Wakool Crossing: a modern-day investigation into the mysterious death of a young woman in 1916

By Mike Richards

In November 1916, just a few years after Federation and while Australia was at war in Europe, Hazel Hood, the beautiful 18-year-old daughter of a Riverina grazier, went to a local dance and never came home. Her mysterious disappearance caused a sensation in the district around the pioneer settlement of Wakool Crossing, near the Victoria–New South Wales border.

The mystery further intensified when, a week later, Hazel’s body — still clothed in her white party dress — was recovered from the Wakool river with a mark of violence upon her head, and her silk scarf tied tightly around her neck. Her disappearance was reported in major daily newspapers as far afield as Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, but the mystery of what happened to her was never fully explained.

As a child in the Mallee in the 1950s, Mike Richards was told the story of Hazel Hood’s tragic disappearance by his grandmother, Hazel’s elder sister, who firmly believed she had been murdered. Now, almost 100 years after her death, the author takes us with him as he seeks to unravel the mystery and reveal the truth about what happened to Hazel Hood — an unassuming, fun-loving, and caring girl, and a favourite in the district.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921942884

Mike Richards

Mike Richards is the author of the best-selling biography The Hanged Man: the life and death of Ronald Ryan (Scribe, 2002), which was a joint winner of the 2002 Ned Kelly award for true crime and highly commended in the National Biography Award in 2003.

Book preview

Scribe Publications

WAKOOL CROSSING

Mike Richards is the author of the best-selling biography The Hanged Man: the life and death of Ronald Ryan (Scribe, 2002), which was a joint winner of the 2002 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime and highly commended in the National Biography Award in 2003.

In memory of

Alice May Richards

1890–1984

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

Email: [e-mail]

First published by Scribe 2012

Copyright © Mike Richards 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Map drawn by Bruce Godden

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Richards, Mike.

Wakool Crossing.

9781921942884 (e-book.)

1. Hood, Hazel, d.1916. 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)–New South Wales–Wakool Crossing. 3. Murder victims–New South Wales–Wakool Crossing. 4. Missing persons–New South Wales–Wakool Crossing. 5. Wakool Crossing (N.S.W.)–History.

364.15230994

www.scribepublications.com.au

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

Lord Byron

CONVERSIONS

I have retained imperial weights and measures, and pre-decimal currency values, in this book as enshrined in official documents and proceedings, as well as in newspaper reports of the day. The table below indicates approximate conversion values for length, distance, volume, currency, and temperature:

1 inch = 2.5 centimetres

1 foot = 30 centimetres

1 yard = 0.9 metres

1 mile = 1.6 kilometres

1 gallon = 3.8 litres

2 ‘bob’ (shillings) = 20 cents

10 shillings = $1

£1 (pound) = $2

100 degrees Fahrenheit = 38 degrees Celsius

CONTENTS

Map of Wakool Crossing, 1916

Prologue

1 Mystery

2 Settlement

3 Reports

4 Missing

5 Inquest

6 Collusion

7 Suspicion

8 Verdict

9 Revelation

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Wakool, n., river in southwest New South Wales, tributary of the Murray river; Aboriginal word meaning ‘deep and slow’, pron. war-cool

PROLOGUE

Summer holidays were always hot and dry when I was a child, taken to stay in the Mallee river-town of my grandparents. The overnight journey by steam train from Melbourne was an adventure, sleeping in the overhead bunks and woken by the porter in the morning as the train whistled its way through the sparse Mallee bush. The end of the line was Mildura, a town on the southern-most fingertip of the central Australian desert. Irrigation from the Murray river had long since made it an oasis of fruit growing, but its sandy desert character was not too far from the water channels that had transformed the place. It took a day or two to adjust to the harsh Mallee light, a blazing blue sky that creased a squint on my face I can see still in photos of the time.

There were lots to occupy a ten-year-old boy in 1950s Mildura — red-dirt laneways to explore with my cousin Johnnie, Pop’s enormous almond tree to climb, and Nan’s chickens to feed. Apart from the fruit trees — nectarines, limes, grapefruits, and oranges — Nan’s chook-run took up most of the large backyard in Tenth Street. There must have been two or three hundred chooks, as the feed of pollard and bran had to be stored in several 44-gallon drums. On one memorable day I was tending the chooks with my grandfather, and had to lean right into the pollard drum to scoop out more feed. I had a two-bob piece in my shorts pocket, and as I stretched to reach in — steadied by my grandfather — the coin spilled into the fine pollard mix and disappeared. I was horrified, but Pop was unmoved: ‘Another one for me,’ he laughed.

The chooks were an important part of a local barter system. Roosters and hens, with names like Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns, were the core of the trading arrangements that operated in the country in those days, or at least in Nan’s little corner of it. I never did learn the values of produce Nan traded. All I know is there was a regular stream of strangers who somehow knew that my grandmother kept chooks and that their own large Murray cod or a brace of ducks or a dip-tin of asparagus could be bartered effortlessly for chickens or generous bags of fresh brown and white eggs. With names like Arthur and Clarrie and Bert, they would turn up with their catch or crop — formal introductions were unnecessary — pleasantries were quickly observed, and the trade would be swiftly completed.

‘G’day missus,’ they’d say, ‘Got a pair of ducks,’ as if this was as natural as ‘a litre of milk, please’ at the corner shop. No haggling, no cash, they knew the value of things, and this was just matter-of-fact, country commerce.

Shopping with my grandmother was something different. Walking along Tenth Street we would head for Shillidays store, but along the way we’d stop off at Thom Pack’s, the Chinese greengrocer on the corner of Ninth Street and Langtree Avenue. This was a windowless, weatherboard shop with rough, sloped racks of vegetables and fruit. Coming inside from the bright light outside, the uniform dimness of the room tended to blend the fruit and vegetables together, as I strained to see what we were there to buy.

One of the greengrocers was Yen Yock, who had his black hair in a long pigtail, and wore a traditional tunic and high-necked shirt under a dun-coloured jacket. Yen was a particular favourite of my grandmother, and she always dallied to talk to Yen’s Chinese wife and coo at what she called their ‘Chinee’ baby. We didn’t have to carry the produce away; it would be delivered later in the day by Yen in his horse-drawn cart. As Yen approached the house, Nan’s cockatoo, Peter, used to tilt its head on the side and call out to him in the tone my grandmother used: ‘Yen-ee, Y-E-N — E-E’.

Nan’s neighbours were part of that country town landscape, too. ‘Old Spog’ and his son, Desmond, lived in the small weatherboard house next door. There was a little girl, as well, Ailsa, who was always being called by her mother. Ailsa, AILSA, A-I-L-S-A! Come in here! Ailsa never did come in, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. Dezzy, a bit older than me, was a nuggety boy with bandy legs and a lisp, who used to earn two bob from Nan for killing a chicken for the Sunday roast. This was a job she deemed well beyond this city boy, albeit one of Mallee parents.

I avoided learning to wield a Sunday axe, but Mildura was where I learned to swim and catch fish in the Murray. It was also where I heard what was to become the dominant story of my childhood, which endures with me still as I write these words.

Nan used to move around the house humming away at some tune or other, always keeping an eye on the fire in her kitchen’s Stanley slow-combustion stove that served as hot-water service, oven, and cooktop. One of my holiday jobs was to feed bits of kindling into the stove’s little furnace. When her housework was done, Nan used to sit at the small kitchen table, her knobbly arthritic fingers gesturing for emphasis, as she told me the family legends.

Born Alice May Hood in July 1890, Nan was an elfin figure — only then in her mid-sixties, but she seemed much older to me then — and she was a natural storyteller. I was enthralled by every detail as she related vivid stories about my father and my aunts growing up in the grape- and citrus-growing district of Mildura in the 1920s and 1930s. They were dark, threatening stories of itinerant fruit-pickers in the pickers’ camps, raucous family tales of eccentric relatives, and sometimes instructive myths and stories, like the one about the local doctor who had a passion for the medicinal properties of asparagus, and drove to his house calls along the irrigation channels throwing asparagus seeds in the water to advance its propagation — a kind of antipodean Johnny Appleseed.

Summer holiday stories were never the same, however, after Nan told me about her younger sister. Some years before — about forty years earlier, I later figured — Hazel Hood had been a beautiful and popular eighteen-year-old girl, living on her parents’ sheep station, when tragedy struck. Nan had been twenty-six years old at the time, having married my grandfather, Jack, at age eighteen and stayed in Mildura.

‘Mum and Dad were on the Wakool’, she said, referring to her parents’ pastoral property, Tararie, on a tributary of the mighty Murray, Australia’s longest river. ‘Hazel went to a dance at Wakool Crossing and never came home. She went missing after the social, her hat was found on the bridge, and all the family and everyone in the district searched along the river for her. She still had on her white party dress when she rose from the Wakool river a week later.’

In the quietly insistent tone that was typical for Nan as she tapped her fingers on the kitchen table, she then told me that Hazel’s death had never been fully explained, although she reckoned that she’d been murdered, and that she knew who’d done it: ‘It was the publican of the local hotel’, she said firmly. ‘He fancied Hazel, and he killed her and threw her in the river.’

This was hard to grasp as a ten-year-old, but the thought of a young girl — my grandmother’s little sister, as I imagined her — disappearing into a river after something bad had happened to her was both shocking and mesmerising. In my child’s mind, all this had taken place a long time ago, nobody else knew about it, and nothing had ever been done about it. The story was like something out of a time capsule; it was in mint condition, but an object of another era and not connected to anything I knew about.

As the years passed, and I returned to spend summer holidays with my grandmother, I always begged her to tell me again the story of Hazel. And she did. With unvarying consistency, she related the detail of Hazel’s mysterious disappearance, the sensation it caused in the district, and the cast of characters who inhabited the time and place of her death. I never tired of hearing the story, and she never tired of telling it, although it never had a point of resolution, and even though I was capable of better understanding it by then. Always, when she’d finished, she would lower her voice