Procrastination, photos and a murder mystery

It’s a well known fact that writers are great procrastinators. Walking is one of my favourite procrastinations. Often ideas come to me while I’m strolling about but, in February 2021, in the middle of a strange lockdown limbo, with nothing but cold, damp weather and Commando at home looking for work, going outside wasn’t exactly tempting. My work in progress, the next big writing project, had begun well but my research kept sending me off on strange tangents. Let’s be honest, most of the interesting facts I discover never ever make it onto the page and research often ends up as just another excuse to procrastinate.

When I received a belated Christmas card from my long lost cousin Katrina in Australia, along with some old family photographs I’d never seen, my procrastinating went into overdrive. Pretty soon I was rummaging through my own boxes of old photos, digitising them and adding photos to my Ancestry.com family tree. What better way to spend a few wet, cold afternoons avoiding writing?

At least the family tree did provide some inspiration, like a great uncle, discharged from the army suffering from delusional insanity. To be fair, it was during the Great War, so he was hardly alone, as this was often used as a description for shell shock. Meanwhile the research kept leading me in strange directions that had nothing to do with the project at all. One of them was too interesting not to share.

Quite how I stumbled upon the story of Harry Leo Crawford I don’t recall, but given that Harry was born in 1875, it is quite a remarkable one. You see, Harry was born a girl, Eugenia Falleni, the eldest of twenty two children, in Italy. In 1877, the family emigrated to New Zealand where Eugenia’s father worked as a carter and a fisherman. When Eugenia was a teenager, she began dressing in men’s clothing and used the name Eugene to get work in brickyards and stables. Originally, this seems to have been nothing more than a way to earn a living in a world where well paid work was denied to women. At the age of nineteen, Eugenia married. Sadly, it wasn’t the happy ending she’d hoped. She very quickly learned that the marriage was bigamous. Her reaction to this was to dress as a boy and run away to sea. No one bothered looking for her.

Things went well for a while, but when the captain of the ship stumbled upon the cabin boy, Eugene’s, secret, things took a nasty turn. She was repeatedly raped and eventually, aged just twenty three, she was put ashore in New South Wales, pregnant and destitute. She gave birth to a daughter, Josephine, in Sidney, left the child with an Italian born woman, and took on the identity of Harry Leo Crawford. In 1912, after a series of hard manual jobs in abattoirs, pubs and a rubber factory, Harry became a driver for a doctor in Sidney. No one suspected Harry’s secret, especially not the housekeeper, Annie Birkett.

Annie was a widow with a young son, Harry. In 1913, when she set up a confectionary shop, Harry Crawford, now in his late thirties, followed her, and before long, they were married. It seems unbelievable that a woman who had had a child could be unaware that her new husband was actually a woman, but this is exactly what happened. Then, in 1917, Annie disappeared. Harry told his stepson that his mother had run off with another man. Two years later, Harry Crawford met Elizabeth King Allison and married her.

It wasn’t until 1920 that young Harry Birkett began to question what had happened to his mother. At about the time she disappeared the body of an unknown woman was found in scrub land off Mowbray Road in Chatswood. The body was badly burned. A woman had been reported in the area at the time acting strangely and a small bottle of kerosene was found nearby. The local police could find no “definite marks of violence” and concluded that she had committed suicide. Harry Crawford couldn’t read and young Harry remembered his stepfather asking him to read a newspaper article about the shoes of this unknown woman. He also remembered his stepfather acting very oddly, taking him to a local suicide spot and throwing stones over the edge of a cliff and also taking him to some scrubland and asking him to dig a hole, then getting emotional and throwing the shovel into the bushes.

In July 1920, Harry Birkett went to the police and told them his suspicions. They showed him the unknown woman’s personal effects and he identified them as his mother’s. He recognised the shoes by the repairs his stepfather had made to them. When Harry Leo Crawford was arrested his secret was soon discovered. He begged the police not to tell his wife that he was a woman. Annie’s remains were exhumed but a second post mortem revealed no more than the first.

The truth of what really happened to poor Annie Burkett will probably never be known. Eugenia/Harry told the police that Annie had confronted him with her suspicion that he was a woman. Afraid that she would go to the police and have him arrested, he’d refused to confirm this. Later, they’d gone for a picnic where they had quarrelled because Annie said she was going to leave him. During the argument Annie had slipped and hit her head on a rock. Harry said he’d tried to revive her but she was dead, and in a panic, fearing he would be exposed as a woman, he’d burned the body to stop it being identified.

Harry Burkett painted different a picture. He said his mother had only married Harry Crawford because he was so persistent and they were never happy. He said ‘there were always rows’ and intimated that Harry was violent. His story of the visit to the cliff top and the hole dug in the scrubland was presented as attempted murder. If it was, it strikes me that the fact Harry/Eugenia couldn’t go through with it tends to point towards innocence rather than guilt. Josephine Fallini’s evidence certainly didn’t help much either.

The trial created a furore in the press. The crowd in court got the scandal they’d hoped for, and more. Eugenia Fallini appeared both in a man’s suit and in women’s clothing. A dildo was presented as evidence of how Eugenia had deceived the women in his/her life. There were many contradictions. His second wife, Lizzie said he was ‘an ideal husband’ and they had ‘a very happy married life.’ When told the truth about her husband’s identity she said, ‘I wondered why he was so painfully shy.’ A witness said he’d seen a woman with a suitcase acting strangely near the spot where the body was found and disappearing into the scrub. The medical officer said he believed the woman had died of burns and had been alive when the fire began but there were cracks on the skull that supported Harry/Eugenia’s story. A woman who’d rented a room to Harry after Annie disappeared said he’d told her, “We had a jolly good row and I gave her a crack on the head, and she cleared.’

Despite a plea of not guilty, Eugenia was convicted of murder and condemned to death. She lodged an appeal, stating that ‘The evidence was weak and merely circumstantial.’ The appeal was dismissed but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Several appeals were made for Eugenia’s release and, in 1931, the Minister for Justice granted her her freedom on the basis that she was nearly sixty years old and in poor health.

Eugenia now took the name Mrs Jean Ford and moved to Sidney to run a boarding house. On 9 June 1938, she sold the boarding house for £100. Where she was going to go and what she planned to do next will never be known. She was hit by a car close to the boarding house and died of her injuries the following day. She was identified by her fingerprints and the £100 in the bag she had with her.

Eugenia’s story was a great way of procrastinating. It was also thought provoking, which is why I’ve shared it here. Was she a villain, a victim, or a little of both? Was she a tom boy, a lesbian, what would now be called a trans man, or was her identity more one of convenience, a way to earn a living and avoid the attention of men? In the end, we will never really know, any more than we will know what really happened to Annie Birkett on that scrubland.