IN the afternoon sun, the boys lay facedown on the decking, their eyes straining to see through the finger-wide gaps in its construction. The old Punt Road landing stage, on its framework of struts, was like a sieve, the underside snagging all kinds of debris and rubbish from the brown, choked Yarra. With recent rain, the river’s level had lifted and now it slapped and sucked below the lads like a taunting thing. They prodded it with sticks, glimpsing an old boot and something else, floating: a parcel wrapped and tied with string like a present. It was 5 pm on a fine autumn day: 4 April 1917, the Wednesday before Easter.
Johnny Carson, thirteen, ran his stick between two wooden planks, guiding the object free. It bobbed there below him at the base of the staging: ‘ … a baby … dressed’, a comforter in its mouth, a tiny bonnet tied to its head—but wrapped from waist to throat in brown paper bound with string.
Seeing bricklayer Bill Morrall walking home, the boys called out to him. He came over and took Carson’s stick ‘and with it landed the body on the bank’.
The case was allocated to Detective Sergeant Richard Keily, fifty-six, who was an old salt in the CIB. His tactics were decidedly ‘old school’—which is to say ‘schooled’ only by what he, a labourer before joining the force in 1886, had witnessed from his peers and supervisors throughout his policing career. He had a reputation for being shrewd with suspects and ruthless when he had to be. He closed his cases one way or another.
At the morgue, Keily watched as coroner’s surgeon, Dr Mollison, untied the string and removed the paper from around the infant’s body. The doctor itemised the clothing: a knitted cap, a white gown, a longer flannel gown with scalloped edges which was ‘turned up at the end over the feet’, a woollen vest and two nappies, one grey flannel, the other white, one soiled with yellow faeces. A flannel binder was pinned round the body†, a bib pinned under the chin; and the comforter, when taken from between the child’s lips, was found to be tied by a white ribbon to the band of the white gown. The garments were secured with seven safety pins.
It was the body of a male child, about a month old, 57 centimetres in length. Being ‘considerably swollen … from decomposition’, its weight was almost 3½ kilograms. Discoloured skin was peeling from the hands and face. When he opened the scalp, Mollison found bruising ‘on the top and side of the head. The left parietal bone was broken into numerous pieces. The brain had been converted … into a thick, dark red fluid … The other organs of the body were undergoing decomposition but appeared free from disease’.
There was also bruising—bleeding into the tissues—at the base of the skull. Noting the bruising was important as it indicated that the fatal violence occurred in life and that the skull fractures were not, for example, the result of river currents subsequently tossing the body against bridge stanchions. The baby was dead before it reached the river.
‘This child was murdered,’ said Keily, assigning Detectives Piggott, Ashton and Federli to assist him. But where to start?
‘Clueless murders are extremely rare,’ Piggott later reflected. ‘Often, however, the lead is so slender as to be almost baffling …’ The constabulary had made their inquiries. No one had reported a baby missing and no one had found any weapon with which the child’s head might have been injured.
The detectives examined the only evidence they had—the child’s clothing. ‘It was of poor quality …’ recalled Piggott, ‘nothing distinctive about it.’ The garments were the same as sold in shops anywhere in Australia. ‘But there was one ray of hope.’ On the baby’s white nappy ‘… we could just discern the letter “T”’ in faded black marking ink.† ‘It was either a laundry mark or the initial or first letter of a name.’
Piggott also noted a pink discolouration like a fabric dye on the white gown—not a traceable clue in any practical sense, but he would keep it in mind. ‘That blurred letter “T” became the sole clue.’ And a slender clue it was.
The dead baby could have come from anywhere in Victoria, even Australia. In the first decades of the twentieth century, home-births were not uncommon. A midwife might have attended, but not all midwives were registered. Some women could not afford to have a doctor present, or to enter a hospital for childbirth.
‘Illegitimate’ babies—that is to say, children born out of wedlock—posed particular difficulties for their parents because of the moral shame, endemic to this period of history, attached to single motherhood.
Lapses in the era’s enforceable record keeping—birth registrations and the licensing of midwives and nurses, for example—meant someone wanting to kill and dump an unwanted baby had a better chance of passing undetected in the Melbourne of 1917 than today.
Keily enlisted the aid of the press. Newspapers reported that the body was found fully clothed and that ‘one garment bore the initial “T”’.
Meanwhile, Piggott and Ashton plotted points on a map. They placed the old river staging at the centre of a circle whose radius covered central Melbourne. Beginning with the official registrations, they assembled a list of ‘every maternity hospital and maternity home, public or private’ in central and outlying Melbourne. Years later Piggott told Herald journalist Hugh Buggy that a bigger list was being assembled, to include all the suburbs if necessary. The detectives faced the ‘task of canvassing every one of them’—in person—‘in the hope of the piece of calico bearing the “T” being recognised’.
On Saturday 7 April, Piggott called at a house in Albert Street, East Melbourne, where nurse Edith Broberg ran a private hospital specialising in childbirth. Asked if she could recall anyone who had recently left with a baby, she answered that, as it was a maternity hospital, the question could apply to any number of her cases. She was guarded with Piggott, not eager to court adverse publicity and certainly not about to impugn one of her patients mistakenly. ‘I showed her our one and only clue,’ Piggott recalled, ‘—the piece of calico bearing the letter “T”.’
After a pause, she said ‘Come in’, and admitted Piggott to her office, where she faced him across her desk. ‘I remember,’ she said, ‘I did see a piece of calico with a “T” on it. Have you any other of the child’s clothes?’
Piggott reached into his satchel and withdrew a parcel containing the other items. ‘I recognise the gown,’ Broberg said, ‘because of the pink stain. It was put into the copper and the dye came into the gown and we could not remove it.’ She also identified the flannel gown with its scalloped edge, saying she recognised it because ‘I bought it myself’.
The nurse remembered that the child ‘was a very healthy baby’. However, she said, ‘The young woman has gone and taken her baby with her.’ The father, a young man who worked in the country, had called to see the woman while she was at the house and they had left together one afternoon in mid-March. She knew them by the name of Thompson, the mother’s Christian name being Millie.
Broberg had another piece of information: Millie was very weakened by the birth and had been unwell; so much so that, on the day of the infant’s baptism at St Patrick’s Cathedral, she did not attend. In the absence of the father and of any other family members, Nurse Broberg had taken the child to the ceremony on Millie’s behalf. In this context she had learned that Millie’s maiden name was Berger.
From faint clues, these were valuable developments. A ‘careful canvass’ of boarding houses and family hotels gave Piggott his next lead:
At the Melbourne Coffee Palace … a young couple who gave the name of Thompson had stayed a couple of nights. Their descriptions tallied with those given me by … [Nurse Broberg]. But no one at the coffee palace had seen a baby with the couple, who had vanished completely. We had reached this point: The murdered baby had disappeared some time between the departure of the Thompsons from the … maternity hospital and the period when the same couple stayed at the … coffee palace. Our minds swung back to the name Berger …
A search of the federal electoral rolls delivered the name of only one Millicent Berger; she was aged twenty-four and lived in Traralgon, Gippsland.
Detective Federli was dispatched to make inquiries. He established that Berger had worked as a waitress at Traralgon’s Club Hotel but had left there in early January; also that she had been associating with Clarence Victor Sefton, a twentyfour year old railway fireman.† Sefton was still stationed at Traralgon, where he had a room at the Club Hotel. Late on the afternoon of 12 April, Keily caught the train to Gippsland and joined Federli. That night they observed Sefton in the bar of the hotel and the next morning, a little before 8 am, they confronted him in the street as he returned from posting a letter.
‘CIB,’ said Keily, introducing himself and Federli. ‘You know a girl, Millie Berger?’
‘Yes,’ answered Sefton.
‘Where is she now?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Is she your sweetheart?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know she has a baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was confined at Nurse Broberg’s place East Melbourne under the name of Mrs Thompson?’
‘You seem to know all about it,’ Sefton challenged.
‘This is a serious matter. That child has been found in the Yarra at Richmond dead and the clothing has been identified.’
‘I did nothing to it,’ answered Sefton and, according to both Keily and Federli, added: ‘and I do not know how they could identify the clothes.’ Sefton later denied the remark.
‘Well,’ said Keily. ‘We’ll go to the police station and write down what you say.’
Sefton’s first statement at the Traralgon Police Station reveals an uncooperative young man who, when not being selective with the truth, lied repeatedly. Of the matters truthful, he stated he was the father of Millie’s child; that he was not married to her; and that the name Thompson had been assumed because Millie ‘did not wish to have it known that she was a single girl having a child’. Of the lies, the most serious was his repeated claim that when he saw Millie on the previous Sunday, 8 April, ‘she had the baby in her possession’ and therefore, said Sefton, ‘it cannot be the same one as was found in the Yarra [on 4 April]’. He also said repeatedly that he had no current address for Millie and no letters from her. When his pockets were searched, however, two recent letters from Millie were found, one of which gave her present address: 121 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.
The information was ‘flashed through to headquarters’, as Piggott recalled, and he and Ashton ‘hurried out to a refreshment shop in St Kilda’ where, ordering a cup of tea, they ‘had not long to wait before a girl answering the description of the Berger girl passed across an inner doorway’. Piggott asked the shop’s owner whether there was a girl there from Gippsland. She said there was.
‘It was a painful scene,’ recalled Piggott, ‘when we sought to question this girl. She was pale and careworn and on the verge of collapse.’ She admitted to being Millie Berger and that she was working as a waitress in the shop. Even though it would have exposed her as a single mother, she said that she had considered ‘going to ask the police to find my baby’, as she missed the child so much. In answer to their questions, she gave Piggott and Ashton this story.
She met Sefton at the Club Hotel. ‘I kept company with him. We became intimate. I became pregnant …’ Sefton offered Millie an arrangement: he would pay the costs for their child’s birth if she would give it up for adoption. She had agreed but with much reticence. ‘Clarence arranged I was to go to Melbourne to a nursing home under the name of Mrs Thompson. I came to Melbourne on 6 January when I went to the People’s Palace in King Street. I left there on 26 February and went to Nurse Broberg’s …’
Next day she gave birth to a son, ‘Sefton being the father’. The child was ‘healthy and well’. To distinguish her baby’s nappies from the laundry of others at the hospital, she marked them ‘with the letter “T” in one corner’.
While at Broberg’s, Sefton visited ‘three or four times,’ Millie said, ‘and was known as Mr Thompson …. On these occasions, he saw the baby. He nursed him but did not otherwise kiss and fondle him …. He told me he would take the baby to a friend of his to be adopted …’ Between visits Sefton returned to his work at Traralgon.
Millie left Broberg’s on 16 March, but not before arranging with the nurse to have her baby baptised at the cathedral. She then moved to a boarding house just opposite Broberg’s—Rosebank—at 200 Clarendon Street, where she continued to nurse her infant, again using the name Thompson.
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, 21 March, Millie wired Sefton: ‘Come at once mother very ill. Millie.’ It was a code they had agreed on that meant she felt ‘well enough to leave Rosebank’ and was asking his assistance to move elsewhere. Next morning, Sefton showed the telegram to his foreman at Traralgon and was granted leave. He headed to Melbourne, arriving at Rosebank at 2.30 pm. ‘I have arranged with a lady in Richmond to take the baby,’ he told Millie. ‘I must go at 4.30 to see my friend about [arranging] it.’
‘Who is the lady?’ Millie wanted to know.
‘You will never know that.’
‘To whom are you going to take baby?’ she insisted.
‘A woman in Richmond as I told you,’ said Sefton, testily. ‘You don’t want it do you?’
‘I do want it,’ said Millie.
‘Why? Do you think we are going to get married?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘It has cost me quite enough already, more than my share,’ he complained.
‘The woman won’t take the baby for nothing.’
‘It would cost more for you to keep it,’ said Sefton. ‘The baby has been promised and he will have to go. I have booked a room at the Coffee Palace where you can go. I will return for you later.’ Sefton left to keep the appointment with his friend.
He returned for Millie and the child at 8 pm. ‘When he came,’ Millie remembered, ‘nothing further was said about baby.’ The child was ‘fully dressed … I had nursed him … and he went to sleep … We left Rosebank about 9 pm. Mrs Stuart [the proprietor] wished us goodbye’.
On the street it was dark and a steady drizzle was falling. Sefton said he had arranged to hand over the baby to a woman ‘at the bottom of Clarendon Street’—about 700 metres from Rosebank. Concerned, however, at being seen off by Mrs Stuart, Sefton told Millie to walk with him in the opposite direction, around the block, he carrying her dressbasket and a small case and she their son, whom she held close, covering his face against the wet night.
They went up Victoria Parade to Eades Street, which ran to the entrance of the Fitzroy Gardens. Millie was weak and felt unwell. ‘I am getting tired,’ she said. ‘I can’t walk much further.’
‘I’ll take the baby and go through the gardens.’
‘It’s too far to walk,’ she said, concerned for the child. ‘Why don’t you take a tram?’
‘It’s shorter through the gardens,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want anybody to see me with the baby.’
On the east corner of Eades and Victoria Streets they faced each other, the baby between them. Sefton held out his hands. Millie hesitated. ‘At Rosebank I was feeding baby by my breast and I gave him a drink just before we left. He was sleeping and contented when I handed him to Sefton … He had the comforter in his mouth.’
Sefton gave her the key to a room at the Melbourne Coffee Palace, telling her to go there and that he would join her in about an hour. He strode away with the child.
For a few paces Millie followed him down Eades Street until, by the light of a street lamp, she ‘watched him go through the gates into the gardens, going among the trees [where] I lost sight of him’.
Carrying her two bags, Millie caught the tram to the Coffee Palace in Bourke Street where her key admitted her to room 118.
I was in bed a good while when Sefton came to our room. He was then alone. I did not speak to him, I was too upset. He said, ‘Do you want anything to eat?’ I said, ‘No.’ We both slept together. I did not speak to him until the morning. I then said, ‘When are you going to take baby’s clothes to the woman?’ He said ‘I’m not going to take them to her at all. She has plenty [of baby clothes] and does not want them.’
Sefton asked Millie if she had any of his letters, as he wanted to destroy them. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they are in my suitcase.’ He went and took them. Millie recalled:
I was weak and I could not talk much. That morning, Friday, [Sefton] booked me into a single room … and that afternoon I was very ill. He said, ‘I have to go back to work so you will have to see a doctor or go to a private hospital.’ In the evening I got slightly better. He left for Traralgon about 4 pm.
The illness from which Millie was suffering is not made clear in the records. It might have been a deficiency of iron or folate. The role played by these nutrients—especially during pregnancy and early post-natal motherhood—was not understood in 1917.
Early the following week Millie wrote to Sefton: ‘I wish you would tell me where baby is. I am dreaming of him every night.’
Tuesday 27 March marked one month since her baby’s birth. On this day Millie walked up to the Registrar of Births in Collins Street and registered her child as Leslie Joseph Thompson. ‘I gave the name of Thompson and that I was married. I did this to shield Sefton.’
As to her illness: ‘I never got properly well. [On that Wednesday] … Dr O’Donnell was called in to see me. While attending me, he asked where my baby was and I said it was dead. I said this because I did not know where it was.’
Adding to Millie’s woes, the Melbourne Coffee Palace charged hotel rates for its rooms, so she could not stay there indefinitely. She found a room in a boarding house—the Grandview in St Kilda—and moved there on 31 March. Although it was a temporary arrangement—the Grandview would be closing over winter for refurbishment—it would do for now. She wrote to Sefton advising him of her new address and he visited the following weekend, arriving on the night of 7 April. The next day, Easter Sunday, it rained. They spent the day in Millie’s room. ‘Tell me where you took baby to?’ she asked.
‘I will never tell you that. What do you want to know for?’
‘Because I want to go and see him,’ she said. ‘I wish I had never let you take him.’
‘What could you have done with him?’
‘I could have worked for him.’
‘You would have been dead by now.’
‘I filled in the application for the baby bonus but if I don’t give his right name, I could get into trouble.’
‘Then don’t bother about it.’ Sefton took the papers.
‘You didn’t put away with him did you—with baby?’
Sefton shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t do such a thing’, he said.
‘If I can’t see him again,’ Millie whispered, ‘at least I have his photo.’
‘If you don’t get different soon, the best thing we can do is to part.’
‘Won’t I ever see baby again?’
‘Yes, all right; you will see him again,’ he relented.
‘I asked no more,’ Millie told the detectives. ‘I thought he would tell me next time he came.’ Sefton left on the Monday morning and returned to Traralgon. That he had relented brightened Millie’s outlook. She wrote an affectionate letter to him on 11 April saying she had found new lodgings:
I got a room opposite St Kilda Station … It is a baker’s shop. They let a few rooms so it shouldn’t be lonely—or at least hungry. I am paying 8/- with use of gas stove … will be glad when I am properly settled. Oh, address my letters to my proper name, Berger. I have been under disguise quite long enough … Heaps of love from Millie.
On 12 April Millie moved to this shop in Fitzroy Street, where—twenty-four hours later—she concluded her story for Piggott and Ashton: ‘I did all I could for my baby. I fed and clothed it well … I am grieved and shocked to know that my baby is dead.’ The detectives brought Millie to Russell Street headquarters to formalise her statement.
Keily and Federli had brought Sefton to Melbourne on the 6 pm train. At Traralgon they had shown him the articles of his baby’s clothing. Now Keily handed these in a parcel to Piggott, who took them to a separate room for Millie to inspect.
With one exception she identified all the garments as those her baby was wearing on the night she passed him to Sefton.
She identified the ‘square of cloth marked “T” in one corner; the white gown … [with the] pink dye stain, also the comforter and ribbon attached, which I tied onto the gown …’. Then she stopped. One item did not belong—a handkerchief with part of one corner torn away, leaving visible only the letter ‘C’. Questioned about it by Piggott, Millie replied:
‘I know that Sefton has his handkerchiefs marked [like that]. I marked a dozen for him once … putting his name C. V. Sefton in the corner in marking ink.’ But Millie was adamant: ‘When I parted with Sefton there was not a handkerchief of his about baby’s clothing.’ Piggott pressed her and Millie stated explicitly: ‘That handkerchief was not with the baby when I handed it to Sefton, and I cannot say how it comes to be among baby’s clothes.’
Indeed, Sefton’s handkerchief was not among the dead infant’s clothes. Mollison’s autopsy report of 5 April, which itemised the garments, made no reference to a pocket handkerchief. Many years later this would be acknowledged by Piggott himself. Apart from the dye stain on the gown and the letter ‘T’ on the calico nappy, ‘There was not one other mark on any of the child’s clothing’.
When Keily and Federli went through Sefton’s pockets, they found one of the handkerchiefs marked with his name. They found others when they searched his room at the Club Hotel. It would seem that Kiely’s strategy was that a similar, slightly torn handkerchief be placed among the baby’s clothes for Millie’s identification and to prompt her to disclose any thought or suspicion she may have had as to Sefton being responsible for killing her child.
Millie was then brought into the room in which Sefton was being held. The detectives watched as ‘She went straight up to the prisoner, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him and said, “Clarence what did you do with my baby?”’
‘I did nothing to it,’ he replied.
‘Did you throw him in the river?’
‘No, I would never do such a thing,’ said Sefton.
Millie was then taken from the room.
Earlier that day, Piggott had phoned Keily in Traralgon to advise that he and Ashton had located Millie and that she had told them Sefton planned to have the baby adopted.
Keily informed Sefton of Millie’s admission, including that she saw him take the child into the Fitzroy Gardens. Sefton then made his second police statement, saying that he met a man in Swanston Street who claimed to know a woman in Richmond wanting to adopt a child.
He said the man, whom he knew only as ‘Arthur’, agreed to bring the woman to a meeting in Clarendon Street, East Melbourne. At the appointed time, however, the man came alone. Sefton handed the sleeping infant to Arthur, giving him £5 and offering to pay more if the woman looked after the child.
‘This story was not accepted by the jury when Sefton was tried for murder,’ recalled Piggott. ‘We claimed that Sefton killed the child and flung it in the river.’
The trial before Chief Justice Sir John Madden took place over three days in late May. Sefton’s case was not assisted by the presence of Exhibit G—‘gent’s handkerchief with corner torn out with mark like the letter C’—submitted by Keily.
Sefton admitted his handkerchiefs were marked in one corner ‘C.V. Sefton’, but he denied this handkerchief was his and said he did not know how it came to be found among his baby’s clothes. Millie too, said it was never part of her child’s clothing.
‘I am not quite clear where in the garments it had been,’ Keily said, when questioned at the trial, ‘because I did not observe it until all the garments had been removed from the body.’
This implied the handkerchief was overlooked even by someone as scrupulous as Dr Mollison who, as well as being State Coroner’s Surgeon, was the examiner in forensic medicine at Melbourne University.
Having tendered his report on the first day of the trial, Mollison’s obligations to the court were complete—unless it chose to recall him. He was not present on the second day of the trial when Keily made his remark. The court did not pursue Keily’s vagueness, nor did it recall Mollison. Keily’s remark was simply left standing to contrast against Sefton’s denial that the handkerchief was his.
On Wednesday 30 May the jury returned a verdict of guilty. In pronouncing sentence, the Chief Justice condemned the prevalence of baby murders throughout the city, ‘the crime … not uncommon … not difficult of commission, but extremely difficult to detect’.
In fact, on the morning of 26 April 1917, the day on which Sefton was committed to stand trial, The Argus reported that the body of another male infant was found in a furnace at the Melbourne City Council’s destructor in Spencer Street, by a stoker about to light it. The body had been collected amongst rubbish by a garbage carter from somewhere in the city. Swathed only in a few rags, it too was parcelled up in paper.
‘The finding of the dead bodies of infants seemed,’ the Chief Justice continued, ‘to arouse little public attention. The coroner holds an inquiry, the police give evidence, a … verdict is recorded, and no more is heard …’ The present case, His Honour concluded, was ‘a callous, calculated crime; and the defence—invented, flimsy and incredible’. Madden sentenced Sefton to hang.
‘It may be hoped,’ wished The Argus the next day, ‘that the … sentence upon Sefton will lead to measures being adopted to stop this shocking crime.’
The work of the detectives, however, had not ended. On the middle day of the trial the Chief Justice had received an anonymous letter asserting that Sefton was innocent.
Posted in Fitzroy on 27 May, the letter began:
Before God my Maker and my Judge I make this confession. My husband must answer to God for that baby’s soul, but for the father, Clarence Victor Sefton, the man who commits him must answer to God. His life’s blood must not rest on my husband’s hand.
We are a childless couple. My husband is passionately fond of children. I have reared two children brought home to me in the same way as this one was. As soon as they are a comfort and pleasure to us, the parents claim them. Only three weeks before my last little child was taken away from me … My husband brought the little baby to me on the night in question and I told him I would not rear it for him and he must take it back to whom he got it from. He took the child away … and I never saw my husband again that night.
The letter did not influence the course of Sefton’s trial, but it demanded prompt investigation. Piggott and Detective Ashton were directed to trace the writer. ‘This woman …’ Piggott observed, ‘was not content to merely affirm that Sefton was innocent’:
She went much further and built up an ingenious story to account for the child’s death. She said that her husband had received the child from Sefton in the Fitzroy Gardens and had been given £5, but did not give Sefton their address so that the child could not be claimed from them as the others had been. When she refused to take in the child she wrote that her husband hurried off to return the baby to its parent.
The letter continued:
Hurrying through the gardens, my husband tripped and fell. He does not know whether he fell on the child or whether the child fell on its head. All he knows is that when he got up, partly stunned by the fall, the child never murmured. He picked it up and nursed it for what to him seemed a terrible time. He dared not do anything, being frightened, so he came home, got some brown paper, rolled the child’s body up and dropped it in the Yarra. I dare not sign this. If you take my husband I will never live one day longer. It was a pure accident. That man, whatever he is, and whom I don’t even know, is not guilty and speaking the truth.
During the trial Dr Mollison was cross-examined on the nature of the child’s head injuries, including whether they could be the result of an accident involving a fall or being fallen on. From a small bag, Mollison produced the fragments of the baby’s skull for the court to see. ‘The skull has been fractured by a violent blow from a hard instrument’, he said. ‘These injuries … could not be caused by a person carrying the child and falling on it. The injuries were too extensive.’ He pointed to some of the smaller pieces. ‘I do not think any fall would cause this kind of comminuted fracture.’ What then of the letter’s allegations? Piggott had doubts:
Sefton had told us that he gave the baby to a man in the Fitzroy Gardens and that that man had a wife. To my mind the letter was a rather clever elaboration of the pivot of Sefton’s defence which was available to anyone outside the case through the newspapers. Our first move was to have a glance through Sefton’s belongings.
There we found a letter from a girl which was couched in very affectionate terms. It was clear that in addition to his liaison with Miss Berger, Sefton had been paying his attentions to the other girl.
The ‘other girl’ was Hughina McLeod Williams, thirtyfour, known as Jean Williams. She was the barmaid at the Traralgon Hotel;† Sefton had been a lodger there in October 1915 when Edward Gillian took over the licence. Gillian ran a tight ship and it did not please him that he frequently could not find Jean when he wanted her. One Sunday afternoon about the end of November, he heard her going upstairs but, instead of her going to her room on the west side of the hotel, he heard her footsteps ‘tracking to the east side of the hotel where Sefton’s room was. Not hearing her come back … I went upstairs to the door of Sefton’s room and listened … I heard voices inside … I looked through the keyhole and saw … them on the bed. Sefton was on top of Jean having sexual intercourse’. Gillian loitered in the hallway and after about half an hour:
Sefton opened the door and went to the bathroom. I then went to his room and opened the door, and Jean Williams was at the glass doing up her hair. I asked her what she meant by such conduct and she said she was only sitting on the bed. I told her to pack up and get out of my hotel; and the same [afternoon] I told Sefton to go …
Jean spent that night at nearby Ryan’s Hotel, and the following day, 29 November 1915, she left town. Sefton moved into the Club Hotel, where his relationship with Millie began. Intermittently, however, Jean continued to correspond with him. She was working at a hotel in Bendigo at the time of Sefton’s arrest. Reading about it in the papers, she wrote to him at the Melbourne Gaol, declaring that she still loved him.
Shortly after Sefton’s sentence of death was passed, the Governor-General (Sir Ronald Ferguson) and Prime Minister (William ‘Billy’ Hughes) each received a letter appealing for Sefton’s life to be spared. Both were signed by Jean Williams. ‘I am on my knees,’ she wrote to the Governor-General, ‘asking mercy … as I make this appeal for a life more precious to me than my own.’ Both letters expressed confidence in Sefton’s innocence and referred to the circumstantial nature of the evidence. To the Prime Minister she wrote:
I feel sure that you could not spare such a man to be destroyed when our Empire is in need of every man … If he was not a good noble-living man I would not dare to seek your most valuable help … He would redeem his past wrongs by doing his share with our brave lads at the front.
Through the Chief Secretary’s Department,† Piggott received access to the original letters. In examining the handwriting he saw the resemblance between the letters signed by Jean Williams and the anonymous letter to the Chief Justice. Piggott submitted the letters to the state’s handwriting expert.
During his forty-four year career with the Bank of Australasia, Edward Shew, a retired branch manager, had developed ‘an intensified acquaintance with pen characters and figures’. Now in his sixty-eighth year, his experience in the differentiation of disputed or incriminating documents had encompassed three decades and earned him recognition throughout the Commonwealth as the expert whose opinion was ‘valued above all others’. He assessed the documents and confirmed Piggott’s conviction that the letters all were written by the same hand.
Meanwhile, Sefton’s death sentence had been temporarily suspended, pending the detectives’ investigation.
On 10 July the police brought Williams into CIB headquarters and showed her photographs of her letters to the Governor-General and Prime Minister. She admitted that they were indeed written, signed and sent by her. Next Piggott confronted her with the letter to the Chief Justice. Although at first she denied that she had written it, Piggott and Ashton directed her attention to certain characteristics and peculiarities of her handwriting. Eventually Williams’ denials collapsed and ‘she made the dramatic admission that she had done the best she could to save a man whom she loved’. The detectives took a statement from her in which she admitted writing the letter to the Chief Justice and that its entire content was a fabrication. ‘She was a single girl,’ Piggott reported, ‘who had become attached to Sefton while she was working at Traralgon.’ ‘I was very fond of him,’ Williams declared, ‘and am still.’
Williams was charged with attempting to ‘defeat the ends of justice’. The news was transmitted to the Attorney-General and Sefton’s death sentence was reinstated, the Executive Council fixing 10 am Monday 16 July for Sefton’s appointment with the gallows of Melbourne Gaol.
Deputations opposing capital punishment were already meeting with ministers of the Victorian Government. On 9 July, representatives from the Political Labour Conference met eighty-year-old Chief Secretary Donald McLeod to put the view that there were grave doubts about Sefton’s guilt. McLeod told them, ‘The law must take its course.’
On Thursday 12 July members of the Women’s Political Association, the Socialist League, the Women’s Peace Army and the International Peace Society met Attorney-General Harry Lawson, expressing concern over the jury’s verdict and the judge’s sentence, and warning that the evidence against Sefton ‘was entirely circumstantial’.
Finally, however, it was a deputation meeting with the Victorian Premier, Sir Alexander Peacock, late on the morning of Friday 13th, which compelled an extraordinary meeting of Cabinet. Through spokesperson Bernard Mulvogue, a deputation comprising members of the Trades Hall Council, the Victorian Railways Union, and the Locomotive Enginedrivers, Firemen and Cleaners’ Association, presented the news that Millie Berger, ‘after thinking deeply over every incident, had realised that immediately after she had handed the child to Sefton in East Melbourne a man did pass by’. (This was in contrast to her court testimony in which she remembered no one else being present.) Additionally, Mulvogue said, Berger had realised that from the time she gave Sefton the child until he returned to her again there was not time for him to go to the place where the child was found. (The prosecution’s case, based on Millie’s earlier account, was that Sefton did have time to go to the river before returning to her at the Melbourne Coffee Palace.)
That Millie introduced these elements to her evidence and was prepared to swear them on affidavit, was the necessary trigger to convene a special cabinet meeting. The result, announced in newspapers the following day—scarcely forty-eight hours before the scheduled execution—was that Sefton’s death sentence was commuted to ‘imprisonment for life with hard labour, without the benefit of the regulations relating to remission of sentences’.
The following month Jean Williams appeared before the Court of General Sessions and was found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice, though the jury recommended mercy. She was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, fully suspended on her entering into a tenyear good behaviour bond.
Sefton was transferred from Melbourne Gaol to Pentridge, the city’s metropolitan prison in the northern suburb of Coburg, to serve out his punishment. He never wavered in his story about the man ‘Arthur’ to whom he said he gave his baby.
One who believed in his innocence was the young lay worker appointed as Sefton’s chaplain while he was a condemned prisoner: theological student and later Anglican priest, William Auguste Wilson.
It was well known that, as the inevitability of their fate encroached on them, condemned prisoners turned to their chaplains for spiritual comfort and in this context often confessed their crimes. It was a point the Reverend Wilson would return to in the numerous petitions he wrote to the government in the years to come: ‘I attended Sefton … to within a few days of his execution … At no time, not even when he was practically a dying man did he ever alter his story as told to the police …’ Throughout the 1920s Wilson campaigned strenuously for Sefton, writing cogently argued letters suggesting that Sefton’s trial was a miscarriage of justice; that Sefton was innocent—‘yet a victim of circumstantial evidence and his own folly’.
In Pentridge Sefton was a model prisoner. ‘A most industrious and exemplary man’, the prison governor reported in 1927. That same year Joseph Akeroyd, Inspector General of Prisons, noted that despite Sefton’s ‘long imprisonment, he has not become apathetic but shows initiative and a desire to help others’. Akeroyd interviewed the prisoner. ‘Mysterious man,’ he observed afterward. ‘Reiterates his innocence so often that he has come to regard it as true.’
More formally, Akeroyd, who was a psychology graduate, reported for the Attorney-General:
He still maintains his innocence, so, after reading the evidence in the case, I turned my mind endeavouring to form an opinion as to whether he was capable of committing such a crime. I came to the conclusion that he was so capable. The way he speaks of the girl shows that he was determined to free himself absolutely from entanglement with her. He regarded her as an incident in his life to be forgotten as soon as possible, and he seems to me as possessed of the grim resolution and incompassionateness necessary to the accomplishment of such a deed. It was a matter of expediency with him … I am certain that he is not in any way sincerely repentant, but he is very sorry for himself.
In September 1931 Sefton presented at the Pentridge infirmary with a swollen testicle. His condition did not improve and in mid-1932 he was, under guard, admitted to Melbourne Hospital for an operation in which his right testis was removed. Tests showed it was infected with tuberculosis. Usually a secondary infection resulting from transmission through the bloodstream, it suggested the disease was in an advanced state. X-rays confirmed: ‘TB also in his lungs.’
While keeping Sefton isolated, Dr Cooper, the hospital’s medical superintendent, advised Akeroyd bluntly: ‘I think it very unwise for this man to be mixing with other prisoners.’ Sefton would need twelve months in a sanatorium, Cooper said, ‘to give him a chance of recovery’ and even then ‘he will probably not recover’. A further difficulty was that the director of the Tuberculosis Bureau refused to admit prisoners to sanatoriums, and there were no facilities in prisons for treatment of the disease.
These circumstances precipitated a review of Sefton’s case. It was decided that if he entered into a £100 recognisance ‘to lead an honest and industrious life’, he could be freed. Sefton’s elderly mother signed as guarantor and he was released into the care of his family on 29 July 1932. Against the odds, Sefton recovered from his illness and went on to live a long and comparatively uneventful life. He never married and died, aged eighty-five, at Wandin, on the outskirts of Melbourne, in July 1978.
Yet some questions remain. Is it possible Sefton was innocent as he always claimed? To what extent was his conviction influenced by Keily’s dubious exhibit—the torn handkerchief marked ‘C’? And would Piggott have participated in the prosecution of a case knowing it involved questionable evidence?
Many years later in an interview given to Herald journalist Hugh Buggy, Piggott distanced himself from the exhibit, stating categorically that, excepting the dye stain on the baby’s gown and the letter ‘T’ on its nappy, ‘There was not one other mark on any of the child’s clothing’.
It was a key tenet of Piggott’s approach that he played hard but fair. When giving evidence in court, he took full responsibility for his casework and his results, but as to the evidence of others—they were responsible for what, under oath, they declared.
The baby killer case was Sergeant Keily’s investigation, the exhibit his to submit and about which he alone answered when questioned. As for Piggott, in a subordinate role on this occasion, the achievement was, in the words of his superior, Superintendent Davidson, the demonstration of ‘acumen, untiring zeal and intelligence in following up slender clues …’.
Clues which, as Chief Justice Madden noted, went undetected in many similar cases. That was something Keily knew, a bitter regret though he kept it to himself: his unsolved case of October 1906—the newborn infant with its skull fractured, found by a platelayer on the Richmond line near Punt Road, its body wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.