The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

One month later, on Christmas Eve, 1995, there was talk of reopening the whole Walsh Street saga with an inquest into the deaths of Constables Tynan and Eyre. The families of the two men had reportedly held meetings with the coroner’s office seeking such a step. No inquest had been held previously because of inquiries the then coroner, Hal Hallenstein, had been making into police shootings.

  * * *

  If, then, Dennis and Walsh Street represent the public face of Kathy’s notoriety, what is the private nature of the woman herself, and what are the milestones along the road that led her to the sleepy sanctuary of Venus Bay?

  I first met Kathy Pettingill in 1974. She was a mother of ten children battling, more often than not on the wrong side of the law, to keep intact what was left of her family. What crime she was involved in was small-time, her days of infamy and fortune still a decade away. I was a journalist on Melbourne’s Truth newspaper, then owned by Rupert Murdoch. Kathy’s tale of police harassment of two of her sons, Trevor and Victor, seventeen years before their acquittal of the Walsh Street murders, had an all too familiar ring to it. But it was a story, and I wrote it anyway.

  Kathy rewarded me with much more significant leads—like the exclusive telephone interview she arranged for me with another of her sons, Peter, at that time officially Victoria’s most dangerous criminal and on the run from a fourteen-year gaol sentence for rape, shooting at police and the wounding of two men. There were other stories and other memories—an exclusive on the bombing of a Richmond massage parlour, a whirlwind car trip around Victoria’s country gaols with introductions to the prisoners’ wives living in local caravan parks, inside information on the pecking order in Pentridge Prison, conducted tours of Fairlea Women’s Prison, and so on.

  When I moved away from journalism and crime reporting in the mid-1980s Kathy and I lost touch. She was in the middle of her decade of tragedy and terror; I was mired in the grey-flannel heartland of corporate Melbourne as a director of a public relations company. In 1993 I re-established contact with a phone call, the first time we had spoken for more than half a decade.

  ‘Kathy?’ I said as her unmistakable ‘Hello?’ came down the line.

  ‘Is that you, Adrian?’

  I was amazed. ‘You’ve got a great memory, Kathy.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Only Kathy could have injected that precise mixture of humour and cocksure defiance into the question. I knew immediately that notoriety hadn’t changed her.

  As the planning for this book began certain friends asked me if I had considered the possible effect of prolonged exposure to the mind and memories of ‘Granny Evil’, the legendary criminal matriarch; others simply counselled against the project. Grasping the nettle of what they perceived to be a tangible evil was all well and good, until you tried to let go. That’s when you got stung. And so on, and so on.

  I ignored the advice, well meant as it was, and the interviews began in July 1995 at Kathy’s seaside hideaway cottage, and continued well into the following year. Our sessions generally ran for four hours at a stretch, and as I went deeper into Kathy’s past, and began to learn more of the private woman behind the public facade, a series of contradictions emerged.

  There were things she dredged up which shocked and appalled me—like her anger over Dennis’s burning of her new vacuum cleaner after he’d used it to remove the splattered brains of one of his victims from the carpet. How could she care about the destruction of an manimate object while remaining seemingly indifferent to the brutal murder of a human being?

  Then there was the terrible business of the tracksuit trousers. Dennis and his minders were in the process of bludgeoning some innocent youth to near death when Kathy noticed his nearly new clothing. ‘Save the trousers for Jamie’ (another of her sons), she urged them. Such callousness was tempered only slightly by the additional information that she eventually helped the youth escape.

  But then there was the other side of her that began to emerge simultaneously. How at the age of fifty-nine she engaged in a vicious fight with a woman half her age, in defence of a frail and elderly victim of prison brutality. Or her decision at the age of fifty-eight to leave the sanctuary of Venus Bay and return to Melbourne to look after three of her young grandchildren for nine months when their parents landed in gaol.

  And there was the way she would waltz into the opulent reception area of her long-time Melbourne solicitor’s office, not waiting to be announced but hollering: ‘Charlie, I’m here, where are you?’ as she passed the gaping receptionist. ‘And why fucking not?’ she responded when I mentioned it. ‘Dennis’s fees paid for that foyer.’

  Probably the most important thing I’ve learned about Kathy is that she doesn’t change for anybody. She is utterly unaffected by rank or fame, as incapable of airs and graces as she is of disloyalty.

  Now it’s all over, and I’ve seen her tears and witnessed her rage, one factor emerges—I still like Kathy Pettingill as a person, and I still regard her as a good friend.

  I also happen to believe that in a different world she could have been someone special. And not for all the wrong reasons, this time.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Seeds by the Wayside

  THE THREE SISTERS WILL never meet again. The youngest, Barbara, is minutes away from death. Her polio-racked body and its withered left arm will go, shortly, into the ground. A lifetime of salt baths and traction is nearly over.

  But Barbara doesn’t know this. At six years of age she has little concept of her mortality. Her life has been a dwindling form of death, anyway, and now the pain is blurring her awareness. She is cradled in the arms of a man carrying her out through the front door of an enormous house, on the first leg of her journey to hospital.

  As Barbara’s vision wavers over the garden for the last time she takes in, without registering it, the forms of her two elder sisters, standing silently by the tall, iron gate. Wilma is eight, and Shirley-Temple-gorgeous. Kathleen is very different. Two years older than Wilma, she has an air of sullen resentment.

  The object of the two girls’ attention is a car parked outside the gate on Beaconsfield Parade in wartime Melbourne. It has running boards wide enough for a game of cards. Elliot Ness should be at the wheel, but he isn’t. Instead a covey of murmuring relatives gaze out through the car windows at the man walking towards them through the gate.

  He reaches the side of the car and, as the rear door opens for him to place Barbara inside, she suddenly stiffens in his arms. There is one clenching convulsion followed by a series of fluttering lesser seizures throwing her head back across his arm. The light in her eyes goes out.

  ‘It’s too late, she’s gone.’

  ‘Take her back in the house.’

  The words mean nothing to Kathleen. She hears them, but as with Barbara’s last sight of her sisters, the message doesn’t get through. All she can think of is what she has just seen. Her head feels light and airy.

  ‘She just died,’ she says, taking Wilma by the arm. The grown-ups have climbed down from the car and gone inside, too preoccupied to notice the girls. Kathleen leads Wilma through the gate to the edge of the pavement. They stand together watching the trundling parade of carts, trucks and cars.

  ‘Stand on the road, Wilma,’ says Kathleen, guiding her sister towards the traffic. ‘Now you can be dead, too.’

  * * *

  Barbara’s death is not the first Kathleen has witnessed. There has been one before and many will follow. Four years earlier an elderly relative dies in the Brunswick house where Kathleen is living. His body lies in its coffin, mounted on a trestle in one of the rooms. Kathy wanders in and is instantly drawn to the open cask and the withered face of the elderly man inside. Why is he sleeping, and why is he in a box, not his bed?

  The six-year-old reaches over the side of the coffin towards the still face. Small fingers force their way past the dry lips and lock onto the upper teeth. The dentures come loose inside the mouth, and the little girl twists them back out through the lips. She pauses
briefly to examine them before placing them inside her mouth. They feel big. She removes them, pushing them carefully back from where they came.

  Dead man’s teeth in a little girl’s mouth.

  * * *

  Kathy was born on 27 March 1935. Her parents were Albert Frederick Kemp, a twenty-year-old timber worker, and Gladys Grace Lee, aged nineteen, who had married on 17 May of the previous year. Kathy was their first-born. They lived in a tiny single-fronted, two-bedroom terraced house in Gold Street in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick.

  Four weeks after Kathy’s birth, on April 25 1935 a one-tonne tiger shark began behaving strangely in Coogee Aquarium in Sydney. Shocked visitors to the Aquarium backed away from the pool as the monster went berserk, threshing the water into foam, and vomited up first a bird, followed by a rat, and then a human arm. A tattoo of two boxers on the arm led to identification of the victim as James Smith, a small-time criminal. Today, sixty years later, the murder remains unsolved.

  So what sort of a world was Kathy born into? Frenzied sharks and severed arms apart, the Australia of the mid-1930s was, like much of the rest of the globe, preoccupied with what historians invariably describe as the storm clouds of war gathering over Europe.

  Under the heading ‘Berlin Talks: Hitler Holds The Floor; What Germany Will And Will Not Do’, The Age of 27 March 1935 detailed a six-hour marathon summit taking place at the Chancellery in Berlin. Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden and Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps, representing Britain, emerged hoarse from their discussions with ‘Herr Hitler’, Baron von Neurath, and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Closer to home 17,000 Victorians went on strike, refusing to work for ‘sustenance’ on unemployment relief schemes. The Sun News-Pictorial, cataloguing the various locations where strike action was most disruptive, declared with a complete absence of irony: ‘The half-castes of Framlingham aboriginal reserve, who are working for sustenance, stopped this morning, declaring the work black.’

  Robert Donat was starring in The Count of Monte Cristo at the Armadale Kinema, and Eddie Cantor in Kid Millions at the Regent. Appearing in a real-life drama at the Melbourne District Court was a woman called Alma Claire Ritcher, charged with the murder of her son Allen Carl, aged nine. She had, the court heard, mutilated his head and neck with an axe.

  * * *

  Kathy’s earliest memory is of a loose brick in the wall of the house in Gold Street, where she was still living at the age of four. It appealed to her instinct for secrecy and soon she was depositing pennies and ha’pennies in her own private vault. Not all were obtained honestly, and there was other naughtiness—often demonstrating less guile. Her mother, Gladys, had acquired a sweet shop nearby in Gold Street.

  I remember there was a piece of wood that you could stand on to open the display cabinet for when they gave the order and my mum could get the lollies out, right? So, I used to stand on it and get the clinkers and bite them in half and put ’em back. I didn’t eat the whole evidence, right? So I got a belting for that because they worked out it was me. Who else’d put them half back? I told them it was the fairies.

  The environment in which Kathy spent her early years was less than stable, and threw up two significant contradictions. Firstly, loyalties between family members were fiercely held— yet marriages were scarred by frequent ‘domestics’. And secondly, certain branches of the family were proud of their rebellious, anti-establishment view, while others, like Kathy’s great-uncle Norman Shields, served for six years on the local

  * * *

  Brunswick Council and had a reserve named after him.

  It was, however, the dysfunctional nature of marriage within the family that was to have the greatest influence on Kathy’s life. Even the earliest family legend deals with a breakdown in relationships. Kathy’s great-grandmother, Kathleen Shields, was first married to a ship’s captain, who had transported the last of the convicts to arrive in Australia. She so valued her independence that, when he returned to home port on one occasion, she moved all the furniture from the front of the house to the rear and erected a ‘TO LET’ sign on the front fence, hoping he would be misled into believing she had moved away.

  Kathy’s earliest experience of the family malaise came in the same lolly shop where her taste for clinkers had got her into trouble.

  My second memory of that shop is of my mum and dad fighting. Maybe it’s because my dad enlisted. They used to have packets of dummy chocolates on the wall—advertising—only cardboard or something in it, whatever. I’m sitting on the counter, my mum is putting her lot of lollies there beside me, my dad’s doing the same. They were asking me: ‘Who do you want to stay with?’ My mum would say: ‘Do you want to stay with me?’ and put more lollies beside me. I didn’t know they were false boxes, I thought they were real. I can remember where they were standing. I’m sitting on the counter, my mum was there, my dad was there, and the chocolates were coming from everywhere. I just remember that. I was bewildered. And that’s the only memory I’ve got of my dad. I must have been four.

  When Albert was sent over to the Middle East after enlisting in the 2nd AIE on the outbreak of war, Kathy’s relationship with her father ended for ever. A card bearing the words ‘To my three darling daughters’ arrived from Egypt, with a wrist watch for Kathy. She broke it not long after in a fall, and was devastated. The next message was that Albie had died, on 13 February 1942, and had been buried in Gaza. The family was told he had fallen victim to a disease. In fact he had lost his mind and committed suicide. Many years later one of Kathy’s children applied under the Freedom of Information Act for details of Albie’s death. The finding was not what Kathy wanted to hear.

  They said he went mad with sand fever or something, and shot himselfI I don’t want to know that story, I don’t believe that story. I wanted to believe the best. If he’d come back it probably would have turned out different. He’d probably have taken us to the other side of the family with him. I might have turned out different. But Wilma’s still all right. I mean there’s nothing ever wrong with Wilma.

  With Albie away in the war, his wife Gladys began to enjoy her freedom, and eventually her preference for a good time over the needs of her three daughters came to the notice of the authorities. Kathy and Wilma were found walking the streets on a particularly cold night wearing little more than singlets and, along with Barbara, were made military wards.

  Because my dad was away in the War, my mum was playing up. She was having a good time. I think it’s because she was so young, I’m not making excuses but she was so young to be tied down with three children.

  It was now obvious that Kathy and her two sisters had to be removed from Gladys’s negative influence. Their grandmother, Bertha Mason, who also lived in Gold Street, had her hands full with her stormy relationship with her husband Rowdy. So it fell to the girls’ great-grandmother on their mother’s side, Kathleen Shields, to do something about the rapidly disintegrating mess that Gladys and Albie’s family had become. Despite being seventy years old, Kathleen let Gladys know she was taking the three girls in and effectively assuming the role of mother to them. Kathy doubts Gladys would have put up much opposition, although she does recall one half-hearted ‘kidnapping’ when Gladys took her three daughters off to Stawell, 250 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. It wasn’t long before they were back with their great-grandmother, however. Kathleen transformed the girls’ environment from a little backstreet hovel to a palatial home called Green Court in Sydney Road, Brunswick. Here food was never scarce and there was a world of long corridors and hidden rooms to explore. On one occasion shortly after the girls moved in, Barbara went missing and the local fire brigade was called in to search some of the less accessible parts of the mansion. Hours later she was found, curled up fast asleep in the folds of one of the luxurious red velvet curtains which hung in the main rooms.

  Kathleen Shields was to remain a major influence on Kathy, long after her death at the age of ninety-five. Gladys’s removal from the scene was almost certainly
a blessing. Kathy and her sisters saw her only at irregular intervals and as time wore on even became unsure of their exact relationship with her. This was when Kathy and Wilma began referring to her as ‘that lady’.

  For Gladys, the death of Albie and the virtual loss of her three daughters was the catalyst for a series of bigamous relationships, generally with merchant seamen. Much later in life she admitted to Kathy she had married as many as six, largely for their pensions. A number died, and because of uncertainty over dates and the order in which the ‘marriages’ had taken place, Gladys was never prosecuted. Many years later there was to be a sordid little sequel to her cavalier attitude to the sanctity of marriage. Kathy’s two eldest sons were under investigation by the police, whose inquiries had begun to widen. Although Kathy’s underworld reputation was still undeveloped, her manner, even over the phone, was enough to intimidate corrupt policemen.

  This copper was investigating the family, and he told my mother that if she had $500, he’d call at her house at Ascot Vale and they could do a deal. She told me she’d married about six, but they couldn’t work out who had died first or who she’d married first, and so they couldn’t prosecute. The copper found out they’d never prosecuted, and he was threatening to do something about it.

  So here she is sitting in the house at Ascot Vale with the $500 in her hand. So I rang the copper. I said: ‘Don’t you dare blackmail my mother. She’s sitting there a nervous wreck with fucking $500 in her hand. It’s not on.’ So he didn’t come. I threatened him.

  The Sydney Road house provided another vivid childhood memory involving death—only this time Kathy didn’t see the body. Her two-year-old cousin Robin had climbed inside a buggy hitched to a horse standing in the long driveway. The horse bolted and Robin was thrown out, either the wheels or the horse’s hooves running over his head.