It’s difficult to know whether it was serendipity or coincidence – or both – which led to me befriending two ‘elderly’ American women, locked up as the infamous ‘Drug Grannies’ in an Australian jail. The media frenzy around them in the late ’70s led to almost daily front pages in the afternoon tabloids and lead stories on TV news bulletins. It would have been hard to find anyone at the time who didn’t have an opinion about the women’s guilt – or innocence.
The story reached me in early 1978. It was 1am, and as the late police rounds reporter at the Toronto Sun, it was my job to cast a final eye over the wires – a clattering telex machine spewing out endless typewritten text on a roll of paper with stories from around the world – to ensure we hadn’t missed any breaking news: the Pope’s died, the President has been shot etc. And there a story from Down Under caught my eye.
Two American women – Vera ‘Toddie’ Todd Hays, 59, and her companion Florice ‘Beezie’ Marie Bessire, 61 from La Pine, Oregon – had just been sentenced to jail for what was then Australia’s largest ever drug importation. The wire report detailed how these two women had tried to bring 1.9 tonnes of hashish into the country. Even to the uninitiated,
