It didn't should the window, didn't should picture on the wall, didn't shod the bed head. It didn't shoot him in the knee or party's hair, or knock his right or left arm. About what it did was shoot him extremely dead. Lorraine was feeding him enough arsenic to kill Farlap. And the reason for this is Lorraine I was conducting a very torrid affair with one of Johnny Moss's workmates. I'm Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes. Today we're going to talk about a group of people some people call
black widows. Now, I don't know if they're call on.
Black widows because of the black widow spider.
That's the spider that's renowned because the female of the species eats the male of the species after they reproduce. It could be, but anyway, it's the name that everyone understands. When we talk about black widows, we're generally talking about women who may or may not have caused the death of their husband or other intimate partner. And today we're going to look at several cases. Three of them were convicted of unlawful killings and one was not. And we
point that out. Now, the one that attracts our attention. First up is the interesting case of Margaret Utley. Margaret Erica Utley. Like a lot of people in the past, she was married young. She married at twenty years old to a twenty year old young farmer, a young guy
called Stephen Henry Utley. And Stephen Henry Utley farmed a block i think growing vegetables, mostly down on the Werribee River out on the other side of Weerriby at Tarneq now Tarnique these days is one of the newer out western suburbs, but back in the seventies, eighties nineties it was very much still a farming district beyond Weeraby and Stephen Utley was a farmer there and he and his wife, Margaret, they.
Had four kids.
She was known as a hard working, diligent, pretty respectable sort of woman, and Stephen was known, I think over time as a hard drinking, probably depressive sort of guy. And after twenty five years of this it had reached the stage where Stephen Utley would apparently drink heavily every night and his only concern was to get his wife Margaret to drive him around as if she was a taxi driver into Werriby, to various pubs and home again, and life had become fairly miserable for her and her
four children, who were at this stage quite mature. I think the youngest one was a secondary school but the others were young adults. And given they've been married twenty five years in the year two thousand, therefore kids ranged in age from about twenty four down to fifteen something like that. The last time that Stephen Utley's friends saw him was at a barbecue on a Sunday night around whereby somewhere, I think it was Sunday, October the eighth, in the year two thousand, so this is only one
week after the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. That gives us the era usual thing, he'd been to a barbecue, got a belly full of grog and went home. Now no one now knows how he got home. Did he take a taxi or did Margaret pick him up as usual, or did he get a ride with one of his mates. But the last time his mate's remember seeing him was
that night. Now he vanishes. Margaret tells her friends and family that Stephen has bolted, that he's left her and gone to the Northern Territory, that you know, finally the straw breaks the camel's back. They've been arguing and fighting. He's a drunken, a big problem, and he's said, bugger it. I'm off to the Northern Territory to work on a cattle station, and I'm going with you, Tom.
Dick or Harry whatever.
This is the story she tells everybody in the following days and weeks that Stephen's left her and he's gone up north. And it would appear that those closest to Margaret Utley believe this, or believed it sufficiently not to question it in any real way. It'd be interesting to know what her adult children thought, but presumably they were sort of more on mom's side than dad's side. Apparently, Stephen's siblings he has at least two sisters, weren't all that.
Happy about this.
Stephen's their mother was dead at this stage, so there were no sort of parents to look into Stephen's whereabouts, and Stephen had been a sufficiently loose unit that it made some sort of sense that he might disappear and not be seen for a while. But as time wore on, the nagging suspicions of relatives, friends, neighbors, drinking buddies started to become stronger because no one heard a word from him.
No Christmas, no birthdays, no this, no that. And eventually I think Stephen's sisters probably caused the police to look into it. And when they did look into it, they went and interviewed Margaret utterly, and she said, you know, he left sometime that week, said he was going to the Northern Territory with with his mate, and I haven't seen him since. And she stuck to that story, but she didn't.
It very long.
The police are pretty good at interviewing.
People, and perhaps they saw that there was a.
Bit of a chink in her armor, that she wasn't as resolute and as defiant as she might be, and they kept at her and in the end she threw her hands up and said, now I'll tell you what really happened. And Margaret Utley's version of what really happened goes something like this. She says that on two AM, so this early morning, after midnight of the eleventh of October, it's in a sense the Tuesday night, but it's after midnight,
so it's the next morning. She says that as usual Stephen stayed up late drinking and was very drunk and very aggressive and nasty, and that he came into their bedroom or her bedroom, in the dark with a loaded shotgun. Now I'm not sure how she knew in the dark what he was holding, and whether she knew it was a loaded shotgun or an empty shop gun or what, but this.
Is the story.
She says that she was able to grab the shotgun. A man handled it away from her husband, who, to be fair to her, was not a terribly big man, and he was a drunk man, so you know, maybe she couldn't. She says she wrestled the shotgun from her husband and that she managed, obviously to reverse it. She didn't just pull it towards us. She was able to turn it around and lo and behold, amazingly, it went off, as sometimes guns seemed to do in these circumstances, they
just go off by themselves. And it went off by itself, and amazingly, of all the places that could have shot, it didn't shot the window, didn't shot the picture on the wall, didn't shit the bed head, It didn't shoot him in the knee or party hair, or knock his right or left arm about what it did was shoot him extremely dead. So it hit him in a vital swat, if not the head, then fair and square around his heart,
and that killed him. And interestingly, she would later assert that her two younger children and by this woman, an adult, a young adult old enough to drive a car, maybe nineteen, and her youngest one who was at high school maybe fifteen something, that they were asleep in the house at the time. Now that is amazing, because this is a quiet, smallish and very quiet farmhouse out on ninety hectares of farmland,
surrounded by other farmland. It's not a suburb. It's farmland and pretty quiet and peaceful at night, particularly back in that era. And a shotgun, a twelve grade shotgun in a house is a massive, explosive and deafening raw. It's a very loud noise, and I think unless the two up children had really good earplugs in that night to stop them hearing all the crickets that you might hear
on a silent night, it would wake them. But anyway, her story is that they were asleep in the house elsewhere in the house and didn't hear a thing but their presence. She would later instruct a lawyer to tell a court their presence means that she could not have premeditated murder because of course her kids were there. So who would premeditate a murder with a shotgun when your kids are there? Because they'd hear it, wouldn't they. This
is very interesting to me. I find it fascinating that this would happen in this way and at work the judge copt it said yep, I'll believe that, and ultimately a judge would believe her or her defense case, which was I think slightly contrived in my view, but anyway, she was very well advised.
Her solicitor was.
One of the most shrewd crime lawyers, particularly on that side of the West Cape Bridge. We won't name him here, but trust me he's good, and her counsel, her barrister was mister Phil Dunn, who we have mentioned him many times in our podcast. He is criminal legal royalty, very very good at it, and they were able to sell or tell Margaret Utley's tale in court very well, and it went so well that Margaret Utly pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
We should point out that previously the police did not get to talk to Margaret Utly for some years, and it really wasn't until two thousand and seven that the going got tough for her, because it took that long, and we're talking a time of six and a half odd years for the suspicions to grow into accusation, and the accusations to prompt the police to go and talk to her. And so for those years Margaret Utley had
basically lived the life of a grass widow. She was home on the farm with whichever of her children were still there with her, and life went on. And in that time, you know, those people who knew her, perhaps apart from Stephen Utley's immediate family, the Utley family, leave them out for the minute, but those other people who knew were neighbors, friends, community people regarded her as a good citizen, a good woman, kind hearted, hard working, decent
in every way. She formed a relationship with a local man who I think proposed to her later when she was in jail. But she certainly formed a relationship with this man who already had children from his previous marriage. And one of the witnesses to Margaret at least good character was her new partner's ex. Her new partner's X said I've got no beef with Margaret. She's nice, she's good, and when my children go to stay at her place with my ex husband, I'm quite happy about it because
she's really good. And so when it came time for the judge, Judge Osborne, to rule how much time she should serve, he took all of those good references into account and said she was a good character, and he sentenced her to five years for pleading guilty to manslaughter with a two year minimum, which meant that with the time she'd already served on remand she actually was in
jail for less than two years. She went into jail in the middle of two thousand and nine and walked out of jail a Taran Gower Women's prison up him Aden in late twenty ten. Not a bad trick if you can do it. The interesting thing about Margaret Utley is that after she got out of prison, her good luck got even better. She served, you know, two years
for manslaughter rather than many years for murder. Good And then it turns out that the property which had been gifted to her late husband by her mother in law who was dead, was now controlled effectively by her children and effectively by herself. So she and her kids had inherited ninety hectares at tarant which had just been rezoned
as a new suburb. And so the ninety hectares of relatively ordinary farmland on which they struggled to make a living suddenly was real estate that was sold by the foot. And so that block of farmland was worth anywhere between, you know, fifteen and twenty one million dollars. So that was falling on your feet. And perhaps because of her millionaire status, million hair status, she hadn't actually got the millions in her pocket, but she could expect not to
be too poor in the future. She joined a syndicate in racing a race horse. Now, any of you out there that takes an interest in the gallops and in punting will have heard of the horse in which Margaret.
Utley had a share. That horse was a very.
Good sprinter, not a champion of champions, but he was one of the better and most durable sprinters in Victoria. In fact, he won five races down the straight six at Flemington. He won over several seasons, and he won a total of close to nine hundred thousand in state money, which means if his owners had been backing him, especially
on those big days at Flemington. They probably grossed a million dollars out of the horse, which makes that horse a remarkable success compared with ninety nine and a half percent of race horses. But it's the name of the horse that is the most excellent part about it. Because Margaret Utley, who was accused by some people of murdering her husband, was convicted and pleaded guilty to manslaughter of her husband after becoming a very serious suspect for his death,
that horse was called serious suspect. The spelling is s I R I us and then suspect, but still when you say it, it is serious suspect, and his breeding a leads to that name. He is by the stallion wanted. Now, Margaret Utley is just one of a handful of people that we're going to look at black widows. Another one that her name has come up over the journey, and some listeners might recall it was Lorraine Moss. Now Lorrain Moss was the Bendigo poisoner, or one of the Bendigo poisoners.
She's not the only Bendigo poisoner. And Lorrain Moss was married, probably young like Margaret to a bloke called Leonard John Moss, and he was known always as Johnny Johnny Moss, and he was a meat worker at Bendigo and they lived locally out on the outskirts of Bendigo and one of the suburbs out there.
And he used to pack hiss.
Cut lunch in the mornings and go off to work at the meat works or small goods factory whatever it was like that, and they had a couple of kids, and you know, life went on. They had a holden and probably a dog all that, and lo and behold in the early eighties, poor oh Johnny Moss starts to get sick, and he gets very sick. He gets terrible stomach pains, and he loses weight and he's in diabolical trouble.
And he gets taken to hospital and they look at him and they examine him, and they feed him hospital food and all the rest of it. And his ever loving wife Lorraine comes in and gives him grapes and stuff. And when he's in hospital, he improves, He gradually improves and he gets a bit better and he goes home and he's wanting to go back to work at the meatworks, and sometimes she would pack his cut lunch to go
to work at the meatworks. One day he didn't feel up to eating his ham sandwiches or whatever, and he gave him to a couple of his mates, who are always hungry and they like kids at school. The mate said that the sandwiches and lo and behold the two mates get crooked. One of them was off work for months and it didn't kill him, but nearly did. And this was an amazing business that these fellows would be sick,
and was very puzzled. And the really strange thing was that when Johnny Moss came home from hospital to effectively recuperate at home, suddenly his condition would get worse. He would go downhill. And the problem was that Lorraine was feeding him enough arsenic to kill farlap. And the reason for this is the actual reason, was that Lorraine was conducting a very torrid affair with one of Johnny Moss's workmates, a blood called White. That's whyte and that was her motivation.
She wanted to get rid of Johnny Bath in their thirties at this stage so she could take up with loverboy. And a bit of bad luck intervened here, a bit of inefficiency in the system. The Austin Hospital did tests on Johnny Moss, and those tests, had they been not lost, which they were for a year or something, those tests showed that Johnny Moss had actually something like eighty times the safe amount of arsenic in his system. Your system can tolerate a tiny amount of arsenic, it cannot tolerate
eighty times that amount. And had that report from the laboratory at the Austin Hospital been sent up the line to Bendigo, to the local hospital and distributed to the perhaps the local police or whatever, things might have ended differently. But it was lost and that didn't happen, and the result of that was that Lorraine Moss kept poisoning Johnny,
and Johnny died. Johnny died in about nineteen eighty two after some sixteen months of being poisoned, and there was a coroner's inquest into it, and some questions were raised.
I think there were suspicions, but the absence of that rep meant that the coroner, who I'd have to say was a very kindly and generous and gentle coroner, concluded that although Johnny mossad died of sustained exposure to Arsenik, that there was no proof that his wife, Lorraine was the one giving it to him, And so she got to do not go to jail card from the coroner's court, and she went home to Bendigo, of course, and she
married the fellow white that was Loverboy, and she lived along. Meanwhile, herd kids, they've grown up and become young adults, and I think particularly one of them.
Was always suspicious about the whole thing, as you might be.
And one day, and this is about eighteen years or so, at least eighteen years or so after Johnny Moss's death, the daughter is talking to her mother, and her mother blurts out something about, oh, well, I can't look into it now because it's too long ago. And she had assumed wrongly. I might say that once something was so long ago, eighteen years, twenty years, that you wouldn't be
able to be charged. She imagined in her befuddled mind, And she was befuddled, otherwise she wouldn't have poisoned her husband. It is a bit befuddled. She imagined that there was a statute of limitations that would protect her, and she said something like this to her daughter. She blurted out something that was actually incriminating, and the daughter didn't miss it. She thought, oh, this is it. Mum's actually admitting she
poisoned DA. And she went to the police and said, mum's admitting she poisoned d and that makes a lot of sense. We always thought there was something strange about it. And the police said, oh, well, that's interesting, and they wired her for sound. They got the daughter to wear a mini tape recorder and a little microphone, and she went and met mum at a picnic somewhere or whatever. They met for lunch somewhere, and she gets mum to tell her the whole sad story of how she poisoned
the girl's father and it's all on tape. And so the girl goes back to the homicide squad and they were able to prosecute her. And the judge in that case, the judge in the murder trial, that is Justice Bill Gillard, who's a lean and hungry judge. He had defended a lot of crooks and so he knew a fair bit about it, and he didn't miss Lorraine Moss at all. He said, you're a wicked woman whose wickedness knew no bounds. You condemned your husband to a painful death, and you
kept at it for month after month after month. You know there's no redeeming features. And he sentenced her to twenty two years with a minimum of eighteen and that was in I think two thousand and two, which means that even if she served every day of that sentence. Lorraine Moss, whose name was later Lorraine White, he's out there amongst us, somewhere, probably wondering what happened to the last twenty years. There's one more thing to add about Lorraine Moss, the Bendigo poisoner.
The police were suspicious of it for.
Some time, and one of them, a sergeant, a detective sergeant Jack Jacob's, a very funny man, a very charming man. Women liked him, and he would drop in and talk to her, to interview her and see if he could get her to incriminate herself. This is before they had the tape recorder, I think. And he said she was really hospitable and friendly, and she would always offer him a cup of tea, which he never ever touched, just
in case. Another Bendigo's story, another black widow, probably seen by many people as not such a black widow extenuating circumstances. You're honor Heather Osland. Now, Heather Osland was a big deal. It was a celebrated case because Heather Oceland. It was well held, and I think fair to say that she was a battered wife. She'd married a man called Frank Osland, and from all accounts he was a violent and nasty piece of work and gave her and perhaps her children
a very hard time. And it got so that Heather thought it would be better if either he'd kill her or she'd kill him, and so she sedated her husband using some form of tablets said it. And when he was fairly well drugged unconscious, she got her son to help her hit him with a blunt object. I'm not sure if it was the back of an axe or what it was, but they hit him with a blunt object until he was dead. One was not terribly old, he might have been a teenager. And he beat the
charge on self defense, which is interesting. I suppose it was one of those defense issues where you say, well, I was scared of him and he used to flog me,
and this was my way to fight back. So anyway, the judge and jury bought that story, and the boy walked, but his mother, Heather, did not walk because Heather had premeditated the death, and she had obtained the sedative and she had administered it to her husband, and so that element of premeditation counted against her, and so it was murder fair and square, and she was convicted of same. And because of the extenuating circumstances, I think she only
served about nine and a half years in total. Unlike Lorrain Moss, she served about half the sentence that Lorrain Moss did. And when she got out of jail, Heather Oslin was welcomed by a group of supporters, mostly women, who clapped and cheered when she walked out of the gates of the women's prison at Tarangawer, the one near Malden. And finally, we're going to talk about not so much a black widow as a sort of a piebald widow
or a gray widow, and that is Diane Griffy. Now, Diane Griffy is the widow of Michael Griffy, and Michael Griffy was regarded in the media as a millionaire building contractor, and Michael had left Diane and their four children, and I think he'd taken up with another woman, and he lived with the other woman down at San Remo on Phillip Island, and Diane and her four kids, who were teenagers up to young adults, lived at the family property at Packenham, pretty big house on a bit of land,
I think. And it comes about that Michael Griffy's body turns up in the garage of the family house, the house that he's left a couple of years earlier, and the body is wrapped and sort of hidden away, trapped in a bed sheet and a tar poland very neat
and tidy. And Diane Griffy, his ex wife, reports it to police that she's just found this body of her ex husband in the garage at the house and she thinks that it must be a robbery gone wrong, that he's surprised somebody who's attacked him, who's killed him by hitting him with something, and then wrap him up and left the body there, which struck the police as highly unlikely. That can be a bit skeptical detectives, and they thought that it didn't look like a hit done by a professional,
not a paid killing. They didn't think it looked like a robbery gone wrong. They thought it looked like a classic domestic murder done by someone very close to home, because the method and be the fact that the body was so carefully wrapped up, and all the rest of it. There's elements of that that go to the psychology of the domestic or family murder. And that is what they believed.
And so they charged Diane Griffy with killing her husband or the murder of her husband, and they were proceeding to put together what I would have thought was a pretty strong circumstantial case. You can be convicted on a circumstantial case. And some of the elements.
That the police looked at were that.
Diane Griffy had mentioned to someone I think she used to play the pokies, and she'd mentioned to someone she knew that maybe that she was short of money, but that her husband, her ex husband, was worth more dead than alive because he had an insurance policy on his life life policy of one point five to four million, quite a bit of money, and mentioning that probably didn't help her cause when it was brought up later, But what did help her cause, just as the police of
putting the final touches to a heavily circumstantial case, now about motive and opportunity and all.
That good stuff.
What derailed it was that their youngest daughter, who was a teenager at the time, she put a hand up and said, oh, I'd done it.
I killed that.
I hit him with a big stick or whatever, or a wood splitter or an axle hammer or whatever. I think it might have been a wood splitter, and.
I killed him.
And the police weren't convinced by this. They thought that she was a bit light on for details, and that she wasn't overly sincere, and they thought that perhaps the daughter was just being a bit of a hero and trying to save mum. But they realized the police and the prosecutors realized that the confession so called of that young woman she was I think sixteen or thereabouts, would be enough to muddy the water and would be enough for a skilled defense counsel to use to raise enough
doubt with a jury. And so the case against dying Griffy was discontinued and she walked. So there you go. So today's episode, he's been about three black widows and one who narrowly escaped that label. I don't know if Dyane Griffy follows the races. She might be more of a poky sort of girl, but if she did follow the gallopers, I hope she had no Oman bet On serious suspect. Thanks for listening. Off and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer
is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au forward slash andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description