THE secret behind one of Australia’s greatest crime mysteries, the Lady of the Swamp murder, has now gone to the grave twice. Or three times, if you count an unmarked burial site that no-one living knows how to find.
More than 40 years after Margaret Clement, a one-time socialite who became a recluse in her decaying South Gippsland mansion, disappeared without trace, police quietly reopened the case.
They always believed at least one person, besides the suspected murderer, knew what really happened, but that she refused to make a statement for four decades because of loyalty … and fear.
Detectives had long given up hope of charging the killer, but they still believed the mystery could be solved if that one witness would tell what she knew.
But in September, 1993, the case was closed for the last time when Esme Millicent Livingstone, then 77, died in a nursing home in the Latrobe Valley town of Morwell, in eastern Victoria. The policeman who had been in charge of the case since 1978, Detective Senior Sergeant Bill Townsend, had hoped Mrs Livingstone would have been prepared to tell him what he and others had always suspected – that her husband, Stanley, was the killer.
‘I believe that she has taken the secret to the grave with her,’ he said afterwards.
The eccentric Miss Clement, then 72 and a virtual recluse, went missing in suspicious circumstances from her 810-hectare property, Tullaree, on 21 May, 1952.
Senior Sergeant Townsend interviewed Mrs Livingstone when he took over the case, when he was posted to the homicide squad in the 1970s. He was convinced she knew what had happened to Miss Clement, but was afraid to speak.
‘When I spoke to her she said: “I’d like to help, but I’m too frightened.” I am sure she was frightened of what her husband would do if she talked,’ Bill Townsend was to recall weeks after his potential witness died.
Stanley Livingstone, aged in his late 70s, had died the previous year, in October, 1992, in Queensland, after suffering a heart attack while fighting a small bushfire on one of his properties. He owned most of Curtis Island, near Gladstone, had substantial rural property interests, and – if police were right about the Lady of The Swamp murder – he proved that crime does occasionally pay. He died a millionaire, and had laid the foundations of his fortune by obtaining Tullaree at a bargain price from Miss Clement, then improving it and re-selling it for a handsome profit.
Bill Townsend was one of the few people still be able to connect Stanley Livingstone with the mystery from South Gippsland. But the death of an elderly landowner in Queensland was not big news, and by the time Townsend, then the officer in charge of a suburban CIB, learned of Livingstone’s death, it was too late.
Confined to a wheelchair and in ill-health, Esme Livingstone returned to Victoria after her husband’s death. For almost eleven months she was in the nursing home, free from the intimidation of her husband. Perhaps then, she would have been prepared to say what really happened in the swamps of South Gippsland in 1952. But no-one ever asked. She died within weeks of Townsend learning of her husband’s earlier death in Queensland.
‘Now that she has died I think that closes the last chapter of the mystery,’ the policeman said afterwards.
It was a story that had begun in World War I, when Miss Clement and her sister, Jeanne, inherited the beautiful and productive Gippsland pastoral property from their father, Peter Scott Clement.
The former bullock driver had made a fortune as a director of the once-famous Long Tunnel Mine in Walhalla, which was the richest gold mine in Victoria.
As well as the property he left his daughters, the then massive amount of 50,000 pounds each. The two women, then in their 20s, spent the next 15 years travelling overseas, meeting royalty and rubbing shoulders with Victoria’s squattocracy.
But, while the young women were away, unscrupulous managers let the property run down, secretly selling prize cattle and replacing them with second-class stock.
The drains on the property were allowed to silt over, and eventually most of the lush farm returned to the swampland it had been before white settlement. The Clement sisters, used to easy money and unused to work, began to sell off tracts of land to pay growing bills. In 1950, Jeanne died. The fourteen-room Victorian homestead had fallen into disrepair and was infested with bats, rats and snakes.
Her beauty faded, her friends gone and her eccentric ways becoming more pronounced, the surviving sister, Margaret, carried a walking stick and wore gumboots to wade through water in the rising swamp that circled the house. She spent her evenings reading crime mysteries by the light of a kerosene lamp.
The property was eventually mortgaged, but Miss Clement kept a caveat preventing the transfer without her approval. In 1951 a neighbor, Stanley Russell Livingstone, persuaded Miss Clement to allow him to buy Tullaree for 16,000 pounds on the proviso he built her a two-bedroom house near the original homestead.
It was a shrewd buy. Twelve years later, after draining the property and restoring it, he was to sell Tullaree for 126,000 pounds. Meanwhile, there had been much speculation about the old woman’s disappearance and presumed murder, but nothing could be pinned on the domineering Livingstone, a former VFL ruckman with Footscray, renowned for feats of strength and a bad temper.
The speculation might have remained exactly that as the years passed, with only the thinning ranks of old local residents remembering the Clement sisters and Margaret’s strange disappearance in the swamps she knew so well. But, in 1978, an earthmoving contractor, preparing some newly subdivided blocks of land for sale at Venus Bay, noticed some strange bones exposed by his machine about a metre below the surface. He investigated, and the police were called.
Tests showed that the bones were human. Careful searching revealed a rotting purse with four shillings and a sixpence coins pre-dating not only decimal currency but, significantly, pre-dating 1952. An old shawl and a shovel and hammer were also recovered.
The presence of the shovel and hammer seemed to indicate that the bones belonged to a crime victim who had been buried by her killer. The body was in a spot about four kilometres from Tullaree where Stanley Livingstone used to graze cattle. This was significant, in light of the suggestion that Livingstone’s wife once blurted to a friend that he had run cattle back and forth over the grave, to hide the freshly-turned earth. An allegation she later refused to repeat to police.
Senior Sergeant Townsend said he believed Livingstone killed the old woman in a fit of rage and then buried the body. ‘He had a bad temper. I believe he hit her, and she may have fallen and possibly fractured her skull. He panicked, put the body in the four-wheel-drive and later buried it.’
He said he believed the theory that Livingstone then ran cattle over the grave.
‘Everything seemed to point to him as the killer,’ he said. Esme Livingstone had told at least four people at separate times over many years that her husband was responsible for Margaret Clement’s death.
In 1980, the inquest into Miss Clement’s death was told that Esme Livingstone had confided to a friend that her husband had organised to have Miss Clement killed.
Jean Lesley Sharp gave evidence that Mrs Livingstone said her husband had forced Miss Clement to sign documents at gunpoint, and later organised to have her killed.
Another friend said that Mrs Livingstone had once handed her a letter and told her, ‘If I disappear suddenly hand this to the police.’ The woman said she opened the letter years later and it read: ‘He was in a temper as usual. He got rid of the body. The grave is not very far from the house.’ Unfortunately, the letter could not be produced for the coroner.
The inquest was also told Mrs Livingstone had told someone else that her husband paid two notorious Melbourne criminals of the 1950s, Bradley and Bradshaw, five hundred pounds to get rid of the body. Mrs Livingstone denied the claims at the inquest.
Livingstone, who had played sixteen games for Footscray as a ruckman, had been known for feats of strength such as lifting a full forty-four gallon drum on to a truck. He was a hard worker and a shrewd farmer, and drained and improved the Clement property before selling it at a massive profit. He bought another property at Yea before selling out and buying the $1.5 million, 3240-hectare property on Curtis Island, off the Queensland coast, a long way from South Gippsland and nosy neighbors who knew his history.
He was never charged over the Clement murder.
He told the inquest he had nothing to do with the disappearance. ‘I did not do anything to Miss Clement, I’ll guarantee that,’ he told the coroner in a crowded South Gippsland courtroom. Under the old man’s watchful eye, his wife also gave evidence denying any knowledge about the death.
The coroner, Kevin Mason, was unimpressed. He said the evidence of the Livingstones was not truthful. ‘I think they were, in their answers, in a number of ways, far from frank with the court,’ he noted in his finding.
But he concluded that the bones found near Venus Bay could not be positively identified as those of Margaret Clement.
Among those spoken to by police was a Ren Lanzon from Gladstone in Queensland, who had got to know Stanley Livingstone in his old age. Lanzon described Livingstone as a man with a strange sense of humor. ‘He sometimes joked about killing someone. He said he was going to write a book called How to Kill Your Wife.