In Tasmania (32 page)

Over the next six months, Doctor Ferris altered his initial testimony ten times as the coroner's inquest led on March 22 to committal proceedings and finally, in August, to a criminal trial. At first, he believed sexual intercourse had taken place shortly before her death. Then he thought her hymen might have been ruptured at any time during the two weeks leading up to it. Then he recalled that she could not possibly be a virgin because he had examined Chrissie two years earlier following a charge of rape. When, 36 days after inspecting the body, he realised that he had forgotten to take scrapings from under her fingernails, he arranged for her coffin to be dug up. But Chrissie had been buried in a waterlogged cemetery: her body had decomposed.

Ferris's testimony was so contradictory that it stoked ‘reports of a startling character'. Rumours of arrests and discoveries exhausted the village. Chrissie had known her attacker … She had made an assignation with him … When she explained that she could not make love because it was ‘her time of flowers', he refused to listen … But who was her attacker? And why had Jack Hearps not come down to the road?

Hearps's neighbour George King considered it all very odd and was overheard to say that he would not care to be in Jack Hearps's shoes. In the event, it was King, not Hearps, who was arrested.

The detective in charge of the police investigation was Fred Harmon from Devonport, a zealous hypocrite with a record of incompetence and dishonesty. Harmon would be dismissed from the police service following his part in bringing George King to trial.

Harmon was so convinced of King's guilt that he saw no need to detain suspects like Patrick Williams, a tramp who had been working on a farm half a mile away and who walked past the stump on the afternoon following the murder. Two days after reaching Ulverstone, Williams was arrested on a vagrancy charge and briefly locked up for his own protection. His manner was described as ‘peculiar'. Odder still was that he had sixteen shillings on him. But Harmon never asked where he had got the money. The murderer was clearly George King.

On March 3, Harmon called at King's house in an aggressive mood and tore out some of King's hair – ‘far more than he should have', complained King – to compare it with some coarse black strands he had in his notebook. Rudely, he asked King if he had ever cut wood for Chrissie's mother. King said that he had, and once had made her a barrow. Leering, Harmon asked how she had paid him – with sex? Offended, King replied that if that was the kind of man Harmon was, he didn't want to be thought of in the same breath.

Two days later, King received an anonymous envelope containing the drawing of a gallows and a man being hanged. Underneath, in a plain angular hand, but ‘rather rough as if disguised', were the words: ‘Beware – I saw you murder Chrissie Venn. If you don't confess, I will tell the police.'

King gave the letter to Harmon saying that he had a good idea who wrote it: Jack Hearps. But Harmon's superior, Detective Oakes, said that he had lots of experience tracing anonymous letters and this was obviously written by a woman. A few days later the drawing vanished. Harmon made no further effort to trace the author.

On March 7, Harmon returned to interrogate King. He was angrier than before and brought with him the hay-wire from around Chrissie's neck and some of her bloodstained clothes. He shoved these up against King's face, practically stabbing him in the eye with the wire.

Harmon was accompanied by Doctor Ferris and George Taylor, who asked King to sit still while he took photographs of his face and hands. Ferris examined a healed scratch on King's upper lip and a scratch on the back of his right hand near the base of the middle finger. The wound on King's hand was lacerated and slightly festering.

When Harmon knocked on the door the following day, King, a man with no prior convictions, said: ‘I expect you will arrest me. I will not run away.' But before Harmon led him off, he had a request: ‘I would like to dig some potatoes for my wife.'

Brodie and his brothers walked eleven miles to Ulverstone to hear George King give evidence, booking into a local hotel and leaving behind a deserted village. ‘It would be impossible to describe the state of nervous excitement in the North Motton district,' wrote the
Advocate
. ‘It was safe to say that not a farmer was on his farm that day.' A travelling salesman who passed through North Motton complained that he was unable to do any business: the entire population had decamped to Ulverstone where they crowded outside the court house in Reibey Street, peering over each other's shoulders and climbing onto window sills, desperate to get a glimpse of the witness.

Of those who testified at the coroner's inquest, King deviated least from his original story. Clean-shaven, with neatly brushed hair and wearing a raincoat, he was described as cool, self-possessed and of ‘a bright and intelligent appearance'. But his manner had changed by the time of his trial in August. He repeatedly burst into tears as he protested his innocence and once more rehearsed to the jury – who numbered among them a Macbeth and a Chatterton – his recollection of Saturday, February 21.

On the afternoon of Chrissie's murder King had been digging in his potato patch. At about 3.30 p.m., after having a pipe, he left his hoe against a stump and made for home, cutting up through a pea paddock and onto the road. A quarter of a mile from his house he spotted his wife's pregnant black pig trotting below him towards a waterfall in the gully. There was no water at King's house and he said that the pig – a two-year-old Berkshire sow – was always escaping to the waterfall. He shooed it back along the road and shut it in his yard.

He then spent 15 minutes talking to his wife in the shed where she was washing clothes. He went to the toilet – a hollowed-out stump; drank a cup of tea, went to collect some thistles for his cow, and at the time that Chrissie Venn was walking along the road was down in his paddock, tying stalks. He didn't have a watch, but he estimated that between 4 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. he saw a motorbike pass with two people whom he did not recognise – possibly Brodie and Gilbert Kennedy. But it was the next group of people who became the focus of his lawyer's special attention.

King said that he saw Chic Purton pass by on horseback between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.; and he saw Chic's sister Florence and Cyril Kennedy pass by a little before 6 p.m. in separate traps heading towards North Motton. So far as King could remember, Kennedy was in front.

There were plenty who agreed that Detective Harmon mounted his case against King on tenuous evidence: the whereabouts of his wife's pig, about which three pig experts were called to give opinions; whether Florence Purton or Cyril Kennedy was in the lead riding up Badcock's Hill; and the scratches on the side of his face and right hand. Harmon claimed that they were marks gouged by human fingernails. He distributed Taylor's photographs to the jury.

King said that the scratches were easy to explain. He had injured his hand when cutting bracken on the Thursday prior to the murder. The wound had reopened when he was looking for Chrissie Venn: in falling over the rotten log, he had torn off the scab. When King got home his wife noticed and said, ‘You have been cutting your hand again.' He was never free from scratches.

Questioned about the wounds on his face, King said they were made by his wife ‘skylarking' while in bed when they were trying to see who could kiss their little girl first. It was a game many had played who listened to him. On Sunday mornings before he got out of bed, his little girl Eileen always tried to ‘annoy' him by giving her mother the first kiss as a joke. That Sunday morning, as usual, she ran across to the bed towards her mother, but this time King decided to compete for his daughter's kiss. They had a tussle and in the giggling struggle his wife accidentally caught him on the side of the face. The scratch was not intentional.

Doctor Ferris, called for his expert opinion, said on balance it was equally likely that the scooped-out appearance of the wounds might have been caused in this way as not, but unfortunately he had been unable to examine Chrissie Venn's fingernails. Listening to his evidence, the solicitor-general, L.E. Chambers, scribbled himself a note that summed up what many felt in the court. ‘The slight variations point to the veracity of the witness.'

Slight variations marked the testimonies of other witnesses who had provided the only alibis for each other. To the jury it became daily more obvious that discussions had gone on between Chic Purton and his sister, the Kennedys and the Hearps brothers – all related to each other or friends since childhood, all apparently anxious to protect one of their number. Some of the times they presented at the inquest were tightened at the trial. In other instances no estimate at all was given. When asked, for instance, what he was doing between 8.45 p.m. and 11 p.m., Chic Purton answered in a meek voice: ‘I had no time,' meaning that he, like King, had no watch.

It was the inability of King and other witnesses to remember what they were doing when that moved Chief Justice Nicholls to make to the jury his disquisition about the attitude of Tasmanian farmers towards time. ‘It is no slander, possibly, to say that when he looks at the family clock and his watch they don't agree, and probably they are both likely to be wrong.'

Chic Purton, a young illiterate labourer who signed his depositions with a cross, was of all the witnesses the most ‘reticent'. King's lawyer, A.G. Ogilvie, judged his evidence ‘contradictory, questionable and suspicious'. He had no doubt: Purton, not King, ought to be standing in the dock.

Purton claimed he had left his house on horseback at about 5 p.m., although he couldn't say for certain. He had ridden to the North Motton store and returned home at 11 p.m., he said, but later changed this to 10 p.m. and then to 8.45 p.m. Asked several times why he had altered the time, he stood mute. He could not answer.

In summing up, King's lawyer said the theory about scratches was ‘absolutely battered to pieces' and suggested that there was one person Purton ought to have seen, or at the very least heard: Chrissie Venn. Purton must have been passing within 40 yards of the girl when she was murdered and he had not heard her scream, while Hearps 300 yards away did hear it. His eyes fixed on Purton, he asked penetratingly: ‘Who was the most likely person to commit such a crime – a married man with an attractive wife or a young man of the locality?'

The jury was persuaded. After deliberating for six hours they delivered a verdict of Not Guilty. The court greeted it with cheers.

King was a free man. But the trial had destroyed the ex-policeman. He had spent 157 days in prison, his home had been broken up, his furniture sold and his wife Ruby admitted to Hobart General Hospital after suffering a mental collapse. Unable to pick up the pieces of his life in Arnoll Road, he changed his name and became an itinerant knife-sharpener.

In North Motton, no-one was found guilty of the crime. But Chrissie Venn continued to throw her shadow. The ghostly shape of an axe was seen to hover along Arnoll Road (even though she had not been killed with one); horses would dig in their heels at the stump where her body was found; motorbikes refused to start. Her murder paralysed the lives of those she had touched and they detected her restless spirit behind the most trivial incident.

Brodie was not summoned to give evidence – he was told that his testimony would merely duplicate Gilbert Kennedy's – but the repercussions of the case marked him as deeply as anyone. At the time of Chrissie Venn's murder he was engaged to the cousin of Chic Purton, the man who became prime suspect after King's acquittal. He married her two months before the trial. Soon after the verdict, Brodie's new wife was cooking dinner on the wood stove at Stoke Rivers when she discovered that she had closed the oven door on her cat, which sometimes crept inside for warmth, and incinerated it.

For Brodie, the burned cat was the final straw. Abandoning the farm that his father and brothers had wrestled from the bush, he left Tasmania for Melbourne, where to the end of his days, his son told me, he was firmly convinced that ‘the policeman had killed her'.

 

But a 70-year-old man who lived on the edge of Hordern's property was not so certain.

‘Who do you think did it?' I asked.

He told me the name. ‘I think
he
did it. Though you have to be careful who you say it to. The amount of lies that were told,' and he rolled his eyes. ‘Old people swear King done it because they're related to Purtons.'

He took me a mile down the road to the site of her murder, on the way pointing out a daffodil patch. ‘That was Chrissie Venn's house.' The road descended through dense bush and between the peppermint gums I saw the steep field where the Hearps brothers were ploughing when they heard a scream. ‘Fifteen years after, when I was a kid, I used to hear old people still talking about it. I wondered, “Where's North Motton? Who's Chrissie Venn?”' It had taken him another 50 years to winkle out the detail that he was about to share. Eighteen months before, old Lester Shadbolt had led him to the spot where her body was found.

There was no longer a stump, they had grubbed it out, but he knew its position down to ten yards. ‘See those big gums?' Up a red bank, behind a mass of blue hydrangeas and white agapanthus, were two eucalypts. ‘One of them trees could have grown over the stump. If he'd done it down there,' he said, gesturing, ‘he could have dragged her back.'

We walked a few more yards, towards the creek where the pig had trotted. Someone had splashed paint across the tarmac. I took no notice until he stopped and pointed at the paintmark, the crude yellowing shape of an axe. This was where her murderer had stepped out. ‘I know a fella, 42, he won't drive down this road at night.'

Back at his cottage, I asked about the first settler who had farmed his land. He had not heard of Hordern, but knew well enough where Hordern's house had stood. Sometimes his plough went over the foundations, raking up stuff.