Tragedy and Scandal – Mrs Mort, Eugenia and the Courts

Suzanne Falkiner is a publisher and author, most recently, of Eugenia (XOUM 2014) and Mrs Mort’s Madness, a forensic study of the story of one of New South Wales’ most intriguing murders. Sydneysiders, in 1920, could hardly have imagined how it was that murder had happened in the sitting room of a bungalow in quiet Howard Street, Lindfield, carried out by a respectable wife in the middle of a working day. It did. So, how does an historian deal with scandal and tragedy without overblowing the drama? Suzanne Falkiner addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 20 October 2015 to explain how.

TRAGEDY AND SCANDAL: MRS MORT, EUGENIA AND THE COURTS

SUZANNE FALKINER

Although I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to learn to read, I never considered that I’d become a crime writer. Both these books, Mrs Mort’s Madness and Eugenia: A Man, had their seeds some 30 years ago when a friend in public relations asked me to research the early history of St Vincent’s private hospital. While doing this, I happened upon a memoir called Viewless Winds by Herbert Michael Moran, an iconoclastic surgeon and Rugby Union player who had worked at St Vincents in the period around World War I. Moran was a lover of all things Italian, and spoke the language, and so he interested himself in the case of Eugenia Falleni.

Falleni, as many now know, was convicted of murder in 1920, in a case that caused great scandal. Born in Livorno, she had migrated with her family to New Zealand as a young child and later, in her early twenties, arrived by ship in Australia in 1898, pregnant and dressed as a cabin boy. After farming out the baby to an Italian couple in Double Bay, she continued to live as a man, who called himself Harry Crawford, and claimed to be of Scottish descent.

Crawford worked in different menial jobs around Sydney until Annie Birkett, a woman he had undergone a marriage ceremony with, apparently threatened to betray his secret. Her burned body was found in the bush at Lane Cove, and Harry was accused of causing her death. Dr Moran, his curiosity and sympathy aroused by Falleni’s strange life, at a time when little was known about transgenderism, visited her in Long Bay and wrote about the case in his book Viewless Winds in 1939.

On coming upon this story, my own curiosity was aroused by the question of whether Falleni – poor, working class, illiterate, and from a migrant family – had got a fair trial, in the face of a barrage of publicity and tabloid newspaper coverage that portrayed her as sexual deviant and even, later, as a “Man-Woman monster”. Of course, it was hard to establish the facts of the case even then because, of necessity, to maintain his male identity Harry Crawford’s account of his previous life and actions was largely fictional, and it didn’t help that the police easily caught him out in lies. Falleni was condemned to death, but as New South Wales had fortunately given up hanging women by that date, this was commuted to imprisonment at the Governor’s pleasure. However, before this, she must have spent a rather nasty month or so until her appeal succeeded.

My book, Eugenia: A Man, came out with Pan Macmillan in 1988, and for about five minutes some of the popular radio programs regarded me as an expert on what was then called transsexualism. More recently, senior Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi has also written a book about the case, Eugenia, which gives his expert view of the legal processes involved. His treatment of Falleni’s life is more speculative and fictionalised than mine, but I was pleased to find that we both came to the same conclusion: whether or not Falleni was guilty of causing Mrs Birkett’s death, she should not have been convicted of murder on the evidence presented. A new edition of Eugenia: A Man published in 2014 has an extra chapter that outlines some of the new information about Falleni’s life that has emerged in the intervening time, or at least those facts that could be fairly objectively established.

Nearly 30 years ago when I was in the newspaper room of the State Library of NSW, thumbing manually through bound paper copies of those reliable Sydney organs Truth and Smith’s Weekly and the Daily Telegraph, hoping to come across some item of news about Eugenia Falleni, I happened upon a photo of a rather different woman: mysterious and glamorous, wearing heavy eye makeup like a 1920s silent movie star, and read that she too had been accused of murder: this time shooting her younger lover.  What was slightly surprising was that – rather being a denizen of New York or Darlinghurst – Dorothy Mort was the respectable mother of two children, and lived in the North Shore suburb of Lindfield, and was married to a clergyman’s son, Harold Sutcliffe Mort. Her younger lover was Claude Tozer, a well-known doctor and cricketer. Harold Mort’s father, canon Henry Wallace Mort, had been the first minster of All Saints church in Woollahra, just around the corner from where I lived, and where various of my elderly aunts had been married or buried. His sister, Eirene Mort, had taught art at a certain boarding school near Mittagong that I once unwillingly attended. Harold’s great uncle was the wealthy industrialist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, of whom we have all read in our history books. Mrs Mort, in contrast to Eugenia, despite some fairly compelling evidence of having planned the crime carefully, was nevertheless found not guilty on the ground of insanity.

Both women had been tried by the same respected Chief Justice, with the same skilled Crown Prosecutor, but while Eugenia had been defended in court by a fairly inept barrister junior barrister, Dorothy had been defended by a prominent King’s council. Sydney was a small town in those days, of just over one million people, and all the prominent legal identities and medical witnesses involved in each trial knew each other well. These of course were almost entirely male, and in those days juries were also entirely male: the only advantage of this general imbalance being that women defendants, particularly those accused of murder, were also relatively rare. This was probably one reason why both trials, at the time, received so much publicity, although the newspapers were noticeably respectfully reticent about the Mort family.

After I’d finished writing about Eugenia, I didn’t think much about Dorothy Mort for quite long time, although the question did niggle at my mind: had Mrs Mort also got a fair trial, or had the Sydney establishment, consciously or unconsciously, come up with a convenient verdict to protect the reputation of one of their own? Was it better for a respectable man’s wife to be guilty of murder, or merely to be thought to be mad? What I wouldn’t realise until sometime later was that the two women were in Long Bay at the same time, and were said to have become friends, and while they were working together in the prison library, Dorothy Mort may have tried to teach Eugenia to read.

Essentially, Mrs Mort’s story was this: Dorothy was also the daughter of migrants, from England, who had moved via New Zealand, Tasmania and Melbourne to Sydney, where Dorothy’s father Mackay Woodruff worked in the city as an insurance broker. Dorothy, said to be very beautiful as a girl, went to school on the North Shore and then, in 1909, in her early twenties, met and married Harold Mort. Not much of Thomas Sutcliffe Mort’s wealth had trickled down to the third generation, however, and Dorothy’s husband Harold was a railway surveyor, and not particularly rich.

By late 1919, the couple were living in a small bungalow in a new development on the North Shore railway line at Lindfield, in a part of Howard Street now incorporated into Tryon Road. They slept in separate rooms, and Dorothy kept herself amused by trying to become an actress in the silent movies, which had become quite a large industry in Australia before the war. By this time, however, Dorothy had started to suffer from nervous problems. Harold employed a housekeeper-companion, Florence Fizelle, to keep her company. Florence was the daughter of a country schoolteacher, and also, incidentally, a sister of the artist Rah Fizelle. Soon Harold also called in a respectable young doctor, Claude Tozer, to treat his wife for depression.

The son of a country bank manager, Claude had been educated at Shore, and lived with his widowed mother Beatrice, née Charlton, just a few minutes drive away in Roseville. Now nearly 30, Dr Tozer was just out of the Australian Army Medical Corps, having served at Gallipoli and been wounded on the Somme, where he had won the DSO for courage under fire while tending the injured. One of his uncles, Leopold Charlton, was the rector at St Martin’s church, Killara, just one stop further up the railway line. Claude was also a national cricket player, and there was talk of him being picked to represent Australia in the upcoming English test match. Not only that, he was extremely good looking.  With time, Claude and Dorothy began to exchange affectionate letters, and apparently they discussed Dorothy obtaining a divorce from Harold and marrying Claude instead.

However, at some point in late 1920, things started to go badly wrong. Claude realised that an affair with a married patient, or being named as a co-respondent in a divorce case with one, could damage his career, and might even cause him to be struck off. Cricket was at that time a gentleman’s game: the scandal would damage his cricketing career as well. Or perhaps he had merely fallen out of love. At any rate, he decided to break off the relationship, and he told Dorothy – possibly only so as to enable a clean break – that he intended to ask another young woman to marry him.

A few days before Christmas in 1920, Dorothy caught a train into the city, pawned a diamond brooch and, with the money, bought a .32 calibre Colt automatic pistol – also known as a Browning – with which she shot Claude, and then tried to shoot herself. The next morning the newspapers had a field day. No one was sure whether, inside her locked drawing room, Dorothy had shot Claude, or whether Claude had first shot Dorothy and then himself. Police questioned Florence Fizelle, who had been in another part of the house when it happened, and was rather vague about the events.  Harold, who evidently had no idea all this was going on, returned from work that evening to find the house full of police, a body on the sofa, and his wife with a bullet wound in the chest. Claude’s dead body was photographed in situ, and the photograph, rather astonishingly, was published in the newspapers.

A few days after Christmas, Dorothy, who was recovering in Royal North Shore hospital under police guard, was arrested and charged with murder, and was sent to Long Bay on remand to await her trial.

Now, as is commonly known, to prove someone not guilty on the ground of insanity, the defence has to persuade the jury that that person in question, at the time they committed the act, either did not know what they were doing, or that that person did not know it was wrong. This is known as the McNaughton Rule.

As Dorothy’s defence counsel, Harold Mort retained Mr Sidney Mack KC, an experienced criminal barrister who was said to be ‘the Man for Murder’. Mack, who was the brother of the writer Louise Mack and journalist Amy Mack, was well-known for his lengthy, passionate and persuasive final addresses to the jury.

Appearing for the Prosecution was Mr William Thomas Coyle, KC, nicknamed “bulldog” Coyle, and he and Sidney Mack were old opponents.  Until recently both had had rooms at Selborne Chambers in Phillip Street. An old Riverview boy, he had been appointed the state’s first Senior Crown Prosecutor some seven months before, and was known for his carefully-reasoned legal arguments. Apart from these two, most of the other personalities involved in the trial also knew each other well. William Coyle lived in Holt Street, Double Bay, and would have been familiar with the family of Canon Henry Wallace Mort, living just up the hill in Woollahra.

The Chief Justice Sir William Cullen, who lived at Balmoral on the north side, was a founder and Patron of the Royal North Shore Hospital, and thus also well acquainted with the doctors who had treated Dorothy there. The superintendent of the Hospital, Dr Emma Buckley, one of the main witnesses for the defence, had been a schoolteacher as a young woman, and had known Dorothy as a girl. Now aged 41, she had graduated in medicine at University of Sydney in 1911, and so would have known Claude Tozer from her student days.

Dr Erasmus Bligh, another prominent defence witness, was a well-known consultant surgeon at Royal North Shore, and had also known Dorothy as a schoolgirl, and had treated her parents Helen and Ronald Woodruff. Now with rooms in Macquarie Street and a practice at Miller Street, North Sydney, Bligh had attended Sydney University at the same time as Harold Mort.

All the medical witnesses, in fact – Doctors Arthur Palmer and Stratford Sheldon, who performed an autopsy on the body of Claude Tozer; and the local Lindfield doctor James Murray, who was first to examine the body at the crime scene; and the prison doctor Robert Lee-Brown, who had treated Dorothy in Long Bay –  would have been familiar with each other, and would also have been familiar with Harold Sutcliffe Mort’s family.

Dorothy’s trial took place over two days from 21 March 1921 and by the end of it, whether they were appearing for the prosecution or for the defence, all the doctors except for Dr Lee Brown had concluded that Dorothy was insane. I won’t go into the actual evidence here, in either case – this is all laid out in detail in the two books, where the interested can evaluate it for themselves.

Having been found by a jury to be “not guilty on the ground of insanity”, Dorothy was nevertheless sentenced to be held in a prescribed place at the “Governor’s Pleasure” – which, in 1920, essentially meant until the State Cabinet had decided it was safe to release her. Probably because there was little room in the overcrowded mental asylums, she was returned to Long Bay.

At the same time, like Eugenia, even if Dorothy had been found guilty of murder, she was in little danger of being hanged.  Of the 256 men and 54 women charged with the crime in New South Wales in the previous 20 years, only a dozen of the females were convicted. No woman had been executed in the state since Louisa Collins in 1899, who had been hanged for the poisoning of two of her husbands with arsenic. Men, however, were not quite so safe.

At this date there were only four women in prison for capital offenses, and the others, apart from Eugenia Falleni, were working class women in for crimes to do with abortion and or the disposal of unwanted babies. Generally speaking, women accused of murdering other adult men or women were pretty rare, and middle class women accused of shooting their lovers were even rarer.

As a small digression: one should also remember that in those days ideas about madness were very different. Insanity was thought to be largely hereditary, and so in a family it became a matter of deep shame. If madness were thought to be present in a Victorian family, the daughters of that family would be virtually unmarriageable.

Again, psychologists, or alienists, tended to be male, and there were also a number of nervous diseases thought to be peculiar to women, such as Hysteria and Neurasthenia. These were believed to be caused by abnormalities of the womb, or sometimes by aberrations such as reading too many novels. One of my favourites was “moral imbecility”. Well into the twentieth century, women showing symptoms of moral imbecility – which usually meant promiscuity or unfaithfulness to their husbands – could be certified as mad by two doctors and locked up. There was never any suggestion that men exhibiting these same symptoms, that is, of promiscuity or unfaithfulness to their wives, were suffering from the same affliction.

However, the type of insanity that the doctors eventually decided Dorothy was suffering from was “emotional insanity” – defined as “insanity produced by a violent excitement of the emotions or passions, although reasoning faculties may remain unimpaired”. Today the law similarly recognises “non-insane automatism”, where a person is for a short time not responsible for their actions, while some psychiatrists might put forward “disassociation” – a fugue state removed from reality – or “post traumatic stress disorder” in a similar legal defence.

And so, at Lindfield, after ten years of marriage and two young children, Dorothy appeared to be suffering from some nameless mental malaise. And so it was that Harold confided in Dr Tozer. From Mrs Mort’s Madness:

A short time later, on a winter’s day in June 1920, Claude got into his new motorcar in Boundary Street in Roseville and drove along the Archbold Road to Lindfield, where for the first time he walked up through the lush little garden to the front door of Ingelbrae. Perhaps it was Dorothy who let him in on this occasion, and led him into the small drawing room off the passage. Softly lit by leadlight windows, with dark wooden doors and an austere chimneypiece set off by plain creamy walls, it was a simply-furnished room. A Chesterfield settee with pale cotton covers stood on a Persian rug, framed by two upright wooden chairs in the Arts and Crafts style. The adjoining dining room, with its own door to the hall, was partitioned off by a low ledge and heavy curtain in a William Morris design – the fashionable Bloomsbury look.

 To make his examination, Claude was no doubt obliged to sit close to his new patient, to take her wrist between his fingers and measure her pulse with his usual cool efficiency. A woman not accustomed to indifference, perhaps she was piqued into trying to charm him. Her books – a collection of poems or a play script; a volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings on spiritualism, a shilling-romance from the NSW Bookstall Company – on the small oriental brass occasional table might have caught his attention. Claude might have learned of her passion for amateur dramatics and the modern life of the mind. Dorothy planned to audition for one of the new motion pictures being made locally – a rare pursuit among his suburban patients. They quickly achieved an easy intimacy.

Claude must have noticed her admiration. He was, after all, a wounded war hero, a man distinguished by honourable service in a world depleted of young men. Already he was recognised as a sportsman in a country where such are held in high regard. A youthful god, with all the pathos of an injured child, and yet endearing with it, like any young man on the verge of a new life.  And, like any young god, he was less accustomed to loving than being loved.

And, later:

On 7 January 1921 they helped her to dress and drove her from the North Shore Hospital to the vehicle punt on the harbour, and then on through the city and down Oxford Street by the old sandstone Darlinghurst Court House. From the motorcar window she saw the grassy paddock of Randwick racecourse as they travelled along Bunnerong Road beside the long, straight tram tracks that led out through the flat southern suburbs. Scatterings of small weatherboard houses gave way to an impoverished coastal strip of swamp and stunted bush.

Eight miles from the city they passed a cluster of ramshackle wooden cottages where groups of squatting Aborigines in ragged clothing looked up expressionlessly as the car went by. Then came the fishing boats of La Perouse and further on the Coast Hospital, its old stone Lazaret rising grimly against a backdrop of windswept sandy waste and flat grey sea echoing with the cry of gulls. Beside the road she might have seen a work gang of male prisoners in white canvas trousers, grey jackets and floppy cabbage tree hats shamble sullenly past, heads down in single file, while a uniformed man on horseback, draped in a cartridge belt and holding a carbine, kept guard. Driving past a line of high walls and forbidding watchtowers they finally reached an ornate brick gatehouse.

 Inside the brick arch, women in crisp blue cotton uniforms took down Dorothy’s particulars in a large ledger and told her what they wanted her to do. In a small, grey room she removed her skirt and blouse and submitted while they lifted her hair and patted and parted her legs, before taking away her clothes and leading her into a second room, where she was measured and weighed. They told her to shower, and then dress in the pile of coarse garments they had placed in her arms.

After almost nine years in Long Bay Gaol, Dorothy was released on 17 October 1929, and returned to live quietly with her husband, and died in 1966, at the age of 81. She had never showed any further symptoms of insanity, and the prison doctor Robert Lee-Brown was convinced that she never had.

Eugenia Falleni was also discharged, granted conditional release on 19 February 1931 on compassionate grounds, due to her age, state of health and good behaviour. There had been petitions got up by women’s action groups for the release of both, and rival journalists on newspapers such as Smiths Weekly and Truth had enjoyed ferociously arguing the case for and against, for both.

But what I found myself asking myself was, what sort of conversations did these two trusties have, as they worked quietly together in the prison library?