11

NIGHT TERRORS

‘You people at the Yard ought to know, with your experience of Jack the Ripper’.

– Anthony Berkeley Cox, The Silk Stocking Murders (1928)

While Colin Colahan sheltered at the Jorgensens’ that Saturday, Mollie Dean was laid to rest. At 11 a.m., a crowd of about 200 gathered round 86 Milton Street, within which Reverend George Philip Bray of St John’s Congregational Church in South St Kilda held a brief service. The only member of Mollie’s artistic circle known to have attended was the novelist Bernard Cronin, of whose Australian Society of Authors she had been a member. There were wreaths also from Mollie’s teaching colleagues, and Ralph’s co-workers at Auto-Car Service Company. Fifty followed the cortege to the graveside for Mollie’s interment in a family plot among the Methodists in the north-western corner of Brighton General Cemetery.

After the scene at Milton Street the night before, Colahan would hardly have been game to attend. But he was able that day to make one gesture towards Mollie, issuing a ‘special statement’, duly reported in Sydney’s Sun and interstate editions of Truth the next morning: ‘Mr Colahan states that he was engaged to Miss Dean and the date of the marriage had been undecided because of economic conditions. He described her as an extraordinarily intelligent girl with great literary talent.’ Launching a further untruth and half-truth, Truth’s Perth edition reported Colahan to have been divorced ‘twelve months ago’, the co-respondent being a ‘woman unknown’.

‘Savagely, fiendishly brutal’: Truth reports

Colahan’s statement also served his purposes. Not only did it engage public sympathy but it drew his relations with Mollie within acceptable bounds. Bohemianism notwithstanding, he was a man of some stature – even Truth deferred to him as ‘son of a surgeon and leader of the most advanced thought in Melbourne’s art circles’. There followed on Monday further favourable news. After reviewing records of the Windsor Exchange, the Postmaster-General’s Department confirmed consecutive calls from the telephone box at St Kilda railway station to ‘Hawthorn 5176’ shortly after midnight Friday. From this point, in fact, Colahan was no longer a suspect, having hardly fitted the frame anyway – the myth that later enveloped him was mainly of his own making.

For the police, this was bad news. From the very beginning, their investigation was skewed, by an abundance of information and a paucity of suspects. Hundreds of letters were received. Scores of eyewitnesses came forward. There had actually been a number of attacks within the triangle of St Kilda, Brighton and Elwood during 1930, including one across the road from the Deans at 73 Milton Street just before midnight on 31 July. Teenage housemaid Dora Phillips had been followed into her employers’ backyard by a dark-complexioned man with centre-parted hair and belted overcoat, who had first kissed her forcefully, then thrown her to the ground and sexually assaulted her; two weeks before the attack on Mollie Dean, sisters sharing a single bed in a sleep-out on Grey Street had been bludgeoned by an intruder whom they were unable to describe. Descriptions now forthcoming were likewise unhelpful, based on glimpses in darkness and retrospective sensations of suspicion. The man seen to follow Mollie was in a suit of blue or dark grey or wearing fawn trousers, with a hat or without, maybe in an overcoat but maybe not.

A man was reported to have been loitering at the corner of Southey and Mitford streets at 11.15 p.m.; a man was reported to have stepped in front of a woman at the Dickens Street tram stop about 11.50 p.m., but turned and walked away at the approach of another pedestrian. Four days after Mollie’s death, Police Commissioner Blamey received an anonymous letter from a woman referring to a disturbing encounter at the same stop a little later, a man trying to make conversation as he followed her. To ward him off, the woman had told the man she was ‘a married woman with a son as big as you are’, quickly walked down the garden path of an unlit house and waited in the shadow until she was convinced he was gone. But her identikit was hardly precise: ‘Short and thick-set wearing a dark grey suit, not wearing a hat, hair brushed back’.

As news about the phone calls came through, Lambell and O’Keeffe were at Queensberry Street interviewing Mollie’s former colleagues. They then widened their inquiries to her friends past, such as George Browne, Sadie Fields, Joyce Pyke, Clara Behrend and Teddy Sell, and present, including the Leasons, the Jorgensens, the Skippers, Norman Lewis, Sue Vanderkelen and Betty Davies. The latter group squirmed, Lena being typically cagey: ‘They also asked me the cause of Colahan’s divorce, if Molly was fond of the boys, did I see her often, when last. I could not remember that. I hope I gave the impression I knew very little but I know a great deal which I have been told and second to third hand and from what I have observed.’ Sue found it more traumatic. In the heated emotions of the moment, Colahan had apparently blurted out a marriage proposal to his other ‘other woman’; Sue had equivocated and, after her brush with the detectives, repaired to Mornington, where she stayed with a widowed aunt, Rose Pitt, in her home, ‘Marina’. Even Betty, though she had been far away, found it disturbing to be accosted at her South Yarra apartment: ‘If I had not been away and Molly had not gone to the theatre, the whole ghastly tragedy might not have happened. I could not shake off a feeling of having contributed to her death.’

Skipper was resolved, nonetheless, that the best face on matters be put. Any Bulletin reader disquieted by that Leason cartoon on Wednesday would have come a few pages later on an old cartoon of Colin Colahan by Dick Ovenden. It adorned a rather otiose biographical paragraph about the painter dropped in at the last minute:

Colin Colahan, engaged to marry Molly Dean, the literary girl who was brutally murdered in Melbourne last week, was more than half-way through a medical degree before he decided to take up art as a career. He had done some very promising black and white work for The Bulletin before he came under the spell of Max Meldrum. On his advice Colahan, who had inherited some means from his father, a well-known Melbourne doctor, went to Paris and studied steadily for four years, before returning to Australia. It was through their devotion to Max Meldrum that he and Leason came together; Colahan and his fiancée were at a theatre party on the evening of the tragedy. As an extreme coincidence, Leason’s drawing for this week’s Bulletin, mailed on the afternoon before the horrible affair, shows a young woman (‘Australia’s Credit’) in terror of assault.

The Bulletin had run the same cartoon and a similar paragraph about Colahan’s university studies at the time of his April exhibition. But what now was the relevance of the medical degree; of Colahan’s cartoons; of Colahan’s father; of Meldrum; of Paris? And what was a ‘literary girl’ anyway? The paragraph drew attention even in seeking to deflect it. And there was ample attention already.

 

The night after The Bulletin’s publication and a week after Mollie’s death, Skipper found himself at the scene of her last night, the Bijou, watching the Gregan McMahon Players follow up their Pygmalion with Right You Are (If You Think So) by the Italian farceur Pirandello. The play, he thought, was showing its age, yet its sibilances of gossip and clashes of contradiction had a sudden thematic relevance. ‘If the playwright had actually set out to write a satire on present-day Melbourne he could not have made his piece more perfectly à propos,’ he wrote in his review. ‘It is safe to say that the majority of the house had been engaged for the past week or so in amateur-detective work on a certain local crime much after the manner of the puppets on the stage.’

Speculation was aggravated by seeming inertia of the police, following their abortive inquiries in the Mena Griffiths case. Lambell and O’Keeffe never seem to have seriously explored the possibility of their having the same perpetrator, and only fringes of the media entertained it: The Age commented caustically that the sole similarity was the ‘baseless optimism of the group of leading officials … that somehow, some day, the offenders will be apprehended’. But the deaths ran together easily, coincident in an unfathomable violence. ‘A horrible presence’, editorialised Truth, seemed to be stalking Melbourne womanhood.

As to the nature of that violence, Truth and its rackety weekend rival Smith’s Weekly had a melodramatic meeting of minds. ‘What kind of fiend is the slayer of Molly Dean?’ asked Truth. ‘Contemplating the awful details of this latest and most fearful of Melbourne’s sex outrages, there advises the vision of some mad murderer abroad: some modern Jack the Ripper slashing and smashing with his weapons of death, slavering with bloodlust, eager to mangle and destroy.’ Smith’s Weekly could not but agree, throwing in a reference to 1924’s ‘trial of the century’ for some contemporary relevance:

What else, except the homicidal mania of a Jack the Ripper could have inspired such an act of bestial ferocity, the murderer raining blow after blow upon the victim, taken unawares, dragging her by the feet a distance of 30 yards across the road, knotting a stocking round her throat to silence her moans, handcuffing her with one of her undergarments, mutilating her breasts and finally, with a tyre lever or some such instrument, committing an unspeakable outrage. A fiendish act so redolent of horror, that upon reflection, it is hard to credit the possibility of the murderer, even if endowed with the super-culture of one of the Loeb brothers [sic], having been able to gain an acquaintance with such a keen student of psychology as Molly Dean, whose work, as a special teacher in the Education Department, was especially directed to the study of mental processes. Would not such a keen perception as hers have recognised such a degenerate, however brilliant and well educated, if such had crossed her path and picked him out for an epileptiform type that lies near the borderline of insanity? For by the testimony of friends and acquaintances, Miss Dean was a particularly discerning young woman who gave the impression of studying men with personal detachment, making no light surrendering of her heart.

That Mollie Dean’s sensitive antennae would have detected the degeneracy of her murderer was just one of a variety of claims made about her in the murder’s aftermath. In some outlets, she went from being part of her circle to a leader, from a scholar to a renaissance woman; in others, she had been drawn into danger by her romantic inclinations. Sydney’s Truth was more indulgent than Melbourne’s. ‘Molly Dean was a prominent member of Melbourne’s famous Bohemian set,’ reported the Sydney edition. ‘Her boon companions were artists and newspaper men. She was clever, a prolific writer, a painter of sorts, perhaps a little unconventional but wholly lovable.’ Its Melbourne stablemate wondered more soberly if Mollie’s ‘desire for the unusual’ had ‘coloured her life’, whether ‘the role of litterateur’ encouraged by ‘the adulation of associates’ had not spoiled ‘a brilliant career’ in education. In fact, neither perspective was accurate. Mollie had never fitted comfortably in her circle; she had received little encouragement from them in her writing; that she was threading her lonely path through Elwood so reluctantly was an outcome of isolation rather than involvement. But in the month to Christmas 1930, rumour was on the wing. ‘Mothers are seen everywhere leading little children to school by the hand,’ reported Smith’s Weekly. ‘And the most independent of flappers, who, in ordinary times would laugh at the idea of being afraid of the dark, are now particular about going out unescorted.’

One man the police were never able to interview was Clarence Weber – whom Colahan, of course, suspected of an assignation with Mollie during his absence in Adelaide. As Mollie had been walking into the Bijou on the night of 20 November, nature’s supreme specimen had suffered a lethal coronary occlusion while washing his hands before dinner. As it does when public figures perish abruptly, speculation surrounded his death. It would recur when Weber’s ambitious widow became the first Victorian woman to win a parliamentary seat at a general election in 1937, and persisted decades more: when Weber’s grandson Ron was at school in the 1950s, a sportsmaster told him authoritatively that Clarence had opened a vein in the bath. One of those helping spread the whispers was Colahan, perhaps exacting a small, delayed revenge on a romantic rival. He breathlessly told Eric Westbrook of the coincidence of Weber’s ‘extraordinary’ death: ‘Then came this strange suicide. There may be no connection. The police gave me one day a very indiscrete word, half a hint there was a connection.’ About it there was never anything extraordinary – heart disease ran in the family. And as alibis go, being dead might be deemed close to unimprovable.

Another man police suspected strongly was well and truly alive. At 11 a.m. on 3 December, twelve days after Mollie’s death, detectives Lambell and O’Keeffe banged on the door of a house in Broadway let by George and Alma Goodwin, demanding to know the whereabouts of Alma’s brother Ernest William Frederick Wilson. Unsatisfied with her vague answers, they forced their way in and found him in bed. Wilson, twenty-six, was the definition of a scapegrace, describing himself as a ‘musician and architect’ but actually a licensed horse trainer – not that he had done much in the 1920s except jail time in three states for theft and false pretences.

In June 1928, Wilson had gone on trial in Sydney with four others for perpetrating ‘the Darlinghurst Outrage’ – the alleged gang rape of 26-year-old Ada Maddocks. Maddocks, a disarmingly well-spoken and resourceful woman who seems to have been turning a few tricks to keep herself and her two children where a violent husband had failed, told police that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted in a flat by men who had picked her out on Bayswater Road. Au contraire, said Wilson blithely, in what Truth described as ‘the most candid testimony ever heard in a criminal court’: Maddocks had offered herself to him, he had promised her ‘a couple of quid’, then after partaking had decided he was ‘a little bit short’ and left without paying, whereupon she had made allegations in retaliation. It was a lurid tale, involving threats with razors, brushes with drugs, a visit to a movie theatre appropriately screening the noir thriller Underworld, and several ‘abominable offences’, but the accused were cleared. Wilson moved on to Adelaide, where he was swiftly banged up for nine months after lifting a fur necklet from Myer.

Since arriving in Melbourne in June 1930, Wilson had been an obtrusive nuisance to women in the area – accosting them, following them, plaguing them with propositions and lecherous remarks. Lambell and O’Keeffe had studied him in action before moving in and, as Alma Goodwin later told a St Kilda magistrate, were in no doubt of their suspicions:

The detectives were in a threatening attitude, and they talked of nothing else but the murder of Molly Dean in Elwood. They kept saying that my brother answered the description of the suspected murderer, and they had hundreds of letters about him accosting and annoying women and girls in the St Kilda district. In fact, from their bullying attitude and the way they spoke about the Elwood murder I really thought I would find my brother charged with the murder when I came to this court today.

By the time the case made it to court, however, the detectives had had to back away. ‘This man is a sexual pervert of the worst kind,’ O’Keeffe told the magistrate. ‘No woman is safe from insult when he is about.’ But Wilson seems to have had an alibi – as, self-representing coolly, he persuaded a chagrined Lambell to concede.

Wilson: Aren’t you in charge of the investigation in the Elwood murder case?

Lambell: Yes, but I am engaged with Detective-Sergeant O’Keeffe in that matter.

Wilson: When you rushed and blustered about the house, you practically told my sister that I was responsible for the murder at Elwood.

Lambell: I did not say you were responsible. I said that a lot of people in the district thought you were.

Wilson: Well, do you think I had anything to do with it?

Lambell paused grudgingly. ‘From my enquiries,’ he said at last, ‘I know you have nothing to do with it.’ Wilson could not keep the smugness from his voice: ‘I thank you, Mr Lambell.’ The magistrate could do no better, or worse, than imposing a twelve-month stretch for lacking visible means of support.

A wilder theory was first tentatively mooted by the normally sedate Age on the morning after the murder: ‘The fact that a stocking was used recalls an exactly similar crime in London, known as the Silk Stocking Murder.’ This epithet had actually been conferred on two murders, one in 1926 (solved), one in 1929 (unsolved), partial inspiration for a bestselling novel. In The Silk Stocking Murders, Anthony Berkeley Cox had set his dandified detective Roger Sheringham, aficionado of Freud and wearer of mauve silk pyjamas, on the trail of a serial killer: ‘He’s mad, of course. His only possible motive … is murder for the love of killing … The victim’s own stocking, for instance. And I imagine it would have to be silk. Yes, that brain of his must be full of strange twists.’ Yes, it must be, agreed Truth on 6 December, including emigration, positing that the still-unknown strangler of clerk Mary Learoyd in a lane 100 metres from her Ilkley home might have carved a transcontinental swathe: ‘There are remarkable resemblances between this sinister affair and one that thrilled England with horror about fifteen months ago – resemblances so striking as to give reason for wonder whether the same person might have been responsible for the two crimes. Far-fetched as this might seem, criminologists know that in their particular profession there are times when truth proves to be stranger than fiction.’ Which perhaps went for Truth also.

Smith’s Weekly, most probably Harry Maddison, renowned as ‘The Gimlet of Gun Alley’ since his vivid reportage of the 1921 murder of Alma Tirtschke, took a few weeks over its double-barrelled reply. First, Smith’s claimed, police inquiries revealed Mollie to have been followed on the night in question not by Colahan but by ‘an earlier admirer’, a university student who had been deflected from his earlier attentions by the ‘anonymous letters’ of a ‘jealous woman’, but whose ‘affections had not swerved’. He, at the last moment, did: ‘Arrived home he sat brooding in the car for some time as though impressed by the shadow of a tragedy that, all unknown to him, was soon to be enacted.’ Teddy Sell? Another presentiment? No further detail exists.

Still more extraordinary was the echo of an unsolved murder case a year earlier – that of 29-year-old Norma McLeod, found in her Toorak bedroom with a fractured skull, having seemingly disturbed an intruder. Police had subsequently been plied with letters from an anonymous seer signing themselves ‘Asmodeus’ – one of the seven princes of hell, identified with lust – containing otherwise undisclosed details of the crime. Now, Smith’s reported, police had been aided in their investigation of the ‘Elwood murder mystery’ by ‘a middle-aged woman to whom a revelation of this tragedy seems to have come in a dream’. This woman’s ‘strange divination’ was that the killer had erupted from the gate, disabled Mollie in order to drag her across the road, then as an afterthought ‘returned and committed the final abomination, perhaps to divert attention from the real nature of the crime and make it appear the work of a sadist’. For additional titillation, Smith’s reported the dreamer in question to have shared with Mollie an earlier lover: ‘Love is a strange potion, especially when two drink from the same bottle.’

Yet, promisingly as it adorned its despatch with the illustration of a spectral assassin over a prone body, Smith’s brought its readers no closer to a solution than Truth. In fact, 1930 was expiring with investigators seemingly no closer to decrypting the mystery than on the night it occurred. An old enigma had resurfaced, with what appeared a satisfyingly ready-made solution.

 

No sooner had police released Robert McMahon, their number one suspect in the murder of Mena Griffiths, than they wanted him back. The reason was that a swag had been found in Temora’s railway shed, including clothes and undergarments stained with blood. It took some weeks to catch up with McMahon, working in his brother Frank’s bottle yard in St Peters. Dragged back to Melbourne again, he admitted that the clothing was his, while explaining the blood as resulting from an attempt to circumcise himself – seemingly unsuccessful. Now, however, new eyewitnesses picked McMahon out of line-ups. On remand at Pentridge, he wrote plaintively to Frank: ‘I must prove to my fellow countrymen that I am innocent.’ It was too late to do so to Mena’s mother, Alice. When the inquest commenced at the City Morgue on 30 December, she threw herself at McMahon with cries of ‘Let me get at him! Let me get him!’ Mena’s sisters had also changed their minds and identified him, as did a majority of those testifying. Coroner David Grant found that McMahon had caused the girl’s death ‘feloniously, unlawfully and maliciously’, and committed him for trial six weeks hence. Victoria Police walked a little taller – but only for a week.

Parents in Melbourne had lately been more circumspect. Frank and Sarah Wilson had always been fairly blasé about the late-night absences of their sixteen-year-old daughter, Hazel, with her friend Lucy Hogan: Frank, an unemployed labourer who was surviving by using his front yard in Ormond to graze racehorses, had enough on his mind. One night Hazel and Lucy slept in an abandoned home, another in a phone box. That had changed after the death of Mollie Dean: the Wilsons began insisting on their daughter keeping more respectable hours, and on waiting up for her return. ‘The Elwood murder was discussed in our house,’ Frank recalled. ‘We all had a fair bit to say about the murders.’ On the night of 9 January 1931, however, their regime slipped: the Wilsons thought Hazel was staying with the Hogan family, but learned the following morning that the girls had separated at Glenhuntly railway station. As Frank narrated, they next discovered a girl’s shoe by their own front gate: ‘I recognised it as Hazel’s shoe, and the wife also said: “My God that is Hazel’s shoe”. The Dean case then flashed through my mind, and also how she was carried away … The wife then picked up the shoe up and said, “My God she has been killed”.’ Hazel’s body was discovered in couch grass 30 cm high on a nearby vacant lot. She was lying on her stomach, hands tied with a patent-leather belt, feet tied with her bloomers, a stocking in her mouth. She had been strangled.

Hazel Wilson’s death, with its similarities to the two preceding murders, struck a heavy blow to the case against Robert McMahon, who, of course, had been safely in custody at the time. Though investigators were as yet unaware, worse was to come. A few days earlier, Truth had resolved, as police had not, to test McMahon’s alibi. With the assistance of his solicitor Roy Schilling, the newspaper’s journalists located as many as fourteen people in the vicinity of Leeton who were prepared to swear that they had interacted with McMahon on the weekend of Mena Griffiths’ abduction. A cross-section of rural life, they included farmers, carters and labourers, a blacksmith, an insurance agent, and a schoolgirl who confirmed overhearing his offer to play euphonium for a Salvation Army band. They would turn the prosecution case to ashes.

The police already seemed helpless, forcing the populace to occasional excesses of zeal. The week after presiding at Mena Griffiths’ inquest, coroner David Grant was closing the morgue at dusk when he saw a man holding the arm of a crying ten-year-old girl. He asked the girl if she knew the man: when she, confused, said no, he snatched her away. The man grabbed her back, punched Grant twice in the face, and boarded a tram. Doing well for a man of nearly sixty, the coroner went in pursuit, and cajoled a constable into arresting his assailant: labourer Patrick Britt, it transpired, was the girl’s uncle, although he would have to cop to a fine for assault. In two months, it seemed, Melbourne had been dissolved from an orderly modern metropolis into a huddle of nyctophobic neighbour-hoods with premonitions of violence and dreams of murder.