How tiny clue helped lead 1920s police to Suitcase Baby’s killer
THEY were three mismatched police officers faced with an “unsolvable” and tragic crime, but as The Suitcase Baby case made sensational headlines one small clue gave them hope of catching a killer.
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ONE of five books short-listed in the Best True Crime category at this year’s Ned Kelly Awards, The Suitcase Baby tells a tragic tale of murder and the trial of the two women involved.
In November 1923, children playing at a Athol Beach in Mosman, Sydney, made the gruesome discovery of a baby girl’s body in a suitcase that had washed up on the shore.
It was seen by many as an unsolvable crime, but police tracked down the baby’s mother Sarah Boyd and her friend Jean Olliver and both were charged with murder.
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Already struggling as an unmarried mother of one, Boyd had been pregnant with the baby girl when she was abandoned by the father.
She would eventually tell police: “I was desperate — I strangled it. I had no money and I had not got any word from its father.” Her good friend Olliver helped her dispose of the body.
In this extract from Tanya Bretherton’s book, we meet the mismatched group of police officers assigned to the case and learn of the tiny clue that offered a major breakthrough.
BOOK EXTRACT: Cornering a suspect
The matter was transferred from the small police station in Mosman to a larger and better-resourced unit: No. 2 Head Station, Regent Street, Central Sydney. Sergeant Ernest Green, Sergeant Don Alchin and Constable Wright Sherringham assumed responsibility for investigation of the criminal case.
Each officer faced a professional challenge. Police force operations in New South Wales were governed by a ‘deploy first, ask questions later’ approach to rostering. Police historians note that it was not until the 1960s in New South Wales that more specialised areas of police work formally emerged as part of operations; as a result, leaders and managers often found it difficult to accumulate detailed knowledge in one area of law enforcement. In the 1920s, officers could literally be assigned to any criminal investigation, whether it matched their skill set or not.
Sergeant Green, the chief investigator on the case, offered special insights as a local. He was more street smart than book smart. Born and bred in Sydney, he knew the social and economic peculiarities of the city and its residents.
Green had worked the constabulary beat of the inner city streets and back lanes, and he understood what kind of seedy crime could happen there. He also knew infanticide cases were widely regarded in the force to be career poison because they were nearly impossible to solve. Many hundreds of unsolved case files for dead babies were attached to No. 2 Head Station already. He was not eager to be involved in yet another dead-end case.
Sergeant Alchin and Constable Sherringham were country boys recruited from rural towns over 300 kilometres out of Sydney.
Alchin was from Young in the southwest — a burgeoning flour and timber mill town surrounded by farming and grazing plains. He was mid-career, and represented an emerging breed of more specialised and expert officers.
He was part of the NSW police elite hand-picked for a secondment scheme designed to deepen the level of deductive reasoning throughout the Australian force. By swapping roles with a counterpart in another state, each senior officer honed his investigative skills in a new setting.
Only a few months before the discovery of the suitcase baby, Alchin led a high profile investigation in Western Australia that had received national media coverage. A man (Don Pizzatti), camped in the bush to cut timber sleepers, was found dead with bullet wounds to the head. It had been a tricky case. Pizzatti had been reported missing by his fellow cutters, but given the dense forest, it had taken days to find him. A fellow sleeper cutter, a seventeen-year-old boy called Thomas Brookes, had been found with Pizzatti’s eleven pounds in savings.
Initially, at least, it seemed a straightforward robbery and murder case. Thanks to careful and somewhat compassionate investigation by Alchin, the complexities of the case came to light. Brookes had been shooting roos. The death had been an accident. Brookes had stolen Pizzatti’s money after the accident. Brookes was also intellectually disabled. It was information critical to the deliberations in court. Brookes was found guilty of manslaughter and not murder. He would serve a few years in prison for robbery and for careless operation of his rifle, but was found not guilty of murder.
Alchin was as experienced as any officer on the NSW force at that time, but he was a poor fit for infanticide, a niche area of criminology. Alchin’s specialty was money-related crime and, much like Sergeant Green, he had a sense of foreboding about the case. He understood crime as a craft and an enterprise. Why the crime had occurred was less relevant to Alchin’s usual investigations, as the primary motive was always financial gain; it was how the crime had been committed that was important. Alchin was an expert in understanding the criminal mind, but his criminals were cunning, not complex. He knew how to capture petty pickpockets, to uncover fraud and graft, and to find bank robbers and safe crackers. Alchin knew the technical proficiencies needed to forge notes and mould pennies into florins. He had captured every kind of robber from street-corner swindlers through to large-scale fraudsters. In the previous year alone, he had developed watertight cases against fencers of stolen watches in George Street, and decoded a major investment fraud in which a local Sydney charlatan duped one investor out of a staggering £125,000 in a primitive version of a Ponzi scheme.
As an experienced officer, Alchin knew what an infanticide case meant. In rare circumstances where a perpetrator was identified and located, it was almost always a woman — and he did not like locking up women. In his mind, women were generally victims not perpetrators.
In Sydney, Alchin had recently led an investigation into what journalists at the time ridiculed as ‘the doings’ of a philanderer. In reality, the crime was a sophisticated dallier-turned-crook scam. One persuasive fraudster had single-handedly swindled wealthy young women out of their fortunes by convincing them to sign over significant estates of property and family heirlooms well before the intended marriage had occurred. Alchin did something highly unconventional for a police officer — he brought together the two very different female victims of the same crime. He tracked down the abandoned wife of the romancing rapscallion and encouraged her to meet with her husband’s wealthy mistress. He then drove the heiress to the wife of the crook so she would witness the financial impact of the man’s desertion on not just his wife but also his brood of children. The experience so touched the heiress that she offered monetary assistance to the family of the very rogue who had swindled her.
Alchin had a reputation for being sharp-witted if unorthodox. He also had a reputation for his social conscience. The problem of destitution in the inner city, particularly among returned soldiers, had become increasingly visible in 1923. Five years since the war had ended, it was not unusual to see homeless veterans wandering the streets still in the civilian clothes they had been issued with on demobilisation. Alchin led an unusual and somewhat unsavoury recycling initiative to clothe the destitute by stripping suits from unclaimed cadavers at the Coroner’s Court and handing them out to ex-diggers.
Constable Wright Sherringham was, like Alchin, a determined and committed police officer. But in many ways he was Alchin’s polar opposite. Alchin was experienced. Sherringham was a novice. Alchin was a practical man and not afraid to bump shoulders with the masses. Sherringham was an unapologetic snob.
Sherringham had moved to Sydney from a tiny town in the central west of New South Wales, even smaller than Alchin’s home town of Young. Cumnock was dominated by pastoral families and was an archetype of early European agricultural settlement, having been built on the holy farming trinity of sheep, cattle and grain production. For an ambitious young police officer, however, it offered little opportunity.
The Sherringhams were well known in the area as aspirational pastoralists who had made a shrewd acquisition of land.
Wright Sherringham was well bred and had married into an equally influential family in the district. He also shared his father’s aspirational tendencies but he set his sights on law enforcement, not farming. While nearby Bathurst had a regional gaol and grand courthouse, offering opportunity for a young officer to cut his teeth in a criminal justice career, the constable had his sights set even higher.
In the suitcase baby investigation, the challenges to be faced by these three officers would not come from within the police force alone. The macabre use of a suitcase as a coffin was splashed as a sensational headline across all of the major newspapers and had been picked up by regionals as far west as the Kalgoorlie Miner and as far south as the Launceston Examiner. Journalists and their editors immediately recognised the potential for the story and began milking it. Rather than release one article encompassing all known details of the case, editors employed a tactic to stimulate appetite for the story and help build public hysteria. In modern-day news circles, this tactic is sometimes referred to as ‘salami-ing’ — one story, cut into thin slices, is slowly released over successive days, creating the impression that discoveries are being made by police on a daily basis and encouraging readers to keep buying the paper.
By the end of a fortnight of reporting, journalists had developed their own jargon for the event. The tomb of the small corpse was no longer a ‘suitcase’: it was imprinted on the minds of the public as a ‘babycase’.
While journalists found the suitcase fascinating, Alchin, Green and Sherringham took a different view. Despite their varying skill sets and backgrounds, they agreed wholeheartedly on one thing — the suitcase would not be much use to the investigation. It was a modest, mass-produced, off-the-shelf port, identical to hundreds sold from the many department stores in all major Australian cities.
The owner of the case had chosen not to add detailing to the exterior in the form of embossed initials or a personalised monogram — a fashion among both tourists and immigrant travellers at the time.
The investigators turned their attention to the other items.
An empty gin bottle — no markings. An empty cigarette packet — a generic brand that could have been bought from anywhere. Sherringham, the least experienced officer present, asked his two seniors if this suggested a male perpetrator. Alchin, a thoughtful profiler of the criminal mind, said it was too early in the investigation to jump to that kind of conclusion. Green shook his head. This was a baby, and that almost always meant a mother, he said. The other officers had to agree. The string tied around the baby’s throat was an ordinary kitchen item — exactly the kind used by a housewife to tie a rolled pork loin.
The clothes were store-bought and not personalised in any way. Hand-stitched needlework, a popular pastime of many mothers and grandmothers, did not adorn the clothing. The same could be said of the towelling in which the body had been wrapped. It was a Turkish towel of woven cotton with a fringe at each end. There was nothing in these items that might offer some clue to the identity of the baby or the family to whom she belonged.
All evidence of the baby’s existence appeared to have been surrendered to the water. The inclusion of the single photograph suggested that no personal keepsake was wanted. The perpetrator had not just sought the death of the baby; they wanted to forget she had ever existed.
By the end of Tuesday, two business days into the investigation, the officers had begun assembling a likely location for the crime. The location of the suitcase near the harbour would have usually presented the police with a deluge of challenges. Port Jackson is about 55 square kilometres, and many tributaries feed into it, including the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers. The suitcase could have been discreetly dropped into the harbour by anyone from any embankment or bridge near the shoreline, anywhere within the greater Sydney region. The Parramatta is the largest of the rivers culminating in a tidal estuary that feeds directly into Port Jackson. The suitcase baby could have commuted a long distance, swept by an energetic tidal movement to arrive at her resting place.
But the presence of the wood block undermined the idea that the murder might have occurred outside of the city.
The block offered police the broad design of the crime, and suggested a story of desperation and deceit as well.
Sydney had relied primarily on wood pavers for road construction since the 1880s, and these blocks were indistinguishable from one another. Many of the city’s older roads were now rotting at the edges. Crumbled chunks of wood were in abundance and loose on the hems of the streets.
The roads were also in a state of continual repair, with piles of fresh pavers stacked on street corners in preparation for resurfacing. But while the pavers were virtually everywhere in the city, they were not everywhere in Sydney — by 1923 they were confined to the metropolis. The paver therefore positioned the perpetrator with an efficiency akin to the tracking of a mobile phone by its proximity to tower signals. In the hours leading up to the disposal of the body, the perpetrator had in all likelihood been in the city and thrown the suitcase into an inner city harbour.
The paver suggested desperation, as it had surely been grabbed opportunistically. The investigators suspected that the perpetrator had chucked it into the suitcase with the expectation that the mass would help to weigh the item down and ensure its sea burial. Ironically, the perpetrator had unwittingly made the vessel seaworthy by increasing its buoyancy. They had shown determination but had certainly not been artful in covering their tracks.
The most important piece of evidence would turn out to be no bigger than a fingernail.
The handkerchief that had been violently crammed into the mouth and upper throat of the victim was laid flat on the table of an interview room at No. 2 Head Station. It particularly intrigued Green, Alchin and Sherringham because of all the items it was the most personal and offered the most direct link to the murderer. In stark contrast to the wicked and violent crime, the item was pretty and delicate. Small mauve flowers dotted the corner, and even the coronial doctor had used a somewhat poetic description in his post-mortem report: ‘A decorative and delicate heliotrope border.’ It suggested something romantic or whimsical about the object and, by association, the perpetrator.
Sergeant Alchin noted how the pattern reminded him of a handkerchief owned by his wife, which she had purchased in the city centre. This observation initially stumped the investigators. The item was unremarkable, with little to distinguish it from the thousands of mass-produced embroidered handkerchiefs on the market.
It was the rookie, Constable Sherringham, eager to make an impression on his senior officers, who stepped forward to turn the handkerchief over. On one corner, visible only from the underside where knotted threads were present, ‘2/14’ had been written in tiny and almost invisible print where the fabric had been carefully hemmed in. The officers recognised what the lettering meant: a commercial laundry code. At some point in time, and perhaps not recently, the handkerchief had been professionally laundered.
The laundry code system was used to track individual orders, and represented an industry-wide practice common to commercial laundries across Britain, the United States and Australia. Each business assigned a unique identification number to each customer, which they used every time they booked in a cleaning order. These mark codes were a core part of business practice, allowing laundries to create economies of scale by washing large volumes of clothing based on the specifications of the items. Linens, cottons and woollens each required different levels of heat, and different quantities and chemical compositions of soap. By sorting orders into lots, then sorting them back into individual customer orders, laundries significantly reduced the cost per item. The mark codes were indelible and designed to sustain multiple wash processes so they could not easily be dissolved by the harsh commercial soaps and solvents used for stain removal.
The mark on the handkerchief suggested the possibility of solving what was widely identified across the police force to be an unsolvable crime. If the code could be deciphered, the perpetrator had effectively signed their name and address on the body of the unknown baby, indelibly, in laundry code ink.
But the investigators still had a problem — where and how to start looking for the laundry. During the 1920s in Sydney, cleaning services represented one of the strongest areas of small business and cottage industry growth. They were easy and low cost to run, and required little more than access to piped water and adequate floor space. They were also in high demand, with residential households, commercial businesses (particularly catering and hospitality operators), itinerant workers and travellers all using commercial operators to launder their clothing and household linens. This demand had created huge growth in the sector, and businesses had mushroomed across the city to launder its unwashed and washed masses alike.
Investigating the origin of the laundry mark could involve interviews with hundreds of operators, requiring them to explain their bookkeeping and customer account records.
While No. 2 Station was better staffed than most other police units in the state, it was still far from well resourced. Its officers’ capacity to undertake a time-intensive criminal investigation was limited, and with vice saturating the streets of the inner city, Surry Hills and Haymarket, the murder of an unknown and unwanted newborn represented the very lowest of police priorities.
To come up with a list of the most likely laundries, Green and Alchin narrowed the geographical parameters of the crime as much as possible. They already knew that the road paver suggested that the suspect had been in the city centre while disposing of the evidence. The suitcase seemed relatively new and had most likely been sold by a large department store; Anthony Hordern & Sons was the biggest in Sydney, with expansive retail frontage on the corner of George, Pitt and Goulburn streets at the southern end of the city centre.
With the examination of the evidence completed, the suitcase and the baby parted company forever. The suitcase and its contents were treated with great care. Each was carefully photographed. The practice of police photography at the time was artful, with meticulous attention paid to capturing the elements of dark and light in each item. Tagged and catalogued, the evidence was preserved in the catacombs of police storage.
While the authorities took great care in handling the evidence, no memorial nor respect was afforded to the baby, who was scheduled for disposal in an unmarked mass grave designated for paupers.
• This is an extract from The Suitcase Baby by Tanya Bretherton. Published by Hachette Australia, RRP $32.99
• This year’s Ned Kelly Awards ceremony is on August 26
Originally published as How tiny clue helped lead 1920s police to Suitcase Baby’s killer