14

The Most Hated Man in Australia

Serial killer Frederick Deeming’s crimes surfaced on 3 March 1892, when police investigated a smell at a house in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor. Embedded in cement beneath a hearthstone of the fireplace in the unoccupied dwelling they found the decomposing body of a woman aged about 30. Her throat was cut. She had been dead for about three months.

Detective Sergeants William Considine and Henry Cawsey were assigned to the case. They checked out the previous tenant, a man named Druin. Local tradespeople came forward with a description of the missing man. An ironmonger who had delivered some cement, a broom, a trowel and a spade to Mr Druin described him as being in his mid-30s, fair-haired, with a fair to reddish beard and a large moustache. He was of medium height and slight build, wore jewellery, and spoke loudly with a Lancashire accent.

Tracing a torn luggage ticket they found in the house, the detectives found that Druin had arrived in Melbourne by boat from the United Kingdom on 9 December 1891 with his young wife Emily. He had travelled under the name Albert Williams. When questioned, other passengers recalled the loud, boasting, oafish Mr Williams, a man who had bored anyone who would listen to him.

Suspecting the corpse to be Emily Williams, the detectives issued an alert for Albert Williams. A week later, an employee of a shipping company reported seeing a man fitting the description boarding a vessel that sailed from Melbourne to Perth on 23 January. The man had travelled under the name Baron Swanston.

Swanston wasn’t hard to find. In the small goldmining settlement of Southern Cross, 400 kilometres east of Perth, where he had taken a job as an engineer, his jewellery, clothes, moustache and accent stood out. The day after the remains of Emily Williams were laid to rest, a trooper wired the detectives in Melbourne to tell them the man was locked up. By this time, Considine and Cawsey knew his correct name – Frederick Bailey Deeming.

Deeming had arrived from England in 1881. In 1885 he was in Sydney, operating a gasfitting shop and living with his English wife, Marie, and their two baby daughters in Petersham. Those who knew Deeming at the time said that when his shop mysteriously burned down and the insurance money fell short of covering his bills, he resorted to petty theft.

The people who remembered the Deemings recalled his wife as being nothing like the woman who was found dead in Windsor. With Deeming awaiting extradition to Melbourne, the detectives set about locating the missing Mrs Deeming and children. Their only lead was a crumpled invitation to a dinner given by Albert Williams at the Commercial Hotel, Rainhill, 14 kilometres east of Liverpool, England.

Considine and Cawsey sent a telegram to the Lancashire police asking them to investigate the dinner and locate Albert Williams. Inquiries led them to the Rainhill newsagency, which was owned and operated by a Mrs Mather. She turned out to be the mother of Emily (Williams) Deeming, the woman who had been found under the fireplace in the house in Windsor.

Mrs Mather explained that she also ran a letting agency in the village. Her daughter had met Mr Williams, who fit the description of Deeming, in October 1891 when he rented a house named Dineham Villa for his employer, a Colonel Brooks, said to be arriving from India shortly. The colonel never arrived.

While waiting for his employer to turn up, Williams lived at the local Commercial Hotel and held court at the bar each night, telling tales of his adventures.

Emily Mathers fell for him. They married on 22 September 1891. Williams threw a lavish reception, then the couple departed for Australia, where they intended to spend their honeymoon. He left a trail of unpaid bills in his wake.

But there was word around Rainhill that a woman and children were living at Dineham Villa. A neighbour spoke of talking to a boy and girl one afternoon. Before he could find out anything, the children were called inside by a woman.

There had been other sightings of the woman and children, but now they seemed to have vanished. Police visited Dineham Villa, and were confronted by the stench of death. They retched as they made their way to the source of the smell. They pulled the fireplace apart with crowbars and shovels, then removed the hearthstones – and found the bodies of a woman and two children (a boy and a girl). The corpses were wrapped in oilcloth. The woman lay on her back; the children were face down, one on either side of her.

When the smell didn’t abate, they dug further, and discovered another two children embedded in cement. One body was an infant; the other was another girl, lying at the woman’s feet.

The woman and the 9-year-old female, the older girl, had been strangled. The others had had their throats cut. Police found a book with the bodies; in it, the name Deeming had been crossed out and the name Williams had been added.

Two days later, at the Rainhill inquest, two men from Liverpool came forward and identified the woman, formerly Marie James, and the children as being the wife and family of their brother, Frederick Deeming. They had brought them all back from Australia to England months earlier.

They explained to police that their brother was a cockney, born in London on 30 July 1853. As a young man he was a ship’s purser, and his travels took him to many parts of the world. He married Marie James, of Birkenhead, England, in 1881. The two girls, Bertha and Mary, were born in Sydney. In the mid-1880s the Deeming family spent time in South Africa. Their third child, a boy named Sydney, was born at sea.

Deeming and his family returned to England in 1890, and a baby girl named Leala was born at Birkenhead. After a brief stay with his brothers, Deeming and his family disappeared, obviously to nearby Rainhill, where it seemed Deeming kept them under wraps at Dineham Villa while playing the eligible bachelor in town.

Then, it seemed, he met Emily Mather and decided he had no use for his wife and four young children any more. He murdered them, then entered into a bigamous marriage with Mather and took her to Australia, where it appeared he murdered her as well.

Deeming left Southern Cross in the charge of three armed constables for the five-day train trip to Perth. On the journey he fainted twice and could not eat or sleep.

On 24 March 1892, Deeming’s extradition hearing took place in Perth. He appeared haggard and thin and during the proceedings held frequent conferences with his counsel.

Back in Melbourne on 2 April 1892, he was formally charged with the murder of Emily Williams. When asked his name he refused to answer: he was charged as Albert Williams.

Deeming’s trial began in Melbourne on 2 May 1892. His defence was that he was not guilty on the grounds of insanity. But though he had been examined by six doctors, none could say he was insane.

The trial took four days. Doctors suggested that he suffered epileptic fits. He was certainly infected with venereal disease, and this may have impaired his mind. He claimed his dead mother had told him to kill Emily Mather, and that he had sometimes been overwhelmed by an irresistible impulse to slaughter the current lady in his life. A prison doctor said Deeming had told him that several times he had gone out with a revolver searching for women who had given him VD, intending to kill them.

It took the jury 40 minutes to find Frederick Bailey Deeming guilty of the murder of his second wife Emily. The judge then sentenced him to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.

At dawn on the bleak morning of 23 May 1892, the day of Deeming’s execution, a huge crowd gathered outside Old Melbourne Gaol. But they were not there to protest an execution, as was usually the case. They were there to celebrate the death of the beast.

When the first of the witnesses filed through the jail gates and announced that Deeming was dead, the crowd let out a roar of approval that could be heard for miles around.