Tanya Bretherton

“Her recipe for murder was simple.”

The use of rat poison has long been a favoured method to commit murder - arsenic, strychnine, phosphide, warfarin, and thallium are common ingredients, as deadly to humans as they are to rodents. Ubiquitous and inexpensive, until relatively recently, deaths caused by rat poison were also difficult to detect, and many a victim went to their grave, often after a slow and painful decline, their cause of death attributed to illness, suicide, or accident.

In post war Sydney, rats were a public health concern, and most households would have kept, and used, some sort of rat poison. Thallium - a colourless, odourless, and tasteless substance, was used in several brands of rat poison from around the 1920’s, and it was the main ingredient in a product called Thall-Rat which was available for sale in Australia.

In The Husband Poisoner, Tanya Bretherton focuses largely on two women who were found guilty of administering Thall-Rat to commit murder in the post World War II period. Yvonne Fletcher killed both her first and second husbands by regularly dosing them with Thall-Rat, while Caroline Grills poisoned several family members. All of their victims suffered in agony, with the toxin causing symptoms that ranged from severe muscle pain to blindness, and even madness. Their stories are tragic, yet fascinating and well told by Bretherton who primarily writes in a narrative style, humanising both the victims, and their murderers.

In telling these stories, Bretherton also explores the social context of the period, and the circumstances which gave rise to a spree of poisonings. Fletcher and Grills weren’t the only ones to seize on thallium as a means for murder, between March 1952 and April 1953, ten deaths and forty-six hospital admissions were attributed to thallium, leading to the newly established Poisons Advisory Commitee amending the Poisons Act in 1953, regulating its sale.

It seems somewhat incongruous that a book about poisoning also includes recipes for pikelets, jam roll-poly, roast pork, and potato and bacon pie, among others, but it was through the provision of banal family meals, sweet treats, or soothing hot drinks, that many victims were poisoned. The use of rat-killer as a murder weapon is a decidedly domestic crime, and the perpetrator is almost always a member of the same family.

I was less interested in the tangent Bretherton followed with regards to the two detectives, Fergusson and Krahe, who investigated both Fletcher and Grills. Though interesting men, their character deficits didn’t seem particularly relevant to the subject at hand.

Well researched and written, The Husband Poisoner is a fascinating and macabrely entertaining read and will appeal to those who enjoy the genres of true crime and history.… (más)

In Sydney in the early 1900s, an astonishing number of babies were found abandoned and discarded in the waterways of Sydney. It's hard to imagine, but many were also left in parks and public areas - some alive - in the hope members of the public would find and look after them. This raised complex questions about women's health and the shame of unwanted pregnancies and babies born out of wedlock.

The Suitcase Baby by Tanya Bretherton is the true crime case of one such baby, who washed up in a suitcase on a beach in Mosman, Sydney in 1923. The mother (Sarah) was identified through some fantastic old school detective work, and Bretherton follows the case through the Sydney legal process, subsequent media circus and court of public opinion.

The author sets the scene well, with plenty of background on the accused before her crime of infanticide. At times I did find a liiiittle too much of the author inserting herself - or fictionalising events - that occasionally jerked me out of the investigative tone.

I'd have preferred more info on other similar cases, given there was an abundance of baby deaths in this period.

"In December 1913 the unofficial count of baby cadavers (in less than two years) came to fifty-nine: on average, one (...) every fortnight for two years straight." Page 123

Bretherton explains that the majority of the babies were unidentified which makes this task extremely difficult and all the more tragic. I would have liked more photos of the two accused women other than those featured on the cover; assuming there are any of course.

I would also be curious to compare the stats with today's crime rates for abandoned babies and infanticide. Now that 100 years have passed (hard to believe the 1920s were a century ago) it'd be interesting to know if society is doing a better job of caring for underprivileged women facing unwanted pregnancies today. I certainly hope so.

In closing, my reading of The Suitcase Baby shed light on a shocking crime in Sydney's history and an underlying tragedy I knew nothing about, and for that I'm grateful.

* Copy courtesy of Hachette Australia *… (más)