The truth about the body in the tower
FOR years locals have been sharing terrifying stories about exactly what was in the water they were all drinking.
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THE sun was just beginning to rise as Molly Thompson crept silently out of the house.
Dressed only in pale green pyjamas and a frock coat with a floral design, the young woman’s bare feet would have been freezing as she walked out of her Adelaide St, Maryborough, home and into the cold August morning.
A witness later told police she had seen the 23-year-old walking along Bazaar St, in the direction of Alice St, about 6am. That was the last time Molly Thompson was seen alive.
Although 76 years have passed, the legend of what happened to Molly Thompson that day remains very much alive in the minds of locals, but over the years the truth has been stretched and Molly’s tragic tale has been turned into something of a ghost story.
On August 12, 1942, The Maryborough Chronicle was focused on reporting news from World War II, with page one leading with a battle between allied forces and the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. Molly’s disappearance was given but a brief mention on page two.
“The girl, who is in ill-health, has been under medical attention and her parents are anxious as to her safety and welfare,” the article said.
It would be another five days before the newspaper would even print her full name.
“The whole town area has been combed by the police and patrols undertaken on the river within the last few days, but without result,” an August 17 story said.
Maryborough-born author Robert Gott, who used Molly as the model for the victim in his novel Good Murder, said the newspaper reports helped to fan the flames of local gossip.
Mr Gott’s father, then a boy of 14, was there the day they dragged Molly’s body from the town’s water supply – the 1,000,000-gallon reservoir on the corner of Adelaide and Ann streets.
“Her body was discovered by two City Council employees, Messrs ‘Bondi’ Lewis and F. Prickett, who had climbed to the top of the tank to fix an indicator which had not been working,” The Maryborough Chronicle reported on August 22.
The task of removing Molly’s body from the huge tank was immense, and it was a local father and son team who arrived at the water tower with a block and tackle – a system of rope and pulleys used to lift heavy loads – who eventually retrieved her.
“And their work under most difficult circumstances was amazing,” The Maryborough Chronicle wrote. “Within an hour and a half they had the body lowered to the ground.
“A large crowd had gathered long before the body was actually recovered. However, it was dwindling when the body was finally lowered to the ground about 6.20 o’clock.”
The newspaper report then does its best to allude to a further mystery.
“One of the strangest features of the tragedy was the manner in which the late Miss Thompson climbed the iron steps leading to the top of the reservoir,” the report said, insinuating it would be near impossible for the woman to reach the iron steps, given a “four foot, six inch” gap between the steps and a ladder at the bottom of the tank.
“Somehow the girl must have negotiated the gap which the average man would find difficulty in traversing,” the report finished.
“We were told that there was a mystery about whether or not she was murdered,” Mr Gott said. “I grew up believing that she dissolved in the tower and that members of my family had drank the water – they were cannibals.”
And to this day many people know about the ‘body in the tower’, or the ‘murder in the tower’ but few recollect the sad facts clearly laid out by the coroner.
“Molly Thompson… met her death by drowning, according to evidence tendered yesterday at the inquest into the cause of her death,” The Maryborough Chronicle reported on September 24, 1942.
The report goes on to detail how Molly had been under the care of a Dr Kenneth Hugh Hooper prior to her death, who had concluded she was “suffering badly from nerves”, as she had been unable to sleep and was “worried”.
Molly’s mother, Ruby Thompson, also told the coroner her daughter has suffered a “nervous rash” 12 months before she died.
“What does that actually mean?,” asks Gott.
“Clearly behind that ‘nervous rash’ there’s an enormous amount of meaning her mother wasn’t providing. Whatever it was it was clearly shameful. She was unable to say that her daughter was suffering from depression, from mental illness. It was a smokescreen for something else.”
Coroner W. Clifford Burrowes categorically ruled out that anyone could possibly have dragged Molly’s body up the side of the tower and that she “was entirely responsible for her own action.”
“He had found that the girl was in love. She had professed this with a young man, but owing to different beliefs between her and the man himself it was considered impossible from her point of view that marriage could take place,” The Maryborough Chronicle reported.
Molly was a Catholic and her beau a Protestant. And depending on where you fell within the Catholic/Protestant divide meant you heard a different rumour about what really happened to Molly.
“I find it fascinating, that sectarian divide between Catholics and Protestants,” Mr Gott said.
“It lives as a memory of people that do have this idea that Molly was pregnant to a Protestant businessman or a Catholic priest - depending on what you’d heard.”
For the record, the coroner’s report stated that she was “virgo intacta” – a virgin.
Mr Gott, who is currently completing a PhD on cultural memory, said despite the truth about Molly Thompson being revealed long ago, he had no doubts the rumours about the body in the tower would continue.
“My interest in the whole collective-memory thing began when I looked at the way that this story survives through generations in this town. I find that completely fascinating.”
Several years ago, Mr Gott was in Margaret River in Western Australia for a writer’s festival where he told the story of Molly Thompson and how it had influenced him.
A woman who had heard him speak later came up to him and told him she knew all about Molly Thompson – her father had grown up in Maryborough and had often used the dead woman’s name as a threat when food was left on the table.
“I’ve eaten Molly Thompson,” he would say. “You can eat your beans.”
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