My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  Once again, Dulcie was committed for trial and stood and told the court, as she had been advised by Vizzard: ‘I plead not guilty and reserve my defence.’ She was now facing three murder trials.

  On top of the court hearings, Hazel and Bill had their café in Wilcannia on the market. They had decided to sell up and move to Broken Hill because Bill had lost his job. He had been working as a postie, blowing his whistle to let people know when he had put mail in their letterboxes. Most days he also drove hundreds of kilometres to customers out on their bush properties with mailboxes at the end of their private roads. The McClures at Netallie and the Fitzgeralds at Burragan were on his mail run. But Australia Post cancelled the service to save money, making people pick up their own mail when they were in town, putting Bill out of work. He had secured a job in Broken Hill at the South Mine, bringing out silver, lead and zinc. A couple of months after the committal hearings, the couple bought an old house in Broken Hill and got their first car, which they paid off on hire purchase.

  In Broken Hill, Hazel finally sought medical help and was diagnosed with major depression. Hazel would never have thought of herself as suffering from a mental problem; she was the kind of person who just got on with things. However, when her condition was explained to her by the doctor, it all made sense. She had felt as though she was dragging herself through every day with a little dark grey cloud pressing down on her head. She had always been houseproud but cooking and cleaning had become a chore. Although she was struggling, she still always put the children first. She knew too well what it was like not to be cared for. Just the diagnosis helped her, because the doctor gave her hope that it was not all her fault and something could be done about it.

  As was the medical custom in those days, she was given electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, better known as electric shock treatment. It was and remains a treatment almost of last resort. She discussed it with Bill and they decided it was worth trying. Hazel didn’t want him to take time off work so when she had to see the psychiatrist who gave her the ECT she got the bus into town and home again. She was given a short-acting anaesthetic and muscle relaxant before electrodes placed on her scalp sent electric currents through her head, causing a brief brain seizure. The electric impulses affect the part of the brain that causes the mental problem. Altogether, she had eighteen sessions of ECT; it was a drastic treatment but coupled with antidepressant medication it helped Hazel cope. She was wrung out after her experience at the committal proceedings and had already miscarried one child because of the stress. All she wanted to do was stay at home with her young family.

  Hazel was living on tenterhooks and counting the days until she had to return to face her mother again at the trial. She was also aware of how calculated Dulcie could be if she had the chance to seek revenge.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JUDGE AND JURY

  THE TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF TED BARON TOOK PLACE IN WHAT was still known as the ‘hanging court’, even though New South Wales had abolished the death penalty for murder in 1955. Hazel thought the name to be appropriate. She had never really given the death penalty much thought before, but these were wrongs that had to be righted. At that time, she truly believed her mother deserved the ultimate punishment: to hang. It wasn’t very Christian, that was true, but Hazel was so bitter at all the lives Dulcie had ruined. She didn’t put Harry in the same basket because she did not feel as betrayed by him as she did by her mother. As much as he was also a killer, poor weak Harry was a pathetic follower. He would have done anything for Dulcie.

  Court Five, the middle court behind the columns of the old New South Wales Supreme Court off Taylor Square in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, was designed with the death penalty in mind. The imposing wooden dock in the centre of the courtroom was constructed high enough off the floor so the condemned prisoner was at the same eye level as the judge up on the bench. It is the only courtroom in the state with curtains along each side of the judge. When the prisoner in the dock saw the judge pull the curtains along each side of his head from shoulder level up, they were left in no doubt about their fate. The curtains created ‘blinkers’ to focus the judge on the prisoner and the prisoner on the judge.

  Sitting in that dock on Wednesday, 9 June 1965, were Dulcie and Harry Bodsworth. They had arrived separately in prison vans through the massive gates in the sandstone walls off Burton Street behind the court. In two of the cold cells deep under the ground, in handcuffs, they were left to sit and wait on stone benches where most of the state’s notorious murderers had sat before them and would sit for years afterwards. One of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, Oxford Street, passes by out the front of the courthouse but the thickness of the convict-built brick walls ensures none of the noise makes it down to the labyrinth of tunnels. Only the sound of the jailers’ keys breaks the silence.

  When Justice Simon Isaacs was ready to empanel the jury, the couple was led from the cells along ominous tunnels with whitewashed walls. Along the floor on each side of the tunnels run narrow channels that carried away water before proper drainage was installed. The handcuffs came off as they turned left through the solid red door with a bolt as long as a man’s arm and a padlock bigger than a man’s hand and walked up the surprisingly narrow wooden stairs that open up into the dock.

  Those narrow silent tunnels with their brutal history would strike terror into the hearts of anyone. They had been walked by almost every one of the state’s murderers since the courthouse opened in 1842, including seventy-nine who were hanged. At the other end of the tunnels was the old Darlinghurst Gaol where among those who had swung from the gallows were bushrangers such as Captain Moonlite, who was hanged in 1880, Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor, hanged in 1901, and the so-called ‘Black Widow’ Louisa Collins, a mother of ten and the last woman to be hanged in New South Wales in 1889 for murdering her two husbands.

  Guards still report hearing footsteps in the empty corridors, which are pitch black when the lights are turned out.

  In the dock, Harry clasped his wife’s left hand in both of his as they sat close together. Harry always needed Dulcie more than she needed him. They were on their own now, though Dulcie never really took Harry into account and felt it was her against the world. More correctly — her against the world and her daughter, Hazel. She still could not believe that Hazel had turned against her, never mind her two sons.

  Hazel recalled how Dulcie had been obsessed with Jean Lee, the last woman to hang in Australia, in 1951, just six months after Ted Baron was drowned. A beautiful red-headed country girl from Dubbo, New South Wales, who had been abandoned by her drunken husband, Lee eventually fell in love with a lowlife criminal and conman, Robert David Clayton, and worked as a prostitute. Together they came up with a scam they called the ‘badger game’. While she was having sex with a customer, he would burst into the room and pretend to be an outraged husband. The customer, more often than not a married man terrified of his wife finding out, would pay up. If he didn’t, he had the money beaten out of him. One customer refused to pay up and was kicked and beaten to death by Clayton, Lee and their accomplice, Norman Andrews. All three were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

  No woman had been hanged in Victoria since 1895, so the media coverage of Lee’s trial and death was massive. Somewhat bizarrely, Dulcie had seen herself in Jean Lee, viewing her as a kind of romantic figure. She told Hazel that Jean Lee had been doing what she had to to look after herself and stay alive. Lee had engendered some public sympathy at the time, championed by women’s groups who saw her death as a way of punishing women’s immorality, of curbing the freedom and equality that women had enjoyed since the war years. Dulcie may have feared she would also be hanged, which would have been a possibility if she’d been arrested ten years earlier.

  Justice Isaacs had the charges read to Dulcie and Harry before empanelling the jury. The sixty-year-old had been appointed to the bench the year before and was noted for his ‘courtesy, patience, knowledge and learning’. The Prime Minister
of the day, Robert Menzies, conferred upon the judge that quintessential Australian accolade of being a larrikin, labelling him a ‘larrikin lawyer’.

  Prosecuting the couple was Bill Knight QC, the plain-talking New South Wales Senior Crown Prosecutor, a veteran of literally hundreds of rape and murder trials in Court Five. He was a country boy from Corowa who had been the state’s Senior Crown Prosecutor since 1954. His legal career had experienced only a short break when he enlisted for World War II only to be discharged thirteen days later when it was discovered he suffered from epilepsy. Before he became a prosecutor, he had built a solid reputation with a general law practice, often representing plaintiffs in negligence cases against big business, on the side of the little man in David and Goliath battles. At seventy-six, he could run prosecutions like clockwork. Just a few months earlier in the same courtroom he had prosecuted another serial killer, William MacDonald. Known as ‘The Mutilator’, MacDonald had murdered four men in Sydney and another in Brisbane. Most of them were homeless and were killed in city parks after MacDonald lured them into dark places, then stabbed them before slicing off their penis and testicles. Among his much-read books which were discovered by police was one on London’s Jack the Ripper. He took the genitalia home and even told the jury at his trial what he then did with them before throwing them off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was reported that some jurors fainted and had to be taken from the court. He had pleaded insanity but the jury convicted him of murder and he was jailed for life, dying of natural causes in 2016 as the longest-serving prisoner in New South Wales.

  Although Knight and Fred Vizzard were friends outside the courtroom, Vizzard would be doing him no favours when defending his client, Dulcie Bodsworth. Knight, Vizzard and Detective Ray Kelly had come up against each other in court several times, the most celebrated being the 1961 trial of Stephen Bradley for the murder of schoolboy Graeme Thorne when Knight was prosecuting and Vizzard was defending Bradley.

  To avoid a conflict of interest, Harry Bodsworth was given his own counsel for the trial, the highly regarded WH Gregory, a barrister known for having a forensic eye for detail.

  Crown Prosecutor Knight’s opening address to the jury was succinct and to the point. As a prosecutor, it was often said he was a good defence counsel because he went into every trial aware that the Crown bore the onus of proof and if it was not there, then the accused should justifiably be acquitted.

  He told the jury how Dulcie and Harry had been living in tents in Mildura when they were joined by her husband, Ted Baron, on 30 August 1950. He said Baron was drowned that same night and the Crown’s case was that both the defendants had decided to kill him.

  ‘The Crown alleges that the two accused agreed to kill Baron; and Henry Bodsworth, when Baron was asleep, carried him into the river, waded out into the water and pushed him in. He threw this sleeping man into the water.

  ‘The motive was because they wanted to get married,’ Knight said as he turned to the dock to emphasis his point by looking at the accused killers. The two had at the time been living in what he called ‘an adulterous relationship’.

  As do all good prosecutors, Knight took time to tell the jury about Ted Baron so the twelve men who sat in judgment could get to know him as more than a faceless ‘victim’. He was a father and a husband and not just a body on a mortuary slab or, as the newspapers had reduced him to for the purposes of brevity, an ‘invalid pensioner’. The jurors were told he had been in hospital for a longstanding and crippling condition of rheumatoid arthritis and needed tablets at night to sleep through the pain.

  When the government medical officer, Dr James Morris, who had examined Baron’s body at Wentworth, took the stand, he confirmed his finding that Baron had been alive when he went into the water because his air passages were full of fluid. In other words, he had drowned.

  Then Mr Gregory, Bodsworth’s counsel, rose to his feet. The defence was going to claim it could not be murder because Ted Baron had not been alive when his body was placed in the Murray River. Gregory put it to Dr Morris that he had been mistaken in his conclusion and suggested that Ted Baron had in fact already been dead ‘from natural causes’. Dr Morris stuck by his report but the defence had lined up their own expert witness who would try to cast doubt on his conclusions and the prosecution case.

  The defence called a Dr Brighton who was employed in the Division of Forensic Medicine of the Department of Public Health and had his own extensive experience of conducting postmortems for the coroner. Dr Brighton had not been able to examine Baron’s body, even after it was exhumed, but he based his evidence on Dr Morris’s report. His conclusion was that:

  ‘The cause of death I think is not able to be determined conclusively.’ He further told the jury that ‘The information is just not sufficient to be positive about the actual cause of death.’

  Hazel was not in court to hear this — as an upcoming witness she had to wait outside for her turn without knowing what earlier evidence was given so it would not taint what she would say.

  Hazel and Bill didn’t have the phone on at home and a few days earlier Hazel had received a telegram from Ray Kelly to tell her there were two tickets at Broken Hill airport for her and Bill, and that Del would meet her in Sydney where they were booked into a motel once again.

  Hazel sat on the wooden bench seats outside the court, lighting cigarette after cigarette, with Del sitting on one side of her and dear Bill on the other. Allan and Jim sat nearby. Hazel was feeling clearer in her mind, after the treatment for depression, and she felt less nervous because she had already faced Dulcie three times in court already. Deep down she worried that Dulcie would be able to outsmart the jury just as she had done with people all her life. She felt that her husband had enough faith in the justice system to see both of them through.

  Dr Brighton was the only independent witness that Dulcie and Harry would call in their defence. They didn’t have to prove their innocence; the onus was on the prosecution to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Their written statements to police were tendered in the trial and read to the jury, and their lawyers had to somehow counter their damaging admissions — an uphill task with officers as experienced as Ray Kelly, John Palmer and Angus Ritchie.

  Just as he did with the officers who were his juniors, Kelly unfailingly treated the lawyers and the jurors with respect. He found giving evidence almost as exciting as hunting the crims because he relished sparring with the barristers and always keeping one step ahead of them. He had been in the game so long that he could predict what the next question would be, what next dark alley the lawyer would try to push him into with no way out. Kelly was able to anticipate and sidestep these stratagems, and made sure he was never cornered. Some of his colleagues thought he was a freak; he was so clever that some of the legal fraternity would go along to watch him in action.

  Because Harry’s defence was that Ted Baron had been dead when he put him into the water, both Kelly and Palmer were cross-examined about the part of Harry’s statement where he said that there had been a bit of a scuffle with Baron. It was put to them that they had in fact asked Harry if Baron had been breathing and that Harry had told them: ‘No, he was dead’. Kelly said simply that those words had never been said.

  Palmer said he could not remember whether they had asked Harry whether Baron had made any movement or cried out and denied that he had asked Harry whether Baron was breathing or if he did anything to show he was alive.

  The prosecution understood that Hazel needed to get home to the kids so they called her as the next witness. She was wearing her favourite double string of pearls again. She didn’t have many fancy clothes but she knew that making an effort for the jury was more important than it had been in the committal proceedings. As her turn came and she walked through the heavy wooden doors into Court Five, everything seemed heightened, sharpened, on the edge: the sound of her footsteps as she walked to the witness box, the voice of the judge’s associate as he asked her to take the oath on th
e Bible, even the eyes of everyone in the courtroom on her. It was as if she could hear them watching her.

  She made a point of looking straight at her mother, who was wearing the same green suit as she had at the committal. Hazel saw a woman who looked broken. She didn’t for a moment believe that her mother was actually ‘broken’ — Dulcie was merely putting on a good act. Hazel knew she was as wicked as ever.

  In answers to questions from Bill Knight, Hazel said her father had seemed in good spirits when he came home that last day from the hospital and told how her mum had given the kids Aspros to help them sleep. She revealed the cruel burden of secrets that Dulcie had placed upon her young family to keep her relationship with Harry a secret from their father.

  Knight: ‘Can you recall whether your mother spoke to you in Mildura as to what you were to tell your father if he asked anything about the life in Mildura?’

  Hazel: ‘Yes . . . she just told us not to say that she had been sleeping with Harry and that he had been just looking after us. He took us to Mildura and he had just been looking after us and that was about all.’

  After she gave her evidence in chief, Vizzard, the snapping Chihuahua, asked the same question he had asked her during the committal hearing: ‘Mrs Baron, have you ever told a lie? Yes or no.’

  Hazel was twenty-four but felt like a ten-year-old about to be scolded by a parent. She was angry about this and it sparked a realisation that she was stronger than she thought. The memory of the last day she saw her dad flashed into her mind; the tall, handsome man leaning on a stick, smiling as he walked towards their tents while Toby the terrier ran circles of joy around his feet. She thought about Harry holding her father under the water until he died. Neither Ted nor the dog were there now but Hazel was and she felt she owed it to both of them to keep it together and not let her mother win.