“Mum was a serial killer”
HazelH lk kept th her mum’s’ shockingh ki secret for more than a decade
Read all about the woman on three murder charges,” the paper boy yelled at Hazel Baron as her husband Bill pulled up at a set of traffic lights.
As Hazel cradled the newborn baby boy they’d just adopted, she looked at her beloved husband and started to cry.
It was 1964, and the woman splashed across the front page of the newspaper was the same woman who’d raised Hazel – her evil 52-year-old mother Dulcie. After years of hiding the truth, the infamous Australian serial killer would soon be behind bars for life.
“The feeling was indescribable,” Hazel, now in her late 70s, tells Woman’s Day. “It was as if an angel had sat on my shoulder and said, ‘You have this beautiful new baby in your arms and your mum will soon be locked up.’ I knew everything was going to be OK,” she says.
Hazel was just nine years old when her mum had to break the news her beloved father Ted Baron, 48, had gone down to the river for a drink and accidentally drowned. But later that day, the little girl found out the chilling truth.
“I heard her saying to her 22-year-old boyfriend Henry “Harry” Bodsworth [who was 15 years Dulcie’s junior] if our dog could talk she would be dead or in jail. That’s when I realised she had killed him,” Hazel says.
“I think she drowned him because my dad had a suspicion she was cheating on him. I had to watch her give evidence to police, saying she had no idea what could’ve happened. All the while I was unable to tell anyone about it because, who would believe me?”
As Hazel grieved for her father, she was forced to watch her mother lie to the police, acting as if his death was an accident, which left her completely devastated.
The young girl believed her mother couldn’t possibly commit such a heinous crime again, but she was wrong.
Six years later, Dulcie killed her next victim – her close friend Sam Overton.
“I remember my brother Allan telling me he saw Mum putting something on Sam’s chops and I immediately thought she’s going to kill him,” Hazel says.
“Sam was the manager of a station, which Dulcie and her boyfriend wanted to take over. So I guess she thought the easiest way to do that was by killing him.”
While Hazel and Allan became the unwilling keepers of their mum’s sinister secrets, Dulcie went about her daily routine as if nothing had happened – baking scones for policemen and cooking feasts for her neighbours in the small town of Wilcannia in northwestern NSW.
Then, in 1958, in an attempt to get rich quick, the callous killer murdered her third and final victim – wealthy Tom Tregenza.
“Tom was a jockey who was very fond of my mother,” Hazel says. “He made his will out to her for 600 pounds. I guess she wanted the money pretty quickly, so she poured spirits all over his bed and burnt him alive. He died in hospital.”
Sometime after her mother put her third victim in the ground, Hazel, then 18, had a breakdown and was admitted to hospital herself.
“I couldn’t keep it inside anymore,” she recalls.
“The police were called and they sat and listened to me while I told them everything, from my mother’s foul temper to how she had killed her victims and why.”
Five years later, while Hazel and her husband were in witness protection, her mother was finally arrested.
“Explaining what had happened and testifying against my mother in court was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” Hazel recalls.
“I was a nervous wreck for months, fearing my mother would find out I was the one who dobbed her in.”
Still, Hazel went and visited her in jail a few times.
“We never spoke about the men she killed... we just chatted about the weather and news.”
Now, 54 years later, Hazel – who’s living on borrowed time with an inoperable brain tumour – has shared her story in her book My Mother, A Serial Killer.
“After my mum died 10 years ago, I felt such a relief I didn’t have to worry about her anymore. I started to write down everything I remembered and the story evolved from there.”
‘That’s when I realised she had killed him’