My Mother, a Serial Killer Read online

  DEDICATION

  I would like to dedicate this book to my husband,

  Bill, who my whole life has shown me love

  and support; to my children, who lost out on a lot

  of regular family life because of the many trips

  to court over a period of five years; to my many

  friends who stood by me through thick and

  thin and made sure that I always felt their love

  and support, which kept me going; and to my

  co author, Janet Fife-Yeomans, who has made all

  this real. I think she has really nailed it.

  — Hazel Baron

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 Ted Baron

  2 Dulcie and Harry

  3 Sam Overton

  4 Tommy Tregenza

  5 Hazel

  6 Mr and Mrs Pill

  7 Ray Kelly

  8 Del Fricker

  9 Judge and Jury

  10 Margaret and Allan Baron

  11 Ruby

  12 Doulsie Bodsworth

  Epilogue

  Photos Section

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  ‘WOMAN ON THREE MURDER CHARGES!’ THE PAPERBOY SHOUTED as the cars pulled up at the traffic lights on Sydney’s busy Crown Street.

  Hazel Baron didn’t need to see the headlines on Monday afternoon’s Daily Mirror to know who they were written about. She didn’t need to see the photograph of the alleged killer on the front page to know who she was. It was her mother.

  In true tabloid fashion, the front page was almost entirely taken up by the photograph. A woman on one murder charge would always guarantee such a spread, never mind a woman accused of being a triple killer. Dressed in a conservative overcoat, gloves and hat, despite the heat of the December day, Hazel Dulcie Bodsworth, fifty-two, had been snapped as she was led by detectives from Sydney Airport. She looked every inch the respectable middle-aged woman, not a hair out of place, not a stray emotion. But Dulcie, as she was known, and her scandalously young husband Henry William Bodsworth, nineteen years her junior, had been extradited from Melbourne to face Sydney’s Central Local Court. Dulcie was charged with murdering three men, Henry with murdering one of them ‘with his wife’.

  Hazel Baron was terrified, exhilarated and nauseated, all at once.

  ‘Read all about it!’ the paperboy shouted through the passenger window, trying to sell another copy.

  ‘No thanks,’ Hazel said, shaking her head in a quick way that was little more than a shiver.

  Her husband, Bill, looked over at her from the driver’s seat and asked her: ‘Are you all right? Did you see Dulcie?’

  Hazel cradled her arms tighter around the two-week-old baby boy she and Bill had just collected from Crown Street Women’s Hospital. In 1964, there were no laws banning babies from the front seat of a car. A few weeks earlier, the couple had applied to adopt another much-wanted child as a sibling for their daughter. They had been told the wait would be about two years and expected it to be even longer as their rural town, Wilcannia, was way back in the northwest of New South Wales almost 1000 kilometres from Sydney. But here they were leaving the state’s largest maternity hospital to drive home with their six-pound bundle of joy on the very day the whole city was talking about Dulcie Bodsworth, the triple murderer. Talk about joy and despair colliding. The young mother looked down at her new baby and a strange feeling of peace came over her. In the busy traffic, she had an ‘out of body’ feeling. It was as though she had been tapped on the shoulder by a spirit or an angel.

  No one who knew Hazel would think of her as religious; she even described herself as a bit of a rough diamond at times. Religion, she always thought, was personal and better kept under wraps, but at that moment, she felt that if she put her faith in God, she knew she would cope. She felt that God was looking after her and had given her the baby at the right time.

  ‘Hazel.’ Bill’s voice dragged her back to reality on that day, 8 December 1964. ‘Did you see Dulcie?’

  Hazel turned and, very calmly, said: ‘Yes.’

  The truth wasn’t always nice but it was always the truth. The truth was that it was Hazel who had dobbed her mother in. The truth was that she knew her mother would have kept on killing if she had not been caught.

  But the courage it had taken Hazel to step forward was ebbing away as the reality hit, splashed across the front page of a newspaper. Bill was her tower of strength, the rock she could always lean on, but it was Hazel who would have to stand up in court and give evidence against her mother and her stepfather if they pleaded not guilty. Even worse was how terrified she felt at how Dulcie would react when she found out Hazel was behind it. Or if Dulcie was acquitted and freed.

  In the heat of that summer day, Hazel was happy about her new baby and scared about her mother’s fate, sweating and shivering, all at the same time.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TED BARON

  HAZEL BARON WAS NINE WHEN SHE FIRST SUSPECTED HER mother was a murderer.

  The tall gangly schoolgirl with short curly hair who wore long socks, wool skirts which came to below her knees and heavy knitted sweaters was already the keeper of too many of her mother’s secrets.

  Don’t tell your dad about this. Don’t tell your dad about that. Don’t tell him about the sneaky hours in the dark on the big back seat of the family’s American-built Nash car with young Harry, nineteen years her mother’s junior. Harry was only supposed to be ‘helping with the kids’. As a kid herself, Hazel did what she was told and never even considered telling on her mum. Dulcie was also quick with her right hand to dish out a slap or worse. In those days, no one questioned using corporal punishment to keep children in line.

  Looking back, Hazel’s suspicions should have been aroused on the night when her mother, Dulcie, then known as Hazel Dulcie Baron, gave the kids warm milk and Aspro tablets before bed. It was the first time in their lives that Hazel, her brother Allan, eight, and the five-year-old twins, Margaret and Jim, had been given warm milk to drink. Dulcie wasn’t much of a mollycoddling mother, treating her four children more like mini grown-ups. But this had been a big day, she said, and the milk and Aspros would help them sleep. Her attention made them all feel special for a change.

  It was the dying days of the winter of 1950 and the Baron family’s home was two old army tents made out of heavy green canvas set up on the northern bank of the Murray River. The breeze coming off the water made the night air even chillier but Dulcie never seemed to feel the cold. As the kids sat with their blankets around themselves, keeping warm by the campfire, Dulcie just pulled the cardigan she wore over her dress closer to her chest. It was quiet and dark as she heated the milk in a pan over the burning logs, the only light the sparks flying up. The ribbons of smoke twisted into the air like ghost gums along the riverbanks. Hazel could just make out the outlines of their two tents a few metres away at the edge of their camp.

  Hazel didn’t know where the tents had come from; they just turned up. Dulcie was a wonderful storyteller and she rarely let the facts get in the way. Hazel figured her mum had probably charmed someone with one of her hard-luck stories, of which she had many; she had them all down pat and they were invariably successful. In the 1940s she had done her bit for the war effort, cooking for the soldiers who were training for the army at Bonegilla army camp in northeast Victoria near Wodonga while the family lived nearby. In 1947, Bonegilla had become Australia’s first migrant reception centre and Hazel thought her mum had probably hustled the tents from there as army surplus. Even now, at forty-one, Dulcie could really turn it on. That persuasive little-g
irl-lost routine, all helpless and in need of a man to save her — it never failed.

  As it turned out, it was the men who needed to be saved from her.

  The family had pitched their tents about a month earlier on the flat lands of Buronga, on the New South Wales side of the river, which faced the Victorian town of Mildura. Their closest neighbours were other nomadic families living in similar post-World War II straitened circumstances in tents further along the riverbank. Dulcie was pleasant to them; she cared what other people thought about her and she liked to be liked. She always had a smile and a hello when they passed each other, but that was as far as it went. She preferred to keep herself to herself and told the kids to do the same. Mind what you say. Careful what you tell people. Wherever they went, Dulcie built fences around them with smiles and reassurances.

  Hazel already suspected that their family might not be quite normal but she really had nothing to compare it with. Everyone had their secrets, didn’t they?

  There wasn’t much to do at night in the bush when home was a tent without a light so this night, as on all the others, it was early to bed. There were no luxuries in their lives but they never wanted for the basics. Wooden crates were used to stack clothes and beds were mattresses on the tarpaulin floor. The two girls, Hazel and Margaret, shared a double mattress in one corner of the tent while the boys slept head to toe on a single mattress in another corner. Ever resourceful, Dulcie would reuse the hessian bags which in those days were used for flour and sugar; she stitched them together into what were called waggas, but because they were too scratchy to use as blankets on their own, they had to be covered in material from the op shop. If she couldn’t get pieces of cloth large enough to cover them in one go, Dulcie got the cheapest dresses, unstitched them so she didn’t lose any of the cloth and hand-stitched patchwork covers for the bags. They were the cheapest doonas and common among shearers and families like the Barons doing it tough.

  Dulcie could conjure up anything from nothing, just like the tents. And the truth.

  The reason for the warm milk and Aspros was snoring on a stretcher bed near the tent flap. Wednesday, 30 August 1950, had been a big day because their dad, Ted Baron, forty-eight, had come home from hospital.

  The once-powerful railway ganger, who had led teams of tough men doing hard graft across New South Wales and Victoria, was just a shadow of himself. He had arrived at camp that afternoon in a taxi from Mildura Base Hospital, over the Murray River Bridge and down to Buronga. Dulcie had been dutifully visiting him every day for the two weeks her husband was in Mildura Hospital and when he told her that he wanted to go home with her, she seemed suitably thrilled.

  Ted couldn’t really afford a taxi fare but, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, he could hardly get around, even with a walking stick. He had had a tough time of it for a few years, in and out of hospitals in various towns as doctors tried all sorts of treatments, including the new-fangled ‘gold injections’ which were supposed to help the pain and swelling in his hands, feet and legs but to which Ted had an adverse reaction. There was no cure for his condition and he knew it was only going to get worse, something he accepted in a matter-of-fact way as people did in those days, at least the people he knew. You didn’t expect too much from life and took what was given you. Ted was a no-nonsense conservative fellow, not the kind of man to make a fuss.

  Ted was still tall at six feet two inches and wore his only suit, a dark brown one, with the pants held up with braces. He would never wear a belt, believing the only ‘proper’ pants were ones with braces. But despite the braces, the jacket and pants that had once fitted his big frame were now hanging loose. His illness, coupled with typical hospital food, had stripped about a stone from what had been a fifteen-stone frame. But Ted was still a handsome man, his high forehead and hair that was still dark and curly making him look younger than his years even as the pain in his gnarled hands and feet never receded.

  He didn’t like that he had been a bit of a poor excuse for a dad in recent years. The twins had barely known him when he had been able to chase them, give them piggybacks and pick them up and tickle them till they cried as he had with Hazel and Allan. The two oldest remembered the jokes he would tell, never in bad taste, never using a swear word, but oh so funny.

  He had provided well for them until he couldn’t work any longer. Hazel never knew how her mum and dad met but when he and Dulcie married in 1940, they had a house on Route Road, Wodonga, before they moved to John Street, Beechworth, the only real home Hazel remembered. Her dad had painted the outside of the house green and the green front door opened onto a white hallway with four bedrooms off it. Their only warmth came from a kerosene heater in the kitchen and there was always a bottle of kerosene on the bench. By the time the 1949 census came around, Ted, to his own shame, had to list himself as ‘unemployed’. Dulcie told the census-taker she was on ‘home duties’, as did a lot of women of the day. As the rent money dried up that year, the family moved into a caravan at Wangaratta. The tents were the final step as they slipped into poverty. Now he couldn’t even put food on the table for them. But they were still his world, all he had, and he loved them dearly. He had a broad smile on his face as he ambled towards his four children that day when he came home from the hospital.

  The kids had got used to their dad being in hospital and they surrounded him and walked him back to the camp. While they were happy to see him, their welcome couldn’t rival that of Ted’s dog, Toby, an Australian terrier, who threw himself at his master, whirling in circles at Ted’s feet and whimpering with excitement.

  Dulcie was kindness incarnate to her husband that afternoon, fussing over him and making sure he was comfortable, much to young Hazel’s surprise. She gave Hazel and Allan some change and sent them to the corner shop at the end of the gravel road along the riverbank to get the milk and Aspros. Money was always tight and milk was a real treat in itself; they usually drank their tea black. For two shillings (around 20c today), they could buy a loaf of bread and enough hot chips to make chip sandwiches for them all. A family feast. Most nights, dinner was stew made from cheap cuts of meat that were only edible once they had been cooked slowly over the fire or in the camp oven.

  Hazel and her brothers and sister never saw their growing up as being poor; they didn’t know they had been living in poverty for over twelve months. They just took it in their stride, as kids do. On the other side of the river, the lights of Mildura twinkled in the distance. Even in 1950 Mildura was classed as a city. While to the locals it still seemed like a big country town, to the four Baron children it seemed as big a city as Sydney or Melbourne and they hadn’t even dreamt of going there. No one they knew had ever been as far as the capital cities.

  Their campsite was about as basic as it got with a folding camp table to eat meals off and oil drums or logs as chairs. The public toilets were a fair walk away and when they needed water for the kettle or to wash and the water tank was empty, the kids just walked the five metres from the tents to the river with a bowl to scoop up the water and bring it back. Their mum always told them to watch what they were doing because the Murray was not only murky and wide, it was deep, especially in August of 1950, swollen with the rains from what had been the wettest winter for years. The river was running about three-quarters full but it was still almost four metres deep in the middle, she warned, at least that deep.

  He might have been crippled with arthritis but Ted Baron wasn’t stupid. Harry, real name Henry Bodsworth, was still hanging around their camp. Harry, twenty-two, had joined their little family at the start of the year during Ted’s bouts in hospitals, first in Wangaratta and then in Albury. He had helped them move to the Murray, piling their belongings on a trailer that Dulcie towed behind their big, black car, the old Nash with running boards, even as Ted was back in hospital in Albury.

  Harry looked more like sixteen than twenty-two and was prone to the giggles, which kept Dulcie entertained no end. He made Hazel feel like the grown-up of the family. To
give him his due, he was young and healthy enough to work hard. He also had no idea how old Dulcie really was because she had been lying about her age for years. When she married Ted Baron in 1940, she listed her age on their marriage certificate as twenty-six — when she was really thirty-one — and those five years she shaved off her age followed her through life.

  ‘He’s got no family and no home,’ Dulcie told Ted. And anyway, because of his illness, Ted wasn’t around to be the breadwinner and while Dulcie did some cleaning for cash in hand, they needed the money Harry brought in when he got a job here and there. Ted didn’t like the situation that Dulcie had created. He tried to stand up to her and he knew he should have done more about it but pain had robbed him of most of his resolve. He rarely raised his voice to Dulcie and was never much of a match for her when she began. In the end, Dulcie always got her own way.

  Ted slouched on the bed soon after arriving back at camp while Dulcie fussed and fluffed about. He may well have wondered what he had done to deserve it but all he could think of was that if he went to sleep, the pain would go away. It was the only comfort he got these days. Dulcie suggested he turn in for the night before the kids did. She told him to stay in what was usually her bed, a camp bed on legs in the kids’ tent, and she would take one of the thin shearer’s mattresses on the floor. Ted got no rest without sleeping tablets, even though they made him snore. As he lay in bed, Dulcie brought him one of their best china teacups full of water so he could wash them down. She pulled the wagga up around his neck and tucked him in at 6 pm.

  He was sound asleep when the kids got into their beds. Hazel bent down and gave his lined cheek a kiss but he didn’t move. As for the kids, the warm milk and Aspros had the desired effect and they slept like logs.

  Hazel’s mum shook her awake the next morning. The flap to the tent was ajar, the shaft of light showing that her dad’s bed was empty. Dulcie was bending over her, her face all teary: ‘Hazel, Hazel. Your father’s gone. He wasn’t here when I woke up. I think he fell in the river and drowned last night.’