the feet.

  Taylor coo-eed: ‘Hey! She is here.’

  The search party had sat down to rest.

  ‘No fear,’ someone said.

  ‘Too true. She’s here.’

  Brodie, Nigel and Joe jumped up, and all took turns to have a look.

  Chrissie Venn had been dead three days. Her face was ‘swollen, livid and bloodstained’, according to the doctor who examined her two hours later, and there were maggots on her eyelids and in her mouth. Her dress and petticoat were torn and dirty. A foot of wire of the sort used for tying hay bales was twisted round her neck, and stuffed into her mouth was a piece of cloth ripped from her dress with a gold brooch pinned to it.

  For the rest of his life Brodie remembered the blow-flies coming out of the stump. Another man who saw the body that morning lost his faith in God and never regained it. ‘If one were to search the world,’ read one of many editorials, ‘it would be impossible to find a more unlikely spot for such an awful thing to happen, here, in a district inhabited by quiet law-abiding farmers noted as they are for their hospitality and good nature, surely the last place that a young girl should be fatally murdered in broad daylight.’ It was the newspaper’s position that no-one hearing of the fate of Chrissie Venn could fail to have a sense of righteous wrath against some person.

  North Motton was a tight-knit community. Most of the searchers were related. But one person who sprang up when Taylor coo-eed was a newcomer to the area. George King, six foot four, 35, ex-miner, ex-policeman and a Catholic, was married to an attractive wife and farmed the land up the road from the stump. While they waited for the body to be removed, Jack Hearps’s father noticed that the flies had started to buzz around King’s large hands and that his right hand was bleeding.

  ‘Look what I done in the search,’ King grumbled, and told Hearps how he had trodden on a rotten log and fallen backwards, catching his hand on a stone and injuring it.

  ‘Oh bugger it, that’s nothing,’ Hearps said.

  But King’s bleeding hand would be remembered. As would the scratches on his face.

  Half an hour later the police arrived.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the murder,’ Ivy said, and spread out the photographs.

  I picked them up and saw that they were taken by G.P. Taylor who had photographed the Horderns outside Stoke Rivers.

  ‘Uncle Nigel gave them to me.’

  They were: a group portrait of North Motton school with Chrissie Venn in the front row; a studio portrait of Chrissie Venn’s mother, Eva Dawes; and a photograph taken at the crime scene. Sergeant Tomkinson, in hat and shirtsleeves, kneels on top of the elephant-sized stump, looking down into the cavity that still contains Chrissie Venn’s body.

  ‘Did you know about the murder?’

  ‘Oh, we could see the stump.

  That’s where grandfather would be walking past. We’d go on the road and mother would tell us about Chrissie Venn.’

  And another portrait. A tall, athletic-looking man with a receding hairline and enormous hands.

  ‘That’s the one, but he wasn’t the one. They accused the wrong man.’

  ‘Bossy’ Jones, the smallest present, was lowered into the cavity to tie a rope around the body and it was pulled out. Wedged underneath was found a basket with a bottle of kerosene, a pudding cloth and the girl’s underpants. But the coins that Eva had given Chrissie, amounting to nine shillings and sevenpence, were missing.

  Her body was laid on a dray, covered in hessian bags and taken to the cold room of the Seaview Hotel in Ulverstone, where Doctor Fred Ferris, Hordern’s GP and a man with no expertise in forensics, conducted a post-mortem.

  Ferris established an order of events. Chrissie Venn had been attacked and raped after a violent struggle. Her right sleeve and the back of her dress were torn, indicating that someone had grabbed her from behind. Her left breast was bruised and her cricoid cartilage fractured, suggesting that she had been strangled. She had suffocated to death probably about five minutes after the gag was jammed into her mouth – following the piercing scream heard by Jack Hearps, ploughing his field 100 yards away. Her body had then been hauled into the cavity of the stump by the hay-wire around her neck. Bloodstained pubic hair (‘short human hair’) on her calico sanitary cloth confirmed that she was either beginning or completing her menstrual cycle. Two smears showed traces of spermatozoa in her vaginal passage.

  Over the next six months, Doctor Ferris altered his initial testimony ten times as the coroner’s inquest led on March 22 to committal proceedings and finally, in August, to a criminal trial. At first, he believed sexual intercourse had taken place shortly before her death. Then he thought her hymen might have been ruptured at any time during the two weeks leading up to it. Then he recalled that she could not possibly be a virgin because he had examined Chrissie two years earlier following a charge of rape. When, 36 days after inspecting the body, he realised that he had forgotten to take scrapings from under her fingernails, he arranged for her coffin to be dug up. But Chrissie had been buried in a waterlogged cemetery: her body had decomposed.

  Ferris’s testimony was so contradictory that it stoked ‘reports of a startling character’. Rumours of arrests and discoveries exhausted the village. Chrissie had known her attacker … She had made an assignation with him … When she explained that she could not make love because it was ‘her time of flowers’, he refused to listen … But who was her attacker? And why had Jack Hearps not come down to the road?

  Hearps’s neighbour George King considered it all very odd and was overheard to say that he would not care to be in Jack Hearps’s shoes. In the event, it was King, not Hearps, who was arrested.

  The detective in charge of the police investigation was Fred Harmon from Devonport, a zealous hypocrite with a record of incompetence and dishonesty. Harmon would be dismissed from the police service followin
g his part in bringing George King to trial.

  Harmon was so convinced of King’s guilt that he saw no need to detain suspects like Patrick Williams, a tramp who had been working on a farm half a mile away and who walked past the stump on the afternoon following the murder. Two days after reaching Ulverstone, Williams was arrested on a vagrancy charge and briefly locked up for his own protection. His manner was described as ‘peculiar’. Odder still was that he had sixteen shillings on him. But Harmon never asked where he had got the money. The murderer was clearly George King.

  On March 3, Harmon called at King’s house in an aggressive mood and tore out some of King’s hair – ‘far more than he should have’, complained King – to compare it with some coarse black strands he had in his notebook. Rudely, he asked King if he had ever cut wood for Chrissie’s mother. King said that he had, and once had made her a barrow. Leering, Harmon asked how she had paid him – with sex? Offended, King replied that if that was the kind of man Harmon was, he didn’t want to be thought of in the same breath.

  Two days later, King received an anonymous envelope containing the drawing of a gallows and a man being hanged. Underneath, in a plain angular hand, but ‘rather rough as if disguised’, were the words: ‘Beware – I saw you murder Chrissie Venn. If you don’t confess, I will tell the police.’

  King gave the letter to Harmon saying that he had a good idea who wrote it: Jack Hearps. But Harmon’s superior, Detective Oakes, said that he had lots of experience tracing anonymous letters and this was obviously written by a woman. A few days later the drawing vanished. Harmon made no further effort to trace the author.

  On March 7, Harmon returned to interrogate King. He was angrier than before and brought with him the hay-wire from around Chrissie’s neck and some of her bloodstained clothes. He shoved these up against King’s face, practically stabbing him in the eye with the wire.

  Harmon was accompanied by Doctor Ferris and George Taylor, who asked King to sit still while he took photographs of his face and hands. Ferris examined a healed scratch on King’s upper lip and a scratch on the back of his right hand near the base of the middle finger. The wound on King’s hand was lacerated and slightly festering.

  When Harmon knocked on the door the following day, King, a man with no prior convictions, said: ‘I expect you will arrest me. I will not run away.’ But before Harmon led him off, he had a request: ‘I would like to dig some potatoes for my wife.’

  Brodie and his brothers walked eleven miles to Ulverstone to hear George King give evidence, booking into a local hotel and leaving behind a deserted village. ‘It would be impossible to describe the state of nervous excitement in the North Motton district,’ wrote the Advocate. ‘It was safe to say that not a farmer was on his farm that day.’ A travelling salesman who passed through North Motton complained that he was unable to do any business: the entire population had decamped to Ulverstone where they crowded outside the court house in Reibey Street, peering over each other’s shoulders and climbing onto window sills, desperate to get a glimpse of the witness.

  Of those who testified at the coroner’s inquest, King deviated least from his original story. Clean-shaven, with neatly brushed hair and wearing a raincoat, he was described as cool, self-possessed and of ‘a bright and intelligent appearance’. But his manner had changed by the time of his trial in August. He repeatedly burst into tears as he protested his innocence and once more rehearsed to the jury – who numbered among them a Macbeth and a Chatterton – his recollection of Saturday, February 21.

  On the afternoon of Chrissie’s murder King had been digging in his potato patch. At about 3.30 p.m., after having a pipe, he left his hoe against a stump and made for home, cutting up through a pea paddock and onto the road. A quarter of a mile from his house he spotted his wife’s pregnant black pig trotting below him towards a waterfall in the gully. There was no water at King’s house and he said that the pig – a two-year-old Berkshire sow – was always escaping to the waterfall. He shooed it back along the road and shut it in his yard.

  He then spent 15 minutes talking to his wife in the shed where she was washing clothes. He went to the toilet – a hollowed-out stump; drank a cup of tea, went to collect some thistles for his cow, and at the time that Chrissie Venn was walking along the road was down in his paddock, tying stalks. He didn’t have a watch, but he estimated that between 4 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. he saw a motorbike pass with two people whom he did not recognise – possibly Brodie and Gilbert Kennedy. But it was the next group of people who became the focus of his lawyer’s special attention.

  King said that he saw Chic Purton pass by on horseback between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.; and he saw Chic’s sister Florence and Cyril Kennedy pass by a little before 6 p.m. in separate traps heading towards North Motton. So far as King could remember, Kennedy was in front.

  There were plenty who agreed that Detective Harmon mounted his case against King on tenuous evidence: the whereabouts of his wife’s pig, about which three pig experts were called to give opinions; whether Florence Purton or Cyril Kennedy was in the lead riding up Badcock’s Hill; and the scratches on the side of his face and right hand. Harmon claimed that they were marks gouged by human fingernails. He distributed Taylor’s photographs to the jury.

  King said that the scratches were easy to explain. He had injured his hand when cutting bracken on the Thursday prior to the murder. The wound had reopened when he was looking for Chrissie Venn: in falling over the rotten log, he had torn off the scab. When King got home his wife noticed and said, ‘You have been cutting your hand again.’ He was never free from scratches.

  Questioned about the wounds on his face, King said they were made by his wife ‘skylarking’ while in bed when they were trying to see who could kiss their little girl first. It was a game many had played who listened to him. On Sunday mornings before he got out of bed, his little girl Eileen always tried to ‘annoy’ him by giving her mother the first kiss as a joke. That Sunday morning, as usual, she ran across to the bed towards her mother, but this time King decided to compete for his daughter’s kiss. They had a tussle and in the giggling struggle his wife accidentally caught him on the side of the face. The scratch was not intentional.

  Doctor Ferris, called for his expert opinion, said on balance it was equally likely that the scooped-out appearance of the wounds might have been caused in this way as not, but unfortunately he had been unable to examine Chrissie Venn’s fingernails. Listening to his evidence, the solicitor-general, L.E. Chambers, scribbled himself a note that summed up what many felt in the court. ‘The slight variations point to the veracity of the witness.’

  Slight variations marked the testimonies of other witnesses who had provided the only alibis for each other. To the jury it became daily more obvious that discussions had gone on between Chic Purton and his sister, the Kennedys and the Hearps brothers – all related to each other or friends since childhood, all apparently anxious to protect one of their number. Some of the times they presented at the inquest were tightened at the trial. In other instances no estimate at all was given. When asked, for instance, what he was doing between 8.45 p.m. and 11 p.m., Chic Purton answered in a meek voice: ‘I had no time,’ meaning that he, like King, had no watch.

  It was the inability of King and other witnesses to remember what they were doing when that moved Chief Justice Nicholls to make to the jury his disquisition about the attitude of Tasmanian farmers towards time. ‘It is no slander, possibly, to say that when he looks at the family clock and his watch they don’t agree, and probably they are both likely to be wrong.’

  Chic Purton, a young illiterate labourer who signed his depositions with a cross, was of all the witnesses the most ‘reticent’. King’s lawyer, A.G. Ogilvie, judged his evidence ‘contradictory, questionable and suspicious’. He had no doubt: Purton, not King, ought to be standing in the dock.

  Purton claimed he had left his house on horseback at about 5 p.m., although he couldn’t say for certain. He had ridden to the North Mo
tton store and returned home at 11 p.m., he said, but later changed this to 10 p.m. and then to 8.45 p.m. Asked several times why he had altered the time, he stood mute. He could not answer.

  In summing up, King’s lawyer said the theory about scratches was ‘absolutely battered to pieces’ and suggested that there was one person Purton ought to have seen, or at the very least heard: Chrissie Venn. Purton must have been passing within 40 yards of the girl when she was murdered and he had not heard her scream, while Hearps 300 yards away did hear it. His eyes fixed on Purton, he asked penetratingly: ‘Who was the most likely person to commit such a crime – a married man with an attractive wife or a young man of the locality?’

  The jury was persuaded. After deliberating for six hours they delivered a verdict of Not Guilty. The court greeted it with cheers.

  King was a free man. But the trial had destroyed the ex-policeman. He had spent 157 days in prison, his home had been broken up, his furniture sold and his wife Ruby admitted to Hobart General Hospital after suffering a mental collapse. Unable to pick up the pieces of his life in Arnoll Road, he changed his name and became an itinerant knife-sharpener.

  In North Motton, no-one was found guilty of the crime. But Chrissie Venn continued to throw her shadow. The ghostly shape of an axe was seen to hover along Arnoll Road (even though she had not been killed with one); horses would dig in their heels at the stump where her body was found; motorbikes refused to start. Her murder paralysed the lives of those she had touched and they detected her restless spirit behind the most trivial incident.

  Brodie was not summoned to give evidence – he was told that his testimony would merely duplicate Gilbert Kennedy’s – but the repercussions of the case marked him as deeply as anyone. At the time of Chrissie Venn’s murder he was engaged to the cousin of Chic Purton, the man who became prime suspect after King’s acquittal. He married her two months before the trial. Soon after the verdict, Brodie’s new wife was cooking dinner on the wood stove at Stoke Rivers when she discovered that she had closed the oven door on her cat, which sometimes crept inside for warmth, and incinerated it.