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Who Poisoned Bobby Lulham?

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Australia, thallium poisoning was a popular method of murder. The cases of Sydney housewife Yvonne Fletcher, who murdered her two husbands with thallium-laced roast dinners, and Sydney grandmother Carolyn Grills, who did away with five family friends and relatives with Devonshire teas and thallium, were the most famous of the time.

But when it came to intrigue and drama, the 1953 case of the thallium poisoning of one of Australia’s most famous and loved rugby league players of the time, Bobby Lulham, leaves them all for dead…if you’ll pardon the pun.

Renowned for his lightning speed on the wing, Bob Lulham played for Balmain and had been good enough to tour England and France with the Australian rugby league team in 1948. Since his return he had been a prolific try scorer and an inspiration to his team. But, totally out of character for Lulham, in an important club game against Canterbury Bankstown on 18 July 1953, he repeatedly dropped the ball and even when he did gather it up he was quickly tackled by the opposition. There was clearly something wrong with the star Balmain winger and his teammates and fans were deeply concerned. Unable to offer an explanation, Bobby Lulham went home to bed.

The mystery of Lulham’s poor form was revealed two days later when an anonymous woman sobbed into the phone to Dr Les Greenberg, the Medical Officer of the NSW Rugby League, that Bobby Lulham had been poisoned and that it was her husband who had put the rat poison Thall-Rat in Lulham’s beer.

Two detectives from the CIB were sent immediately to Lulham’s home, where they found the footballer very ill in bed. He told the detectives that he had been feeling increasingly crook over the past fortnight; the team doctor had told him that he was most likely suffering from an ulcer, and that with a lot of rest it would eventually go away, but it hadn’t.

But as Lulham explained his symptoms – nausea, pins and needles in the toes and fingers, and pains in the chest – from their experience with similar cases in recent years, the detectives knew it wasn’t an ulcer. To them there was little doubt that the Balmain legend had been, or was still being, poisoned with thallium. But by whom? It had to be someone close to him. It was now up to them to find out.

Bobby Lulham was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, where his hair began to fall out until in no time at all he was completely bald. The government toxicologist reported that he was lucky to be alive and it was most likely his perfect physical condition that had saved him. Lulham had ingested as much as 8 grams of thallium – more than enough to kill a normal person but a couple of grams less than it would take to kill a healthy athlete.

Two weeks later police charged Bobby Lulham’s mother-in-law, Mrs Veronica Monty, with attempted murder. It seemed that Mrs Monty had admitted poisoning her daughter’s husband – but by a terrible accident. She said that in a fit of depression she had intended killing herself and had heavily laced her bedtime drink of Milo with thallium, but then it had become mixed up with Bobby’s mug of Milo and he inadvertently drank it instead and became ill.

But at Veronica Monty’s trial for attempting to murder her son-in-law, held in November 1953, the prosecution would have none of it. The Crown steadfastly claimed that Lulham could not have drunk her cup of Milo by mistake as she didn’t take sugar and Bobby did and he would have known the difference immediately. Apart from a lack of motive, it seemed an open and shut case. But no one was prepared for the bombshell that lay ahead.

The Sydney Central Criminal Court was packed to the rafters as the handsome footballer took the stand to give his evidence. Bobby Lulham told the court that in November 1951, he had married Judith Anne Monty. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Veronica Monty, had separated from her husband and moved in with the newlyweds at their Ryde home in Sydney’s inner north-western suburbs.

Lulham said that he and his wife’s mother became a little closer than perhaps they should have and on three separate occasions they had indulged in ‘acts of intimacy’, all of which were at Mrs Monty’s instigation. At the revelation that her husband had been having it off with her mother, possibly in the marital bed, Mrs Judith Lulham had to be helped from the court for fear she would faint.

The following day at dawn there was a long queue of women with cut lunches and thermos flasks in string bags, waiting for front row seats in the court for what was shaping up to be the juiciest scandal Sydney had seen in years. As ten o’clock approached, police on horseback were forced to break up the huge crowds of women outside the court as they tried to get a glimpse of the players in the drama that was about to unfold.

The court heard that four days after her being charged with attempted murder and released on bail, Veronica Monty had taken an overdose of thallium and was admitted to hospital, where they saved her life. Her lawyers made mincemeat of the allegations that it was Mrs Monty who had seduced Bobby Lulham. They challenged the jury to try and believe that the much smaller woman had grabbed the huge footballer by the hand and dragged him to the bedroom, where she had had her way with him and deprived him of his honour against his will.

Mrs Veronica Monty looked a broken and pathetic figure – certainly one incapable of seducing a footballer – as she stood in the dock and pleaded her case from a written statement:

I am not guilty of this crime. I have never borne any ill feelings to Bobby in my life. I consider that I always have and always will more than like him.

There were many things I had done that I know I shouldn’t have done. There were many things I said that I shouldn’t have said. But I want you to believe me when I say…and I say this quite deliberately…that I never gave Bobby thallium deliberately.

A sympathetic jury found her not guilty.

But that was not the end of it. In a matter of days the whole sordid affair was back on the front pages of the dailies. Veronica Monty’s husband, Alfred, announced that he was suing his estranged wife for divorce and naming Bobby Lulham as the co-respondent. Bobby Lulham’s distraught wife, Judith, also announced that she was suing her husband for divorce and that she was naming her own mother as the co-respondent.

But it was not to be. In a tragic and final twist before any further courtroom dramas could take place, Veronica Monty committed suicide. Bobby Lulham made a full recovery and played one more season with Balmain. He eventually passed away in 1986.