Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly Page 5

  They visited James’ wife, who told them that her husband had gone out fishing on 7 April and never returned. A forger friend of his, Patrick Brady, might be able to help them, she suggested. People in the area near Brady’s home in Cronulla had seen the two men together. The real estate agent who rented Brady his house said that some stuff was missing from it. Heavy stuff. A big tin storage case (nearly big enough to hold a body, perhaps?), an anchor and some lead window weights had all disappeared.

  When the detectives found Patrick Brady, he said that he’d seen Smith with two others, one of whom was a man called Reginald Holmes. Holmes was a boat builder. A boat which Smith had helped to build had sunk. Holmes had lost money on it and was not happy with Smith. Not happy at all. They arrested Brady anyway, and then went to find Holmes.

  When the detectives reached McMahon’s Point, where Holmes lived, they found that Holmes had decided to kill himself in one of his own speedboats. As the boat sped through Sydney Harbour, he put a gun to his head to shoot himself, but messed up. He did manage to blow himself out of the boat, bleeding but relatively unharmed. Climbing back aboard, he tried to escape from the police, but after a thrilling two-hour chase, he finally stopped at a place called Watson’s Bay and gave himself up. He said he hadn’t realised it was the police chasing him. Nobody believed that. He was arrested.

  As he was injured, Holmes was taken to hospital where the police put him under guard. A few days later, he told them that Patrick Brady had murdered James Smith and had threatened to kill him, or have one of his friends kill him, if he spoke to police about the murder.

  Whether or not this was true, we may never know. Holmes was going to speak as a witness against Brady at an inquest, beginning on 12 June. The prosecution was relying on him.

  Perhaps Brady really did threaten to have Holmes killed, because on the morning of 12 June, someone shot Holmes as he was driving his car under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Two men were arrested for Holmes’ murder, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them and they had to be released.

  With no witness, now that Holmes was gone, no evidence and no body, the police had to release Brady.

  The shark arm mystery has remained a mystery, even to this day.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  In 1992, James Finch, who had served time for the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing, made a truly weird request from his home in England. While he’d been in prison, someone had sliced off the top joint of his little finger. It was in a jar in the prison’s museum. He wanted it back.

  SNOWY ROWLES

  THE PERFECT MURDER

  What would be a crime novelist’s worst nightmare? Many would say that what they fear most is that someone will use their books to help commit the perfect crime.

  Arthur Upfield, a popular crime writer of the 1920s and 1930s, author of the ‘Bony’ mysteries, found out how this felt.

  Upfield had had some novels published already in 1929, when he went to work as a boundary rider on Western Australia’s Rabbit-Proof Fence.

  He was working on a novel, The Sands of Windee, and wanted his fictional detective to try to solve a murder without a body. He hadn’t come up with an idea yet for how this could be done and asked his workmates for suggestions. How, he asked one night at the campfire, could a murderer get rid of a body completely?

  The answer came from a man called George Ritchie. George suggested that the body could be burned first. There would be bits of bone left over, but those could be sifted out from the ashes. The ashes could be scattered and the bones pounded down. What was left could be dissolved in acid.

  It was a great idea, Upfield agreed. Perhaps it was too good. After all, the detective had to be able to solve the mystery in the end! He asked Ritchie to think about it and offered a pound as a reward for a flaw in the plan that would help the detective solve the crime.

  Unfortunately, one of the other workers was a travelling stockman called Snowy Rowles. When Ritchie mentioned the problem to him one day, he started to think – and he wasn’t thinking about a way to earn that pound, either!

  Soon after, Upfield, Ritchie, Rowles and some others were discussing the problem again at Camel Station, where they all worked. Still no one had thought of a flaw. That was in October.

  In December, James Ryan and George Lloyd, two men travelling with Rowles, disappeared. A prospector called Yates mentioned that he’d seen Rowles driving Ryan’s car. Rowles had told him that the other two were walking through the scrub, but Yates hadn’t seen them.

  On Christmas Eve, Rowles, who still had the car, mentioned to Upfield that Ryan had decided to stay in Mount Magnet and had lent him the car. He told someone else that he’d bought the car.

  In May 1930, a man called Louis Carron left his job at Wydgee Station with Rowles. No one ever saw him alive again, yet Rowles was seen cashing Louis’ pay cheque. But Carron had friends who were worried for him, because he had been keeping in touch and nobody had heard from him in a while. Rowles had been seen in Carron’s company. When Rowles didn’t answer a question sent to him by telegram about Carron, the police were called.

  By this time, everyone had heard of the ‘perfect murder’ from Upfield’s new novel and the police found that not one, but three men had last been seen alive hanging out with Rowles. Detectives found some of Carron’s belongings at a hut along the Rabbit-Proof Fence, including a wedding-ring which was definitely his. His wife had had it recut and the jeweller had accidentally soldered it with a lower grade of gold than the rest of the ring.

  Rowles was arrested. It turned out that he was a burglar called John Thomas Smith, who had escaped from jail. That meant they could keep him in prison while checking out the evidence.

  Upfield had to be a witness at the trial and meanwhile, the newspaper reports were published side by side with scenes from his book. No doubt it sold plenty more copies of the book for him!

  Rowles was found guilty of the three murders and hanged in 1931.

  As for Arthur Upfield, he not only had a great plot for that book, but he used the wedding-ring story in another book. No more giving ideas to murderers!

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  Better late than never… In 2008, 86 years after Colin Ross was executed at the Old Melbourne Gaol for the rape and murder of twelve-year-old Alma Tirtschke, he finally was pardoned by the Victorian government. Unfortunately, although he almost certainly didn’t commit the crime, the sentence can’t be overturned, because that would legally require a retrial and it’s a little hard to retry a case like this after nearly a century.

  THE PYJAMA GIRL

  In September 1934, a farmer leading his prize bull home along a road near Albury found the body of a woman dressed in yellow silk pyjamas. Police had trouble identifying her. They couldn’t even check dental records, because there was a bullet lodged in her jaw. Someone had shot her and then tried to burn her.

  Because she couldn’t be identified, the ‘Pyjama Girl’, as she became known, was taken first to Albury hospital to be put on ice, then to Sydney University, where she was put into a tank of a preserving liquid called formalin.

  After a few months, police interviewed an Italian waiter, Tony Agostini, who had lived in Sydney before moving to Melbourne. His wife, Linda, had disappeared around the time the Pyjama Girl turned up. He looked at the photo of the dead woman and denied it was his wife. He said that Linda had left him about a year ago and he had no idea where she was.

  At that point, the police didn’t take it any further.

  For ten years, the Pyjama Girl lay in her formalin bath at the university. Then the New South Wales Police Commissioner, William Mackay, re-opened the case. He arranged for the Pyjama Girl to be removed from the tank. Make-up artists and hairdressers made her look presentable and, hopefully, like she had during her life. Sixteen people who had known Linda Agostini were asked to take a look at the body. Seven of them said they recognised her.

  Mackay knew Tony Agostini personally. He was a waiter at Mackay’s favouri
te Sydney restaurant, Romano’s, where he had been working since moving from Melbourne.

  He rang the restaurant and asked to speak to Agostini. He told him what had happened.

  Tony broke down and confessed. He said that Linda had made his life miserable. She had a very bad temper and got especially violent after she had been drinking. She drank often. One night, he said, he had woken to find her standing over him with a gun. He had wrestled with her for the gun, to stop her shooting him. The gun had gone off by accident while they fought and she had been killed.

  Agostini said that he panicked. Instead of contacting the police, he had put her body in his car and driven through the night, along the Hume Highway towards Albury. He had thrown the body into a ditch, poured petrol on it and tried to burn it. It had begun to rain, so the body didn’t burn completely. Agostini said he’d returned to his car and driven back to Melbourne.

  When he was put on trial, the jury didn’t take long to reach a decision. He wasn’t convicted of murder, but of the lesser crime of manslaughter, because the death wasn’t intended. He was sentenced to six years of hard labour, but he served only four before he was deported to Italy, where he lived the rest of his life.

  There are some strange bits to this story. Tony and Linda were living in Melbourne when this killing was supposed to have happened. Albury is on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, hundreds of kilometres away from their home. Why drive all that way to dump a body?

  When asked what he wanted done with the body, after conviction, Agostini said he didn’t care, because it wasn’t his wife.

  A Sydney woman called Jeanette Rutledge had been saying that the dead woman was her daughter, Anna Philomena Morgan, but she had mental problems and police didn’t believe her.

  Was it Anna Philomena Morgan? If so, what did happen to Linda Agostini? If her husband hadn’t killed her, why did he say he had? And then why did he change his story? Right until he left for Italy, he denied having killed the Pyjama Girl. He was in trouble with an Italian criminal organisation, the Camorra. Perhaps he felt safer in jail than out!

  These days, it might be possible to do a DNA test on any living relatives Linda might have, to see if the body was hers. Otherwise, we may never know.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  Archaeologists digging at Melbourne’s former prison, Pentridge, found some bones that probably belong to the bushranger Ned Kelly. The skull was missing, as it was stolen in 1978.

  CAROLINE GRILLS

  Caroline Grills was exactly the sort of person you would have wanted for a grandmother. She was a tiny thing, only about 1.22 metres in height, with a kind, smiling face. She had been happily married for many years and had children, grandchildren and many friends. When visiting, she always brought delicious food – homemade, of course.

  What you really wouldn’t want to do was have afternoon tea with her.

  In the 1940s and early 1950s, rat poison contained a nasty ingredient called thallium. If you swallowed it, you got horrible stomach pains, your hair fell out and you went blind. Finally, you would die. In most Australian states, anyone buying poison had to sign a special book, but in New South Wales anyone could buy rat poison without signing anything. Best of all, it was easy to put in food or drink and had no smell or taste. The perfect way to kill an unwanted family member!

  But Caroline had other ideas. Her first victim was her stepmother, Christina Mickelson. When Caroline’s father, Mr Mickelson died, he had left his house to Christina for her lifetime, then to Caroline.

  Whilst Christina lived in the lovely Sydney suburb of Ryde, Caroline and her husband lived in the not-so-nice suburb of Gladesville, where there were a lot of – yuk! – rats. Christina was 87 and Caroline thought – how long could she live anyway? Why not speed things up just a little? Poor Christina died in agony and Caroline got the house.

  After this success, Caroline decided that it might be good to have a second house. Her husband Richard was going to inherit one in the Blue Mountains, from a relative, Mrs Angelina Thomas. The old lady was, after all, 84 years old. Why couldn’t she just die?

  Early in 1948, Caroline’s homemade cakes and pikelets made sure she did.

  Caroline had something to gain by her first two murders. But now, she started killing for fun. It made her feel good to see her victims sick and dying while she had this wonderful secret that only she knew.

  Her next victim was her husband’s brother-in-law. John Lundberg was a strong, healthy man. Nobody would have expected him to become sick. But after a holiday spent with Richard and Caroline, he did – losing his hair, going blind and finally dying in October 1948. Just to be fair to her own side of the family, Caroline also finished off her brother’s widow, Mary Anne Mickelson.

  After this, Caroline’s luck started to run out. John Lundberg’s widow, Eveline, became very sick, suffering cramps and going bald and blind. Of course, the kindly Caroline visited her with food and made her tea. Eveline’s daughter, Christine Downey, and her husband, John, who played cards with Caroline, also became ill. After hearing in the news of a poisoning murder, they began to wonder. Their symptoms sounded familiar. Could sweet Aunt Carrie be poisoning them?

  The Downeys spoke to the police, who said they needed proof and suggested that they get some samples of Caroline’s food. John Downey managed to save some poisoned tea and they had their proof.

  Caroline was arrested, to the horror of her loving husband. He couldn’t believe his wife would do anything so dreadful.

  She sat smiling through her trial and joking with the police. In October 1953, she was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in Long Bay jail.

  Caroline lived till 1960, charming everyone in the prison. The other prisoners affectionately called her Aunt Thally. Even the staff liked her. They probably didn’t try her homemade cakes, though.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  ‘Pretty’ Dulcie Markham was a gangster’s moll in the 1930s. She just adored men with guns. And they adored her too, with her film-star looks. The trouble with gunmen was that they didn’t last long. Other men with guns or knives killed them. Some of her eight boyfriends killed each other over her. Dulcie must have decided she’d had enough, because finally she married a nice man who wasn’t a criminal. She might have lived happily ever after, but died in a fire in 1973 when she fell asleep smoking.

  JEAN LEE

  LAST WOMAN TO BE HANGED IN AUSTRALIA

  When Jean Lee was born in Sydney in 1919, no one would have thought she would end up on the gallows. Her family lived in North Sydney, the nicer part of the town. She did well at her studies and was good at sport. Everyone liked her.

  Suddenly, at the age of only fourteen, she dropped out of school. At nineteen she married. The marriage didn’t last and by the time she was 23, she’d thrown over her old life, leaving her child with her mother and going to Brisbane.

  During World War II, Jean, who liked to party, found plenty of soldiers to have fun with. She had also discovered the world of crime. In 1949, she and her boyfriend, Bobby Clayton, went back to Sydney, where they made good use of Jean’s beauty. Another friend, Norman Andrews, joined them.

  What they would do was this: Jean would choose some lonely-looking man and take him into the back seat of a car. After a short time, Bobby would interrupt them, pretending to be her angry husband and threatening to bash the man up if he wasn’t given money. This worked nicely, but towards the end of the year, the three crooks decided to head for Melbourne, where they could find new victims.

  While having a drink at the University Hotel in Carlton, they met an old man, Bill Kent. Bill was happy to chat with them. He was a bookie and the Melbourne Cup had just been run. He would certainly have plenty of money from bets. Their plan was to get him alone for a while so they could find out where the money was and steal it.

  Jean suggested they all go back to Bill’s home, a boarding house. Bill agreed and they walked to the house in Dorritt Street. Jean was very good at persuading men to
do what she wanted and Bill certainly enjoyed her company, but when she couldn’t get the money off him, things began to get nasty.

  The three criminals tied Bill to a chair. They hit him with a piece of wood, smashed a beer bottle on his head and demanded to know where the money was.

  Around nine o’clock, they left the room. One of them said, ‘Goodnight, Bill, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ But Mrs Hayward, who lived in the next room, was suspicious. First there had been a lot of noise, which she thought was a party. Now, suddenly, it was very quiet. Too quiet.

  She called the police who arrived to find Bill, dead. Someone had strangled him with one hand. They arrested Jean, Bobby and Norman at the Great Southern Hotel in Spencer Street, in the early hours of the morning. The trio had been partying at a nightclub. They were planning to leave the state; Jean had plane tickets for Adelaide.

  Bobby insisted that he had left the room early and Norman and Jean had done it all. At first, Jean refused to say anything. Then she admitted she had hit the old man and claimed that no one else was involved. She couldn’t possibly have strangled Bill, though; that would have taken someone much stronger. She was clearly protecting her boyfriend, but that didn’t help her when she was tried for murder.

  The trial lasted only five days. On 25 March 1950, the court found them all guilty and sentenced them to hang. Jean appealed against the sentence, but failed. People didn’t like to see a woman hanged, but whether or not Jean had actually killed the old man, she had been involved in his torture. And she didn’t even seem to be sorry.

  In the end, she probably didn’t know what was being done to her. The night before she was due to hang, 19 February 1951, Jean screamed and cried and protested that she was innocent. She was sedated and carried to the gallows in a chair.