‘I am very sorry, Mister and Missus Schippan, but your youngest girl, Bertha, has been savagely attacked and murdered by an intruder. We are doing all we can to find the perpetrator of this barbaric crime. What I can say is that your other three children are safe, although distressed, as you can imagine. Mary has suffered a few cuts and bruises.’
On hearing this, the shocked Mrs Schippan hurried to Mary. Priest took Mr Schippan to the house and led him into the bedroom where his dead daughter lay. Carefully he drew back the sheet and asked him to identify Bertha.
‘This is Johanna, Mister Schippan?’
‘Ya, but vee call her Berta,’ he replied quietly, and reached for his neckerchief.
‘Bertha, right. I’ll cover her up now. The flies are pretty bad, I’m afraid.’ They returned to the kitchen.
‘Mr Schippan, we have seen what we need to and now that you have identified Bertha she must be buried as soon as possible.’
‘Ya, I can see that, Mr Priest. There is an undertaker in Sedan.’
‘I have some notepaper here. Write a note to him and one of my men will ride there for you. Inform him that he must come early tomorrow morning with a coffin. My trooper will also make sure the clergyman you need will be at the graveside in Sedan for a ceremony later in the day. I am sure you want relatives to know too. I’ll leave you to write all the letters you wish delivered. There’s pen and ink in my writing box on the table. Write the notes you need and I’ll send some of my men off to deliver them.’
Mathes Schippan looked distraught and Detective Priest placed a comforting hand on his arm and said quietly, ‘This is a terrible affair Mr Schippan but while I’m here my men and I will do all we can to lessen the burden you and your wife are suffering.’ Applying a little extra pressure to Mathes Schippan’s arm, Priest continued, ‘Now, Mr Schippan, you can see how much mess this brutal murder has made to your home but we are still looking for clues. I’m afraid no one is allowed beyond the kitchen until we have finished our search. We can’t afford to miss any traces of whoever was in the house with Mary and Bertha. After the notes are written I want you and your sons – with help from my men – to construct an outside kitchen with a cooking and eating area. It has to be large enough for your family and all of us. Then you need to re-arrange your barns for your family to sleep in for a few nights.’
Priest noticed that Schippan’s sons were soon helping their father to carry out these instructions. But there was no chatter between them. Rather the boys appeared scared of their father, flinching when he came near. Mrs Schippan sat with Mary on the bench in the little shade there was, and Priest heard raised voices followed by the sobbing and weeping of Mrs Schippan. Mary never lost her composure. When Mrs Schippan finished her relentless questioning and it was quiet between them Mary continued to sit calmly, staring out across the paddocks. Frequent outbursts followed, Mrs Schippan working herself into hysteria and sobbing while Mary remained composed.
Mulligan the coroner and Steele the doctor compared notes and at four o’clock they gathered in the large implement barn for a coroner’s meeting. Mr Mulligan sat at the head of a table that had been brought from the kitchen and asked each of the senior staff about what had been found. Although it was obvious from the moment they first saw the corpse that they were dealing with a murder, the meeting was held to confirm that death resulted from multiple stab wounds inflicted by what appeared to be someone in a frenzy. The evidence indicated several attempts at slashing the throat with a knife, similar to the one found in the kitchen – or was it that one? It took little effort for the police to find half a dozen bloodstained butchering knives around the farmhouse and in the barns. And it was likely there were others still to be found.
Within an hour the meeting was closed and plans were made to have the official inquest six days later in the same barn. Priest groaned at the thought of being holed up in Towitta for the next few days. But important procedures had to be carried out, such as the hunt for clues by the Aboriginal tracker. He hadn’t arrived yet and who knew what he might find. Priest pinned most of his hopes on these clues.
It had been quiet, hot and still when they arrived at the Schippan farmhouse. By the next day conditions had deteriorated dramatically. The wind started in the night and with it the real hardships began. A high wind blew all day, carrying with it clouds of red gritty dust. There was no relief from the blinding choking curse that stung the face and made everyone miserable and snappy. Priest reckoned that the wind was strong enough to bury an idle person in half an hour and blow away a foot of Towitta every day. He resorted to covering his nose and mouth with his neckerchief. The place was not far from how he imagined hell to be. At least he knew he could return to Adelaide, unlike the poor local farmers. He had been told the farmers were sentenced by restrictive land regulations to reside on the plains nine months in the year, an unfair form of persecution he believed. It was a mockery that the native meaning of ‘Towitta’ was fresh water.
By the end of their second day in the district Priest felt he was coming to know the Schippan family. Even though he’d heard it said by many in the district that the family was held in the highest respect, looked upon as a model family and described as sober, industrious and affectionate, he wondered whether his leg was being pulled. There was plenty of evidence to think otherwise. He must face the question of what went on behind closed doors, as well as consider the acts of violence that Mathes Schippan had committed. Priest noticed that interactions between Mary, her brothers and Mrs Schippan appeared normal, almost affectionate. This was not the case when Mathes Schippan was involved. Any family dealings with him appeared difficult and strained. Although Priest never heard him raise his voice in anger, his family jumped to his commands. In fact, he never seemed to speak unless he was ordering someone. Priest began to wonder if Mathes Schippan had been involved in the murder, yet he had been more than twenty miles away when the murder took place, according to his testimony. But if Mathes Schippan hadn’t done it, who else would do such a thing? And why was Mary not murdered instead – or as well as Bertha?
People were adamant that Mary was not a ‘flighty’ girl. Rather, she was known to have a nervous disposition and an obsessive fear of the dark that meant she was indoors well before nightfall. Priest observed that she may have been quite pretty once, but she was overly thin. This thinness and the way her hair was styled made her look deceptively tall. Like many spinsters with long wavy hair, she wore it pinned up on her head offset by a crimped fringe. The drab dark-brown of her clothes set off her deathly pale skin with its sprinkling of freckles over her nose and enhanced the reddish streaks through her pale-brown hair. Her face was strained and pinched and Priest never once saw her smile or relax. In many ways Mary was a younger version of her mother. Even the slightest smile would have changed her countenance. But then she had little to smile about.
It was said that when Mary and her older sister, Pauline, were young girls they created their own world of make-believe and acted out fairytales that reflected the reality of their lives. They dressed up in old clothes of their mother’s or aunts’. Crowns and veils were made to turn them into princesses and queens, or the lovely daughters of a peasant or wicked parent. Their brothers, August and Wilhelm, roped in to be monsters, beasts, dwarfs or huntsmen, revelled in their odd roles. They were naturally ghoulish and loved any excuse to act out the brutal killings that were a part of many fairytales.
When not playing these roles, Priest was informed that the younger brothers loved killing whatever moved, whether birds or animals. They enjoyed dissecting the animals and generally scaring everyone with hoaxes and tricks that included animal blood and offal. He knew living in a dreary and isolated place such as this was partly responsible for the bizarre behaviour that several of the Schippans’ neighbours had mentioned. Some folk in the nearby township were convinced the boys were the devil’s work. But to be fair, it was probably because they were not the full quid.
Priest turned his attenti
on to Mary Schippan and the possible motive of revenge. Did she have feelings of resentment against the actions of a girl not quite fourteen, an innocent girl? Or was she innocent? He’d already heard from an outspoken farm labourer that the young Bertha, a rising beauty and far prettier than her older sister, was rather precocious. Bertha did not share the family’s fair complexion. Mathes Schippan told Priest, ‘Berta inherited her striking dark looks vrom her long dead großvater, you know – and her gypsy character.’
Priest asked him to continue.
‘Ov all my kinder, she vas the most difficult. Always spoilt rotten by Pauline, my oldest tochter, when she was alive. Don’t know how she did it, but I can see she had me round her little vinger. My vife used to wring her hands in despair when Berta vas bedevilled because she knew I should lock her up or give her a touch of the whip, but I never did. I just couldn’t.’
Priest considered whether Mary, ten years older, had been jealous of Bertha’s youth? And Mary had a sweetheart. What had been going on there? Did her sweetheart, Gustave Nitschke, look in Bertha’s direction and Mary found out? Priest had been told that Bertha had been forbidden from attending the New Year’s Eve dance in Sedan. Had she set up a constant cajoling, perhaps threatening to tell her father of Mary’s indecent behaviour with Gustave? If the inevitable punishment of a sound whipping by her father was simply too humiliating for Mary to contemplate, revenge could have been a possible motive. And the father’s violent past provided reason for suspicion too, yet he was away in Eden Valley.
Priest could see that Mathes Schippan’s control over his children was all but total. He treated his family as his property, preventing them from having lives of their own. The two eldest sons had run away from home, and the eldest daughter had died of tuberculosis. Being afflicted, the youngest brother was cursed to remain forever an ageing child. The youngest of the children, probably the smartest, had been brutally murdered. And then there was Mary, the tuberculosis she had suffered for several years sapping her energy, leaving her to accept her lot. Her one possibility for escape, if she was well enough, was Gustave Nitschke.
Priest knew it was crucial to get to the bottom of what had gone on between these two sisters between eight and eleven o’clock on the evening of the murder. They were referred to as ‘loving sisters’. Surely Mary would not have resorted to murdering her sister?
The Schippans’ house had been left unattended after the murder until the following morning when Constable Lambert and his mother and the three Schippan siblings returned. Mrs Ann Lambert then laid out the body before returning home. Certainly there was plenty of evidence of blood all about the house, over the floors and up the walls. With so much animal butchering going on around the farm it was hard to tell what blood was what.
On the Sunday after Priest and his company of men had arrived, Tommy King, the famous Aboriginal tracker from Gladstone, joined them. Originally from Alice Springs, he had earned an outstanding reputation on the trail. Accompanied by Corporal Finch he soon made a circuit of the Schippan house at the distance of about half a mile, but failed to find any trace of footprints other than those of the police and other visitors. Even with gales blowing throughout the day it was hard to baffle an expert tracker. Tommy told Priest with conviction, ‘No fella come along there. No tracks here, Boss.’ But Priest had a suspicion that even supposing foreign footprints had been made in the vicinity of the house, they would now have been blown away by the terrific dust storms. Perhaps Towitta itself had disappeared?
Priest told his troops, ‘I don’t care if all the dust storms of the Sahara have swirled to the Murray Flats, we will not abandon the enquiries, meaning none of you are going home until I am satisfied that all avenues have been pursued. Is that clear?’
Corporal Finch went with Tommy into the farmyard as he continued his meticulous search for tracks, but to no avail. There was no trace of bloodstains beyond the kitchen door and they were certain no one left the house at the time of the murder. The search by the troopers, a two-mile wide sweep, was extended beyond the farm. All that was found was the print of an old boot of Mr Schippan’s in a dried-out puddle from long ago. The hopes that had relied on Tommy’s skills blew away with the dust and left Priest frustrated and baffled.
The inquest had to consider these facts, of course. The evidence from inside the farmhouse directed suspicion to Mary. Priest was convinced that the father could not have committed the crime. His men rode from Eden Valley in daylight to see how long it took. They concluded that attempting it at night was simply not possible. One of the troopers volunteered to try but had to abandon the attempt. The evidence was pointing to Mary, and Priest was finding it hard to accept.
1
Mary
April 1919
I have consumption. For eight years after my father’s death I thought I was getting better because I felt free from his tyranny. How wrong I was. After Christmas, when I had several serious fits and bleeding bouts, Mother was so alarmed at the thought of losing me, her last remaining daughter, that she brought me for treatment at the Adelaide Consumptive Home. I’m told that once you come here you don’t leave – except in a box. My prospects are hopeless.
Apart from its lovely but neglected gardens, the place has little cheer. According to the nurses, the hospital was once a lunatic asylum; that is perhaps why there are so many tiny cell-like cubicles with big iron locks on the doors. I have one of these old cells to call my own with a tiny window overlooking a shady garden. The rooms are in the long narrow building which everyone calls ‘the corridor’. And it is here that other women patients like me will die.
Amid such gloomy surroundings, one of the nursing sisters almost half my age has befriended me. Although she’s not from a German family like ours, Sister Kathleen tells me her family comes from the Barossa Valley, near where I have lived for most of my life. She understands my situation and we have become friends. She tells me of her sorrow for her sweetheart who was killed fighting near the end of the war in Europe. She bears this loss alongside the day-to-day squabbles between her, another nursing sister, seven nurses and the matron. The daily shenanigans provide us with much amusement; there isn’t much else here to make us laugh. Without Sister Kathleen, I would have no idea of the ‘goings on’ in the hospital.
For my part, I tell her of the hardships of living on a farm for years dogged by drought, and something of Father’s harsh treatment of my brothers and sisters and myself before they either died or ran away from home. I tell her that both my sisters died young, but I have not said how. It is touching that she is treating me as an equal. In the Barossa Valley and on the Murray Flats, where so many families of German descent settled, it is our lot to be treated as inferior or foreign because of our so-called peculiar customs and a foreign language and church. As for ‘blocker’ families like ours mixing, it simply wasn’t done. Then, as now, it is always them and us – the British and the Germans.
We sit on the tiny verandah shaded from the warm sun with Sister Kathleen holding out her arms with my skeins of wool wrapped around her wrists as I wind balls. I pass much of my time knitting baby clothes for a church orphanage. When Sister Kathleen sweet-talks me into yarning about my life I find telling my own brand of tales still comes easy to me. We might spend just ten minutes together or as much as two hours, but these longer periods are rare as she is kept very busy.
After years of not saying much to anyone, I found it wasn’t hard to tell tales in the way I once used to. So I began to look forward to her visits. I can’t do much else now anyway, I have plenty of time to think of the tales I will tell her. Not long after we met she asked me straight out if I was that woman in the Towitta tragedy. She was plumping up my pillow at the time and asked, casually, ‘Miss Schippan, I know you’ll think I’m nosey and you can tell me to mind my own business if you wish, but Schippan is not a common name. I can remember our family talking about a murder in a family that had that name when I was a girl, and I’m sure there was a woman called
Mary. Was that your family?’
I was caught off guard and hesitated. It may have been only seconds before I replied, but my whole life flashed before me. I liked Sister Kathleen for she made a point of coming to see me whenever she was on duty, even when she wasn’t rostered for duty to the ‘corridor’. You couldn’t ignore her because, despite the recent loss of her sweetheart in the war, she was bright and cheery. People like her make all the difference in a place where so many have low spirits, and she lifted mine without really trying. I made a hasty decision to answer her question honestly. What did I have to lose?
‘Yes, it was my family. And if you don’t mind me pointing it out to you, you’re a brave one asking questions that don’t really concern you, Sister. I hope you don’t go about asking other women such personal questions. You’d be told you were nothing but a sticky beak. But I know that since arriving here a few weeks ago you’ve done your best to make me comfortable as well as make me laugh. So please, don’t keep calling me Miss Schippan, just call me Mary.’
Sister Kathleen came round to the front of the day bed, grabbed my hands and looked straight into my eyes. She told me she had grown up knowing of the Towitta tragedy, as it was referred to in the newspapers of the day. Once we started to talk about this part of my life she enjoyed revealing to me what a thrill it was to talk to someone like myself, though I failed to see why. So yes, I admitted, I was notorious for being put inside a prison awaiting trial for murder. Prison was a world she knew nothing about and she was curious. She asked me if I was willing to share such memories. Well we will see how we go. I told her she would have to be patient with me as I needed time to think about what tales I would share.
I found that after keeping secrets for so long, being asked to talk of this time was like someone taking the stopper out of the bottle containing an impatient genie. And so we always spoke about my life and family, rarely hers I noticed. I let her rush on with her own views about the Schippans, because until now I’d never discussed them. The trouble was where to begin. I thought the next time we met and if she had enough time, I would tell her about the life of a Wendish family in South Australia. It would take time to explain how one family came to suffer so much misery. I thought of keeping her interest by telling her a little at a time of our family, unfolding our story like a fairytale. This would give her a background to my life and how I ended up in this prison of a hospital. It would also help to make the days go by, though I know there are few left for me. But from the night following that first talk the nightmares returned.
The Noon Lady of Towitta Page 2