List of Characters

1 February 1923
At 11.10 pm Harold Sharkey-Boyd was crossing the Anderson Street Bridge in Richmond when he heard a man emerge from a parked car. He looked back to see the man struggle with a large, lumpy sack, which he unburdened over the side of the bridge. He heard a dull splash. Feigning apathy, if he had been caught looking, or ignorance, if he hadn't, Sharkey-Boyd restored his attention to the street ahead. On the walk home, he stopped in at the police station.

At 9 o'clock the next morning, Detective Sydney McGuffie and Constable A Taylor from the Russell Street police department 'commenced dragging operations' close to the bridge. From a small boat off the bank they cast a broad net beneath the water. Their dredges of the stretch under Anderson Bridge at first seemed a waste of time: a motorcycle and some bicycle parts. McGuffie congratulated himself on the find: there was yesterday's case of the missing bike solved.

Sharkey-Boyd had been thrilled to witness a suspicious act. In his statement to the police he dwelt gleefully on the brightness of the moonlight, the loom of the parked car, and the unshapely bulk of the mysterious sack. Senior Detective Frederick Piggott had been on duty with McGuffie the night before; they smirked at Sharkey-Boyd when he insisted he had witnessed a body-dump.

But as far-fetched as this was, it gave McGuffie and Taylor an excuse to keep dredging. At 2 pm, they ensnared a decaying black bran sack spewing weight-stones and tied with insulated wire. It had been in the water a lot longer than one night. This was not the bag that Sharkey-Boyd had seen being thrown over the bridge last night. McGuffie and Taylor gagged at the severe 'stench'. They took it ashore. McGuffie cut it open. They found the sack contained another, a corn sack. Stuffed with muddied black fern leaves, the corn sack held the decomposing remains of a woman's body. 'The legs were bent up', and between them was another bag. McGuffie looked closer, and read 'Victorian Portland Cement Company, Cave Hill, Lilydale' on the smaller bag. He hacked it open to find the woman's skull, and a faded and slimy length of dark brown hair.

At the Melbourne City Morgue, Dr Crawford Mollison began a post-mortem, leaving McGuffie to identify the fern leaves and wash the hair. The hair was infested with pupa casings; evidence which, taken with the fern leaves, indicated that the depths of the Yarra had not been the dead woman's only resting place. Dr Mollison discerned that the bones were those of a young woman with a distinguishing feature: she had no teeth.

Police evidence: dead leaves found with a long dark human hair in the bag with Bertha's body in the Yarra River.
PROV, VPRS 30/P, Unit 2001, Melbourne Supreme Court, Case number 151 of 15 March 1923.
Photograph by Akiko Kawasaki

18 November 1922
Frank Bonfiglio 'was staying with some Italian friends at the Palamara's shop in Victoria Street', Richmond. By an unhappy accident, Nurse Hannah Mitchell² had been passing by on her way to the Caulfield Cup at the very moment Bonfiglio was wandering out for the day. She stopped the taxi and skipped over, urging him to join her in an afternoon of revelry. She appealed to their mutual love of a flutter, to their shared personal history: he had the dubious honour of being Nurse's third ex-husband. She won him over.

In the course of the afternoon they won £600. They didn't talk about her little cottage industry: fixing women's troubles. And they didn't talk about the last time she had seen him, just before he got six months inside for (false) charges of cruelty against her. They certainly didn't mention the dashing Mr Ridgway, her solicitor and ex-lover, who had been directly responsible for Bonfiglio's time behind bars.³ They didn't even talk about little Margaret 'Queenie' Mitchell, his one-time step-daughter, who hated him and had never shrunk from saying so.

They had a splendid afternoon. When the taxi stopped at 4 Burnley Street in Richmond, Nurse Mitchell invited Bonfiglio inside to 'sing a song': Bonfiglio was a gifted tenor. He demurred, but said he would meet her later. At 9.30 pm he turned up on her doorstep, carefully shaven, wearing his best jacket. Nurse's sister, Mrs Margaret Milward, let him in. Nurse Mitchell made a fleeting appearance, and told him to read the paper; she had 'things' to finish up. Bonfiglio made himself comfortable in the sitting room.

The house was full of people being quiet. Mrs Milward and her friend, Mrs Florence Spicer, were murmuring over coffee in the kitchen. Queenie Mitchell and Mrs Milward's son Albert were upstairs amusing Albert's little brother. The bedrooms downstairs contained various moaning or snoring girls, three and four to a bed, shamed and docile. Nurse Mitchell likely had another girl in the bedroom (strategically) nearest the bathroom at that moment. Bonfiglio shared the sitting room with a sickly looking man who introduced himself as Horace Solly. His wife was in a bedroom upstairs, awaiting a procedure; they had five little ones already, he told Bonfiglio, and himself 'in a delicate state of health' - well, Nurse Mitchell was their only hope!

But Bonfiglio was losing interest and patience. Twenty minutes later Nurse Mitchell came back transformed: brusque, cool, severe. She said, 'I have a girl taken bad. Take your coat off and help carry her to the bathroom. Maggie will help you.'