My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  Apart from the two murders of Billy Cavanagh and Carmelita Lee, Rose was wanted for the murders of prostitutes Kerrie Pang and Fatma Ozonal, at a massage parlour in the Sydney suburb of Gladesville on Valentine’s Day 1994. He had turned up at the brothel to kill Kerrie Pang, one of his former lovers, for a $10,000 contract. Ms Ozonal was shot three times. When Ms Pang, a mother of five, arrived, she was stabbed eighteen times, shot in the right eye, and her throat was cut. Just to make sure, Rose then set the building on fire.

  He was also wanted for stabbing to death Reynette Jill Holford who caught him breaking into her millionaire lover’s West Ryde mansion, overlooking the Parramatta River, one summer night in 1987. Rose stabbed her thirty-two times and then strangled her as her companion, developer Bill Graf, seventy-nine, slept through the attack.

  Rose was a former paramedic who had been hailed as a hero for being one of the first on the scene of Australia’s worst rail disaster, in 1977, when a crowded commuter train on its way into Sydney from the Blue Mountains derailed on its way into Granville railway station. It smashed into the supports of a road bridge that collapsed onto two train carriages. Of the passengers, eighty-one died and more than 201 were injured. Rose went on to become a volunteer State Emergency Services worker, a member of the Army Reserve and a licensed pilot. When Rose was twenty-nine, Billy Cavanagh became his first murder victim.

  Rose confessed to killing Billy for revenge after Billy had badly beat up a mate of Rose’s. He told detectives that Lee was just in the way: ‘I had to kill her — she was there!’ He pleaded guilty to five previously unsolved murders and was jailed for life without the prospect of parole. He went on to become one of the first six inmates of Goulburn jail’s High Risk Management Unit when it was opened in 2001.

  *

  Dulcie never saw Billy or Ronnie after abandoning them as children. Ruby didn’t return for another visit while Dulcie was in jail. Dulcie never told Hazel that Ruby had come back and visited her and Hazel never asked.

  Hazel met Ruby once after she had visited Dulcie, but the two half-sisters didn’t really hit it off. They arranged to meet in a Sydney park where they would know each other by the colour of the coats they were wearing, Hazel green and Ruby blue. But just as Dulcie and Ruby had recognised each other immediately, so did Hazel and Ruby. They looked like sisters. Both women were anxious to see what the other was like and had been a bit trepidatious about the encounter. In the end, their meeting was cordial but brief. There were never any hard feelings between them but Hazel thought Ruby was too like their mother, Dulcie reincarnated.

  In 1972, the South Mine in Broken Hill closed and Hazel and Bill and the family were on the move again. They went to Mansfield in Victoria where Bill got a job at the gold mine, known as the A1 Mine because the gold was ‘first class’. One of the country’s longest operating mines until it closed in 1992, it was about thirty kilometres outside Mansfield and the miners and their families lived out at the town at the mine, named simply the A1 Mine Settlement. The houses were very basic but the families living in them were only charged fifty cents a week in rent. The mining company charged them in order to create a legal lease so that they could evict them if they wanted.

  One day Hazel went to get the washing off the line and discovered it was frozen solid — the first time she had seen ice and snow.

  The drive from Mansfield to Silverwater took five hours less than the journey from Broken Hill but the once-a-year visits were still a chore for Hazel. She went because she felt it was the right thing to do and it seemed like she had spent her whole life doing the right thing.

  Hazel still never asked about the murders — there was nothing Dulcie could tell her that she didn’t already know. But after about five years of meaningless chitchat as Dulcie complained about prison food and Hazel asked her if there was anything she needed, Dulcie said she wanted to tell her about her father. Hazel realised she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want the past; she was over it. She just desperately wanted the future.

  ‘I admit that I did in your father but he was a cruel man, always bad-tempered.’ Dulcie was still totally unremorseful. Ted Baron had died not because she and Harry killed him but because he had been cruel and bad-tempered. Hazel didn’t feel fear or anger or hatred. She felt an overwhelming sadness.

  Dulcie went on to say that of course she had never killed Tommy Tregenza and Sam Overton but she said Tommy was better off dead because he had no one and Overton had been a lonely man whose wife didn’t care for him. She went on about never getting a penny from Tommy’s will; it was as if he had robbed her. Hazel pushed her plastic chair back and said she would see Dulcie next time.

  *

  Once Harry had served his five years, he was a free man; but because he had a criminal record, he needed special permission to visit Dulcie. He had vowed never to wear dark green again after all that time in prison garb and was wearing his smart navy suit with a white shirt and colourful tie when he saw Dulcie at Silverwater. The last time she had seen him they had been kissing and cuddling in the tunnels below the Supreme Court at Darlinghurst after being sentenced for killing Ted Baron. She still loved her young Harry and saw that jail had been kind to him. He looked fit and handsome but there was a distance between them now. She put it down to having been separated for all those years and having to put up barriers to survive in jail.

  She had no idea that he had fallen in love with someone else — a woman, Pamela, who worked in the prison — and he didn’t dare tell her. At least one of them had been rehabilitated.

  Harry didn’t visit her again and Dulcie was furious when he wrote to say he wanted a divorce. It was the last time she heard from him. Harry moved on to settle into the kind of comfortable loving family life he had never had with Dulcie. He got a job as a storeman and then as a driver, married Pamela and they lived in suburban western Sydney and had three children. When Harry died in June 2016, he was eighty-seven and left a proud legacy of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  *

  After thirteen and a half years behind bars, Dulcie was released and couldn’t resist changing her name one more time. Unbeknown to Hazel, she added a touch of exotic to her life by registering on the electoral roll as Doulsie Bodsworth.

  Toughened by jail, she was ready for an audience again. When the TV series Prisoner hit the small screen in 1979 and went on to become a cult classic around the world, the public would get to meet Dulcie’s alter ego. One of the best-loved characters, that mischievous lovable old lag, Lizzie Birdsworth, was based on Dulcie. Bodsworth, Birdsworth . . . get it?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DOULSIE BODSWORTH

  THE SCONES LOOKED DELICIOUS, THICK AND FLUFFY. GAYLE Hewitt thought it was very Christian for the new lady who had just moved into one of the housing commission units on Roosevelt Avenue in Riverwood to offer to bake for the congregation. Gayle’s husband John was the senior pastor at the nearby Revival Life Centre and one of his parishioners had told him about the lonely lady with the gold-framed glasses who always wore a nice frock, ‘Doulsie’ Bodsworth. John Hewitt reached out to Dulcie just as he did to the other disadvantaged people living in the units, many of them elderly or mentally ill or victims of domestic violence or from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Dulcie had lied that she had been a nurse with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and even donated some crisp white bed sheets to the church for the poor people. Where she got them, nobody knew.

  Dulcie attended a couple of services at the Revival Life Centre, which was a Pentecostal church, but when the Hewitts invited her to their latest function she politely declined but offered to make some scones, which were picked up from her by a grateful Gayle Hewitt. Grateful, that is, until she bit into one. She spat out that first morsel. It tasted of kerosene. The Hewitts knew nothing of Dulcie’s real background at the time but they did think she was trying to poison them all.

  Had Dulcie purposely tried to poison the congregation? Hazel knew her mother was a ‘bugger for keros
ene’. She loved the smell of it and used it on rags as a polish. Dulcie always had kerosene in the kitchen and it’s possible the scones had been exposed to the fumes and picked up the smell and the taste of it. Then Hazel wondered if her mother had slipped just a bit of the kerosene into the scones to make a good story so she could tell people: ‘Well, I only saw them yesterday and they weren’t sick then.’ Of course it would be a story with her at the centre of it.

  The Hewitts didn’t accept any more food from her and neither did the local police station. There, her reputation and criminal record had preceded her. The officers had received a general direction that any scones or cakes donated by Mrs Bodsworth to them or the local magistrates were not to be eaten.

  When the public housing was built in Riverwood in the 1950s, the streets were named after United States presidents, cities and states. Dulcie, a model prisoner, was released in 1977 after serving thirteen years. Her parole officer Nancy found her a nice little unit in Washington Street, named after the first US president. Dulcie hated it and she hated one of her neighbours. She had to walk past this man’s front door every day and as she did so he always called out an abusive name for her.

  She was still an arsonist at heart. This time it was not for murder, like the killing of Tommy Tregenza, or for revenge, like the time she burnt down the house and shed at Burragan Station. It was simply to get her own way. She stuffed newspapers into the electric bar heater in the kitchen and started a blaze in her own unit.

  Hazel and Bill and the family had been on the move again, this time from Victoria to a town in the Central West of New South Wales where Hazel got a job as a nurse at the town’s hospital. Bill worked as a machine operator with Telstra. Hazel was at work when she got a call from her mother’s parole officer to say that Dulcie’s unit had gone up in flames. The unit was trashed but Dulcie was okay. She had only suffered burns to her hands while she tried to put out the fire and save things. Putting it out! Hazel suspected straight away what had happened. Sure enough, Dulcie was happily moved into the second unit at Roosevelt Avenue — named after the twenty-sixth President of the United States — leaving her abusive neighbour behind.

  She liked this second unit because it was on the ground floor at the front of the complex so she could see who was coming and going. Nancy the parole officer helped Dulcie get some replacement second-hand furniture from Vinnies and when Hazel visited her for the first time six months after her release from jail, Dulcie had set herself up nicely. The unit stank of kerosene, which Dulcie had been using as polish. Bill gave Hazel a lift from their country town but he still was not ready to see Dulcie so he waited in the car while Hazel spent the afternoon with her mother. She had brought Dulcie some fresh clothes and some kitchen utensils — everyone likes new kitchen utensils.

  Harry was gone so Dulcie was on her own with Hazel, the only family who visited her. The way Dulcie treated her daughter, you would think she had always been the apple of her eye instead of the person who put her behind bars.

  So Dulcie settled into the retirement unit where her new best friend was Margaret, a widow with no family but some money and valuables. Just the kind of person Dulcie liked. A bit like a female Tommy Tregenza.

  Dulcie read in a newspaper about plans for a new TV series based in a women’s jail with the slogan: ‘If you think prison is hell for a man, imagine what it’s like for a woman’. She still showed no remorse for killing three people and wrote to the production company making the series, the Reg Grundy Organisation, offering to tell them her story. Bizarrely, after spending the first half of her life hiding behind false names and in strange towns, she was suffering from publicity deprivation. She had got used to being a bit of a kingpin in Silverwater. She also had heaps of new stories to tell from her time behind bars but no one to tell them to. After all, she couldn’t tell Margaret about her real past, not about being a serial killer.

  So Dulcie sat down with one of the writers from Grundy and what she told them was a story that was no closer to the truth than she ever told anyone. She told them she had been in jail for something she had never done and rolled out the sob story about betrayal and having to bring up her children herself. The production company did their own homework on her and knew there was more to her past than she let on, but they knew she would make a great character in the series. After thirteen years behind bars, she knew a lot about how to get through the day in prison and prison slang.

  Dulcie gave herself the grand-sounding title of ‘consultant’ to the production. Watching the series today, Prisoner looks its age but decades before programmes like Orange is the New Black, it was a TV trailblazer focusing on the lives of the female inmates and the officers who kept them in line in the fictional Wentworth Detention Centre.

  The characters were mainly clichés, like the butch and violent lesbian, a yuppie out of her element and the firm-but-fair governor. The producers took bits and pieces of Dulcie’s past to build the Lizzie Birdsworth character. Lizzie was behind bars because of a poisoning on a sheep station, except that Lizzie was serving a sentence for poisoning four sheep shearers who she cooked for — not the station manager, as Dulcie had done. It turned out in later episodes that, unlike Dulcie, Lizzie was innocent of the poisoning. Lizzie gave up a daughter at birth and when she got out of jail, she burnt down the house where she was living to stop it from being sold. Veteran actress Sheila Florance became a household name for her performance as the mischievous Lizzie, one of the best-known characters, who appeared in almost every episode of the soap opera, 403 in all.

  The real murderer the character was based on was never revealed. It had been years since Dulcie’s case had been in the news and there was no internet or Google in those days. The real life killer and the woman who portrayed her met a couple of times but there were few of Dulcie’s mannerisms in Sheila Florance’s brilliant portrayal of Lizzie.

  When Hazel went down to Sydney to clear out her mother’s unit years later, she found signed photos of nearly all the Prisoner crew such as the Grundys, Peta Toppano, who had played one of the inmates, and a number of stars who had done concerts for the show. There was even an autographed photograph of the pop star Sandy Shaw, who was of the ilk of entertainers like Col Joye and Johnny O’Keefe. Hazel also found receipts from Grundys who had been paying Dulcie good money for her advice. One receipt was for $500, a lot of money in those days. It was obvious that Dulcie had thoroughly enjoyed herself as a ‘consultant’.

  One of the few people who knew about Dulcie’s past was Sister Carmel, the full-time chaplain at the Riverwood retirement unit complex. Hazel found her to be a spirited, friendly person, and even more importantly, she was wide awake to Dulcie’s antics. One day Hazel got a call from Sister Carmel to say that she feared Dulcie was up to her old tricks because Margaret had been sick and was going downhill. Hazel was terrified. She couldn’t cope with another murder. She thought about calling Del Fricker but Sister Carmel calmed her down and said she would keep an eye on the two ‘friends’.

  One day, when the Sister tried to visit Margaret, Dulcie told her that Margaret was asleep and had asked to be left alone. Sister Carmel got a key to Margaret’s flat and was horrified to find rope and torn-up sheets tied to chairs like a jigsaw across the room to keep Margaret away from the front door. Margaret was in bed and very weak. Dulcie said the rope and sheets were meant to give Margaret something to hold on to when she got up. Whatever the truth, the chaplain called for an ambulance and at the hospital, pathology tests showed Margaret had overdosed on the sleeping tablet Mogadon.

  It turned out that Dulcie and Margaret had the same doctor. Dulcie would take him her infamous cakes and say Margaret wanted her to pick up her prescriptions. Hazel was furious that the doctor had been taken in like this and called him up to tell him about Dulcie’s past. He didn’t believe her until Sister Carmel backed her up. Margaret recovered and went to a nursing home where she didn’t see Dulcie again and died peacefully two years later, aged ninety.

 
For the next ten years, Dulcie amused herself conning people and picking fights with other residents of the retirement units. Some of them were tough cookies and Dulcie, being manipulative and liking to be top dog, had difficulty convincing them that she should rule the roost. She regularly had little ‘accidental’ fires in her unit, just because she liked the drama, and Hazel would visit to find burn marks on the carpet or the couch. Dulcie dug out a few of her hard-luck stories including how her husband had drowned and she had raised their four children herself. ‘Oh, Dulcie,’ people would say. ‘You have had such a lot of bad luck.’ And Dulcie would revel in their sympathy.

  When Hazel visited her mother in late 2003, she had to go to the office to sign some papers, and she was amazed when the staff almost laid out the red carpet for her.

  ‘Well, aren’t we in the presence of royalty,’ one of them said.

  The former real estate agent Mary Donaldson of Tasmania had just become engaged to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Dulcie had told everyone the Bodsworths were related to the Donaldsons. She claimed that her family was related to the ‘Donaldsons of Tasmania’.

  ‘Your mum’s such a dag. We love her. She told us about her and Mary!’ the office staff said.

  Inside, Hazel was thinking what a lying old bitch Dulcie was but she couldn’t deny that she was entertaining. She decided not to put the office staff straight and just smiled secretively.

  The office staff thought Hazel was a hospital matron because that is what Dulcie had told them, boasting about how successful her daughter was.

  Then there was Jim Courier. Dulcie told everyone they were distantly related and even convinced herself it was the truth. It was his ginger hair. When Hazel looked at the US tennis ace she did think that was what her brother Allan would have looked like if he were still alive. She still thinks of Allan whenever she sees Courier on the TV, usually during Wimbledon. Although there is no evidence they are related, Dulcie even has Hazel wondering if it is true.