Who is martha rendell

Rendell was then buried in Fremantle Cemetery, and shares a grave with serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, who for unknown reasons, was buried there more than 50 years later. Join our mailing list. First Name. Last Name. Subscribe Now. On a visit to Rendell she had smelt the bottle and experienced strong fumes and burning, but Rendell claimed that a doctor had prescribed the medication.

As there was no scientific evidence of the effect of swabbing with spirits of salts, Mann prevailed upon the Department of Health to experiment on rabbits and guinea pigs. This proved that such swabbing would bring about the effects seen by the autopsies. No motive could be found apart from Rendell's infatuation with Morris and her anger at the children's disobedience. Although Thomas Morris was also charged with the murders, he was acquitted as it was believed that, although he had purchased spirits of salts, he had not been aware of the crimes until after the children's deaths.

However he had lied to police and to the Coroner, and the Jury wanted to find him guilty of being an accessory after the fact, but this was not allowed. Rendell was hanged in Fremantle Prison at hrs on October 6, At no stage did she show any remorse for her despicable crimes.

There are several valid reasons for revisiting the trial of Martha Rendell in Perth over years ago. There are the tantalising stories of hidden private lives and intimacies in Perth of a by-gone era exposed by this jolting, disjuncture in the social fabric of the city.

Then there are the niggling doubts that have trickled down the century concerning the justice of the trial. Viewed in the context of recent exposes of innocent men wrongly imprisoned for murder by Perth courts these doubts merge into an insistent demand for a thorough review of the facts of the Rendell case. In Martha Rendell and the people of Perth were propelled into a new century and an uncertain future.

Rendell had just moved to Perth, following her lover Thomas Morris and his family escaping the scandal of their affair back home in Adelaide and seeking a new life in the anonymity of Perth.

Rendell had broken early in life from the womanly ideals of her day: leaving home at the age of sixteen, taking lovers and bearing three illegitimate children before striking up a passionate relationship with Morris in the mids and abandoning her children and family to join him in Perth. Working in a well-to-do Perth residence as a domestic servant and with the right to vote granted to women in Western Australia in she may have seemed independent but with her emotions and future security dependent on a married man with a wife and nine children she could easily slide into the abyss of aging single women condemned to charity, the poor house or worse.

There was no going back for the people of Perth either. Their newly modern city built on the riches of wealth and people brought by the gold rushes was no longer a distant backwater but a proud capital city in the new federation of Australia. Its citizens were swept up in international social movements of the times, albeit in more conservative iterations, that divided and brought them together in allegiances that would coalesce around the Rendell trial and execution.

Making up the legal contingent of the Rendell coronial inquiry and trial, they endorsed capital punishment and their representatives were in government when Rendell was sentenced to death. The thorn in the side of this comfortable class was the contingent of Labor socialists who had arrived from the eastern colonies during the gold rushes. They were a brotherhood of men who espoused equality for women, mainly in the breach, and who opposed capital punishment as being barbarous and out of date.

Then were was the loose grouping of medical doctors and men of science, most of them new to Perth, influenced by the Progressivist movements in the United States and Britain whose members were applying scientific knowledge and skills to forge the modern, efficient and healthy nations of the future. Alarmed by evidence of population decline, poor health, racial degeneration and moral deviance and contagion that they attributed to the rapid social change and urbanisation of the fin de siecle period and inspired by the promises of modernity in the new century, Progressivists adopted an interventionist stance through government programs of urban planning, public health, housing, education and care of children in the home.

Arguing that it was not a deterrent she recounted how she had spoken with condemned men in the United States and how all but had one killed in an unpremeditated frenzy of madness. Society had no right to take the life of another Uniting these disparate networks of Perth citizens was a fervent allegiance to the family as the powerhouse of the new Australian nation, with mothers forging its future citizenry and Christian marriage as the binding glue, all guided by values of respectability and hard work.

There was also growing public endorsement of greater government intervention in family life to achieve these benefits. This was evident in the outraged public condemnation of Rendell, which provided a potent instructive example for Perth women of the consequences of deviant female behaviour. Already in there was a warning shot across the bows when three French women of ill repute were sentenced to death with three men for their part in a fight that led to a murder shooting in the Perth hills.

In April after nearly ten years of waiting Rendell finally achieved her long-awaited dream when the Morris marriage broke down irrevocably and the couple separated.

Morris was granted custody of his five youngest children and the lovers set up home in a rundown cottage in East Perth. Divorce was out of the question, being expensive, scandalous and controversial. At a public meeting Perth in speakers opposing a proposed federal divorce bill staunchly reasserted Christian marriage as the foundation of the state and of the welfare of its citizens and their happiness and prosperity.

The only realistic alternative to divorce was de facto living but in secret since the arrangement was universally condemned as immoral. Private family memories suggest that this practice behind closed doors was not so unusual at the time since the upheavals and separations of the gold rushes had undermined many marriages. In Perth de facto couples were able to play out the semblance of respectability safe from prying friends and family back home and cloaked in the anonymity of city life.

Reflecting gendered judgements of the time Morris was far less harshly judged for his part in the arrangement. Who could she turn to for help? They succeeded in exposing parental abuse and arousing public sympathy but were also prying into very sensitive areas of family life.

For Rendell a call for help to these women would have meant certain exposure. Many women new to Perth were struggling to re-establish their families, often in the face of financial problems and difficult marriages. In contrast to the other states Western Australia was experiencing a baby boom yet mothers were exhorted to bear even more children to build up the nation. Mothers also faced growing interference in their maternal role in the home as Progressivist doctors insisted that they be trained in scientific standards of child rearing, hygiene and efficiency.

State schools also had an important new role to play and in the Science Congress in Adelaide passed a resolution that all state Education and Public Health Departments should introduce compulsory school medical inspections and hygiene instruction in line with developments in Great Britain and the United States.

How could overworked mothers be expected to achieve these rigid standards? The official answer lay in the nature of instinctual maternal love that sacrificed all for this noblest of callings; by contrast women like Rendell who abandoned their children for their own lustful ends were contemptible aberrations of nature.

As a secretive stepmother Rendell was in an unenviable position. In a society that idealised motherhood the drive to become the loving mother she had displaced and to recreate a loving family and home must have been irresistible. This goal was also unattainable and heart breaking.

Harsh prejudices about stepmothers had survived for centuries regardless of their vital role in caring for motherless children after family breakdown through death of the wife or separation. In Perth newspapers reported the sensational case in Queensland of Florence MacDonald who was found guilty along with her husband of the wilful murder of her young stepdaughter.

In the little East Perth cottage relative calm reigned for twelve months but then in April the four youngest children Olive, Annie, George and Arthur aged between five and fourteen were struck down with diphtheria during a city epidemic.

The demands on Rendell of nursing four children were exacerbated by the terrible rasping sounds as her patients struggled to breathe but the life threatening danger was the poison that could spread fatal toxicity from the diphtheria throat membrane throughout the body.

The family doctor James Cuthbert who gave damning evidence against Rendell at her trial visited regularly and commended Rendell for her devotion in nursing the children to recovery at the expense of her own health. Sickness seemed to have taken a hold on the family and soon nine-year-old Annie was back in bed with convulsions, vomiting and diarrhoea for which the doctor administered the diphtheria anti-toxin and prescribed tinctures of laudanum to ease her pain.

She died in a delirium in July, the cause of death given by Cuthbert as epilepsy and cardiac weakness. Then in August just when life seemed to be returning to normal Olive, George and Arthur were diagnosed with typhoid. This time Olive did not recover and suffering from vomiting, diarrhoea and an undiagnosed membranous condition of the throat she died in October according to her death certificate from haemorrhage and typhoid.

What was happening in this household? These tragic events were played out against the backdrop of shocking disclosures of infant deaths in the Mitchell baby farming case that galvanised Perth in early and shone a glaring spotlight on issues of surrogate child care and immorality.

Stories were rife of neglectful conditions, cruelty and abuse in these premises. Reports alleged that 37 children had died at the Perth home run by Mrs Alice Mitchell, despite the requirement for inspections by the Board of Health and the fact of regular visits by local doctors who regularly signed death certificates but raised no concerns with the Board. Mention of illegitimate children in the Mitchell case inevitably drew attention to issues of immorality in Perth.

Women bore the brunt of the blame. Condemnation and surveillance of reproductive controls through contraception and abortion escalated. What were women to do? With few alternatives some were pushed to the brink to commit infanticide or even suicide. Perth newspapers refer to several infanticide cases in the early s, although the hysteria that the Rendell case provoked was absent from their reports.

Similar judgements would be made against Rendell. In the schools medical inspections and hygiene instruction were introduced and doctors lobbied the government for compulsory vaccinations and treatment regimes for children as well. Meanwhile further tragedy was brewing for the Morris children. In June Arthur was suffering from the same symptoms of vomiting, diarrhoea and the mysterious throat membrane as Olive and he died in October just twelve months after her.

She later claimed that she did so because she thought they had seen enough. They made no report concerning the unusual situation where three grown children had died within the space of fifteen months. The trigger was the reunion of the two surviving boys with their mother.

From George the police heard the horrific allegation that his stepmother had murdered his brother Arthur and that Arthur had told him she was painting his throat with spirits of salt hydrochloric acid. With her secrets exposed to the world Rendell retreated into a shocked silence that she broke only once at the Coronial Inquiry and in statements from her prison cell proclaiming her innocence. And how could the woman have forced a youth of fifteen to submit to such cruelty?

The strength of feeling bordering on mass hysteria that lay at the heart of public frenzy about this woman was exhibited in the shrill crowds of Perth women demanding her hanging and worse. Public reaction to child murder is always extreme provoking universal abhorrence and condemnation. Women child murderers are the most hated of all and here were alleged multiple killings.

Forensic psychologist Geoffrey McKee[14] explains that such killings provoke the irrational, being a shocking attack on the most fundamental of human relationships and arousing memories and fears from childhood or even guilty feelings of frustrated parenting as adults.

Murderesses also have a particular allure and cache; they compel and repel in ways that male felons rarely do. This is due to their statistical rarity and their exceptional behaviour in transgressing ideals of feminine conduct to the point of murder. Her behaviour breached all of the cherished ideals of family, wifely conduct and motherhood that Perth society demanded of its women.

What was held up as the ideal of home, husband, children, respectability and security she not only destroyed for herself but also mocked in her deceitful charade of respectability to hide her immoral behaviour. There was also public conjecture about the likely reasons she failed to bear any children to Morris.

Rendell was a bad woman who was beyond the pale. Vital issues of trust in the home were also involved. Noel Sanders[15] in discussing the outbreak of thallium poisonings in Sydney homes in the mid-twentieth century highlights the significance of women and fundamental understandings of trust that underpin the domestic division of labour and activities of everyday life.

Women prepare and serve food and nurse the sick, all duties that could be easily transformed into acts of malice through poisonous attempts on a life. Mothers give trusting children medicines that taste nasty and even hurt and tell them the concoctions are doing them good and the doctors back them up.

How could a child know the difference? Rendell fitted all the stereotypes of a woman poisoner and criminal. The tell-tale appearance and behaviours, Rendell being plain, middle aged and stony faced was the very embodiment of the deceitful, cold-blooded woman who poisoned her loved ones, poisoning being considered the most fiendish method of murder imaginable.

Popular stereotypes of murdering stepmothers further amplified the potent mix. Even the silence that Rendell maintained for the duration of her ordeal, normally deemed to be the legal right of the accused, served to confirm her guilt, fitting as it did with popular ideas of wicked women as witches and deceitful poisoners.

Clair Scrine[19] demonstrates how in the case of sensational murder trials involving women the courts and media can create from misogynist stereotypes, gossip and the stated facts of the case a logically consistent system of meaning that glosses over inconsistencies and details of what actually happened.

In the Rendell case police and press representations that masked political and other forces at work and powerful prejudices of the times helped to send a woman to the gallows on the flimsiest of evidence. Mud-raking and sensationalist, the Sydney owned tabloid claimed a special role in exposing the murders and proudly proclaimed to have been the first to realise the significance of the terrible facts of the case and to reveal them to the world.

In the competitive Perth market this sold newspapers. Recently Perth criminologist Richard Harding provided a similar list of factors that he argued contributed to more recent miscarriages of justice in Western Australia. Had this indeed been the case then Rendell could have expected a far more merciful sentence.

In Tasmania in a quack doctor who applied sulphuric acid to a patient to cure a particular cancerous condition an accepted treatment at the time who subsequently died was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for eighteen months for rashly administering a medicine that caused death. It is true that this was a difficult and unusual investigation with no crime scene, fresh bodies or eye witnesses, only a fourteen-year-old boy reporting words his deceased brother had allegedly spoken and neighbourhood gossip reported retrospectively, no incriminating physical evidence collected from the cottage and no incontrovertible forensic evidence either.

Forensic science may have been in its infancy in Perth but still the expert evidence presented at the Rendell trial in no way matched the rigorous standards of proof demanded by British toxicology experts notably Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor who pioneered the field during the nineteenth century.

The trial began in mid-September and rolled like a juggernaut to its inevitable conclusion, setting out a prosecution murder theory that was alarmingly reminiscent of a wicked stepmother fairytale and so bound to capture the fevered public imagination. Their flimsy expert evidence couched in the aura of science mesmerised the court rather than raising alarms.

The fact was that their forensic analyses did not produce any evidence of poisoning with hydrochloric acid, nor did they know of its use in any other murder cases. His frequent absences working away from home also pointed the finger at her as the sole culprit.

Rendell bore the full brunt of public prejudices and stereotypes. The jury made no recommendation for mercy as in for the three condemned French women nor was a plea of insanity raised by the defence as in the case of Harry Smith in Even should she achieve these impossible outcomes the final decision still rested with the Executive Council whether to advise the Governor to extend the prerogative of mercy.

Her case seemed hopeless. It had been 38 years since the last woman was hanged in Western Australia and understandably there was some heated debate on the issue of capital punishment in the lead up to her hanging, although few people challenged the verdict of guilty. A small but vigorous group of men took up the fight to save Rendell. If this woman is guilty then let her suffer life. Rendell was hanged with unseemly haste on the 6th of October , just twenty days after the guilty verdict was handed down and only seven weeks from when the coronial inquiry had that deemed she should stand trial.

She was the third woman to be hanged in Western Australia, the only one to be executed for child murder and the only woman ever to be hanged in Fremantle Prison. Rendell has continued to be condemned in history and public memory down the years.

In the process she has been reinvented to reflect images of bad women in popular culture as a glamorous femme fatale, serial killer, sexual pervert and, most recently, iconic murderess at the Fremantle Prison heritage precinct. Today researchers are constructing a further image of this sorry woman as the wrongly condemned victim of prejudices and public hysteria in Perth of bygone days. Hopefully, this more enlightened interpretation of the trial will gather public momentum for Martha Rendell to be granted a retrospective pardon for a crime for which she should never have been found guilty, let alone hanged.

Charlie Fox ed. Criminals are not born that way. There is no genetic component to criminality. Sadistic serial killer Ted Bundy b: in a home for unwed mothers; executed: , for example, was raised by grandparents not criminals. His biological mother later married and took care of him; her new husband, John Bundy, formally adopted the boy.

Neither of his parents were criminals. Environment alone does not always lead to criminality, either. It may, in certain people, create a laissez-faire attitude but it will not make a criminal of someone not already predisposed, for whatever reasons, to be criminal.

The Menendez Brothers parricides were born into privilege. They enjoyed wealth and comfort. These two minor examples show how environment had no hand in creating the criminal. Cult leader Charles Manson and serial killer Henry Lee Lucas are two stellar examples of environmental factors shaping the young psyche.

Manson who actually never killed anyone personally and Lucas were both born of prostitutes. In any event these two were raised in a milieu where criminality was accepted, acceptable, and even condoned. Prisons are full of innocent people — just ask any inmate. He or she will generally claim innocence, or a frame-up, or accident, or bad legal representation. Almost any excuse is acceptable but the truth: he or she may actually be guilty of a crime. There are others who, of course, blame their lack of education or their upbringing, or blame the current state of human morals and norms for their problems.

However, what happens if one truly is a victim of society? Australia was born of a strange dichotomy in its group think. The law-and-order element of the British Crown enforced Australian rule, while its growing populace carried the memory of a criminal culture with them. Australia has a richly colorful history of extraordinary characters.

Illustrations of him in this makeshift gear are amusing — he looks like a cross between the Black Knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and a man wearing a Franklin stove. Merriment aside, this man was a killer and a thug finally captured and executed in late , aged Adelaide, Southern Australia, incorporated in , was a rustic backwater not yet fifty years old when Martha Rendell was born on August 10, Victorian priggishness was in full swing.

Martha was not the typical Aussie woman of her day, and she was far from the ideal espoused by Aussie convention. She left home when she was sixteen. Her early promiscuity led to the birth in quick succession of three illegitimate children. She struggled along as a social outsider, and then became involved with a married man in the mid s. Paradoxically, while following this lesson from the sources could have disempowered her, it had the effect of filling the book with her presence.

Just as she drove the imaginations of the people of Perth she also pervades our imaginings. There is poetry and power in her deliberate silence. This article is based on an essay published in the academic journal Text and is the fifth in our series, Writing History. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.

Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Martha Rendell was the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia, in Depicted here as imagined by newspapers in the s. Wikimedia Commons. Anna Haebich , Curtin University. Australian history Historical fiction Writing History.