Jean McDonald, 26 June 1924, Central Police Station, Sydney. FP07_0104_004.

Jean McDonald was a fraudster and confidence trickster. She looks drab and resentful here but her sob stories were ambitious, florid and well-told. Through 1923-24 she methodically extracted money and favours from a gullible Randwick benefactress with tales of heroic war service, sick children and missing husbands. When she needed to up the narrative ante she started killing off the fictitious children (and asking the benefactress for funeral expenses). When eventaully hauled before the court, she claimed that her larcenous industry was conducted, at least in part, to support a layabout ex-policeman de facto husband, Sylvester Feld. Because she had acted “under the influence of a man” the judge suspended her twelve month sentence and put her instead on a good behaviour bond. Within a year though McDonald was arrested for swindling a suburban grocer, which triggered her call-up on the earlier conviction. She failed to show up for sentencing, at which point she drops out of the records. At least, that’s how I report it in Crooks like us, (pages 26-29). I based that claim on a fruitless search for her in the Police Gazette for the subsequent five years.

Photo Supplement to the Victoria Police Gazette, Thursday May 4, 1933, p5. Courtesy of the Victoria Police Historical Services.

Recently I came across Jean McDonald in the Victorian Police Gazette Photo Supplement of 1933 — she had apparently skipped out to Melbourne, where she continued her trickery. Listed there among her aliases is “Jean Doyle”. I’d turned up an archive mug shot of a “Jean Doyle” years ago, but never made the connection with Jean McDonald.

'Jean Doyle', 30 April 1930, Central Police Station, Sydney. FP07_0137_005.

It’s obviously the same woman (and I kick myself for not having spotted it). She’s put on a little heft, but the same flat, despairing look is there. This second portrait is dated 30 April 1930 and, like the 1924 one, was taken in the gloomy muster room at Central Police Station. We don’t know what led to her arrest then, as no new charges are recorded against her. My guess is that she had been busted running yet another scam, but police chose not to waste resources prosecuting, since she was up for automatic gaoling anyway over the 1924 business. A week later she was sent away to do her twelve months sentence. Her release is noted a year later, on 7 May 1931. No remission was granted.

Sydney clearly wasn’t working out for her. So on to Melbourne. A little over a year later, the Victorian Gazette records, she was convicted of fraud and sent to gaol for three months. What became of her after that, we don’t know.

You’ve got to wonder about crims like Jean: she was easily smart enough to charm the money out of a mug’s pocket, but not, apparently, able to elude police and the courts. How unspeakably tedious each arrest, trial and inevitable gaoling must have been. You can see it there in her portrait. My guess: Jean McDonald loved the very early stages of the scam — making up the story, improvising, embellishing, winning the mark’s sympathy, making a new friend. The golden period during which the inevitable consequences can be ignored. Like a drunk who’s fallen off the wagon, relishing those first few delicious, uncomplicated sips.

A window in the upstairs bedroom rattles in its frame, and the shamus knows that his enemies are coming for him. It’s a gentle but potent image, as though the house itself had taken a sharp breath. It’s from Dashiell Hammett’s story, the ‘House on Turk Street’. It replays one of the oldest riffs in crime narrative: the seeming complicity of built places in the crimes that happen within them.

Violent domestic crime explodes within and into space – emotions hitherto unspoken become suddenly manifest. Bodies move haphazardly around rooms, stumble against furniture, trip here, collapse there, come to rest awkwardly on a bed, on a floor. That hitherto sweet refuge now is part of the crime. A witness and a participant.

“MAN AND WIFE FOUND DEAD / Flat Tragedy at Waverley.” So reports the Sydney Morning Herald of Thursday, 4 May, 1944. Maurice Reuben John Anderson, a pilot officer and Alice Cabella Anderson, his wife, had been found the night before in the bedroom of their Birrell Street flat, dead from gunshot wounds.

Lights had burned all through the previous day, and a radio had continued to play. Early in the evening a neighbour peeked through a window and saw that things were wrong. He phoned the police. The report goes on:

Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor.

Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot.

A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door.

The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.

With the discovery not happening until Wednesday evening, the Herald reporter would have been hard pressed to make the deadline for Thursday’s paper – traditionally on the streets at midnight. Yet the description he got from the police accords perfectly with the photographic evidence: the sprays and smears of blood, the wireless knocked against the sideboard. The bodies in the bedroom too are arranged exactly the way the police had described; the barrel of Anderson’s pistol can be seen poking out from under his right trouser cuff.

The Andersons, who had moved in only a week before, had been in buoyant spirits earlier that day. They had hung out the washing together. We can see from the photos that the table has been modestly laid for bread and tea. There’s an untouched slice of (apple?) pie, a tobacco tin and a spent match on a plate. There are framed portraits of the Andersons on the mantel shelf. At some point things had gone badly wrong. These photos appeared in City of Shadows, listed as “no details known”. Only much later did we turn up a reference in the NSW Police Gazette, which lists the killings as the murder of Alice, by Maurice, followed by the latter’s suicide. In the absence of any hard information, the most common interpretation that readers of City of Shadows gave the pictures was indeed a crime of passion murder-suicide.  An accusation or admission of infidelity perhaps, followed by the killings.

Our eyes are drawn as much to the objects and the setting as they are to the shocking subject at the centre. Every humdrum item and piece of bric a brac is given equal value in the composition, and so invested with a charged, but unspecified importance. Figure and ground are in near equilibrium. The traces of everyday domestic routine and the petty emblems of marital life present an obvious, mocking counterpoint to the corpses. A movie art director would probably consider it way too heavy handed. Yet there it is.

One last thing: the photographs highlight the claustrophobic dimensions of the domestic space.  There was an acute wartime housing shortage in Sydney at the time, and many perfectly respectable couples were forced to squat in derelict houses, or camp out in Moore Park, or sleep rough elsewhere. We might wonder how much the space itself contributed to the events. Dashiell Hammett’s gumshoe is at first baffled by the House on Turk Street, where nothing is what it first seems. In the end though the house itself comes to his aid, and warns him of the mortal danger. Not so the house on Birrell Street: it seems to have had it in for the Andersons.