by Hazel Baron
The Buffalo ceremony went ahead without Allan; Bill and Jim had figured he was just running late. Until, that is, the knock on the door in Bagot Street later that night. Hazel opened the door to face the police, who delivered the devastating news. They didn’t have the phone on so Bill went over to Jim’s and let him know.
One of the first things Hazel wondered was if Allan had killed himself. He had been drinking far too much and their mother had him tied up in emotional knots. It had broken his heart. But the police said that it was definitely an accident. They told Hazel that Allan’s son was with him and she knew Allan would never have put his son through that. The police also said that no one killed themselves by shooting themselves in the liver.
Then Hazel recalled her mother’s weird comments when she had not been told about Margaret’s death and funeral: Dulcie had said that if ‘anyone else died’, she would sue Hazel if she wasn’t told about it. It was the strangest thing to say. You would never expect another of your children to die so young. She fleetingly wondered if Dulcie had had some sort of premonition, then she shook that thought out of her mind. She refused to confer that kind of power on her mother.
Allan was buried in the Catholic section at Broken Hill cemetery. Years later when he was a teenager, his oldest son who had been in the car with him could be found just sitting staring at his father’s grave.
Once again, Hazel left it up to the police to tell Dulcie about Allan’s death. None of the family wanted her at the funeral.
The next time Hazel made the journey to see Dulcie, she realised that she had been right not to have been taken in by her. All Dulcie said about Allan’s death was: ‘He won’t be able to change his story now.’ Even at the news of her son’s death, she thought first of herself.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RUBY
DULCIE WORE A SHAPELESS DARK GREEN DRESS BUT THE SEVERE prison clothes were softened by the wide smile on her face as she approached Hazel.
‘This is my daughter and she’s a nurse and she’s come from Broken Hill,’ Dulcie boasted to the warder, as inflated as though she were showing off the Queen.
‘Shut up, Bodsworth,’ the prison guard snapped.
In the grubby bleak visitors’ room at Long Bay jail, Hazel flinched. Dulcie was fawning and the guard was just plain rude. It was as though Dulcie were showing off to the school principal and the principal was putting her back in her place. Perhaps in jail, reactions were never on an even keel and emotions were emphasised.
It was about a year since the end of the Overton trial and sitting on green chairs around a table bolted to the floor, mother and daughter spoke about Hazel and Bill’s kids — their seven-year-old daughter, three-year-old adopted son and a baby boy just a few months old. Dulcie’s grandchildren, whom she had never seen let alone met. They chatted about Bill’s family and Jim and Alma. The weather. The journey from Broken Hill. Neither of them mentioned the ‘m’ word — murder. The closest they got was when Dulcie said life was hard inside and she shouldn’t be there.
Hazel reminded her that it was crook on the outside as well.
Hazel had two reasons for going to visit Dulcie. She told herself that, rather than loyalty to Dulcie, it was to keep an eye on her and know what she was up to, but it was also because she was a softie at heart. Even after everything her mother had done, she couldn’t leave her to rot.
Dulcie had started to write to her after she lost an appeal against her conviction for murdering Sam Overton. The Court of Criminal Appeal handed down its decision in February 1968, rejecting her lawyers’ argument that her record of interview with police had not been made freely and should never have been read to the jury.
‘In our opinion there does not appear to be evidence surrounding the making of the statement of the conditions under which it was obtained which justifies a decision that the learned trial judge was bound to hold that unfairness existed or undue pressure was applied or that the appellant was incapable of appreciating the full extent and purpose of her words or of doing justice to herself in her answers.’ It was a unanimous decision. Dulcie’s lawyers said the High Court would never hear an appeal against a unanimous ruling. It was the end of the road for her. She had to suck it up. She had one life sentence to serve as well as five years for the manslaughter of Ted Baron, both sentences to be served concurrently.
Harry was also in Long Bay but in the men’s section, serving his five years.
‘I wish I had some margarine to put on my toast,’ said Dulcie’s first correspondence with her daughter.
‘You don’t know what it’s like in here. The other people get visitors and my family don’t care about me. No one ever comes to see me.’
It was real heart-wrenching stuff, totally over the top, but despite that, Hazel felt it pull at her heart strings, even as she realised at the same time that the whole thing was bizarre. As Bill drove her all the way from Broken Hill to Sydney to visit Dulcie, Hazel was wondering how she was going to stop her mother from asking awkward questions such as why did she go to the police? Why did she give evidence? She thought Dulcie would try to coerce her to get her out. She was the one who should have been asking the questions. Why did you kill my father? You bastard, you never cared for us! Where were your hugs? Why go after Sam and Tommy? Why did you put us through all this? But Hazel never asked those questions. Ever. After being the iron lady in the witness box, Hazel couldn’t shake the elusive ties between mother and daughter and she had to mentally fight herself to stay in charge.
She was shaking as she walked through the massive wooden doors at Long Bay while Bill waited in their car in the car park, but she never thought about turning back. This is what she had to do just the same as she had had to give evidence against Dulcie. Bill wanted nothing to do with his wicked mother-in-law but never tried to talk Hazel out of visiting her. He supported her as he always had done.
It was the noise that hit Hazel, the shouts bouncing off the concrete walls, the security checks when you went in, showing your identification through the hole in the glass and then securing your handbag in a locker. Just a number, not unlike the people you were going to visit, called out when they were ready to take you through the corridors made of heavy metal bars with barbed wire strung along the top. The banging of the gates, unlocked and locked before the next one was unlocked. The stink of cigarette smoke that permeated the walls and the scrape of chairs as the prisoners got up to greet their visitors.
The visiting room was packed and Hazel took a deep breath as she scanned for her mother. She expected Dulcie to look as old and downcast and even angry as she had the last time she saw her, which was in the courtroom all those months ago. This time, would Dulcie be visibly crushed by the dullness of her daily routine, and the lack of sunshine in the impenetrable brick bunker that was now her stark home, shared with other inmates who were classed as among the country’s worst humans, locked up to keep everyone else outside safe?
But Dulcie was grinning and chipper. Hazel was the one who was feeling tense. She braced herself because she knew she had to stop Dulcie taking control once again. She didn’t feel ashamed at having once wished her mother had gone to the gallows but her bitterness had subsided. Hazel had spent all those years terrified of what her mother would do, what revenge she would take on Hazel for going to the police, what she would say. Instead, here she was boasting about Hazel probably for the first time in her life.
Hazel had stood up to her and Dulcie knew that. She could see her daughter was not one to mess with. Allan, on the other hand, had never been as strong and Dulcie reserved her venom for him. When he was still alive, Dulcie would send him cruel letters from jail, hammering him and making him feel like the guilty one.
Hazel realised that her mother needed her for the first time in her life. She was under no illusions as to the reason for that — she was the only one in the family who visited Dulcie and Dulcie saw Hazel as her lifeline to the outside world. The woman was as tough and cunning as ever and that was t
he only reason why she was so nice to Hazel. Hazel didn’t really enjoy the visits but she went twice to Long Bay in between February and June 1968 out of a sense of filial duty.
Dulcie hadn’t previously had much time or the inclination to read, but behind bars she now had all the time in the world. She learnt to read properly in jail and frequented the library, reading all the newspapers that she could.
She developed a fascination for bushrangers, seeing them as romantic figures thumbing their noses at authority, which she somehow saw herself as doing. Robbing from the rich to give to the poor. In lots of ways, Dulcie was still naïve.
Her favourite bushranger was Ben Hall because she had seen a painting of him when he was young and thought him handsome with his curly brown hair. She was caught up in the romance that he was part of the daring gang who staged the biggest gold robbery in Australian history, the famous Eugowra Gold Escort Robbery. He was still a young man when he died with a 1000-pound bounty on his head after being declared an outlaw, wanted dead or alive.
He was shot dead by police at dawn on 5 May 1865, near Goobang Creek in central western New South Wales at the age of twenty-seven with the circumstances of his death still controversial. Hall was buried in the cemetery at Forbes beneath a simple white headstone.
*
When Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre opened in 1970, Dulcie was one of the first inmates to move into one of its purpose-built twelve living units inside the sprawling complex. She wasn’t one for art classes like pottery but she was trusted to have knitting needles and a crochet hook and made baby clothes for the women who had young children in there with them. She had never had a structured life before but she told Hazel that it wasn’t as bad as she had feared. Even in jail she got on well for herself and didn’t really have a tough time. Just like she had outside, she revelled in having some sort of status. Being in for murder did that for you.
Silverwater was about twenty kilometres outside the CBD and easy to reach for visitors driving from Sydney. However, it was not as convenient for Hazel when Bill was working, and she caught the train or the bus from Broken Hill for her visit once or twice a year.
One day, Dulcie was told there was a Ruby Cavanagh to see her. Ruby knew her mother wouldn’t recognise her new name of Shirley McGloin.
She had found out who her mother was through the police when they delved into Dulcie’s past as part of their murder investigations. Until then she had lived her life in a vacuum without a birth certificate or knowing the Christian names of her parents, although she knew she had been a Cavanagh. She had few memories of her life before she was abandoned at the orphanage in Wagga Wagga and didn’t even think she would recognise her mother again. She had found out where Dulcie was by ringing around the jails. It took a lot of guts for her to go to Silverwater jail and try to talk to the woman who had abandoned her as a little girl. There were enormous pieces missing from the jigsaw puzzle of her life and she hoped Dulcie would help find them. But Dulcie refused to see her and told the prison officers to send her away.
The next time Hazel visited, Dulcie was full of it.
‘I told them I wouldn’t see her. I’m not interested in Ruby; I’m only interested in you. You are the only one who is sticking by me,’ Dulcie told her with an earnest face.
Hazel could see right through her mother’s manipulative act. She only told Hazel about Ruby to make her jealous while at the same time trying to curry favour with her by saying that she was more important to her than Ruby. Hazel was over it. She didn’t care if Ruby visited or not.
Ruby persevered. A few months later, she went back and was finally reunited with her mother in the drab surrounds of the prison visiting room. Dulcie knew immediately who Ruby was when she walked through the door to where the visitors were already seated at the tables. The two women froze when they first saw each other because they looked so much alike. They discovered that they not only looked alike but they shared similar traits. Ruby’s family kept telling her that she was ‘flippant’, carefree, threw caution to the wind and let whatever was going to happen just happen. A lot like Dulcie.
Ruby had left her husband Gilbert a couple of years earlier but still lived in Yagoona in Sydney’s southwest with their three children, son Michael, an adopted son Ian and a daughter she had called Theresa. Ian had made his own headlines in June 1965 when, aged eleven, he ended up at Sydney Airport. With airport security being very lax in those days, he climbed into the cargo hold of a Qantas Boeing 707 before the door was closed — and the plane took off. He didn’t mean to stow away, just to have a look around.
After seven hours in the dark and freezing cold, the plane landed in Manila in the Philippines. He was taken to a local hospital, checked over and given hot food, getting a tour of Manila in the meantime.
Qantas flew him home in the proper cabin with a few souvenirs of his unplanned trip, including a Filipino T-shirt and a giant wooden spoon and fork. His parents were told that it was a miracle he had survived. At 30,000 feet he could have frozen to death or his lungs could have burst from lack of pressure. His mother was so relieved to see him that the only punishment dished out was that he couldn’t watch TV or use the gifts Qantas had bought him for a month. Dulcie could appreciate the story. Little Ian shared his grandmother’s sense of adventure.
Ruby told her mother that her two brothers, Billy, then forty-one, and Ronnie, thirty-seven, were both also living in Sydney and that they were really close to each other. Neither of them ever visited their mother.
*
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who had met one serial killer never mind someone who had been given birth by one and killed by another, but that was Billy Cavanagh. It could be said that he shared his mother’s wild streak and lack of respect for the law. Amazingly, both Billy and at least one of his sons also shared Dulcie’s penchant for changing their names when it suited them.
Years later, on Saturday, 21 January 1984, the bodies of Billy, fifty-four, and his de facto wife Carmelita Lee, twenty-one, were found in the bedroom of their home in the Sydney suburb of Hoxton Park. The night before, their killer had broken into the house, stripped and gagged Carmelita and tied her hands and feet with a telephone cord before laying her on the couple’s waterbed. Then he waited.
Billy, who used the surname Collins as well as Cavanagh, had driven home from a drinking session at his local, the Stop and Rest Hotel at Mt Pritchard, with two bottles of oysters he had bought at the pub. As he walked through the front door, a .22 rifle was pressed to his head and fired twice with another two shots into his neck and the top of his back. His body was then dragged into the bedroom where the rifle was pointed at Carmelita. The mother of two young children back in the Philippines was also shot four times at point blank range. One of Billy’s sixteen children, eighteen-year-old Glen, made the shocking discovery of their bodies in the ransacked bedroom on the Saturday.
When it hit the news, Dulcie rang Hazel to ask if she had any photographs of Billy that she could give to the newspapers. Hazel could see that Dulcie wanted to play the grieving mother role and she was livid. She knew that if the newspapers got onto who Billy’s mother was, it would be an even bigger story than it already was. She told her mother in no uncertain terms that she would never speak to her again and Dulcie would be on her own if she dragged the family back into the limelight. Dulcie was suitable chastened with the threat of having no one at all to look after her if Hazel turned her back.
One of Dulcie’s grandsons — another of Billy’s sons — William, who had changed his surname to Cavanough, arrived at his dad’s funeral a week later at Leppington Cemetery in handcuffs and under heavy police guard. The convicted armed robber was midway through serving fourteen years’ hard labour at Sydney’s Parklea jail after making national headlines two years earlier when he cut a hole in the roof of a moving police van in a spectacular escape while on remand for rape and abduction. He was on the run for less than two months before being caught in Sydney after
a bank hold-up and a high-speed chase in which he tried to shoot his way to freedom.
Billy senior had been an amateur boxer, handy with his fists, who ran a successful interstate trucking business. Seven of his semi-trailers were parked out back in the yard of his home. As detectives delved into his background looking for a motive for his murder, they discovered that his trucks had carried millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana crops from all over the country for Robert ‘The Godfather’ Trimbole. The powerful crime boss was known as the Mr Fix-It for the Mafia in Australia. He had started off as a legitimate businessman born into a Mafia-connected family in Griffith but moved into the far more lucrative marijuana trade. Billy was also known to keep thousands of dollars in cash hidden all over the place at home including inside a lampshade. His murder could have been either a robbery gone wrong or a Mafia hit.
In fact it was neither but it would be another thirteen years before the killer was caught.
In April 1997, across in South Australia, an Adelaide resident was watching a Foxtel TV programme about the man dubbed ‘Australia’s most wanted’, serial killer Lindsay Rose. This person recognised him as Lindsay Lehman who was living in a Bowden boarding house and working as a labourer on the Patawalonga dredging project in the city’s west. The person called their local police station and less than twelve hours later Rose was arrested.
‘Looks like I won’t be in today, boys,’ he said as he was arrested at work by heavily armed police. New South Wales detectives flew to Adelaide to seek his extradition on five murders.
