Speaker 1: It didn't should the window, didn't should picture on the wall,
Speaker 1: didn't shod the bed head. It didn't shoot him in
Speaker 1: the knee or party's hair, or knock his right or
Speaker 1: left arm. About what it did was shoot him extremely dead.
Speaker 1: Lorraine was feeding him enough arsenic to kill Farlap. And
Speaker 1: the reason for this is Lorraine I was conducting a
Speaker 1: very torrid affair with one of Johnny Moss's workmates. I'm
Speaker 1: Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes. Today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about a group of people some people call
Speaker 1: black widows. Now, I don't know if they're call on.
Speaker 2: Black widows because of the black widow spider.
Speaker 1: That's the spider that's renowned because the female of the
Speaker 1: species eats the male of the species after they reproduce.
Speaker 1: It could be, but anyway, it's the name that everyone understands.
Speaker 1: When we talk about black widows, we're generally talking about
Speaker 1: women who may or may not have caused the death
Speaker 1: of their husband or other intimate partner. And today we're
Speaker 1: going to look at several cases. Three of them were
Speaker 1: convicted of unlawful killings and one was not. And we
Speaker 1: point that out. Now, the one that attracts our attention.
Speaker 1: First up is the interesting case of Margaret Utley. Margaret
Speaker 1: Erica Utley. Like a lot of people in the past,
Speaker 1: she was married young. She married at twenty years old
Speaker 1: to a twenty year old young farmer, a young guy
Speaker 1: called Stephen Henry Utley. And Stephen Henry Utley farmed a
Speaker 1: block i think growing vegetables, mostly down on the Werribee
Speaker 1: River out on the other side of Weerriby at Tarneq
Speaker 1: now Tarnique these days is one of the newer out
Speaker 1: western suburbs, but back in the seventies, eighties nineties it
Speaker 1: was very much still a farming district beyond Weeraby and
Speaker 1: Stephen Utley was a farmer there and he and his wife, Margaret, they.
Speaker 2: Had four kids.
Speaker 1: She was known as a hard working, diligent, pretty respectable
Speaker 1: sort of woman, and Stephen was known, I think over
Speaker 1: time as a hard drinking, probably depressive sort of guy.
Speaker 1: And after twenty five years of this it had reached
Speaker 1: the stage where Stephen Utley would apparently drink heavily every
Speaker 1: night and his only concern was to get his wife
Speaker 1: Margaret to drive him around as if she was a
Speaker 1: taxi driver into Werriby, to various pubs and home again,
Speaker 1: and life had become fairly miserable for her and her
Speaker 1: four children, who were at this stage quite mature. I
Speaker 1: think the youngest one was a secondary school but the
Speaker 1: others were young adults. And given they've been married twenty
Speaker 1: five years in the year two thousand, therefore kids ranged
Speaker 1: in age from about twenty four down to fifteen something
Speaker 1: like that. The last time that Stephen Utley's friends saw
Speaker 1: him was at a barbecue on a Sunday night around
Speaker 1: whereby somewhere, I think it was Sunday, October the eighth,
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand, so this is only one
Speaker 1: week after the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. That
Speaker 1: gives us the era usual thing, he'd been to a barbecue,
Speaker 1: got a belly full of grog and went home. Now
Speaker 1: no one now knows how he got home. Did he
Speaker 1: take a taxi or did Margaret pick him up as usual,
Speaker 1: or did he get a ride with one of his mates.
Speaker 1: But the last time his mate's remember seeing him was
Speaker 1: that night. Now he vanishes. Margaret tells her friends and
Speaker 1: family that Stephen has bolted, that he's left her and
Speaker 1: gone to the Northern Territory, that you know, finally the
Speaker 1: straw breaks the camel's back. They've been arguing and fighting.
Speaker 1: He's a drunken, a big problem, and he's said, bugger it.
Speaker 1: I'm off to the Northern Territory to work on a
Speaker 1: cattle station, and I'm going with you, Tom.
Speaker 2: Dick or Harry whatever.
Speaker 1: This is the story she tells everybody in the following
Speaker 1: days and weeks that Stephen's left her and he's gone
Speaker 1: up north. And it would appear that those closest to
Speaker 1: Margaret Utley believe this, or believed it sufficiently not to
Speaker 1: question it in any real way. It'd be interesting to
Speaker 1: know what her adult children thought, but presumably they were
Speaker 1: sort of more on mom's side than dad's side. Apparently,
Speaker 1: Stephen's siblings he has at least two sisters, weren't all that.
Speaker 2: Happy about this.
Speaker 1: Stephen's their mother was dead at this stage, so there
Speaker 1: were no sort of parents to look into Stephen's whereabouts,
Speaker 1: and Stephen had been a sufficiently loose unit that it
Speaker 1: made some sort of sense that he might disappear and
Speaker 1: not be seen for a while. But as time wore on,
Speaker 1: the nagging suspicions of relatives, friends, neighbors, drinking buddies started
Speaker 1: to become stronger because no one heard a word from him.
Speaker 1: No Christmas, no birthdays, no this, no that. And eventually
Speaker 1: I think Stephen's sisters probably caused the police to look
Speaker 1: into it. And when they did look into it, they
Speaker 1: went and interviewed Margaret utterly, and she said, you know,
Speaker 1: he left sometime that week, said he was going to
Speaker 1: the Northern Territory with with his mate, and I haven't
Speaker 1: seen him since. And she stuck to that story, but
Speaker 1: she didn't.
Speaker 2: It very long.
Speaker 1: The police are pretty good at interviewing.
Speaker 2: People, and perhaps they saw that there was a.
Speaker 1: Bit of a chink in her armor, that she wasn't
Speaker 1: as resolute and as defiant as she might be, and
Speaker 1: they kept at her and in the end she threw
Speaker 1: her hands up and said, now I'll tell you what
Speaker 1: really happened. And Margaret Utley's version of what really happened
Speaker 1: goes something like this. She says that on two AM,
Speaker 1: so this early morning, after midnight of the eleventh of October,
Speaker 1: it's in a sense the Tuesday night, but it's after midnight,
Speaker 1: so it's the next morning. She says that as usual
Speaker 1: Stephen stayed up late drinking and was very drunk and
Speaker 1: very aggressive and nasty, and that he came into their
Speaker 1: bedroom or her bedroom, in the dark with a loaded shotgun.
Speaker 1: Now I'm not sure how she knew in the dark
Speaker 1: what he was holding, and whether she knew it was
Speaker 1: a loaded shotgun or an empty shop gun or what,
Speaker 1: but this.
Speaker 2: Is the story.
Speaker 1: She says that she was able to grab the shotgun.
Speaker 1: A man handled it away from her husband, who, to
Speaker 1: be fair to her, was not a terribly big man,
Speaker 1: and he was a drunk man, so you know, maybe
Speaker 1: she couldn't. She says she wrestled the shotgun from her
Speaker 1: husband and that she managed, obviously to reverse it. She
Speaker 1: didn't just pull it towards us. She was able to
Speaker 1: turn it around and lo and behold, amazingly, it went off,
Speaker 1: as sometimes guns seemed to do in these circumstances, they
Speaker 1: just go off by themselves. And it went off by itself,
Speaker 1: and amazingly, of all the places that could have shot,
Speaker 1: it didn't shot the window, didn't shot the picture on
Speaker 1: the wall, didn't shit the bed head, It didn't shoot
Speaker 1: him in the knee or party hair, or knock his
Speaker 1: right or left arm about what it did was shoot
Speaker 1: him extremely dead. So it hit him in a vital swat,
Speaker 1: if not the head, then fair and square around his heart,
Speaker 1: and that killed him. And interestingly, she would later assert
Speaker 1: that her two younger children and by this woman, an adult,
Speaker 1: a young adult old enough to drive a car, maybe nineteen,
Speaker 1: and her youngest one who was at high school maybe
Speaker 1: fifteen something, that they were asleep in the house at
Speaker 1: the time. Now that is amazing, because this is a quiet,
Speaker 1: smallish and very quiet farmhouse out on ninety hectares of farmland,
Speaker 1: surrounded by other farmland. It's not a suburb. It's farmland
Speaker 1: and pretty quiet and peaceful at night, particularly back in
Speaker 1: that era. And a shotgun, a twelve grade shotgun in
Speaker 1: a house is a massive, explosive and deafening raw. It's
Speaker 1: a very loud noise, and I think unless the two
Speaker 1: up children had really good earplugs in that night to
Speaker 1: stop them hearing all the crickets that you might hear
Speaker 1: on a silent night, it would wake them. But anyway,
Speaker 1: her story is that they were asleep in the house
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the house and didn't hear a thing but
Speaker 1: their presence. She would later instruct a lawyer to tell
Speaker 1: a court their presence means that she could not have
Speaker 1: premeditated murder because of course her kids were there. So
Speaker 1: who would premeditate a murder with a shotgun when your
Speaker 1: kids are there? Because they'd hear it, wouldn't they. This
Speaker 1: is very interesting to me. I find it fascinating that
Speaker 1: this would happen in this way and at work the
Speaker 1: judge copt it said yep, I'll believe that, and ultimately
Speaker 1: a judge would believe her or her defense case, which
Speaker 1: was I think slightly contrived in my view, but anyway,
Speaker 1: she was very well advised.
Speaker 2: Her solicitor was.
Speaker 1: One of the most shrewd crime lawyers, particularly on that
Speaker 1: side of the West Cape Bridge. We won't name him here,
Speaker 1: but trust me he's good, and her counsel, her barrister
Speaker 1: was mister Phil Dunn, who we have mentioned him many
Speaker 1: times in our podcast. He is criminal legal royalty, very
Speaker 1: very good at it, and they were able to sell
Speaker 1: or tell Margaret Utley's tale in court very well, and
Speaker 1: it went so well that Margaret Utly pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Speaker 1: We should point out that previously the police did not
Speaker 1: get to talk to Margaret Utly for some years, and
Speaker 1: it really wasn't until two thousand and seven that the
Speaker 1: going got tough for her, because it took that long,
Speaker 1: and we're talking a time of six and a half
Speaker 1: odd years for the suspicions to grow into accusation, and
Speaker 1: the accusations to prompt the police to go and talk
Speaker 1: to her. And so for those years Margaret Utley had
Speaker 1: basically lived the life of a grass widow. She was
Speaker 1: home on the farm with whichever of her children were
Speaker 1: still there with her, and life went on. And in
Speaker 1: that time, you know, those people who knew her, perhaps
Speaker 1: apart from Stephen Utley's immediate family, the Utley family, leave
Speaker 1: them out for the minute, but those other people who
Speaker 1: knew were neighbors, friends, community people regarded her as a
Speaker 1: good citizen, a good woman, kind hearted, hard working, decent
Speaker 1: in every way. She formed a relationship with a local
Speaker 1: man who I think proposed to her later when she
Speaker 1: was in jail. But she certainly formed a relationship with
Speaker 1: this man who already had children from his previous marriage.
Speaker 1: And one of the witnesses to Margaret at least good
Speaker 1: character was her new partner's ex. Her new partner's X
Speaker 1: said I've got no beef with Margaret. She's nice, she's good,
Speaker 1: and when my children go to stay at her place
Speaker 1: with my ex husband, I'm quite happy about it because
Speaker 1: she's really good. And so when it came time for
Speaker 1: the judge, Judge Osborne, to rule how much time she
Speaker 1: should serve, he took all of those good references into
Speaker 1: account and said she was a good character, and he
Speaker 1: sentenced her to five years for pleading guilty to manslaughter
Speaker 1: with a two year minimum, which meant that with the
Speaker 1: time she'd already served on remand she actually was in
Speaker 1: jail for less than two years. She went into jail
Speaker 1: in the middle of two thousand and nine and walked
Speaker 1: out of jail a Taran Gower Women's prison up him
Speaker 1: Aden in late twenty ten. Not a bad trick if
Speaker 1: you can do it. The interesting thing about Margaret Utley
Speaker 1: is that after she got out of prison, her good
Speaker 1: luck got even better. She served, you know, two years
Speaker 1: for manslaughter rather than many years for murder. Good And
Speaker 1: then it turns out that the property which had been
Speaker 1: gifted to her late husband by her mother in law
Speaker 1: who was dead, was now controlled effectively by her children
Speaker 1: and effectively by herself. So she and her kids had
Speaker 1: inherited ninety hectares at tarant which had just been rezoned
Speaker 1: as a new suburb. And so the ninety hectares of
Speaker 1: relatively ordinary farmland on which they struggled to make a
Speaker 1: living suddenly was real estate that was sold by the foot.
Speaker 1: And so that block of farmland was worth anywhere between,
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen and twenty one million dollars. So that
Speaker 1: was falling on your feet. And perhaps because of her
Speaker 1: millionaire status, million hair status, she hadn't actually got the
Speaker 1: millions in her pocket, but she could expect not to
Speaker 1: be too poor in the future. She joined a syndicate
Speaker 1: in racing a race horse. Now, any of you out
Speaker 1: there that takes an interest in the gallops and in
Speaker 1: punting will have heard of the horse in which Margaret.
Speaker 2: Utley had a share. That horse was a very.
Speaker 1: Good sprinter, not a champion of champions, but he was
Speaker 1: one of the better and most durable sprinters in Victoria.
Speaker 1: In fact, he won five races down the straight six
Speaker 1: at Flemington. He won over several seasons, and he won
Speaker 1: a total of close to nine hundred thousand in state money,
Speaker 1: which means if his owners had been backing him, especially
Speaker 1: on those big days at Flemington. They probably grossed a
Speaker 1: million dollars out of the horse, which makes that horse
Speaker 1: a remarkable success compared with ninety nine and a half
Speaker 1: percent of race horses. But it's the name of the
Speaker 1: horse that is the most excellent part about it. Because
Speaker 1: Margaret Utley, who was accused by some people of murdering
Speaker 1: her husband, was convicted and pleaded guilty to manslaughter of
Speaker 1: her husband after becoming a very serious suspect for his death,
Speaker 1: that horse was called serious suspect. The spelling is s
Speaker 1: I R I us and then suspect, but still when
Speaker 1: you say it, it is serious suspect, and his breeding
Speaker 1: a leads to that name. He is by the stallion wanted. Now,
Speaker 1: Margaret Utley is just one of a handful of people
Speaker 1: that we're going to look at black widows. Another one
Speaker 1: that her name has come up over the journey, and
Speaker 1: some listeners might recall it was Lorraine Moss. Now Lorrain
Speaker 1: Moss was the Bendigo poisoner, or one of the Bendigo poisoners.
Speaker 1: She's not the only Bendigo poisoner. And Lorrain Moss was married,
Speaker 1: probably young like Margaret to a bloke called Leonard John Moss,
Speaker 1: and he was known always as Johnny Johnny Moss, and
Speaker 1: he was a meat worker at Bendigo and they lived
Speaker 1: locally out on the outskirts of Bendigo and one of
Speaker 1: the suburbs out there.
Speaker 2: And he used to pack hiss.
Speaker 1: Cut lunch in the mornings and go off to work
Speaker 1: at the meat works or small goods factory whatever it
Speaker 1: was like that, and they had a couple of kids,
Speaker 1: and you know, life went on. They had a holden
Speaker 1: and probably a dog all that, and lo and behold
Speaker 1: in the early eighties, poor oh Johnny Moss starts to
Speaker 1: get sick, and he gets very sick. He gets terrible
Speaker 1: stomach pains, and he loses weight and he's in diabolical trouble.
Speaker 1: And he gets taken to hospital and they look at
Speaker 1: him and they examine him, and they feed him hospital
Speaker 1: food and all the rest of it. And his ever
Speaker 1: loving wife Lorraine comes in and gives him grapes and stuff.
Speaker 1: And when he's in hospital, he improves, He gradually improves
Speaker 1: and he gets a bit better and he goes home
Speaker 1: and he's wanting to go back to work at the meatworks,
Speaker 1: and sometimes she would pack his cut lunch to go
Speaker 1: to work at the meatworks. One day he didn't feel
Speaker 1: up to eating his ham sandwiches or whatever, and he
Speaker 1: gave him to a couple of his mates, who are
Speaker 1: always hungry and they like kids at school. The mate
Speaker 1: said that the sandwiches and lo and behold the two
Speaker 1: mates get crooked. One of them was off work for
Speaker 1: months and it didn't kill him, but nearly did. And
Speaker 1: this was an amazing business that these fellows would be sick,
Speaker 1: and was very puzzled. And the really strange thing was
Speaker 1: that when Johnny Moss came home from hospital to effectively
Speaker 1: recuperate at home, suddenly his condition would get worse. He
Speaker 1: would go downhill. And the problem was that Lorraine was
Speaker 1: feeding him enough arsenic to kill farlap. And the reason
Speaker 1: for this is the actual reason, was that Lorraine was
Speaker 1: conducting a very torrid affair with one of Johnny Moss's workmates,
Speaker 1: a blood called White. That's whyte and that was her motivation.
Speaker 1: She wanted to get rid of Johnny Bath in their
Speaker 1: thirties at this stage so she could take up with loverboy.
Speaker 1: And a bit of bad luck intervened here, a bit
Speaker 1: of inefficiency in the system. The Austin Hospital did tests
Speaker 1: on Johnny Moss, and those tests, had they been not lost,
Speaker 1: which they were for a year or something, those tests
Speaker 1: showed that Johnny Moss had actually something like eighty times
Speaker 1: the safe amount of arsenic in his system. Your system
Speaker 1: can tolerate a tiny amount of arsenic, it cannot tolerate
Speaker 1: eighty times that amount. And had that report from the
Speaker 1: laboratory at the Austin Hospital been sent up the line
Speaker 1: to Bendigo, to the local hospital and distributed to the
Speaker 1: perhaps the local police or whatever, things might have ended differently.
Speaker 1: But it was lost and that didn't happen, and the
Speaker 1: result of that was that Lorraine Moss kept poisoning Johnny,
Speaker 1: and Johnny died. Johnny died in about nineteen eighty two
Speaker 1: after some sixteen months of being poisoned, and there was
Speaker 1: a coroner's inquest into it, and some questions were raised.
Speaker 1: I think there were suspicions, but the absence of that
Speaker 1: rep meant that the coroner, who I'd have to say
Speaker 1: was a very kindly and generous and gentle coroner, concluded
Speaker 1: that although Johnny mossad died of sustained exposure to Arsenik,
Speaker 1: that there was no proof that his wife, Lorraine was
Speaker 1: the one giving it to him, And so she got
Speaker 1: to do not go to jail card from the coroner's court,
Speaker 1: and she went home to Bendigo, of course, and she
Speaker 1: married the fellow white that was Loverboy, and she lived along. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: herd kids, they've grown up and become young adults, and
Speaker 1: I think particularly one of them.
Speaker 2: Was always suspicious about the whole thing, as you might be.
Speaker 1: And one day, and this is about eighteen years or so,
Speaker 1: at least eighteen years or so after Johnny Moss's death,
Speaker 1: the daughter is talking to her mother, and her mother
Speaker 1: blurts out something about, oh, well, I can't look into
Speaker 1: it now because it's too long ago. And she had
Speaker 1: assumed wrongly. I might say that once something was so
Speaker 1: long ago, eighteen years, twenty years, that you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to be charged. She imagined in her befuddled mind,
Speaker 1: And she was befuddled, otherwise she wouldn't have poisoned her husband.
Speaker 1: It is a bit befuddled. She imagined that there was
Speaker 1: a statute of limitations that would protect her, and she
Speaker 1: said something like this to her daughter. She blurted out
Speaker 1: something that was actually incriminating, and the daughter didn't miss it.
Speaker 1: She thought, oh, this is it. Mum's actually admitting she
Speaker 1: poisoned DA. And she went to the police and said,
Speaker 1: mum's admitting she poisoned d and that makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. We always thought there was something strange about it.
Speaker 1: And the police said, oh, well, that's interesting, and they
Speaker 1: wired her for sound. They got the daughter to wear
Speaker 1: a mini tape recorder and a little microphone, and she
Speaker 1: went and met mum at a picnic somewhere or whatever.
Speaker 1: They met for lunch somewhere, and she gets mum to
Speaker 1: tell her the whole sad story of how she poisoned
Speaker 1: the girl's father and it's all on tape. And so
Speaker 1: the girl goes back to the homicide squad and they
Speaker 1: were able to prosecute her. And the judge in that case,
Speaker 1: the judge in the murder trial, that is Justice Bill Gillard,
Speaker 1: who's a lean and hungry judge. He had defended a
Speaker 1: lot of crooks and so he knew a fair bit
Speaker 1: about it, and he didn't miss Lorraine Moss at all.
Speaker 1: He said, you're a wicked woman whose wickedness knew no bounds.
Speaker 1: You condemned your husband to a painful death, and you
Speaker 1: kept at it for month after month after month. You
Speaker 1: know there's no redeeming features. And he sentenced her to
Speaker 1: twenty two years with a minimum of eighteen and that
Speaker 1: was in I think two thousand and two, which means
Speaker 1: that even if she served every day of that sentence.
Speaker 1: Lorraine Moss, whose name was later Lorraine White, he's out
Speaker 1: there amongst us, somewhere, probably wondering what happened to the
Speaker 1: last twenty years. There's one more thing to add about
Speaker 1: Lorraine Moss, the Bendigo poisoner.
Speaker 2: The police were suspicious of it for.
Speaker 1: Some time, and one of them, a sergeant, a detective
Speaker 1: sergeant Jack Jacob's, a very funny man, a very charming man.
Speaker 1: Women liked him, and he would drop in and talk
Speaker 1: to her, to interview her and see if he could
Speaker 1: get her to incriminate herself. This is before they had
Speaker 1: the tape recorder, I think. And he said she was
Speaker 1: really hospitable and friendly, and she would always offer him
Speaker 1: a cup of tea, which he never ever touched, just
Speaker 1: in case. Another Bendigo's story, another black widow, probably seen
Speaker 1: by many people as not such a black widow extenuating circumstances.
Speaker 1: You're honor Heather Osland. Now, Heather Osland was a big deal.
Speaker 1: It was a celebrated case because Heather Oceland. It was
Speaker 1: well held, and I think fair to say that she
Speaker 1: was a battered wife. She'd married a man called Frank Osland,
Speaker 1: and from all accounts he was a violent and nasty
Speaker 1: piece of work and gave her and perhaps her children
Speaker 1: a very hard time. And it got so that Heather
Speaker 1: thought it would be better if either he'd kill her
Speaker 1: or she'd kill him, and so she sedated her husband
Speaker 1: using some form of tablets said it. And when he
Speaker 1: was fairly well drugged unconscious, she got her son to
Speaker 1: help her hit him with a blunt object. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if it was the back of an axe or
Speaker 1: what it was, but they hit him with a blunt
Speaker 1: object until he was dead. One was not terribly old,
Speaker 1: he might have been a teenager. And he beat the
Speaker 1: charge on self defense, which is interesting. I suppose it
Speaker 1: was one of those defense issues where you say, well,
Speaker 1: I was scared of him and he used to flog me,
Speaker 1: and this was my way to fight back. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the judge and jury bought that story, and the boy walked,
Speaker 1: but his mother, Heather, did not walk because Heather had
Speaker 1: premeditated the death, and she had obtained the sedative and
Speaker 1: she had administered it to her husband, and so that
Speaker 1: element of premeditation counted against her, and so it was
Speaker 1: murder fair and square, and she was convicted of same.
Speaker 1: And because of the extenuating circumstances, I think she only
Speaker 1: served about nine and a half years in total. Unlike
Speaker 1: Lorrain Moss, she served about half the sentence that Lorrain
Speaker 1: Moss did. And when she got out of jail, Heather
Speaker 1: Oslin was welcomed by a group of supporters, mostly women,
Speaker 1: who clapped and cheered when she walked out of the
Speaker 1: gates of the women's prison at Tarangawer, the one near Malden.
Speaker 1: And finally, we're going to talk about not so much
Speaker 1: a black widow as a sort of a piebald widow
Speaker 1: or a gray widow, and that is Diane Griffy. Now,
Speaker 1: Diane Griffy is the widow of Michael Griffy, and Michael
Speaker 1: Griffy was regarded in the media as a millionaire building contractor,
Speaker 1: and Michael had left Diane and their four children, and
Speaker 1: I think he'd taken up with another woman, and he
Speaker 1: lived with the other woman down at San Remo on
Speaker 1: Phillip Island, and Diane and her four kids, who were
Speaker 1: teenagers up to young adults, lived at the family property
Speaker 1: at Packenham, pretty big house on a bit of land,
Speaker 1: I think. And it comes about that Michael Griffy's body
Speaker 1: turns up in the garage of the family house, the
Speaker 1: house that he's left a couple of years earlier, and
Speaker 1: the body is wrapped and sort of hidden away, trapped
Speaker 1: in a bed sheet and a tar poland very neat
Speaker 1: and tidy. And Diane Griffy, his ex wife, reports it
Speaker 1: to police that she's just found this body of her
Speaker 1: ex husband in the garage at the house and she
Speaker 1: thinks that it must be a robbery gone wrong, that
Speaker 1: he's surprised somebody who's attacked him, who's killed him by
Speaker 1: hitting him with something, and then wrap him up and
Speaker 1: left the body there, which struck the police as highly unlikely.
Speaker 1: That can be a bit skeptical detectives, and they thought
Speaker 1: that it didn't look like a hit done by a professional,
Speaker 1: not a paid killing. They didn't think it looked like
Speaker 1: a robbery gone wrong. They thought it looked like a
Speaker 1: classic domestic murder done by someone very close to home,
Speaker 1: because the method and be the fact that the body
Speaker 1: was so carefully wrapped up, and all the rest of it.
Speaker 1: There's elements of that that go to the psychology of
Speaker 1: the domestic or family murder. And that is what they believed.
Speaker 1: And so they charged Diane Griffy with killing her husband
Speaker 1: or the murder of her husband, and they were proceeding
Speaker 1: to put together what I would have thought was a
Speaker 1: pretty strong circumstantial case. You can be convicted on a
Speaker 1: circumstantial case. And some of the elements.
Speaker 2: That the police looked at were that.
Speaker 1: Diane Griffy had mentioned to someone I think she used
Speaker 1: to play the pokies, and she'd mentioned to someone she
Speaker 1: knew that maybe that she was short of money, but
Speaker 1: that her husband, her ex husband, was worth more dead
Speaker 1: than alive because he had an insurance policy on his
Speaker 1: life life policy of one point five to four million,
Speaker 1: quite a bit of money, and mentioning that probably didn't
Speaker 1: help her cause when it was brought up later, But
Speaker 1: what did help her cause, just as the police of
Speaker 1: putting the final touches to a heavily circumstantial case, now
Speaker 1: about motive and opportunity and all.
Speaker 2: That good stuff.
Speaker 1: What derailed it was that their youngest daughter, who was
Speaker 1: a teenager at the time, she put a hand up
Speaker 1: and said, oh, I'd done it.
Speaker 2: I killed that.
Speaker 1: I hit him with a big stick or whatever, or
Speaker 1: a wood splitter or an axle hammer or whatever. I
Speaker 1: think it might have been a wood splitter, and.
Speaker 2: I killed him.
Speaker 1: And the police weren't convinced by this. They thought that
Speaker 1: she was a bit light on for details, and that
Speaker 1: she wasn't overly sincere, and they thought that perhaps the
Speaker 1: daughter was just being a bit of a hero and
Speaker 1: trying to save mum. But they realized the police and
Speaker 1: the prosecutors realized that the confession so called of that
Speaker 1: young woman she was I think sixteen or thereabouts, would
Speaker 1: be enough to muddy the water and would be enough
Speaker 1: for a skilled defense counsel to use to raise enough
Speaker 1: doubt with a jury. And so the case against dying
Speaker 1: Griffy was discontinued and she walked. So there you go.
Speaker 1: So today's episode, he's been about three black widows and
Speaker 1: one who narrowly escaped that label. I don't know if
Speaker 1: Dyane Griffy follows the races. She might be more of
Speaker 1: a poky sort of girl, but if she did follow
Speaker 1: the gallopers, I hope she had no Oman bet On
Speaker 1: serious suspect. Thanks for listening. Off and Crimes is a
Speaker 1: Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go
Speaker 1: to Heroldsun dot com dot au forward slash andrew rule
Speaker 1: one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold
Speaker 1: at news dot com dot au. That is all one
Speaker 1: word news podcasts sold And if you want further information
Speaker 1: about this episode, links are in the description