In Tasmania (31 page)

A MILE BACK DOWN THE ROAD WAS A SIGN: PURTON'S CORNER. THE
name rang a bell – and I remembered that Jimmy, the Aborigine who once lived in my shed, had mentioned that his grandmother was a Purton.

I only grasped after visiting Stoke Rivers that Hordern had settled – unwittingly, I am sure – in the heart of a significant Aboriginal community. Next to the Purtons were the Hearps family, and next to them – in a property directly opposite Hordern's house – the Kennedys.

I could not wait to tell Greg Lehman.

It was hardly surprising that the families along Arnoll Road should have intermarried and formed a tight community, working on each other's land and helping out with washing and cooking. The Hordern children were no exception. Disgrace and bankruptcy had pushed them from Devon and down this road. Stoke Rivers lay at the very end. It was not the back of beyond: it was further. But here, in the middle of nowhere, where the red track petered out in the bush, Hordern's son Brodie was thrown together with Greg's grandmother Molly Kennedy and her brothers Cyril and Gilbert.

The pursuit of a lost uncle had led me into a territory where family earned me, in my head, the right to ask more questions. If I was not able to tell my grandfather, at least I could share with Greg what I had learned. How his uncles had supplanted SPB in Brodie's affections. How right up until 1916, when Brodie went to fight in France, the Kennedys were Brodie's best mates. And how they were drawn closer still by the violent death of Chrissie Venn.

‘
MUM SAID IT CHANGED THEM WHEN THEY CAME BACK FROM THE
war. They were different people.'

Still, it did mystify me. Why so soon after Hordern's death did all four of his surviving sons plus his widow abandon the district? Had they really so hated living in North Motton? Ivy's answer did not make sense. In the Ulverstone museum a casual enquiry threw up an explanation.

‘Is North Motton famous for anything?' I asked the archivist.

‘There's the North Motton murder,' and she brought out a newspaper, 80 years old, in which not one headline but four were stacked above each other:

‘
MURDER MOST FOUL
'

‘
SHOCKING NORTH MOTTON TRAGEDY
'

‘
GIRL'S BODY FOUND IN STUMP
'

‘
GAGGED AND HORRIBLY MUTILATED
'

Ivy had not mentioned this.

‘Thought you knew all about
that
,' she muttered.

‘Who was she?'

‘She's related, and the one they reckon did it is related too,' and went to fetch something.

There is the Tasmanian light, and then, all over the island, there are pockets of extraordinary darkness. If a single reason determined Brodie once and for all to get rid of Stoke Rivers, and mobilised the Hordern diaspora, it was the desire of SPB's cousins to flee a place that had become inseparably linked to a shocking event. What occurred on Hordern's road in the space of a few minutes one February afternoon in 1921 was, for months afterwards, the main topic of conversation in the north-west. Mention of ‘North Motton' carried the same impact as would the words ‘Port Arthur' in 1996 when Tasmania woke up to the news that Martin Bryant had coolly mowed down 35 people outside the Broad Arrow Café. The
Advocate
of March 3, 1921, put it in context: ‘It has been reserved for the quiet and peaceful hamlet of North Motton to place upon the criminal records one of the most cruel and brutal of the murders that stain the annals of crime in Tasmania.' The crime, in the reporter's opinion, was a ghastly exhibition of how low civilisation could stoop and how much the human could be made to resemble the lowest beast of creation.

Lorna Doone
begins with a murder. It was apt that a murder should put a full stop to the precarious existence that the Horderns had carved for themselves in North Motton.

It happened on the Arnoll Road, down which Hordern used to amble to collect his mail. He had known the victim well: the young girl had lived less than a mile away. Shortly after 5 p.m. on Saturday, February 26, 1921, she left her two-windowed, shingle-roof shack, waved her mother goodbye and set off on an errand to North Motton, three miles away. She headed downhill along the horse-and-cart track, running her hand against a bank overgrown with bracken and blackberries, and was entering a thickly timbered gully when a man stepped into the road.

 

The following afternoon, Brodie pulled up on his motorbike at the house of Chrissie Venn's mother, Eva Dawes, who lived in the next property to Stoke Rivers. Eva was separated from her husband, who had belted her ‘from the day he met her until the day he left'. Chrissie was their daughter. To Brodie, who had watched her grow up, she was more younger sister than neighbour.

A distressed Eva told Brodie that Chrissie was missing.

Chrissie Venn

To begin with, Eva had hoped that she might have spent the night at her uncle's house. She was now less certain. Chrissie was 13 years old and, as the doctor observed at the inquest, ‘a particularly well-developed girl'. When she left home the day before – to get some meat and groceries, and to fetch the post – she was wearing a cream-coloured dress with a green sash around it, a white calico petticoat, white stockings, black shoes, black garters, and a gold bar brooch. It would have been impossible to miss her.

Brodie offered to drive to the post office where his sister – Ivy's mother – used to work behind the counter and send a message to the police. Just then John Hearps appeared, who owned a farm above the Arnoll Road. He, too, was worried about Chrissie. His son Jack had said something the night before that he could not stop thinking about:

The previous afternoon Hearps's son was ploughing a steep paddock with a team of horses when, about a hundred yards below, he noticed Chrissie coming along the lane towards Dead Horse Gully. She ‘had a lean on her' and seemed in a hurry. That was the last Jack saw of her.

But it was not simply Chrissie's failure to reappear further along the road that had nagged at Jack. Later in the evening when his father came home, he asked: ‘I say, Dad, did you see anyone kicking about or dead down at the turn-off?'

‘No, don't be silly, why?'

‘I heard a squeal down there.'

And out it came, how Jack's brother Tom, also ploughing the field, had heard it too, a terrible scream that sounded like a girl who had trodden on a snake ‘and got a fright', or was reacting to a horse bolting along the road.

‘A pity you did not run down,' Jack's father remarked.

Jack's excuse was that he was waiting for another scream. He did not think it could be serious with only one scream. He told his brother that if it was a bolting horse they would have heard the cart rattle. He had listened again and when they heard nothing, he went back to his plough. ‘I didn't think there was anything there to harm her.'

On the same afternoon as Chrissie had disappeared, at about 6.20 p.m., Brodie had ridden his motorbike home along Arnoll Road. His friend and neighbour Gilbert Kennedy was behind him on the pillion. Brodie confirmed to Eva that neither he nor Gilbert had seen Chrissie. All agreed that Brodie must now drive to the post office and wire the constabulary at Ulverstone. At 7 p.m. the police received the message.

The following morning a search party that included Brodie and his brothers Nigel and Joe fanned out along the potato and pea fields, converging into the gully. They looked all day without finding anything.

The search resumed on Tuesday morning. At 11.30 a.m. a fettler called Charles Taylor, following Jack Hearps's casual suggestion, approached a huge tree stump 40 yards above the road. The stump was nine feet high and burned around the base, and Taylor noticed that in several places the charcoal was crushed. He hoisted himself up by a sapling and as he neared the top he heard ‘the buzzing of a blow-fly'. The stump was hollow. Peering down, he saw, about six feet below him, a body thrust head-first into the cavity. The buttocks were naked and bruised, the legs had white stockings on and there were shoes still on the feet.

Taylor coo-eed: ‘Hey! She is here.'

The search party had sat down to rest.

‘No fear,' someone said.

‘Too true. She's here.'

Brodie, Nigel and Joe jumped up, and all took turns to have a look.

Chrissie Venn had been dead three days. Her face was ‘swollen, livid and bloodstained', according to the doctor who examined her two hours later, and there were maggots on her eyelids and in her mouth. Her dress and petticoat were torn and dirty. A foot of wire of the sort used for tying hay bales was twisted round her neck, and stuffed into her mouth was a piece of cloth ripped from her dress with a gold brooch pinned to it.

For the rest of his life Brodie remembered the blow-flies coming out of the stump. Another man who saw the body that morning lost his faith in God and never regained it. ‘If one were to search the world,' read one of many editorials, ‘it would be impossible to find a more unlikely spot for such an awful thing to happen, here, in a district inhabited by quiet law-abiding farmers noted as they are for their hospitality and good nature, surely the last place that a young girl should be fatally murdered in broad daylight.' It was the newspaper's position that no-one hearing of the fate of Chrissie Venn could fail to have a sense of righteous wrath against some person.

North Motton was a tight-knit community. Most of the searchers were related. But one person who sprang up when Taylor coo-eed was a newcomer to the area. George King, six foot four, 35, ex-miner, ex-policeman and a Catholic, was married to an attractive wife and farmed the land up the road from the stump. While they waited for the body to be removed, Jack Hearps's father noticed that the flies had started to buzz around King's large hands and that his right hand was bleeding.

‘Look what I done in the search,' King grumbled, and told Hearps how he had trodden on a rotten log and fallen backwards, catching his hand on a stone and injuring it.

‘Oh bugger it, that's nothing,' Hearps said.

But King's bleeding hand would be remembered. As would the scratches on his face.

Half an hour later the police arrived.

 

‘What's this?' I asked.

‘That's the murder,' Ivy said, and spread out the photographs.

I picked them up and saw that they were taken by G.P. Taylor who had photographed the Horderns outside Stoke Rivers.

‘Uncle Nigel gave them to me.'

They were: a group portrait of North Motton school with Chrissie Venn in the front row; a studio portrait of Chrissie Venn's mother, Eva Dawes; and a photograph taken at the crime scene. Sergeant Tomkinson, in hat and shirtsleeves, kneels on top of the elephant-sized stump, looking down into the cavity that still contains Chrissie Venn's body.

‘Did you know about the murder?'

‘Oh, we could see the stump.

That's where grandfather would be walking past. We'd go on the road and mother would tell us about Chrissie Venn.'

And another portrait. A tall, athletic-looking man with a receding hairline and enormous hands.

‘That's the one, but he wasn't the one. They accused the wrong man.'

 

‘Bossy' Jones, the smallest present, was lowered into the cavity to tie a rope around the body and it was pulled out. Wedged underneath was found a basket with a bottle of kerosene, a pudding cloth and the girl's underpants. But the coins that Eva had given Chrissie, amounting to nine shillings and sevenpence, were missing.

Her body was laid on a dray, covered in hessian bags and taken to the cold room of the Seaview Hotel in Ulverstone, where Doctor Fred Ferris, Hordern's GP and a man with no expertise in forensics, conducted a post-mortem.

Ferris established an order of events. Chrissie Venn had been attacked and raped after a violent struggle. Her right sleeve and the back of her dress were torn, indicating that someone had grabbed her from behind. Her left breast was bruised and her cricoid cartilage fractured, suggesting that she had been strangled. She had suffocated to death probably about five minutes after the gag was jammed into her mouth – following the piercing scream heard by Jack Hearps, ploughing his field 100 yards away. Her body had then been hauled into the cavity of the stump by the hay-wire around her neck. Bloodstained pubic hair (‘short human hair') on her calico sanitary cloth confirmed that she was either beginning or completing her menstrual cycle. Two smears showed traces of spermatozoa in her vaginal passage.