The Noon Lady of Towitta (15 page)

While I waited, a two-year-old who had travelled with her mother on the coach to Freeling approached me in a friendly manner. She was so endearing I spilled a tear or two, realising it was unlikely that I would ever have a darling girl like her to call my own. When the train steamed in twenty minutes later I took my place like an ordinary passenger, off to Adelaide for shopping or a visit, in a second-class compartment with the constable seated nearby. During the journey others boarded but the policeman gave no indication that he was with me, and the other passengers were oblivious to my state. If only you knew who I was, I thought, the alleged Towitta murderess, no less. How would you treat me then? Would you move out of the carriage if you knew, or spit in my eye with outrage? But no one guessed; no one even looked in my direction.

When the train arrived at Gawler station I saw a group of people marching up and down the platform inspecting the passengers, hoping to catch a glimpse of the alleged murderess, I guessed. But they were fooled by the plainclothes policeman who made a show of being oblivious to me and when the train started again for Adelaide, I never felt their curious eyes on me for a moment.

20

At this point, a nurse called for Sister Kathleen to help and she did not return. It was three days before I saw her again.

‘Hallo there,' she said, as she poked her head around the door. ‘Can I come in? I'm sorry about the other day but it can be so busy some days when there aren't enough staff for the work. The staff are falling like ninepins, struck down by the influenza that's raging. Do you know, Mary, countless people are dying from it? An emergency hospital has been established at the Jubilee Hall to quarantine people.' She settled into a chair near my bed. ‘Time to move from one depressing topic to another.'

‘You mean prison? Now, Sister, I've guessed your curiosity about my imprisonment and the time has come to tell you how it was. It was supposed to be a place of punishment, but the truth is it was one of the happiest times in my life.'

When the train reached North Adelaide Station, I was led to a waiting horse and trap. By lunchtime I'd passed through the sallyport of the Adelaide Gaol. As I passed through I heard the clanking of the keys as this inner iron gate locked behind me and it would be two months before I was once again to pass through those gates to stand trial. The prison was cold and dank, a stark contrast to the hot bright world outside.

I was unprepared for the terror of being locked alone in a cell each night, where the black was so like my nightmares that it affected my sanity. I was told that at the time there were no other women prisoners on remand, so I joined the convicted women prisoners. They knew about me and the story of what I had done, and they assured me I would be shown no mercy but be hanged like Elizabeth Woolcock, nearly twenty-five years before. They reminded me that nothing saved her from the gallows after she'd poisoned her brutal husband, even though many believed she had reasonable grounds for doing so. To shock me I was told that her body, as with all those executed at the prison, was buried between the walls of the prison. The frenzied stabbing, which they were convinced I did, was the act of a madwoman who deserved the ultimate punishment.

They taunted me. ‘Are you mad, Mary Schippan?' they asked, every day. I was reminded that there was no likelihood of a lesser punishment, that hanging was inevitable for a frenzied killer and the charge would not be downgraded to a manslaughter charge. They mocked my hope of a miracle that would see me acquitted. ‘Who believes in miracles?' they asked. I told them it was a ghastly mistake, at which they broke out into howls of laughter stating, ‘That's what we all say, Mary Schippan, but as you can see no one believed us either.'

A well-known woman of the night told me, ‘Mary Schippan, I have been to this prison more times than you've had cream cakes, and not one of us has ever admitted her crime. So we're all innocent too.' They cackled and laughed like a flock of corellas, but despite all their carry-on I knew it was a terrible mistake and I would be acquitted when the intruder was caught. But despite my fragile confidence I carried a sense of dread about my trial. The outcome of the inquest had been so unexpected; perhaps I must prepare myself for never leaving prison alive.

I was jailed in a three-storey wing of the prison that housed about fifty convicted women prisoners. I mixed with prostitutes, abortionists, pickpockets and drunks. Most were good-natured despite their mockery of me. They didn't hold out hope for me because they believed I had committed a brutal crime, not like their minor crimes of petty thieving or indecent language. My prospects were not good, as they never ceased to remind me, but they soon treated me as one of their own and included me in their activities.

Although I was petrified of the dark and anxious of the outcome of my trial, I felt liberated in a strange way. I was away from Towitta and more importantly, I was away from Father, and I had the company of the women throughout the day. The nights remained terrifying. The lonely dark led to new and terrible nightmares. Barely a speck of light penetrated the blackness once the heavy wooden door was locked on me. Yet I stayed awake because of the early hour. During the long black nights the border dividing nightmare and reality blurred. I had been troubled for many years by the nightmare of the goblin sitting on my chest, but from my first night in prison I had a new nightmare. It was a dream wrapped inside another. I thought I'd woken from it only to find I hadn't, and the nightmare would continue on its twisted way.

I dreamt my clothes were covered in warm sticky blood after I chopped off the heads of animals. The blood, more than any parrot, pig or sheep could possibly spill, sprayed over my face, my hair and my feet. Then I woke inside another dream but it was not parrots' blood spurting over me this time but Bertha's. I screamed inside my night terror. I couldn't see the blood for it was pitch black but I could feel it warm and sticky as I slid across the kitchen floor and Bertha was laughing hysterically at me. The parrot's head that became a pig's head became Bertha's. I screamed for my life.

The nights I had a reprieve from this nightmare, I returned to my childhood one of waking, paralysed, to find a goblin-like creature sitting on my chest – the changeling, the strange intruder. Wasn't this what happened to me on the night of the murder when I found the stranger lying across me attacking Bertha?

My blood-curdling screams invariably woke the women. They yelled curses at me to keep quiet. This sometimes brought the warden to see what the din was about. She'd tell me not to be so childish, that they were silly nightmares. She thought I was screaming because I was frightened of the intruder who I said murdered Bertha. But I never saw him in my nightmares.

Most of the prisoners were so kind and friendly that I wondered why they were there. Sometimes a woman's children were also locked up, at the Magill Reform Institute, or fostered out, for there was no husband or family member to look after them. Several women worried about their poor little motherless children growing up in some cheerless institution or in an unkind foster home. There were plenty of tales being spread about the cruel foster homes.

The women grew flowers and vegetables around the prison yards and were allowed to knit, sew, tat and quilt. We were sometimes allowed to walk for exercise and some of the women carved pretty little scrimshaw-like pictures into the hard red bricks of the inner walls of the prison when no one was watching. Flowers and birds and images of the natural world that we missed were beautifully scratched into the bricks. I scratched a picture of a vase of flowers. Another woman carved a sailing ship like the one she'd sailed on to South Australia many years before.

I worked as hard as they did and I soon made friends. We worked from breakfast until teatime at five o'clock. After tea we were locked up again. The women did all the laundry for the Adelaide Hospital, the washing and the ironing. We often spent our afternoons in a vast room at a long table sewing the clothes we had to wear, as well as clothes for the male prisoners. The wardens were surprisingly relaxed and we were allowed to talk while we worked. Only when the language became too coarse were we reprimanded.

Each Sunday we trooped into the chapel for a religious service. It was on the first floor of the two-storey building at the entrance of the prison. We were separated from the men by a wooden partition, but we could see them through the cracks. I don't know why we bothered but because we could see the men and we assumed they could see us, we all took care to preen ourselves before we visited the chapel.

We had some kindly regular visitors. Each week Caroline Maughan, a grand old lady from the Methodist Church, visited us for two hours or so in the sewing room. She brought us comfort and hope. She was the widow of a well-known minister and she was kind and gentle, which had a wondrous calming effect on us. She listened to our fears and hopes for the future without condemning our behaviour. All bad language stopped when she was in our midst.

I was allowed a special visitor from the Lutheran Church in Adelaide. Pastor Eitel, not much older than me, visited every week. I eagerly anticipated seeing him. Like Mrs Maughan he gave us reason to believe that our stay in prison would be brief. But while Mrs Maughan visited us all, Pastor Eitel was my own special visitor. I told him of my nightmares, but his calming words did not stop them.

When we sat together in little groups to sew I responded to the other women's queries about my nightmares. I spoke about my life with Father and the fairytales we told each other at home which invariably frightened us to death. Of course they were curious about the more bizarre Wendish fairytales which I knew were capable of frightening adults. Some of the more popular tales about Cinderella, Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin they knew, but they had never heard of ‘The Girl with no Hands', ‘How the Children Played Butchers', or even ‘Bluebeard'. So I became a popular storyteller, the best they'd known. So around the sewing tables in the afternoon they would hush each other when they wanted me to begin a story. I would tell them about the Wendish witches and the terrible Waterman who drowned children by enticing them into lakes, rivers or water tanks. Even Mrs Maughan was shaken by the violence of some of the fairytales.

‘Miss Schippan, I don't think your fairytales are proper. Fairytales are meant to be for children not for you women.'

‘Yeah, but aren't Mary's more thrilling – more real?' one of the women said on my behalf.

Their favourite story was about the time I ran after a tree spirit in the Towitta Creek, and as he slipped down between the crevices of a rivergum root my fingers caught hold of his clothing. Long after he vanished my fingers glowed an eerie green in the dark. I asked the women to snuff out the candles or cover the windows to darken the room so they could see my fingers glowing green like fireflies in the darkened room. Showing them this trick never ceased to amaze them. They had no idea how it was done. And I was not about to enlighten them for it would destroy my standing among them. It never occurred to them that the copper coin I held in my hand and which I was rubbing vigorously into my hot sweaty hand, was creating the magic. Father had shown us this trick when we were young but it took many years to figure out how it was done. I was only able to tell the tree spirit story and undertake the trick after finding a copper penny in one of the vegetable gardens and hiding it in my pinafore. A couple of the older women were unnerved at this trick and thought me a witch, or something even more sinister. They were quite frightened of me and kept their distance.

All too quickly the remand period, one of the best times in my life, came to an end. It was March and the trial was to begin.

21

Detective Priest

16 January 1902

It came as no surprise to Priest when the inquest ordered Mary Schippan to stand trial. He'd hoped it might be her cruel father but there was no evidence to indicate it could be him. Once Mary was committed for trial, the matter of exhuming the body of Bertha became imperative. There needed to be a search for clues that implicated Mary, clues that may have been missed during the initial examination.

The government coroner, Dr Ramsay Smith, wanted to carry out his own investigations. So only a few days after the official inquest, having returned to Adelaide and disbanded the troops and equipment, Priest and an assistant accompanied Dr Smith back to the godforsaken country at Sedan to exhume the body of Bertha. When they eventually arrived at the Sedan cemetery they erected tarpaulins over the grave while the coffin was dug up. It was a gruesome affair seeing this beautiful young girl once more. Smith used a razor-sharp scalpel to scrape under Bertha's nails and the specimens, including long light-brown hairs, were placed into a box. Dr Ramsay Smith proceeded to undertake further detailed examinations.

Priest looked puzzled. ‘Sir, I'm trying to get a clear picture of what went on between these sisters. I know Bertha was very unhappy about not being allowed to go to the New Year's Eve dance in the Sedan Institute. Maybe she was planning to meet a young man there?'

‘Or maybe the accused's sweetheart looked in the direction of this girl. You know, jealousy, revenge and so on. It's all here somewhere. If there are clues that we can't find now, then they will return to this grave.'

Priest asked, ‘Have you finished for now, Sir'.

Ramsay Smith replied, ‘I have, Priest, so we'll cover the grave again and take the box of specimens to the hotel. I'll ask the landlord to lock them up for us while we stay the night. Then we'll make an early start in the morning for Adelaide.'

22

Mary

One evening about five days later, Sister Kathleen appeared at the start of her night shift. She promised she'd return later that evening when the hospital was quiet. I was in bed when she reappeared and she lit the lamp, settled in a chair by my bed and I continued the story as I remembered it.