17

The Mysterious Eugenie Fellini

In 1912 Annie Birkett was working as housekeeper for the local medical practitioner at Wahroonga, on Sydney’s north shore. She was a widow in her early 30s, with an 11-year-old son named Harry. She saved her money and aimed to buy her own small business – she looked forward to the independence it would bring.

The doctor’s coachman, Harry Crawford, was sallow and slightly built. He kept to himself in his room above the stable and had a sullen disposition. He also had a love of whisky. When he drank, Crawford changed from withdrawn and taciturn to bitter and violent.

Before long, Crawford took a shine to the widow, though Annie was unimpressed by the hard-drinking man and his unpleasant mood swings. Still, Crawford persisted with his advances and slowly gained favour – a fact that probably had more to do with a lack of other suitors than with any actual attraction on Annie’s behalf.

By 1914, the widow had saved enough money to buy a small confectionery shop in the inner-west suburb of Balmain. Harry Crawford would come to visit on his days off. He bought flowers, gifts – and eventually a marriage proposal. Annie accepted, and within weeks Crawford moved into the back of the little shop. The former workmates were now husband and wife.

Over the next few years, business at the confectionery shop went well, but Annie’s home life left little to be desired. Crawford drank continuously and bludged off her. Annie openly accused him of using her, but this did nothing to change anything. The pair fought regularly. Crawford flat out refused to work. He made even less effort to get on with young Harry. Then one day, out of the blue, he brought home his 16-year-old daughter from another marriage. Annie had no idea the child even existed. Without any consultation, this dark-haired, moody girl, Josephine, moved in with them – four people under one tiny roof.

Months passed and Josephine became more withdrawn. She stayed out until all hours and refused to answer to her stepmother. Annie eventually sold the shop and took her son to live at her sister’s place in Kogarah. But Crawford’s persistent ways soon had the family of four back living together again, this time in Drummoyne. What followed was a period of relative calm, though Annie one day noted to a neighbour that she had found out ‘something very weird about Harry’.

Then one day late in September 1917, 16-year-old Harry Birkett returned home from a holiday camp to find his mother gone. Crawford told him that they had fought and his mother had gone to stay with friends in North Sydney. He assured the young boy that there was nothing to worry about. But before Harry saw his mother again, Crawford sold all their furniture, sent Josephine to board in the city, and moved himself and his stepson to lodgings in Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo. The landlady, a German woman named Mrs Schieblich, was immediately suspicious of the pair.

Just weeks after moving into Cathedral Street, at his stepfather’s urging, Harry followed Crawford up to nearby William Street, where they caught the Watson’s Bay tram. It was early evening and raining – a strange night to be going anywhere, Harry thought. But after all this time he knew better than to ask questions when Crawford was drunk. The pair got off the tram at Double Bay and made their way along the harbour foreshore. Crawford took regular swigs from his liquor bottle while they walked.

They eventually stopped at a lonely patch of scrub. Crawford then unwrapped a shovel from a parcel he had brought with him. Harry stood terrified, blinking rain from his eyes, as Crawford started to dig a hole. The longer Crawford dug the long, shallow pit, the more Harry’s fear increased. He soon realised Crawford’s hole was a grave, and he had a good idea who it was being dug for.

No one is quite sure what happened next. Perhaps Harry pleaded for his young life with enough urgency to break through Crawford’s alcoholic haze, or maybe the stepfather had a pang of conscience. Whatever the case, he suddenly dropped the spade, grabbed the boy by the arm and headed back home.

Not so lucky, however, was the dead woman who had been found by two young boys in bushland in Lane Cove, on Sydney’s north shore, a couple of weeks previously. The fact that she was a woman was about all that could be discerned from her charred remains. It seemed that the victim had been hit over the head with a bottle and thrown onto a bonfire while still breathing. Police were unable to identify the corpse. All they had to go on was a greenstone pendant, which they removed from around her neck. Near the murder scene they also found a piece of gaberdine, a pair of black stockings and a pair of shoes.

The only witness was a local woman who, while out walking on the day the body was found, came across a man sitting on a rock with his head in his hands. He walked away when he saw the woman.

Back at their Cathedral Street lodgings, Harry asked nothing about the grave-shaped hole his stepfather had dug at Double Bay. But Mrs Schieblich was becoming increasingly suspicious of Crawford: all he had told her was that his wife had deserted him. She found it hard to muster sympathy for someone who was drunk most of the time and who once, while drunk, had confided to her that he cared little for his stepson.

Crawford’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. One night he rushed from his room, screaming that it was haunted. Mrs Schieblich admonished Crawford and said she thought it was his wife that was haunting him, and that was probably because he had killed her.

As Crawford’s mental health deteriorated, he packed Harry off to live with his aunt in Kogarah. Like her nephew, she had not heard from her sister for weeks and, when Harry arrived, she quizzed him about what exactly had been going on. The boy’s answers raised her suspicions.

Meanwhile, Mrs Schieblich came to the conclusion that she didn’t want an alcoholic under her roof – especially one she believed to be a murderer. She devised a plan to get the lodger to move out. One evening, when Crawford returned from a rare day of work, she told him that two detectives had called around to the house looking for him. The plan worked. Crawford disappeared in the early hours of the following morning.

Not long after he left, Mrs Schieblich’s fictitious scenario became reality. Annie’s sister had reported that Annie Birkett/Crawford was missing. Two detectives traced Crawford to Woolloomooloo. Mrs Schieblich had to tell them that she had no idea where he had gone. She then told the detectives about her tenant’s irregular behaviour. She noted that even though Crawford could neither read nor write, he became agitated when he saw a photo in the newspaper of the shoes found near the charred body. She also directed the detectives to a youth a few doors down. He told them Crawford would ask him to read him items from the newspaper. The items invariably related to murder. The boy explained how, one day, he read out a piece about a badly burnt body that had been found in the bush at Lane Cove. He described to police how Crawford just muttered to himself, ‘That’s her. That’s her.’

Despite their efforts, authorities still couldn’t locate Crawford. They had no trouble finding his daughter Josephine though, and what she told them blew the case wide open. Harry Crawford, Josephine explained, was not her father: he was her mother.

Josephine told authorities how, as a child, she had arrived in Sydney with her ‘father’, or the person she believed to be her father, who claimed to be a widower. She said he placed her in the care of a childless Italian couple called De Anglis in Double Bay. Mrs De Anglis doted on the young girl as if she were her own child. At the same time, the couple came to despise the illiterate drunk of a father, who only occasionally turned up to offer a few shillings for child support.

The De Anglises eventually separated, possibly due to Mr De Anglis’s resentment over his wife’s total devotion to the girl, and he returned to Italy. After that, Mrs De Anglis and Josephine had a tough time. They supported themselves with cleaning jobs. But when Crawford realised that his daughter was now old enough to earn a wage, he started to turn up regularly at the Double Bay residence demanding that she return to live with him. Mrs De Anglis and Josephine resisted his demands, but Crawford was persistent – and increasingly violent. Then Mrs De Anglis died unexpectedly. Josephine had no choice but to return to her father.

When Josephine got older, she learnt the truth about her father/mother. The two lived with an unspoken agreement: Crawford had told her daughter that she would rather kill herself than be found out, and so Josephine helped keep the bizarre family secret.

With this shocking new information, detectives were finally able to put the pieces together. Annie Birkett’s sister identified the greenstone pendant as belonging to Annie. They then had a dentist confirm that a dental plate found on the corpse fitted the dimensions of one supplied to Annie. However, detectives also knew that there was no use looking for a ‘Mr Crawford’; they believed their suspect had probably switched back to her original sex. The trail went cold.

By 1919, two years after the death of Annie Birkett, Harry Crawford had taken another bride. S/he was living under an assumed name with this new wife. But by early September 1920, detectives managed to track Harry down. Once in custody, the complicated story of Harry Crawford became clearer. Harry’s real name, it transpired, was Eugenie Fellini. She was born in Italy on 25 July 1876. As a child, the tomboy immigrated to New Zealand with her parents. At the age of 16, wearing boy’s clothes, Eugenie Fellini signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship to sail through the Pacific Islands. Even surrounded by rough seamen and living in confined quarters, Eugenie managed to keep her gender a secret.

Soon she struck up a friendship with a fellow Italian crewman named Martello. The two enjoyed talking in their native tongue. They were shipmates for several years, and at some stage Martello discovered his friend’s secret. When Eugenie finally signed off the ship in Australia, she was pregnant.

In the early 1900s, society had little empathy for single mothers. Eugenie realised that if she became a man again, she could avoid the ‘fallen woman’ tag – and she could also earn more money as a male. And so ‘Harry Crawford’ made his way into the life of Annie Birkett and her son Harry.

Chief Justice Sir William Cullen presided over the trial. Eugenie Fellini appeared dressed in woman’s clothes and pleaded not guilty. The jury took two hours to come to the decision that Annie Birkett had been murdered by the woman standing in the dock, the woman who had posed as her husband. Eugenie Fellini was sentenced to death. But after an appeal the sentence was commuted to life in prison.

After serving just over 10 years, Eugenie Fellini was released in February 1931. She remained in Sydney, and for the next seven years ran a boarding house in Paddington under the name of Mrs Ford. On 10 June 1938, at the age of 63, she was run over by a car and killed while crossing the road.