My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  As Hazel sat by his bed, Allan also told his big sister that he had known before Tommy died that Dulcie was getting everything in his will. She had told him.

  ‘He’s not got long to live,’ Dulcie had said, but Allan just thought it was because Tommy was drinking himself to death.

  However, the two of them did have a laugh — because Dulcie had in the end got nothing. She had taken the will to the bank expecting to be able to withdraw the 600 pounds there and then but the bank manager said he would have to get a solicitor to check it out. She was livid when they told her that it was illegal to be the beneficiary as well as the witness on a will. Then the owner of the Court House Hotel put together Tommy’s bill, which ate up a lot of what was left.

  When Allan recovered, the doctor still could not diagnosis what had landed him in the iron lung but surmised it had been a consequence of his bad cold. He was sent home and told to rest from work for another week but as a result of their chats, both he and Hazel felt very shaken. She worried that Dulcie was getting ‘gamer’ but she did not know what to do. Who would believe her? She couldn’t report what were, after all, just suspicions. If Dulcie thought she was on to her, goodness knows what would happen.

  A couple of days later when Hazel called in at the Court House Hotel to see how her brother was recovering, she witnessed Dulcie and Harry at loggerheads in the kitchen over something. It was unusual to see them arguing because Harry was a total doormat.

  ‘Hazel, if anything happens to me, you tell them that Harry’s already done one murder,’ Dulcie turned to her daughter and said.

  Hazel was gobsmacked. She was at the same time amazed that her mother had finally admitted it to her and emboldened because she thought Dulcie was taking her into her confidence as she used to do. It took her back to 1950 and made her feel like a daughter again.

  In that moment, Hazel got cheeky.

  ‘And I know who that was,’ she said.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Dulcie.

  ‘Yes, I do. It was Dad — that’s who he murdered,’ Hazel said, but before she could finish, Dulcie lifted her right hand, hit it across her cheek and knocked her down on the floor.

  ‘How can you say that? You don’t know that,’ Dulcie said.

  Hazel realised that her mother was shocked; she really hadn’t thought anyone had worked it out and instead of taking Hazel into her confidence, everything she had said had all been bravado. Hazel quit while she was ahead, let it drop, said goodbye to Allan and fled home to Bill.

  Hazel wasn’t in the wilderness any longer — she had Bill by her side and that did make her feel safer. It had given her the confidence to confront her mother. But love brought with it responsibility and she didn’t only have herself to worry about any longer. Now she began to worry about Bill. Dulcie had got away with three murders and the death of her father’s dog. Would there be another one, especially now that she knew Hazel was on to her?

  She started to imagine the terror of her dad when he was being held down in the river, groggy from his sleeping tablets. There was the shocking pain she had witnessed Sam Overton go through. She hoped Tommy had been at least partly anaesthetised from all the grog and whatever Dulcie might have slipped him in his soup on the night he died. What would be next?

  Hazel couldn’t sleep; every noise she heard through the night she thought was her mother come to burn the house down. She knew Dulcie was an arsonist — there were the two properties at Burragan Station as well as Tommy’s death. Bill had been injured by Harry. She thought Dulcie was treating them all like playthings and none of the grown-ups could stop her.

  Even at work, Hazel couldn’t stop shaking. She had been avoiding Dulcie but she was terrified that it was only a matter of time until something even worse happened. She felt like a rabbit, sticking her head up above the ground only to retreat back into the safety of her burrow. Dulcie was getting bolder with each crime she planned, but who would believe Hazel? There was no evidence. Dulcie had the police eating out of her hand; they wouldn’t believe anything this bad of her. But she had to be stopped from doing more damage. All those whispered secrets of don’t tell your dad, don’t tell Harry, Sam and Tommy saying what a good woman Dulcie was, became a roar in Hazel’s ears. She couldn’t see a way out.

  Until it all became too much.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HAZEL

  THE LIGHT WAS DIM, THE WALLS BARE AND COLOURED PALE green, and the narrow mattress Hazel was lying on was hard. The room she recognised very well — it was the one private room at Wilcannia Hospital. As soon as she opened her eyes, she began to sob. Great heaving cries until she could hardly breathe. Her friend Connie, who was now the matron, pushed through the door and held her hand, telling her to shush and it would be all right. Connie thought that she had never seen anyone so afraid.

  When Bill had come home from work the evening before, his eighteen-year-old wife could barely remember looking up at him from her chair on the verandah. He’d asked her what sort of day she had had and she couldn’t speak. Instead, she had started to cry. She couldn’t stop the tears and then she got the shakes and began vomiting. It was 1959 and he had never seen Hazel in a state like this in the two years they had been married. He took her to hospital; Connie was on duty and thought Hazel had a virus or a bacterial infection, which was why she was put in the private room in case it was contagious. Over the next twenty-four hours after tests showed she had no infection, Hazel had to come to the realisation that she had suffered a breakdown. She was given a mixture of sedatives, but while they made her feel calmer, they couldn’t make her feel any safer.

  Bill knew people talked in such a small town so he asked Connie to tell the staff not to tell Dulcie what had happened. Connie picked up on the panic and told hospital staff not to let Dulcie visit Hazel. She couldn’t tell them why because she still didn’t know herself, but she just told them that Hazel needed total rest.

  Hazel had never taken more than an aspirin before and the sedatives hit her with a thwack. She slept for three days. As matron, Connie was still in the nurses’ quarters next door and as much as she could, she looked after Hazel. In her dazed sleepy state, Hazel started to talk. She started murmuring something about poison on lamb chops and her father’s dog still sitting next to the river waiting in vain for him to come back. Connie was very worried about her friend and encouraged her to talk in more detail when she was awake.

  The next evening, after Bill had gone home, Connie took her last cup of tea of the day into Hazel’s room and found her sitting up in bed leaning back on the pillows and wanting to talk. With her voice still raspy from the drugs, it all came pouring out about her dad, about Sam Overton, her suspicions about Tommy’s death. It was the first time Hazel had voiced her fears to anyone outside her family but Connie was her best friend.

  It was also the first time she had seen the cool and calm Connie looking flustered. Connie stood up from the hospital chair, looked around the room and sat down again, as if unsure about what she was hearing. Her face was drained. While it should have been the other way around, it was Hazel who put a consoling hand on Connie’s arm. She thought she had gone too far.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that,’ she said.

  To Connie, it all sounded like a novel set in a foreign world. Yet Hazel was a sensible young woman and she couldn’t imagine her lying. Connie had no choice but to accept what she was being told. She knew she had to help and simply asked Hazel what she could do. Hazel said she feared it was all becoming too easy for Dulcie.

  She likened it to driving a car. The first time you drive, you are so careful; the second time behind the wheel you are more confident. The third time you feel as though you have been driving for years and it is all too easy. After three murders, Dulcie was on cruise control. She had moved into her comfort zone and she thought she could take whatever she wanted because no one could stop her. No one she knew about anyway.

  Connie had seen Overton suffering
with gastro and had also been on duty when Tommy was carried into the hospital in agony. It was beyond her comprehension that her friend’s mother who cooked them all meals at the pub could have killed them but she could tell that Hazel believed it.

  Hazel said that she thought she was the only person who could stop Dulcie before she went any further. Like most people, Connie put her trust totally in the police and suggested that she go down to the station and bring one of the officers up to the hospital where Hazel could talk to him.

  Hazel wasn’t so sure. She knew the only way to put a halt to Dulcie was to get the police involved but she didn’t think the Wilcannia officers would believe her. Number one, she wanted to tell them, but number two, she was too scared. The three of them seemed to like Dulcie. They might even have Hazel declared mental if they thought she was telling such dreadful ‘lies’ about poor Dulcie. She was also terrified that if they spoke to Dulcie, Dulcie would come after her to exact revenge. Being family meant nothing to her — she had walked out on four children and got rid of another four. Hazel had no reason to trust her.

  Connie had been reducing Hazel’s medication and on her fifth day in hospital when Hazel was feeling like herself again, Connie persuaded her that she had no choice but to talk to the police. The two friends came up with a plan to bypass the local cops.

  Connie walked down to the police station where she told the officer on the desk that she needed to talk to a detective about something someone had told her. There were no detectives in Wilcannia and, at Connie’s insistence, the officer called the much bigger Broken Hill police station where there were forty-eight officers including a detective sergeant and two detective senior constables. As the hospital matron, she was almost town royalty and had a bit of pull.

  The Wilcannia officer wasn’t able to tell the Broken Hill police much but it was only a couple of hours’ drive to find out what the story entailed, so the detective sergeant had one of his senior constables drive him in their unmarked four-door Ford Customline down the Barrier Highway. Having been told how toey the matron was of anyone finding out she was talking to them, they parked around the back of Wilcannia police station. There were two reasons they didn’t go straight up to the hospital. One was that they needed to talk to Connie privately. It was early evening, but before they did anything else, the detectives had to make sure she was on the level. The second reason was a matter of courtesy — out-of-town police always introduced themselves to the local boys.

  As matron, Connie was used to medical crises that involved dealing with the police so she was calm and deliberate as she passed on what Hazel had said. She said she wouldn’t have involved them if she didn’t think there was something to Hazel’s story. When they asked her if she believed Hazel, Connie was sure. ‘I believe her,’ she said.

  Two detectives lobbing up to the hospital would have got people talking, especially dressed in their ‘corporate’ outfits. In those days, all detectives — even in the bush — wore a suit, tie and hat. It was as obvious as wearing a full police uniform. They drove Connie to the hospital and left their jackets and hats in the car as she led them through a back entrance.

  Hazel felt silly talking about something as serious as this while wearing just a white hospital gown. She also felt at a disadvantage sitting up in bed. Connie stood guard at the door of the private room while the detectives pulled the visitors’ chairs up to the side of the bed, where they could sit down instead of standing, which made Hazel feel a bit more at ease. The senior constable got out his notebook and started to make notes as Hazel began with her father and told them all about her murderous mother.

  Broken Hill was a wild outback place, the ‘Silver City’, built on the world’s largest discovery of lead, silver and zinc and the reputation of the hard men who mined it and drank their wages. Despite this, there was little violent crime because Broken Hill was a union town and the unions implemented a tough regime. So the two detectives sitting at Hazel’s bedside had heard nothing like the story she had told them and they immediately realised it was way out of their league. They had to call in the big guns from Sydney.

  Hazel was terrified of what might happen if they left her in Wilcannia once investigations began into Dulcie’s past. She told the officers she couldn’t go home. Despite the care they had taken, word would soon get around Wilcannia and back to Dulcie that the detectives had been in town and the reason why. As for the detectives, they knew they had to get down on paper what she had told them and get her to sign it off straight away. Connie had sent someone to get Bill to come up to the hospital and he brought some clothes for Hazel. It was after 11.30 pm when the talking stopped and Hazel’s life changed forever.

  Connie signed her out of hospital and, in the dead of night, Hazel said goodbye to Bill. She would always remember that as Bill hugged her at the back door of the hospital, some red-tailed black cockatoos lifted out of one of the gum trees. She felt as spooked as they did. She got into the back of the police car and made herself as comfortable as possible on the sticky vinyl seats. Then she was smuggled like contraband out of town and away from Dulcie.

  At Broken Hill, while it was only early in the morning, the detectives knocked on the door of one of the motels and woke up the owner, who seemed to Hazel to have been woken many times before by the cops. The senior constable stayed with her while his boss went back to the police station and called the CIB in Sydney. He was told to make sure they took a typewritten statement from Hazel, got her to sign it and put her on the first plane down to Sydney. All police know the adage that there is a trip in every job, so the two Broken Hill cops felt they both had to accompany their witness on the flight. It would give them a couple of nights’ drinking in the city with their Sydney colleagues, who had to show them the courtesy of joining them. The first flight back to Wilcannia wasn’t for two days. Sweet as a nut, as they said.

  Commercial flights to Sydney from Broken Hill left three times a week, arriving before lunch and leaving just after. There was one that very day. Never having flown before, Hazel was given a window seat on the Fokker Friendship. As the earth fell away, she realised she had escaped but had no idea what awaited her. It was all happening so fast. Strangely, she wasn’t scared about the future. It was either that or retreating to the shadows for the rest of her life. She felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders because she had been able to pass some of the responsibility for what to do about Dulcie onto others. It was like walking up to a window with the dark behind her and opening the curtains to let in the light.

  Dobbing in her mother wasn’t easy but Hazel told herself it had to be done. She put aside the few fond gestures there had been between mother and daughter and pretended that Dulcie was no relation, just a woman who had committed three murders. And one of the things she would have to confront was how everyone thought Dulcie was so nice. Hazel knew that she had to stay strong to survive.

  Detective Sergeant Raymond William Kelly was waiting for her on the tarmac at Sydney Airport. The first thing she noticed were his hands — they were huge. The whole of Ray Kelly was very imposing. He was as tall as her father had been, over six feet, and he was a snappy dresser wearing a light suit with a white handkerchief pointing out of the top left-hand pocket, a white shirt with a tie with wide stripes and the obligatory hat. In his case it was a fedora. His face was a bit aristocratic if craggy and he wore glasses which were partly rimless with a black slash across the top. Hazel thought he looked dashing. She didn’t know his history or his reputation but she immediately felt that with him, she was in a safe pair of hands.

  Kelly had been accused of many things since fulfilling his childhood dream of joining the police in 1929 but subtlety was not among them. He was once seen hanging a suspect over the balcony of Sydney’s CIB headquarters by the ankles as he shouted: ‘Confess or I’ll drop you.’ As a young cop barely out of probation, he had chased a stolen car — on his bicycle. When the driver found himself in a dead end and reversed, knocking Kelly off his
bike, Kelly made his first headline arrest. He leapt onto the running board of the car, grabbed the steering wheel and drove into a shop window. Then he took two of the criminals from the car into custody but only after shooting them and killing their mate, the driver, with a shot to the head. He got his first of eight commendations for bravery.

  Born the son of a brewer in Wellington, New South Wales, Kelly cut his teeth in the mines of Broken Hill and as a jackaroo in Queensland before joining the police where his toughness and charisma became the stuff of legend, nurtured by the headlines in Sydney’s tabloid newspapers whose reporters and photographers just happened to turn up when Kelly made a major arrest. He knew the power of the media and Sydney was his city.

  His nicknames spoke volumes about the man — he was known as Gunner, because he shot first and asked questions later, or Verbal, because all of his suspects confessed. At the time Hazel met him he was the most infamous officer in New South Wales if not the whole of Australia — a star detective. It would later be said that he was corrupt but he was a bloody good cop. The sort you wanted on your side, not against you.

  One of his many sayings was: ‘If a man hits you, hit back. Hard. If a man shoots, shoot back.’ In an era when bank robberies and safe cracking were the glamour criminal professions, Kelly had been the head of the safe-breaking squad. He arrested notorious bank robber Darcy Dugan four times, the first time putting him behind bars for shooting a bank manager, the following three times leading the hunts that recaptured him after his celebrated escapes from jail.