Death Downunder

By JOHN J. ANGUS

True stories of classic Australian murders, mysteries of the out back and in some of Australia's cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ROBIN NORTHOVER
• Release date: Feb 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201276041

Book preview

THE HEARTHSTONE HORROR

IT was the smell that betrayed the grisly secret of number 57 Andrew Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor...

1892 was only two days old when Mr Druin, the tenant of number 57, suddenly departed, telling his neighbours he was going to join his wife in Sydney. Number 57, a neat, five-roomed brick house, remained vacant.

It was still vacant on March 3, 1892, when the owner, local butcher John Stamford, took a prospective tenant, a woman, to inspect the premises.

The woman seemed pleased enough with the house - until she went into the back bedroom, where there was an appalling smell. It was a sweet, cloying odour, like rotting meat, and was strong enough to force the woman out of the house.

Stamford, being a butcher by trade, was familiar with the smell of dead meat, and he suggested it must be caused by some dead household pet.

But the prospective tenant had had enough, and Stamford was left with his still-vacant property. He sent for his estate agent, a Mr C. Connop, and the two men went back into the house to investigate further.

Like most rooms in house of the period, the back bedroom was equipped with an open fireplace, and Stamford couldn't help noticing that the hearthstone, although firmly cemented in place, appeared to have been raised from its original position.

With the aid of an iron bar, the two men levered the hearthstone up slightly. The full force of the smell hit them, and they ran, gagging and retching, into the fresh air outside.

As soon as they had recovered, they sent for the police. Two officers from Windsor Police Station, Sergeant O'Loughlin and Constable Webster, arrived and began breaking up the cement around the hearthstone. The beat policeman, Constable Kinneburgh, joined them, and the three men, their faces wrapped in damp towels, worked on into the night.

It didn't take them long to established that a woman's body had been cemented into a shallow grave beneath the hearth, but getting her out proved to be a terrible task.

The smell was so bad that all three men later burnt the uniforms they had worn throughout that dreadful night.

Crouched down close to the putrefying remains, the policemen took it in turns to gently chip away the cement from the body. It took them three hours to free the corpse, but even so, as they lifted it out of its makeshift tomb the hair, which was thickly matted with cement, was torn completely off.

The woman's skull had been splintered by repeated blows with what could only have been an axe. Her throat had been so savagely slashed that the head was almost severed.

Thus was discovered one of the two murdered wives of Frederick Bayley Deeming, a cold-blooded monster with a fatal fascination for women.

Two weeks later, on the other side of the world in England, another house yielded up a similar grisly secret when the long-dead bodies of Deeming's first wife and her four young children were found.

They too had been butchered and entombed in cement.

And when the police finally tracked Deeming down in Western Australia, they found that all the grim preparations had been made for yet another monstrous murder.

The house