MURDER IN MIND:
After WWII, a crime wave washed through Sydney proving women killers can be just as ruthless as men. Sue Williams investigates a new book that uncovers the wives who killed their husbands and other inconvenient family members with rat poison.
rat poison was the method of choice for Sydney’s postwar femme fatales
By day, she seemed just another ordinary housewife, mother and wife living cheek-by-jowl with the neighbours in a rundown row of terraces in Sydney’s working-class inner west.
She looked like the perfect mum to her two children, and appeared to ignore the gossip that her husband, a known gambler and drinker, was secretly seeing other women. But in the evenings, when Yvonne Butler handed Desmond his favourite beef tea, Bonox, to keep up his health, she had exactly the opposite in mind.
For she was heavily lacing the drink with deadly rat poison and was actually killing her childhood sweetheart with kindness.
Their friends, family and neighbours in the tight-knit street where most had lived for over a decade were mystified about Desmond’s constant illnesses and his deteriorating mental health. Yvonne wrung her hands in despair. No one had a clue what could be going so wrong. So terribly, horribly wrong.
Years later, it was discovered that Yvonne was one of a number of women, in a short spell in the suffocating domesticity of Sydney in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who had turned to poison to rid themselves of the troublesome men, and women, in their lives. They were the quiet killers, the patient, cold-hearted women who watched and plotted and planned their deadly revenge for the perceived slights or wrongs that life had dealt them.
And, in most cases, they were caught far too late to save their victims.
Three of those women are now the subject of a new book, The Husband Poisoner, by one of Australia’s most successful true crime writers, Tanya Bretherton.
She investigated a wave of women surreptitiously poisoning their husbands and lovers in post-World War II Australia, with the deadly rat-killer serum thallium – tasteless, odourless, colourless and easily available, back then, at every grocery store. Vermin were always a problem in the tightly packed areas of the inner city. Thall-Rat was always the answer.
But while Yvonne was spiking her husband’s Bonox with the poison, another was lacing her family’s favourite black tea. A third dripped it into Milo. “They did it sneakily and secretly, which is the classic archetype of the female killer,” says Tanya. “A lot of people are still aware of ‘the thallium murders’ of the postwar ➝
period as it’s still quite recent in our history.
“When I came across these cases, I was amazed by them and completely shocked by what they were doing.”
The women she profiles in the book are all quite different, and united only by the desire to bump off inconvenient people in their lives by the handiest, cheapest and hardest-todetect method.
Caroline Grills, for instance, across Sydney Harbour in Gladesville, was always welcoming to her family members, supplying copious quantities of black tea. Too late, it was discovered it also contained that generous serve of thallium, killing four of her family, including her stepmother, and nearly killing three more.
In 1953, she was sentenced to death, changed to life in prison, where she was forever more known as “Aunt Thallie”. She died in hospital in 1960 from a ruptured ulcer.
At the same time as Caroline was on trial, in neighbouring Ryde a third woman was also playing with poison. Veronica Montanari split up with her husband and moved into the house their daughter Judy shared with her new husband, well-known rugby league player Bobby Lulham. Veronica seduced her son-in-law, and embarked on a clandestine affair with him. Then she began putting the rat poison in his Milo.
Bobby didn’t die, but it shattered his health, his career and his marriage. However, when his mother-in-law from hell was eventually caught and charged, the jury believed Veronica’s claims that she’d poisoned him by accident. She was found not guilty and released but killed herself with a gun to the head not long afterwards.
“She’d had a long period of mental instability,” Tanya says. “But Caroline Grills seemed to kill because she resented her family members, they were inconvenient and she was greedy. Then Yvonne Fletcher [née Butler] had a husband she suspected of infidelity.
“But I’m not providing an excuse for them – they all probably felt they had reasons for doing what they were doing – but I’m really interested in looking at the social history and the social context in which they lived. It’s fascinating to look at that postwar period and see what constraints they were living under.
“I think during World War II, women experienced a degree of freedom and they’d been able to move into the workforce and establish themselves in society. After the war, there was a period of domesticity back
again and you could argue that part of some women’s behaviour at the time was a backlash, to a degree, against the repression they were experiencing again.”
In addition, this was a period where cinema was the number one form of entertainment and women made up the biggest audience. At the top of the bills was a flurry of crime movies, like Lured with Lucille Ball, The Suspect with heart-throb Charles Laughton being accused of murdering his wife using drops from a bottle of the deadly anodyne poison, and Possessed, where Joan Crawford plays a woman who coldly commits murder in secret, but is ultimately driven mad by guilt.
Then there was A Woman’s Vengeance, starring Charles Boyer and Jessica Tandy, where a husband trapped in a bitter marriage is accused of poisoning his wife until … it turns out a woman had done it.
Yvonne doubtless would have seen such films as that’s what women did when their husbands went to work. It was likely too that she was frustrated by how her life had turned out. Desmond had been jailed for two years at the end of the war as a deserter from the home army, the Citizen Military Forces, and she’d been forced to go to work, to earn a living for herself and the kids.
She’d enjoyed her job, making cardboard packaging for artillery and foodstuffs, liked the company and money, and relished the freedom it gave her. But when Desmond was released, he drank and gambled away all her savings and the poisoning began soon after.
As the heavy metals seeped into his brain, he experienced wild mood swings and weaknesses in his body until he finally became totally unable to look after himself. He was eventually declared insane and banished to the mental institution in Callan Park. He died there in 1948.
Yvonne later remarried and actually sent her violent second husband, Bertrand Fletcher, out to bring her back some more of the rat poison he worked with. She secretly dosed him with that too, and he died in 1951.
The following year, she was convicted of murder and given the death penalty, later commuted to life imprisonment.
“In Yvonne’s case, she had a long history of fractured family life, with her own mother going through a very public and embarrassing divorce at a time when divorce was deeply frowned upon,” says Tanya.
“If you were in a situation where you weren’t happy with your partner, you didn’t have a lot of options … ”
Tanya, 50, a mother-of-two, has long had an interest in both true crime and social history. Originally from Brisbane, and then working in government in Canberra, she has a PhD in sociology, and has been a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney for 15 years.
While doing research about child adoption procedures, she stumbled across the case of a suitcase being washed ashore in Sydney’s Mosman in 1923, with a murdered baby inside. She investigated further, and ended up writing her first book, The Suitcase Baby, shortlisted for the 2018 Ned Kelly Award. Her next, The Suicide Bride, was about murder-suicides and her third was The Killing Streets, about a serial killer of women, which won the 2020 Danger Prize.
“This time, I wanted to write about women who kill, and came across this spate of poisoning cases,” she says. “I found it amazing that these women were quietly poisoning people while going about their regular domestic lives, and using Bonox and tea and Milo to hide the poison. Not long after, the manufacturer put blue dye in the thallium so it couldn’t be hidden as easily but unfortunately the dye would sink to the bottom and separate, so it eventually had to be withdrawn.”
These women were particularly shocking as generally we all like to think that femmes fatales are the vengeful victims of domestic violence, that they had terrible childhoods or that they have some other rabid reason to kill. But the truth is usually far more confronting and distressing: women can simply be wicked and wild and wily, and can make the most ruthless and calculating of murderers.
“We don’t blink an eye when men kill for power or financial advantage but we’re always taken aback when women do the same,” says Tanya. “The reality is that women can be pretty awful too. And that’s endlessly fascinating.”
“She resented her family, they were inconvenient and she was greedy.”