11

Death in Drag

Harry Birkett had always known there was something very strange about his stepfather, Harry Crawford. He sensed a black side – a dark secret perhaps – and certainly when Crawford got drunk – as he did daily – his foul temper was on display for all to see. But Birkett felt something deeper, much more sinister, and one night, late in 1917, when the 16-year-old took a tram ride with his stepfather out to Double Bay on east Sydney’s harbour shore, Harry Birkett’s suspicions became a frightening reality.

At his stepfather’s urging, Birkett followed him up to William Street from their home in Woolloomooloo where they caught the Watson’s Bay tram. It was early evening and the rain was falling steadily. It was a strange night to be going anywhere, young Harry thought, let alone towards the outer reaches of Sydney Harbour. But Birkett knew better than to ask questions when Crawford was drunk. They alighted at the ‘village’ of Double Bay, and began to trudge along the harbour foreshores with Crawford regularly swigging from his liquor bottle.

The pair stopped at a lonely patch of scrub and Crawford began to unwrap a strangely shaped parcel he had carried with them all the way from home. It was a shovel, and the young man stood watching, terrified, blinking rain from his eyes, as Crawford started to dig a hole. In his state, Crawford made hard work of the soft earth, and he cursed and swore as he thrust the spade in and threw dirt over his shoulder. The longer Crawford dug, and the more Birkett watched, the more fear started to rise like bile in the young man’s stomach. This was no ordinary hole. It was long, and shallow. Eventually there was no denying it – Crawford’s hole was a grave, and the young man had more than a fair idea who it was for.

Just how an innocent young man ended up there that night, on a lonely, wet beach, staring at a chronic drunk – a man he hated – who was digging him a grave, is part of a larger story involving dysfunction, deviance and surely one of Australian crime history’s most bizarre deceptions.

Unfortunately for poor Harry Birkett, he had simply got himself – through no fault of his own – wound up in a huge web of lies. And it was his equally unfortunate mother, Annie Birkett, who had originally, yet unwittingly, placed him there. In 1912 Annie Birkett had a very respectable job for a very well-to-do man in one of Sydney’s very respectable satellite hamlets, Wahroonga, in the far reaches of Sydney’s upper North Shore. At the time, the suburb was a drowsy haven of large houses amongst expanses of beautiful gums. As it was 20 kilometres to the harbour’s edge at Milsons Point, Wahroonga, with its population of just over 200, was small, isolated and friendly.

The medical practitioner for the village was Dr Clarke, and Annie Birkett worked as his housekeeper. A widow in her early 30s, Annie was an efficient woman who took pride in her work. Annie believed that she and her son, Harry, who was then 11, were destined for a higher station. But at the time, being a cook and housekeeper to a provincial doctor and earning a respectable salary served its purpose. Annie saved fastidiously and looked forward to the day when her savings would buy her a small business of her own so she and her boy could have the comforts of life that they rightly deserved.

Less meticulous in his personal life was Dr Clarke’s coachman, Harry Crawford. Clarke made his rounds, along the dusty, unsealed, provincial roads in an open phaeton and while Crawford was a capable enough coach driver, he was a less than competent man. Sallow and slightly built, Crawford kept to himself in his room above the stable and possessed a generally sullen disposition. He also possessed an unhealthy love of whiskey, and when he drank he underwent a personality transplant: from being withdrawn and taciturn he turned bitter, violent and somewhat destructive. Despite the fact that Annie Birkett would have thought him to be a non-starter in the suitor stakes, Crawford nevertheless took a shine to the comely widow. And indeed, Annie was thoroughly unimpressed by the hard-drinking coachman and his foul mood swings.

Undeterred, Crawford persisted with his advances – invitations for a trip to town, or to watch a play at the local hall – and bit by bit gained favour. The truth of the matter was that circumstance and the lonely reality of Wahroonga’s isolation held more sway over the widow’s emotions than Crawford’s ability to seduce, but nonetheless he still worked his way into Annie Birkett’s heart and life. A lack of competition also did Crawford’s chances no harm, either.

In 1914, Annie Birkett fulfilled her modest dream. Her carefully saved nest egg had bought a thriving little confectionary shop in the densely populated, inner-west harbour suburb of Balmain. The grimy, industrial area was another world away from the leafy, rural surrounds of Wahroonga. Balmain, with its waterfront factories, engineering shops and local coal mine, was the epicentre of Sydney’s burgeoning working classes. The year that Annie and her son moved there, the Great War broke out in Europe. The factories and industry of Balmain worked overtime, and the area swarmed with young families, whose children Harry, then 13, could mix with freely while his mother tended the business. But a part of their life in Wahroonga still followed them.

On his days off Harry Crawford would come into town to visit. He would bring flowers, small gifts, and eventually a proposal of marriage. The widow Birkett accepted. If he had little else going for him, Crawford’s persistence had paid off in spades, and it had given him the ‘in’ that he so desperately wanted. Within weeks Crawford had given up his coach-driving job for the doctor and moved into the rooms at the back of the little shop in Darling Street. They were now Mr and Mrs Crawford, husband and wife.

Over the next few years, while business was great, Annie Birkett’s quality of life wasn’t so. Her worst fears about her husband were being confirmed. While they lived in Sydney’s ‘working class’ heartland, Harry Crawford did not take the name of their social standings literally. He drank continuously, and bludged. Annie accused him of using her as his ‘meal ticket’. They fought all the time. Crawford refused to work, and made even less effort to get on with his stepson Harry. Then one day, without explanation, Crawford brought home his 16-year-old daughter from another marriage. Annie had no idea that she existed, and now, without consultation, the dark-haired, quietly spoken and moody girl called Josephine was living with them – making it four people under the same tiny roof. As the months passed, Josephine became more and more withdrawn. She stayed out until all hours and refused to answer to her stepmother. Her stepfather refused to care – whether he was drunk or not.

Circumstances had become too claustrophobic for Annie Birkett. Her dream had disintegrated, and the only way out was a fresh start. She sold the shop and took her son to live with her at her sister’s place in Kogarah. However, the distance Annie put between her and Harry made little difference, and soon his persistent, wheedling ways had the four of them back together under the same roof. This time Mr and Mrs Crawford, and the two children, had located to Drummoyne, a few rungs up the ladder of opportunity, but still without the support of a wage-earning man in the family. It was during their stint in the suburbs that the foursome was probably at its most stable. However, one day Annie noted to a neighbour that she had found out ‘something very strange about Harry’. It was a curious remark but the neighbour took little notice and she and her family would be moving in a matter of weeks.

Late in September 1917, 16-year-old Harry Birkett returned home from a beachside holiday camp at Collaroy on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. He found his mother was absent, and ‘Uncle Harry’ explaining that they had had a tiff, and that she had left to stay with friends in North Sydney for a week or two. He assured the boy there was nothing to worry about. Before Harry saw his mother again, though, Crawford had sold all the furniture, sent Josephine to board in the city close to where she worked, and moved himself and his stepson to lodgings in Cathedral Street in Woolloomooloo. The landlady was a German woman named Mrs Schieblich. She was suspicious of the pair – which was probably her prerogative – given that a man and his stepson had suddenly turned up on her doorstep looking for accommodation offering very little to explain away their circumstance.

It was only a matter of weeks after moving into Cathedral Street that Harry and his stepfather took their fated tram ride and mysterious rain-drenched walk along the harbour foreshore. No one is quite sure what happened on that night, when Harry Birkett finally realised the purpose of his stepfather’s hole. What would run through a young man’s mind when the penny dropped with the weight of an anvil? Certainly Crawford was drunk, probably out of his mind, and operating with the lack of logic only an alcoholic on a bender would know. Maybe the boy pleaded for his life with enough urgency to break through the fog of booze. Whatever the case, Crawford suddenly snapped from his course of action, dropped the spade, grabbed the boy by the arm, and headed back towards the village for the tram ride home.

Not so lucky, however, was the dead woman found by two young boys playing in bushland in Lane Cove, on Sydney’s lower North Shore. The cadaver was discovered a couple of weeks before Harry Birkett’s fateful tram ride. The fact that she was a woman was about all that could be discerned from her completely charred and unrecognisable remains. It seemed that the woman had been hit over the head with a bottle, and while she was out cold, was thrown alive onto a bonfire. The police who investigated the find had very little evidence. They were unable to identify the corpse and all they had to go on was a greenstone pendant which they removed from around her neck. Near the scene they had also found a piece of gaberdine, a black pair of stockings and a pair of shoes. The only witness to anything unusual was a local woman who, while out walking along the footpath through the bush on the day the body was found, came across a man sitting on a rock with his head in his hands. He was noticeably startled and walked away quickly when he saw the woman.

Back at their Cathedral Street lodgings Harry Birkett asked nothing about the grave-shaped hole that his stepfather had dug at Double Bay. Mrs Schieblich was becoming increasingly suspicious of Crawford, as 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 with her that he cared little for his stepson.

Crawford’s behaviour became increasingly erratic, too. One of his stranger episodes was one night when he rushed from his room, screaming that it was haunted. Mrs Schieblich had seen it all and could no longer hold her tongue. In no uncertain terms she admonished the delirious Crawford, and said that she thought it was his wife that was haunting him, and that was probably because he had killed her.

As Crawford’s state deteriorated, and probably realising how close he’d come to killing a 16-year-old boy, he packed Harry off to live once more with his aunt in Kogarah. Like her nephew, she had not heard from her sister for weeks and when he arrived, she quizzed him thoroughly about what was going on. The boy’s answers, naturally, raised her suspicions.

Meanwhile Mrs Schieblich had had enough. She didn’t want an alcoholic under her roof, and she certainly didn’t want an alcoholic who she thought was also a murderer under her roof. Convinced that he had killed his wife, she devised a plan to get rid of Crawford. One evening, when he returned from one of his infrequent days of work, she told him two detectives had called for him during the day. That was enough to put the wind up Crawford, who packed up his belongings and disappeared in the early hours of the following morning.

Not long after her lodger left, the scenario invented up by Mrs Schieblich became a reality. The sister had reported that Annie Birkett/Crawford was missing, and two detectives had traced Harry to the Woolloomooloo residence. Mrs Schieblich had to tell them she had no idea where he had gone. What Mrs Schieblich could tell the detectives, however, was all about her tenant’s irregular behaviour. She related to them how Crawford could neither read nor write, yet became extremely agitated when he saw a photo of the shoes found at the scene of the charred body in the newspaper. She also directed the detectives to a youth who lived a few doors down in Cathedral Street, who explained that sometimes Crawford would ask him to read him items from the newspaper – they invariably related to murder. The boy explained how, one day, he read out a piece about a badly burnt body found in the bush at Lane Cove. He described to police the way in which, when he was finished, Crawford just blubbered to himself, ‘That’s her. That’s her.’

Despite this circumstantial evidence, the police could still not locate Harry Crawford. They had no trouble however, finding his daughter, Josephine, and what she would tell them under questioning would blow the whole case wide open, and turn many people’s lives upside down. Harry Crawford, Josephine Crawford said, was not her father. Harry Crawford, instead, was her mother. Josephine explained how, as a child, she had arrived in Sydney with her ‘father’, or who 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. They lived in Double Bay and Mrs De Anglis doted on the young girl. At the same time, they came to despise the illiterate drunk of a father who grudgingly turned up time to time with a few shillings for child support. Sadly, 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.

Mrs De Anglis and Josephine did it tough, supporting themselves with cleaning jobs, and when Crawford realised his daughter was of an age where she could earn a wage, he showed up regularly to their Double Bay residence demanding she return to live with him.

Mrs De Anglis and Josephine resisted, but Crawford, as he was wont to do, was persistent, and increasingly violent. However, one day Mrs De Anglis died unexpectedly, and Josephine had no choice but to return to her father.

As she got older, she eventually learnt the truth about her father/mother. The two of them lived in an uneasy, unspoken agreement. Crawford had told her daughter that she would rather kill herself than be found out, and so – especially in the Birkett household – Josephine helped keep the charade alive. Even still, Josephine would often warn her mother that ‘Mrs Birkett will find out one of these days’.

Furnished with this new background information, detectives were soon able to put the pieces together. Annie Birkett’s sister identified the greenstone pendant as having belonged to Annie. They then had a dentist confirm that a dental plate found on the corpse fitted the dimensions of one supplied to a Mrs Annie Birkett. However, detectives also knew that there was probably no use looking for a ‘Mr Crawford’, as they believed their suspect may have switched back to her original sex.

It had become one of the – if not the most unusual – cases they had ever had to deal with. The comment from the Crawfords’ old neighbour in Drummoyne, about Annie saying she had discovered ‘something very strange’ about her husband, rang truer than ever. To them it suggested Annie Birkett had either discovered her husband’s secret, or was becoming increasingly suspicious. As far as the detectives were concerned Harry Crawford’s irrational fear about being exposed as a woman was motive enough for murder. But they still couldn’t find him/her, despite the fact that police had issued descriptions of the suspect in question in both male and female attire.

In 1919, two years after the death of Annie Birkett, the elusive Harry Crawford had taken yet another bride. Harry was living with her new wife – they had married at a registry office in the Sydney suburb of Canterbury – and was living under an assumed name. Having found work at a hotel in nearby Annandale, Harry was doing his best to live the charade all over again.

But by early September 1920, detectives had managed to work through the trail of gender bending and thanks to information from the posters, had managed to track Harry down. When the detectives arrived at the Annandale Hotel they didn’t have to look too far to find the short, thickset man with a lined, solemn face that they were looking for. Harry offered no resistance as the detectives handcuffed him and said, ‘Harry Crawford, you are under arrest for the murder of Annie Birkett at Lane Cove on September 28, 1917.’

Once in custody, the story of Harry Crawford unravelled fast and loose. Harry’s real name was Eugenie Fellini. She was born in Florence, Italy, on 25 July 1876. As a child she immigrated to New Zealand with her parents. She was a model tomboy: everything that she did, and that interested her, had a masculine edge.

At the age of 16, and wearing boys’ clothes, Eugenie Fellini signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship to sail through the Pacific Islands. Surrounded by rough and ready seamen in such cramped conditions, Eugenie somewhat amazingly managed to conceal her real gender. Soon she struck up a friendship with a fellow crewman who was also Italian. His name was Martello and the two enjoyed talking in their native tongue. They were shipmates for several years and at some stage on a long voyage – and no doubt unable to believe his luck – Martello discovered his friend’s novel secret. When Eugenie Fellini finally signed off the ship in Australia, she was pregnant.

The ironic thing about Eugenie’s circumstance at this point was that, after giving birth to her daughter Josephine, she then had more reason than ever to revert to her masculine persona. In the early 1900s, society had little time or empathy for single mothers with fatherless daughters. Not only could Eugenie avoid the ‘fallen woman’ tag by becoming a man again, but she could also earn more money. And so she played the sad widower, and as such, easily found someone to take baby Josephine into care for minimal upkeep while going out to make a living. And so it was when ‘Harry Crawford’ made his way into the life of the unfortunate Annie Birkett and her son Harry.

When Chief Justice Sir William Cullen presided over the trial, Eugenie Fellini was dressed in women’s clothes and pleaded not guilty. The statement which summed up her defence of what happened to Annie Birkett amounted to little more than unimaginative denial. Ironic, when one considers the flamboyant nature of all Eugenie Fellini’s deceptions.

‘I have been months in Long Bay Jail,’ she said, ‘and I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I do not know what made this woman leave home. We never had any serious row to speak of. I know absolutely nothing about this charge.’

Despite the fact that the woman who claimed to see a man near the crime scene while walking the bush path in Lane Cove had picked Fellini out of a police line-up, the defence harped on the fact that the charred corpse could not be conclusively proved to be Annie Birkett. Perhaps she was still alive today, they hypothesised. If that was the case, how could Eugenie have killed her?

Unsurprisingly, none of this held water with the jury. They took two hours to decide that Annie Birkett was dead, and that she had been murdered by the woman standing in the dock who had posed as her husband. Eugenie Fellini was sentenced to death. Fellini’s defence posted an appeal, but only five weeks later the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed it. Back on death row, Fellini finally had more luck with a last-minute plea to the New South Wales Executive Council. Her death sentence was commuted to life in prison.

After serving just over ten 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. Then, on 10 June 1938, at the age of 63, she was run over by a car and killed while crossing the road in Paddington. It was a fitting end for someone who spent their entire life on both sides of the street, so to speak.

The story of Eugenie Fellini is remarkable for many reasons, but the question that lingers for almost everyone that hears it is simply: how was she able to fool two wives – Annie Birkett in particular – for so long? Sadly Annie Birkett is probably the only person who could have filled in the intimate details to this puzzle, however, part of the answer can be found as an exhibit in the New South Wales Police Department’s criminal museum at Sydney’s Circular Quay. It is a strange, phallic-shaped device and were any wife to have seen their husband in possession of it they would have definitely thought that … well, there was something very strange about their spouse.