When living as a de facto is a bigger crime than murder.

By Anna Haebich, Curtin University

My novel Murdering Stepmothers (2011) is about Martha Rendell, the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia, in 1909.

Rendell’s alleged crime was horrific: murdering her 15-year-old stepson by painting his throat with hydrochloric acid and, it was widely believed, her two young stepdaughters as well.

She also lived “in sin” with their father as his de facto wife. Shocking for those times.

Police, the prosecution and medical, forensic and medical witnesses all endorsed the unlikely murder scenario, despite having no precedents of furtive poisoning with hydrochloric acid or forensic or medical proof of its use.

There were no eyewitness accounts.

In the court’s feverish atmosphere, a small bottle with a squeaky cork took on the proportions of a murder weapon. The fictions were conjured up from scraps of hearsay and popular stereotypes about the archetypal wicked stepmother and female poisoner and the “science” of women’s criminality and immorality.

The passions surrounding the trial and execution were extreme: outrage and moral panic united the good citizens of Perth. Their outpouring of vehement hatred culminated in demands for Rendell’s execution.

Of the official sources, only the records of the coronial inquiry and Rendell’s last days in the condemned cell survive, but Perth's newspapers of the day provided idiosyncratic accounts of her guilt. With little really known about Rendell, everyone was free to imagine the worst.

The Truth featured outrageous headlines and a photograph of Rendells’ veiled face at the coronial inquiry with the features of a vicious witch scratched into it.

As a stepmother, immoral woman, poisoning murderess and middle-aged and plain-looking working-class woman she ticked all the public’s fantasies of female criminals and poisoners.

She also personified anxieties about the proper care of children and sexual morality in the family. Rendell was the perfect scapegoat.

This poor working-class woman left no personal records or diaries and, out of shame or defiance, muttered only a few words to proclaim her innocence at the end in letters written by her spiritual adviser.

But there is every possibility the murder theory was concocted by the dead children’s aggrieved brother, who had been recently reunited with his mother.

To this day Rendell continues to intrigue - but now more often as a woman wrongly accused and hanged.

I could have written a conventional history of the event. My decision to write imaginatively about the Rendell case wasn’t so much a protest against the limits of this sort of crime history; rather it was that the murder and its archive seemed to demand that I write imaginatively, subjectively and ambiguously.

Iconic murders such as the Rendell case electrify our imaginations and passions. They cut across our mundane lives, as novelist Noel Sanders writes, “like lightning, momentarily lighting the whole terrain up and then returning it to darkness”. They expose unspeakable deeds by figures who fascinate and repel.

Added to this is the artifice of the crime archive: seemingly objective and true, it is crammed with passion and conjecture. The sources are traumatic and conflicted and charged with powerful emotions.

They are rich in stories, each with its own half-truths and unique perspectives on the crime: a victim’s account of events, a witness’s evidence, an accuser’s deposition. Learned legal arguments are theories to prove innocence or guilt, constructed from the stories recorded in the archive and popular discourses from criminology, psychology and forensic science.

From these rich fictions and a host of unanswered questions, I conjured up my own account of the Rendell case, informed by reading about the context of the times.

Inspired by the idiosyncratic approaches of the sensationalist Truth and the stodgy West Australian newspapers and records of the coronial inquiry and condemned cell I created four male characters: the Photographer, the Detective, the Doctor and the Reverend.

With the exception of the sympathetic Reverend, Rendell’s spiritual adviser to the end, the men accepted the prosecution case - but each had his own professional involvement and personal perspectives to narrate and to justify.

There is also a fifth, female, character.

Factual information I unearthed about Rendell independent of the archive revealed not a monster, but a quite ordinary woman who fell in love with a married man, Thomas Morris, and followed him from Adelaide to Perth.

When he eventually left his wife she moved in with him and cared for his younger children, nursing them with regular visits by the family doctor through serious bouts of diphtheria, typhoid and their final illnesses carefully listed by the doctor on their death certificates.

Rendell remains silent in the book. With the real woman so elusive in the sources I could not unequivocally give voice to her guilt or innocence. Paradoxically, her silence had the effect of filling the book with her presence.

Just as she drove the imaginations of the people of Perth she also pervades our imaginings. There is poetry and power in her deliberate silence.

This article is based on an essay published in the academic journal Text and is the fifth in our series, Writing History.

Anna Haebich is Senior Research Professor at Curtin University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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