The harrowing true story of the Suitcase Baby
<p>The suitcase washed up on the North Shore in the early hours of Saturday morning, 17 November 1923. The tidal waters of Port Jackson pushed it onto the small and gentle curve of Athol Beach, Mosman, only a short distance across the harbour from Sydney’s busy metropolis. Greasy and stained from the seawater, the beaten-up case seemed out of place against the neatly clipped backdrop of Ashton Park.</p>
<p>At around 9.45 a.m., a large Sunday school group from the north-west suburb of Gladesville began arriving at Athol. Some of the children scattered across the beach, while others began playing in the bushland and gardens.</p>
<p>William Lodder, a young schoolboy from Drummoyne, was playing near the water when he spied the silhouette of an upright suitcase at the other end of the beach. The boy was drawn to it. Guided by the age-old childhood rule of finders keepers, he claimed the prize. He unfastened the clips on the case and swung its lid open. The odd dank smell intrigued him more.</p>
<p>Inside the case, an object shaped like a pork loin was wrapped in a towel and secured with a piece of string. Although seaweed and sand had been tossed about within the case, the parcel remained secure, chocked by a block of wood.</p>
<p>William lifted the parcel out of the case for closer inspection, holding it up by the piece of string. Pulled taut by the wet weight of the parcel, the string promptly snapped and the parcel dropped onto the sand. The thud made William feel more uneasy, and he later described to police an ‘unsettling smell’. He poked at the parcel with his toe. It felt strangely soft. His courage crumbled. Something seemed wrong.</p>
<p>Reluctant to touch the parcel again and too timid to look at it more closely, William raced up the beach. He urged a group of boys to follow him, hoping he could lead a party back for a more forensic examination of the fascinating and mysterious object. But the boys ignored William’s boasting and dismissed the object as swimming trunks wrapped in a towel. He quickly forgot about it.</p>
<p>About an hour later, Eunice Clare, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl also attending the church picnic, made her way down the beach flanked by a small posse of friends. Eunice was less hesitant than William: on sight of the parcel, she walked directly to it and commenced a systematic examination. She picked it up thinking it was ‘what appeared to be costumes rolled in a towel’. The parcel had now been exposed to the air for some time and the dank smell had dispersed a little. Eunice knelt on the soft sand. She began to unwrap the towelling, hoping some treasure might be inside – perhaps a forgotten piece of jewellery stashed carefully by a wealthy Mosman lady during a beach swim or, even better, money. Within moments Eunice stumbled back in fright as a baby’s head flopped loose from the wrappings.</p>
<p>Eunice was swift in sounding the alarm. Followed by her band of young cronies, she ran up the beach until they located the nearest adult – a man working near the wharf.</p>
<p>Athol Beach was only a short distance away from Mosman Police Station on Bradleys Head Road, so it did not take long for local police to arrive. At around 12.30 p.m., William O’Reilly, sergeant of the Mosman unit, walked the length of the beach starting at the wharf end. He easily found the suitcase, still resting near the high-water mark with a parcel alongside it; a baby’s head was clearly visible at one end. The string remained tightly wrapped around the towel coiled over the torso and legs of the child’s body. The scene was jarring. The child was clearly dead, but not repugnant: the small face was cherubic and uninjured. The child had been carefully swaddled, as if put to sleep, and then gently set afloat. The sight before Sergeant O’Reilly seemed somehow sacred: a baby Moses consigned to the Nile with only a basket of reeds for protection.</p>
<p>The police typed up statements of the children’s observations at the scene. At the bottom of these pages, small handwritten signatures reflect the two very different personalities of the young beachcombers whose discovery would launch the highest-profile child murder case in Sydney’s history.</p>
<p>Eunice’s signature, ‘E. C. Clare’, is indistinguishable from that of a well-educated adult of the time. Her cursive is perfectly formed and justified neatly to the right of the page. Each initial is expertly spaced with a full stop. In her sworn statement, Eunice is careful to note the presence of other possible witnesses and calmly explains her inability to recall more detail: ‘I picked up the parcel and saw a child’s head in it. When I saw that I put the parcel down again. A lot of other children were there and saw what I saw… I did not notice whether the towel was wet or dry as I was upset at finding the baby.’</p>
<p>In contrast to Eunice’s clinical notes, William Lodder’s statement reveals the true horror of what had occurred on Athol Beach: a young child had discovered the dead body of an even younger child. Despite him being almost exactly the same age as Eunice, the immaturity and innocence of William Lodder’s words is undeniable. His signature provides a clear reminder of how traumatic this discovery must have been for all of the Sunday school group. ‘W Lodder’ is written erratically, inconsistently. The oversized loops skip down the page in an impulsive way, much like William on his fateful skip down the beach.</p>
<p>That morning, Sergeant O’Reilly had handled the suitcase baby gently, reacting with a protective instinct that he couldn’t explain. He placed the child’s body back in the suitcase and proceeded directly to Mosman Wharf to catch a ferry to the city morgue. Like an ancient ferryman carrying a soul to the underworld, O’Reilly solemnly crossed the harbour. A police sergeant carrying a well-beaten port in his hand as if on holiday, but in full uniform, must have been a curious sight for his fellow travellers. He disembarked at Circular Quay and walked the short distance to the city morgue, located right near the water’s edge on George Street, where the metropolis of Sydney empties into the harbour.</p>
<p>Sergeant O’Reilly and Charles Broomfield, keeper of the morgue, began preparations for the formal medical examination. Both men were highly experienced and not likely to be shaken by the grim undertaking before them. O’Reilly was an officer of long standing, having risen to a senior supervisory position on the North Shore. Charles Broomfield was a second-generation morgue keeper, closely apprenticed by his father, with over twenty years’ experience in the job.</p>
<p>O’Reilly placed the child’s body face up on the examination table. He freed the legs and lower body from the towel. It was a baby girl. Her size indicated that she could be newborn. Both men suspected her body had spent a good deal of time floating in the harbour, given the quantity of seaweed and sand inside the case. It had definitely emerged from the water and had not been abandoned by someone trudging along the beach.</p>
<p>This fact added another level of strangeness to the discovery. Sydney Harbour beaches are rough, hazardous, and known for their aggressive and destructive rips that typically smash anything washed ashore. And the harbour is deep, capable of safely accommodating large-scale steamships and cargo vessels with the biggest hulls ever created. Should a parcel successfully sink, it is unlikely to surface again. The harbour does not usually surrender its captives so easily. To this day, its floor is a junkyard of wrecked vessels, motor vehicle bodies, and industrial debris from two hundred years of European settlement.</p>
<p>Yet the harbour had somehow been kind to this child’s body, and the mysterious suitcase raft had proved to be a more-than-adequate vessel. The body’s exposure to the sea had also afforded it a level of preservation and protection from the insect infestations commonly found in bodies left exposed on land, especially in the warmer months of a Sydney spring. There was no evidence of adipocere: the crumbly white particles, known as grave wax, that form through saponification – the same process used to make soap – when a body is stored in moisture-rich environments that lack oxygen. Against all odds, the unusual coffin had drifted atop the water and safely landed on a stretch of sand less than 100 metres long, located on one of the least hazardous beaches in all of Sydney Harbour.</p>
<p>Given their combined amount of experience, Broomfield and O’Reilly would have most likely conjectured back and forth about the child’s age. However, before the autopsy took place and medical expertise was brought to bear on the matter, it would have been difficult to estimate the bracket of hours, days, weeks or months.</p>
<p>It was Broomfield’s job, grim and methodical task that it was, to enter the baby’s particulars in the heavy-bound and oversized tome known officially as the morgue book. His formal entries resemble a macabre parody of a cherished mothercraft tradition of growth milestones in a family keepsake album. The morgue keeper, not the baby’s mother, recorded the weight, height and key measurements.</p>
<p>The body was 21.5 inches (over 54 centimetres) long, using the perinatal convention of measuring from the top of the head to the heel. Her weight was recorded to be a healthy and ‘well nourished’ 7 pounds 2 ounces (3.2 kilograms).</p>
<p>In addition to those of the body, details of all other items – including the condition of the suitcase and noteworthy observations of its characteristics and contents – were carefully recorded. In the presence of Broomfield, who also acted as a witness, O’Reilly examined everything again, more closely. He now had time to be more attentive, sheltered from the hot mid-November Sydney sun by the cool, contemplative stone environment.</p>
<p>While it would be the medical practitioner’s job to perform an internal examination of the body and thereby officially determine the cause of death, it was obvious to both officers that they were looking upon the result of something wicked and violent. A string was tied tightly around the body’s neck, the string still attached, a length of it dangling slack and twisted. The tip of a pretty and delicate piece of mauve stitching protruded from the mouth. Both officers recognised the design as one common to the decorative border of a woman’s handkerchief.</p>
<p>The body was dressed in basic and commonplace items of baby apparel for the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. A napkin. A garment known as a baby binder or corset, made of flannel, which wrapped around the torso and remained laced in the front. It was a slightly old-fashioned item as binders were not used by all mothers at the time, but investigators did not see the item as particularly significant. A loose flannel undershirt hung over the corset.</p>
<p>A small number of items remained in the suitcase. A block of wood. An empty gin bottle. Part of a cigarette packet. There was also a photograph – an eerie echo of the scene on the morgue slab: the baby girl lay alone, with no carer in sight, as if sleeping.</p>
<p>At 2.15 p.m. that day, the medical practitioner, Stratford Sheldon, commenced the autopsy. Sheldon was the closest thing that Sydney had to medical royalty. He came from a dynasty of doctors. His father, William Sheldon, was a popular North Sydney doctor. Both Stratford and his brother had become doctors with thriving independent practices in the city centre and in the burgeoning suburb of Granville in the west.</p>
<p>Sheldon was one of the best in his field, and his set of specialisations was directly relevant to the examination of a suitcase baby. He had a rare knowledge of deaths in Sydney Harbour and experience in undertaking post-mortems of watery deaths. In 1921 he had conducted the autopsy of Isabel Lippe, a Victorian woman involved in a complex and high-profile case. Lippe’s body had been found at the bottom of The Gap, a cliff edge on South Head with a reputation for both fatal accidents and suicide jumps from its 21-metre drop into the Tasman Sea.</p>
<p>Everyone in law enforcement wanted Lippe’s death to be ruled as murder. She had been pursued and deceived by a well-known con man, Charles MacAlister, and the police wanted a reason to arrest him. But Sheldon held firm in the face of immense pressure. After a long and complex inquest, he argued that by analysing multiple sources of evidence – the number and placement of broken bones, estimated time in the water and position of the body on impact – only one scientific conclusion was possible. Suicide. His post-mortem report ruined the case that police had been building against MacAlister. Sheldon’s opinion was respected but he wasn’t always liked by Sydney’s metropolitan police.</p>
<p>Sheldon looked first at the suitcase baby’s clothing, seeing that it comprised only the most basic of necessities. The empty gin bottle found inside the suitcase also suggested to Sheldon that indigence had played some role in the death. Gin was popular with the inner-city underclass because it was cheap. Its easy availability meant that gin had become a home remedy for common ailments from cradle to grave. The elderly used it to treat arthritis, while mothers used it as a sedative and tonic for restless and colicky babies.</p>
<p>As a legally qualified medical practitioner engaged to undertake work for the morgue, Sheldon was under instruction to determine the cause of death, and this meant performing an internal examination. Though the making of social commentaries did not fall within Sheldon’s immediate brief, he knew, before he even started his examination, that he was looking at the body of a child born into poverty. In his daily comings and goings as a city doctor, Sheldon would rarely if ever have encountered a baby so common, but in the morgue there was no social hierarchy. In this cold and damp place, the lowest and the highest of society assembled to participate in the ritual of the post-mortem. The perverse logic of the social welfare system in 1923 meant that while the suitcase baby had most likely not received any professional medical care in life, her body was being subjected to the best post-mortem that money could buy.</p>
<p>Sheldon estimated the baby to have been between three and four weeks old. On the umbilicus there remained a small amount of ‘dry epithelial string’. This meant the umbilical cord stump had healed, but only recently, because new tissue was visible.</p>
<p>Sheldon repositioned the baby’s body on the slab, elevating the torso to ensure the chest and abdomen could be sliced open cleanly and the ribs sawn through neatly. An internal examination found all of the organs to be healthy. The heart showed no signs of a common and potentially serious vulnerability such as a hole. The foramen ovale, a hole between the two halves of the heart which remains open before birth, had closed, as it should, shortly after birth. Sheldon was looking down on the body of what had been, at one time at least, a perfectly healthy baby.</p>
<p>While the general condition of the body indicated that the baby had been fed and cared for, the stomach was empty at the time of death. The baby had been dead when the suitcase was put in Port Jackson as there was no evidence of water in the lungs – a hallmark of drowning.</p>
<p>Using a magnifying glass and drawing the lamp as close to the body as possible, Sheldon leaned in to examine the lungs. In his final sworn statement, lodged with the Central Criminal Court, he said that he had found unequivocal evidence of death due to suffocation. Petechial haemorrhages were dappled on the tissue of the lungs; these red marks appear when blood leaks from ruptured vessels. Sheldon was methodical, noting the significance of this observation by drawing on other contextual evidence. As petechial haemorrhages can also occur as a result of cardiac arrest, Sheldon examined the heart closely to see if it exhibited signs of rupturing. It was unspotted and perfectly formed. Sheldon’s conclusion: death had occurred as a result of strangulation, with the airways purposefully obstructed by some external source.</p>
<p>The string was still tied so tightly around the neck that it told a story of the force and determination in the perpetrator’s mind. A white muslin handkerchief, decorated with the mauve stitching, was stuffed deeply into the mouth. It was as if the baby was frozen in time, trapped in a silent theatre of her last struggles for breath.</p>
<p>Sheldon’s summary of the post-mortem evidence concluded: ‘Either the string around the neck or the handkerchief in its mouth would have been sufficient to cause death.’ The murderer had not hesitated and had fully committed to the undertaking. There was no doubt the suitcase baby had suffered a horrible death. Not only had her body been discovered twice, but in a manner of speaking she had also died twice.</p>
<p>The Suitcase Bab<em>y by Tanya Bretherton, $32.99, published by Hachette Australia is available now.</em></p>
<p><img width="155" height="237" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7815930/suitcase-baby-cover_155x237.jpg" alt="Suitcase Baby Cover" style="float: right;"/></p>
<p><em>Image credit: NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive.</em></p>
