And he panicked. He looked at her and thought, oh, couldn't feel a pulse. She's gone, She's dead. And he actually took her body out to the foreshore in a wheelbarrow, had burnt some stuff and essentially buried her at sea. That's his story. I mean, it was completely horrendous. Slashed the telephone cord and basically grabbed the baby, ran to the carpoard, absolutely terrifying.
I'm Andrew Rule's Life and Crimes. Today we welcome back to the studio at South Bank an old friend of ours, not that she's old, but she's been a friend for a while, and that is Emily Webb, one of the better crime writers around town and been at it now quite a while. I used to think of her as sort of a young girl, you know, learning the craft, but now, of course she's a veteran and I'm, in fact, like Moses, I'm a Methusela. Emily's written yet another book.
This one is called Murder in the Suburbs and it seems to me that it covers stories from all around Australia and perhaps the odd one from overseas. But because we're sitting in Melbourne, will probably open Emily with talking about something from greater Melbourne, maybe even Frankston, would that be right? And welcome to Life and Crimes.
Welcome back, Thank you, because I listen to Life and Crimes every week. It is one of my all time favorite podcasts.
I am on it beautiful. Now you've been just telling us off, Mike, all the work you've been doing, a lot of the work you've been doing is getting this book done. There's a lot of stories, isn't it? How many? Oh?
This is about fifteen eighteen.
And inside some of those are multiple stories. Inside some of those long chapters are more than one story. Yeah, And we're going to delve into one of those in a minute. But the Frankston Vanishing case, what is that I'm not familiar with? And I'm really curious.
Well, I came across it. I'd never heard of it before. And I know, you know pretty much all the crimes that have ever happened. But I always feel really thrilled when I find something I don't know about. So this happened in nineteen fifty and in Frankston.
How old do you think I am?
I was not born then, No, I know you wouldn't, but I thought you might have come across it in your you know, in your research.
I have not so delighted to hear about it because I'll steal it absolutely.
Hey, we help each other out. So this happened in nineteen fifty in Frankston and a woman in her fifties disappeared. Her name was Caroline Scully. She lived in a house that was right in the main guts of Frankston where the street. Actually there's a shopping center there now, but Frankston was not the Frankston we know back then.
It was like Bayside Holiday. Yeah.
Yeah, But so she was like a mother and grandmother, had four adult children. Her husband, Edward Scully, had been in the navy for many years. They were both actually from the UK and came out to Australia in the late nineteen tens early nineteen twenties and were married and had their family. And Edward had recently left the navy. He was a cook, he started as a cook and yeah, like Caroline just went missing. And there was a bit about the situation though. So Edward and Caroline had been
living apart. I mean, he was away a lot when he was in the navy.
But was it a case of in the navy.
Yeah, definitely. I think it was a bit of that. And they married, but they're not living together.
It was a village village people, well that's.
It, and they were well known around the village and Caroline lived in the house that they had purchased. But Edward was kind of he was in a relationship with someone else, shall I say, a younger woman he'd met working as a cook at like a holiday camp at I can't remember the name of it. It was an old migrant camp, you know, that had then been sold to a group who wanted to make it into almost like an Australian Butler's you know, like those yeah, like
Heidi High campers, that kind of thing. And that went on for a few years. But then I believe the government bought that land back and it's now a defense based down on the peninsula somewhere.
Oh that's fine.
Yeah, So he had met a younger woman in her thirties, a waitress called Jean Baker, and look, yeah, he was in a relationship. People kind of knew, but there were some attempts to reconcile. So Edward came back and it's like Caroline, like let's sell the house and make a fresh start. So that actually sold the house in Frankston. And yeah, they were going to buy a business and maybe move to the country somewhere Bendigo, Ballarat, somewhere like that.
But Caroline sort of just disappears. She doesn't turn up for work one day. She actually worked for a really well known book maker who you might know of called Lenn Juson. It was a pretty prominent bookie. She was like a housekeeper a few days a week for Len and his wife Alma, who lived in a very beautiful home in Frankston that's heritage listed. But she didn't turn
up to work that when she was expected. And yeah, like it's believed Edward had rung up Alma juice and and said, oh, Caroline won't be in We're packing for a trip or something like that, or the house move. The thing is, no one hears from Caroline. She didn't turn up for something she was meant to. And the kids are like, well, where's mum, what's going on? The kids are adults, some of them have children. One of the daughters is expecting a baby very soon.
So potential Grandma's not about this bomb.
Night and Caroline and her daughters were particularly close and spoke a lot. I think the kid A few of the kids lived locally. One of the sons was in the navy as well. And what happened was Edward told people a few weeks later that Caroline had left a note that she'd gone on the Spirit, which was a train that went to Aubrey I think, and then you could move to Sydney. He said he came back one
night and found this note gone on the Spirit. Okay, that's strange, and he was just very evasive about what had happened, and the kids were like, what's going on, where's mum. One of the daughters had checked the house and said, well, mum never travels without this croached blanket,
which is still there. You know, her possessions were there, but things like she knew that her mum if she traveled, and they had lived in other parts of Australia, so it wasn't beyond the realm that maybe she might have gone somewhere, but not when she was about to be a new grandmar again. So yeah, they almost had to press gang their dad actually to go to the police and report Caroline missing. And this was almost a month after she'd gone. Caroline hadn't collected the money from the
house sale. It just was all a bit weird. So the police got involved. The homicide squad got involved pretty quickly. But there was a very big, big search like across Frankston obviously foot police talking to witnesses, looking at There was some pine groves back then. I don't believe they're there now. In Frankston. There was like pine plantations. They're
probably where the pines are, you know. The housing and stuff was you know, just looking for and from what I was reading in the newspapers and other things like because there was quite a few articles, you know, please for have you seen this woman? Went all around Australia. But they were on the back foot because really the last time she'd been seen was at the end of May in nineteen fifty and police won't alert it till sort of early June, a couple of weeks into June.
And yeah, it was a big search Australia wide.
But so the police took it pretty seriously.
They certainly did. They dug up the garage at the house.
They they clearly were looking for a body.
Yeah, they were saying, oh, she's missing, but I think they believed she was dead. Edward would say, well, she could be in the Blue Mountains in Katoomba because we lived there once when we were married, or maybe she's in Queensland, or maybe she's in Tasmania. Just so evasive. And meanwhile it was a big media story and papers like the Truth, you know, like great, look, I love the truth. Issues of the truth. Salacious crime reporting, but usually pretty good crime reporting. But he was back with
the girlfriend, Jean Baker. He had given some of Caroline's jewelry to Jean, and they'd actually at one point were working together at the Black Stump Hotel out in the Ara Valley in Nabathon and would sign in as mister and missus Scully. So it's looking pretty dodgy really, And witnesses would say that they knew that the marriage was a bit rocky. The lawyer who did the house sale said, well, they said they were going to have a new start,
but Caroline didn't seem too happy. So there was a really massive search all over, but nothing, nothing came up.
This just fell off a cliff. What led you back to look at it again and bring it up?
I just found it when I look, I don't really have a great plan when I'm writing. I'm not a very well planned writer. I just research read you know that rabbit holes would go down, and I just noticed it, and I thought, wow, I don't know about that. This is really interesting. I do find missing person's case is really fascinating. And I think what drew me in was
as this evolved. I mean, Edward Scully was arrested for and charged with the murder of Caroline, and it was to be the first case in Victoria for someone to be charged with homicide without a body. And we know that that has happened.
It's hard to prove, but it can happen.
And I thought, well, that's interesting, but also the scale of the search. They eventually, you know, went and arrested him in Queensland. He was living with his girlfriend Jean.
And he ended up up there.
Yeah, he moved up there. He lived up there with Jean for a bit of a fresh start. The thought is that he kind of forced the house sale under the guise of let's make a fresh start Caroline, so he could get the cash to make this start with sort of hapless gene Baker, who was splashed all over the newspapers a bit, but I don't know. It seems a bit of a younger woman. But you know, hey, we've all been silly in love before. Yes, it happened,
hopefully not to that extent, you know. But he was arrested in Queensland.
And what was he like? Were the photographs in the truth?
Yes, so he seemed quite a tall man, dark.
Hair, don't trust them, tall blade.
He was younger than Caroline, so he was probably in his early fifties. Caroline was about fifty six or fifty seven, and you know the way papers describe women and the clothes they wore. You know, she had like brown hair that was pulled back in a Gaberdine last scene wearing a Gabardine suit. And yeah, in the photo she does look a bit older than him. She, you know, had a very established life in Frankston. She had that job
with the bookmaker and his wife doing the cleaning. She had friends that she caught up with regularly, and she was very close to her kids. But the homicide squad back then were like, yeah, she's dead, but where.
Is she any idea of what happened to the family. Any of those kids, you know, are they out there somewhere.
I actually got in some contact through ancestry dot com, very handy with like the wife of the son of one of the kids. It was a bit convoluted, but she does remember, she said, we weren't able to catch up. The people were sort of scattered around and you know, stars did in the line. But I did make some contact. But they seem to have very scant knowledge about things, and I'll send a book to them. She did mention that Auntie bet Bet was one of the children of
Caroline Edward. You know that her husband has always said, yeah, Auntie Bet always thought her mother would never go go away, like never leave. It was just weird. Now look a bit of a spoiler alert, but look, Caroline's body was never found. But Edward did make a confession of sorts. I mean that the issue is, though you've only got
one voice, like Caroline's voice can't be heard. So he actually told his son when he was in the watchhouse in Brisbane that they had been having an argument in the kitchen of the Richie Street, Frankston home that they just sold, and Caroline had suddenly fainted and hit her head on the stove in the kitchen and he panicked. He looked at her and thought, oh, couldn't feel a Pulse's she's gone. She's dead. And he actually took her body out to the foreshore in a wheelbarrow, had burnt
some stuff and essentially buried her at sea. That's his story, which probably did bury her at sea. But whether or not she fainted, the doctor gave evidence. Caroline's family doctor gave evidence that you know, back then, they seem to have inquest really quickly. Did you know that that really quickly.
And then there was no bog.
Yeah, no, it was like weeks after and that.
Wasn't clogged by legal process and lawyers and scientific stuff.
They just banged it on and they had all the witnesses, you know.
As a clerical exit.
Yeah, and you can get quite a lot of information from that. But the family gp gave evidence. I've never known Caroline to have fainted before.
So these sort of crimes are as old as time, aren't they. We see versions of them every you know, there's been that big money in Queensland and other places where usually hasband kill's wife, sometimes the other way around, usually because of a third party.
Yeah, and who knows what the argument was about probably understandably, Caroline was probably frustrated because he's you know, off with.
You know or nearly always money and see yeah, and.
Reading between the lines of all the information, I think Caroline was probably reluctant to sell the Frankston home. That that is what it sounded like. But look, he ended up he pled to lesser charges of I think the charge was interfering with the coroner's ability to you know.
So what sort of time did he get?
He did about three years, not too long, and then he ended up actually back up in Queensland married to Jene Baker.
This underlines a theory I've got that sentences have not got a laxa. They've gone the other way. When you go back in time, you think that's amazing. You'd get three times that now, Yeah, it is amazing.
Well, especially with some of the episodes you do where I was listening to one about like completely heinous murders of young women and the two guys kind of got out pretty quickly.
Naughty Rosalind. Yeah, that's one of the worst murders anywhere in the world ever, shocking torture murder. They were both out before they were forty they've gone in nineteen or twenty. They are out at the age of thirty nine. Yeah, and I should have had the key just never never to be released.
You'd never be released now, well, shouldn't be. I thought you'd find interesting though as well. Is the homicide Squad at the time. There's probably some names. You know. There was a guy called Frank Bluey.
Adams, Yes, and so it was famous.
And then when I was, you know, like researching, I thought I need to I need to mention this. I'm not saying that the homicide Squad did not do their investigation properly, but later on some of those guys were embroiled in the Big abortion inquiry.
Ordon Matthews, Jack Ford and Jack Matthews, the two Jacks.
So they were like getting you know, oh, kickbacks because doctors and that didn't want to be jailed for performing abortion.
There were, yeah, there were abortioners who paid homicide Squad to possibly refer not only protect them, but bring clients, of whom there were plenty, because that's how it went then. Now it's something that I've never done much of, but you know a bit about it. They're strange cases of people snatching babies now there's been the meaning relatively recent times. There's one involving would you believe one of the big Calabrian families, funnily enough, funnily enough by chance.
Yeah, they picked the wrong baby, that's for sure.
Yeah, Barbara, one of the Barbaras of all the people in all the world. That's a bart bro baby. But anyway, tell us about the baby snatching story and you've got a long chapter here.
Yeah, there's quite a few cases. And look there was in the nineties. There was some really big cases in the UK that really exposed deficiencies in hospital security. But I did one even further back because I read about this case years ago and I just farted away. It was actually a young woman, a waitress snatched a baby from a hospital in Sydney in the nineteen forties because she just wanted a baby and she just rocked on in and after a dance and took this baby.
A psychological thing that affects.
Some definitely mostly women. And there is a theme with the big UK cases, like Abbie Humphreys was one. I mean it was massive. They're women who have experienced usually a loss like a child loss or a pregnancy loss. Then you've got probably mixed in there, some mental ill health, a lot of stuff, you know. Or trying to keep a relationship is another theme that they fake pregnancies to try and keep a relationship. But so there's a few of those. I kind of went, I went pretty wild
with this chapter. I just found it interesting. I even touched on the Lindbergh kidnapping only because that was probably the most famous of.
Of course time, one of the biggest.
Crimes, biggest crimes ever. And you know, there's a lot of theories about what happened there, you know, But I did find one locally, because you know, I grew up in the Outer East and I live out that way. There was one in lily Dale in the nineteen seven really nineteen seventy six, remind yeah, and actually just it was probably a few months before I was born. I am getting along in The.
Truth was after I started work, sadly.
Doing all that great reporting. Well, what happened was as a family they're living in Lilia, which you know, the gateway to the Arra Valley, you know, an out of suburb. The couple have got three children, they've got their new two week old baby was born at the probably either the William Angus Hospital or I think there was a
lily Dale Bush Hospital back then. Back then, and you know, back in the day, you'd have all the baby announcements in the paper and it's all I think I had one in the Leader when I had my younger daughter. But you know, just going about the day. It's like in the morning, midweek, the mom's got you know, the little kids, and she's feeding the baby and there's a knock on the door and one of the children goes
to answer answer it. They're under ten, these kids, and there's a woman at the door, you know, wanting to speak to the mum and saying, oh, my name's Sue, I'm here to take the baby, check the baby, and she actually entered the home. But it took a really
dark turn here. So this woman threw pepper in the woman's face her name was Janine, who has the newborn baby and the two other kids, and held a button knife to her back and forced her into the kitchen and basically tied her up with you know the kind of sticking plasty use for like jeris plasts, that kind of stuff. I mean, it was completely horrendous. Slashed the telephone card and basically grabbed the baby, ran to the carport,
absolutely terrifying. So she'd put the younger children in a bedroom. So this mother, I mean, I cannot imagine the terror, like I having had my own kids, just that absolute terror, broke free and ran to the neighbors. The baby's gone, called the police, called her husband. It's absolutely all systems go, and the police are pleading going. This is a young baby. The baby is breastfed, it's in danger. So the husband obviously spoke for the wife. There's a fair bit of
press coverage about this. I mean, I think things are a bit looser back then. Yeah, with like access to families or just a bit more impromptu. It's not as polished as it was, but still seemed extremely effective, you know. And they just pleaded, please bring our baby back. Interestingly, once police had started doing investigations, they found out from talking to the parents of the stolen baby that a woman had called the house and claimed to know the mum.
He said, oh, my name's Sue, I know the mom from you know, the hospital, and the dad's like, well, we don't know anyone of that name. But it turns out the abductress, the woman who abducted the baby had actually been calling people literally from you know, looking at the birth notices just so she's kind of punting, well organized hunting.
Yeah, so it's a sort of an irrational mad crime, and yet she'd gone about it very rationally.
This is the thing.
It was completely yeah, fairly well planned.
I feel like it was, you know, a bit rudimentary, but she, you know, she threw the pepper in the face and did all that.
You went prepared.
She went prepared, and you know, there was a fair bit of planning going on in like calling and looking. And so a few days later, so the baby's missing. But a few days later they get a call. Now I couldn't find out exactly who had made that call, but I think it's pretty safe to say it was the hut of the woman who had taken the baby, because this is where it gets a bit weird, weirder
than horrifying than usual. You've got to maintain a facade of being pregnant, right, like if you're suddenly coming home with a baby. So it turns out that the woman who'd taken the baby was from Tacoma, up in the hills, a thirty six year old woman called Elsie Robison. She already had six kids, and you know, pretty sure her husband was the one who called and said, okay, yeah, we've got this baby here. And she told him that she had given birth at the angles and then you know,
been discharged so like within a day. But also the baby's two weeks old, and I thought, if you've got six kids, surely you can tell a bit if.
It's like had some sense of it. Yeah, look, it seems someone who's seen all those new ones.
Yeah, exactly, the real freshies.
You know.
It's so good that the family were reunited. But the story of why this woman did it is it's really interesting. It's believed that she was having a phantom pregnancy. Now I had to do a bit of research. It's apparently a thing where you know, maybe you really want a baby so much, or you think you might be pregnant, and you know it's a psychological thing, but you know, you have a scan and you can't deny if there's not a little fetus in there. You can't you know,
fake it. But the psychological thing is so strong and it can actually mimic symptoms in your body of pregnancy,
like your period stops or you know, other things. But going back to when I said about the baby being a couple of weeks old, it did go to court and the police prosecutor did ask Elsie Robison's husband about the fact that the baby his wife presented to him at home saying oh, look, we've got a new child, was not a new bond and he said, I could not tell the difference between a brand spanking new baby and one that was two weeks old. And I just noted,
that's a bit odd considering you've got six kids. I don't know, I thought that was a bit strange. But she told him she gone into labor at the Anglos Hospital that morning and was just discharged the same day.
Covering up the fact that he hadn't immediately collected.
And I think it look, it must be a shock, Like I mean, honestly, if your your wife is stealing a baby, you're pretty unwell. And you know, she thought she was pregnant, but then she'd had tubal ligation six years before. It's kind of all a bit shady, but you know, she really wanted another baby, so I think there was a bit of trauma that her husband had said, hey, we've got enough kids. Like, let's, you know, sort it out.
They'd explored fostering and adoption. They actually even had a foster baby who'd stayed with them for six months, but then they had to return that baby, and so that was traumatic. So I sort of see how this.
Sort of loss of yeah, ligation, yeah, painting the other one baby.
It's all happening. But they, as I said, the detectives found out that she had been making phone calls to other parents, pretending to have a legitimate reason to visit their homes, trying to say, oh, maybe I'm a visit nurse nurse. I don't know what they called them back then, mothercraft.
Nurses or something.
Yeah, she didn't get jail timing. Mostly these women need intensive psychological help, and well that's.
The system was actually, I think pretty tolerant of women with problems in Fanticide was on the books, and any child that was killed by its mother under a certain age, under twelve months or something, it was written off as infanticide, not murder, and the penalties were much lower. It was sort of a recognized thing that sort of a de facto acknowledgment.
Of postpartum depression or psychosist.
Post always always recognized it in a way.
In some ways, I feel like courts were more woke back there, like a bit more understanding or there was a probably a ground swell at that time as well to have more understanding about mental health. I think from the tush days it was.
But yeah, there was discretion magistration. Judges had discretion, and I think they used it.
Yeah, Well, she was committed to stand trial. She was released on bail. Her husband gave assurance, I'll keep an eye on airy. Change the way he worked so he could be at home, you know, like probably had to travel a bit being in uplay to like go to wherever he worked. He rearranged his hours. She pleaded guilty
to abduction, but not guilty to aggravated burglary. I thought the aggravated part of what she did was actually extremely serious, like you know, let alone just taking a baby and tying I'm in terrifying, absolutely terrifying, And she showed a lot of remorse. Four years probation. But the judge did say his name is Roland Lackey, and her use of forced it against the mother was appalling. You know, it
caused appalling distress. But you know, then the newspapers followed up after the court case, and that a photo of a like the the woman who'd abducted the baby with her youngest child was probably about five or six, sort of you know, hugging her and you know, I feel terrible, you know, something that just built up. So the journals are like interviewing it, going what the hell happened? She wanted to personally apologize, but she couldn't face her and
well that's really all I could find after that. But I just found it. I was like, that's just scary. It's like one of those chilling suburban crimes, like completely wild. But you know, who knows what her mental health was like, presumably she got some help.
A lot of crime it's happening to the people next door. You know, that's.
Mushroom murders, I mean exactly. You know, the more I think about that, the more I hear and I listened in a bit to the pre sentencing stuff, it's actually so chilling. Like the more I hear about what happened to those poor people and what Aaron Patterson did, I find it terrifying. I cannot lie, Like it's so scary.
She with melos a forethought for months, as long as if she sort of got out of bed one morning and said, I'm going to do this, got to cook a florid episode of she planned it for a long time.
And the ripple effect, you know, like you think about the trauma, the terrifying nature of what happens. Your baby's abducted, You're tied up, You're like just in bits for two days, you know, listening to and hearing what some of the witness statements were in the Aaron Patterson case. You know, just the fallout for everyone. You know, the children will have to see their mother in jail, Like why, I just keep thinking, why would you do that? If you're a devoted mother?
Why? Yes, there's something loose there. Yeah, Emily, member, is it fair to say that anyone who wants your new book, Murdering the Suburbs can get it from all good bookstores and all bad ones as well and online.
Correct? It is in quite a few bookstores. I know it's in the bigger name ones, but you can also go into your little indie and request it to be ordered, and also your library. You can go and ask your library to order it.
Recommended retail price it's.
About thirty that sounds yeah, different places looks about thirty Yeah, like different places do different they do.
And thanks for telling us that. One next week you're going to come back again and talk to us. I think about some poisoning cases.
Certainly am I have a chapter.
In the book Poisoning with a Twist. Yes, thanks for listening. Life 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 Heraldsun 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 podcast's soul And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description