Speaker 1: Buried underneath this modern court case, in our own time,
Speaker 1: in our own year of twenty twenty six, is a
Speaker 1: story of human frailty and passion and heartbreak and crimes
Speaker 1: of the heart. One of the things I've worked out
Speaker 1: over years of looking at criminal stuff is that people
Speaker 1: tend to do similar things. Killers nearly always dump or
Speaker 1: buried bodies in an area they know, an area they've
Speaker 1: been to before. I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes.
Speaker 1: Today we've got something a little bit different, and this
Speaker 1: is what I've called a crime of the heart. Because
Speaker 1: not all crimes are about bullets and blood poison or
Speaker 1: any of that sort of stuff. There are other sort
Speaker 1: of crime, and these are where acts of carelessness and
Speaker 1: cruelty and passion have lasting effects that can hang over
Speaker 1: families for generations until the day when the past reaches out.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're talking about today. This is the
Speaker 1: strange case of an old block called George Thomas Watson,
Speaker 1: who might never have known the true story of his
Speaker 1: birth because he grew up in Melbourne with the lie
Speaker 1: that his mother had woven around his entire life. George
Speaker 1: died back in early twenty and eleven eighty one years old.
Speaker 1: He was an old, childless bachelor with no close relatives
Speaker 1: at all. He had no first cousins, and he had
Speaker 1: no uncles and aunts, and his dear old mother, the
Speaker 1: one who's at the heart of this story, had died
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty five at a very great age,
Speaker 1: and like some people, George had not got around to
Speaker 1: making a will. Now, this wouldn't have matted much if
Speaker 1: he'd had nothing much to leave, and it wouldn't have
Speaker 1: mattered much if George's family affairs had been fairly conventional.
Speaker 1: But there were two differences. One is George did have
Speaker 1: something to leave. George had been studious and clever enough
Speaker 1: to become an engineer. He actually owned the big, double
Speaker 1: story Victorian house that he lived in in Prince's Park
Speaker 1: otherwise known as North Carlton or Carlton North, and he
Speaker 1: had substantial assets as well. He had assets apart from
Speaker 1: the house, and I'm not sure if it was shares
Speaker 1: and money in the bank and other properties or what,
Speaker 1: but he had quite a bit. And he'd put that
Speaker 1: together either from his own efforts entirely, which is possible,
Speaker 1: or possibly maybe because he'd had a silent benefactor a
Speaker 1: lifetime ago. Maybe he got a little leg up when
Speaker 1: he was young. We'll never really know that for sure.
Speaker 1: Probably doesn't matter, but it's intriguing now. George Watson's estate
Speaker 1: was estimated when he died in twenty eleven at two
Speaker 1: point three million. That's in twenty and eleven dollars, which
Speaker 1: are worth a lot less now when it comes to
Speaker 1: real estate. But when his house at twenty Arnold Street
Speaker 1: sold late that year, it sold for far more than
Speaker 1: its estimated value. I think they estimated the value at
Speaker 1: one point three million, and they got one point five
Speaker 1: to five or something like that, So his estate was
Speaker 1: actually more by the end of that year, was more
Speaker 1: than the estimation. So I'm saying that it was probably
Speaker 1: even in the year he died, worth more like two
Speaker 1: and a half or more, two and a half million
Speaker 1: or more. Now, this two and a half million, let's say,
Speaker 1: was held in trust by the state trustees, which is
Speaker 1: not unusual. When people die intestate, the state trustees look
Speaker 1: after the estate, pending distribution of that estate to the
Speaker 1: legitimate heirs, and normally that can be slow, but it
Speaker 1: follows a process and it all happens. Now it's routine
Speaker 1: when someone dies intestate, that is, without making a will,
Speaker 1: that the state trustees, in their wisdom, search for next
Speaker 1: of kin to identify who should inherit. Now, this can
Speaker 1: be slow, and it can be costly for the estate,
Speaker 1: which of course bears all the costs. They just take
Speaker 1: it off the top. But it should be reasonably fair,
Speaker 1: or at least be equally unfair to everyone. Fairly fair,
Speaker 1: the state trustees, i understand, use their own in house
Speaker 1: genealogy people to check out who's related to whom. Now,
Speaker 1: if you die without leaving a will, then it's up
Speaker 1: for grabs who's related to you, So they look through
Speaker 1: your birth certificate. Then they established backwards, just like all genealogists,
Speaker 1: who mom and dad were, who your grandparents were, who
Speaker 1: your siblings are, and all that stuff. But it's all
Speaker 1: got to be documented legally and properly. And it turns
Speaker 1: out with George Watson that they hit a bit of
Speaker 1: a glitch. They worked out that the person named as
Speaker 1: his mother on his birth certificate that she wasn't any
Speaker 1: Watson has claimed she was in fact Annie McPherson. And
Speaker 1: they worked out that the man named as his father
Speaker 1: on the birth certificate same name, George Watson, same name
Speaker 1: as as the dead guy, that he hadn't actually existed,
Speaker 1: at least not in the way that he was portrayed
Speaker 1: in these certificates, the certificates claimed. If you work back
Speaker 1: from the certificates, it was claimed that a young Australian nurse,
Speaker 1: claiming she was Scottish born and claiming her name was
Speaker 1: Annie Clark, had at some point traveled to Scotland, in
Speaker 1: this case allegedly home to Scotland, and there had married
Speaker 1: an Australian, a West Australian man called George Watson, in
Speaker 1: the city or town city of Dundee in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 1: Now that is what was on the paperwork, but it
Speaker 1: didn't take the genealogist many weeks or months to work
Speaker 1: out that this was bogus, a that there was no
Speaker 1: any Clark who became Annie Watson, that in fact it
Speaker 1: was this unmarried woman called Annie McPherson, and she hadn't
Speaker 1: been born in Scotland at all, She had been born
Speaker 1: in Victoria, and b she had not married anyone in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six, let alone a West Australian chef called
Speaker 1: George Watson. He didn't exist and the marriage didn't exist. Now,
Speaker 1: this would a bit of a spanner in the works,
Speaker 1: to put it bluntly, because they had a dead guy
Speaker 1: within a state, but they couldn't really work out who
Speaker 1: his real father was. Now common sense would seem to
Speaker 1: suggest that in a case like this, that is so
Speaker 1: long ago. This is now eighty years back. In fact,
Speaker 1: speaking today in twenty twenty six, the events we're discussing
Speaker 1: go back one hundred years really, But even back in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven this was old stuff. It was two generations old.
Speaker 1: No one involved would still be alive now. In a
Speaker 1: case like this, I am told on pretty good authority
Speaker 1: by an expert in the field, the state trustees can
Speaker 1: elect to use a legal device which has it as
Speaker 1: a name, and it's well known in probate law. This
Speaker 1: device allows them to make a ruling that the estate
Speaker 1: should be divided up among the legitimate is that present
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. However, that is not
Speaker 1: what happened here. I am told that what happened here
Speaker 1: was that the state trustees officials at the State Trustees
Speaker 1: Office decided in their wisdom to not do that, and
Speaker 1: they instead adopted an extremely conservative approach some would say
Speaker 1: an extremely pro government approach by placing the entire estate
Speaker 1: of two and a half million dollars plus in the
Speaker 1: state government coffers in treasury or state revenue or whatever
Speaker 1: it's called. Now, you know, that's not unusual. That does
Speaker 1: happen with money, and it's sitting there, and when a
Speaker 1: legitimate person turns up, they will get their money eventually. However,
Speaker 1: in this case this has turned into a Charles Dickens scenario,
Speaker 1: like Jarndyce versus Charndace, where fourteen years later the legitimate
Speaker 1: heirs of poor old George Watson, the bachelor who died
Speaker 1: without a will, have not been able to get any
Speaker 1: of the money. Now there are ten of these people.
Speaker 1: They're all quite old. They are, in fact the descendants
Speaker 1: of Ani McPherson's first cousins. These ones Ani McPherson, who's
Speaker 1: the mother of the dead man, had first cousins, and
Speaker 1: it is those cousins' descendants, those cousins' grandchildren, I think,
Speaker 1: who are now quite elderly people who lining up to
Speaker 1: share the estate, and so they should. Now there are
Speaker 1: ten of them, but I think there was eleven, but
Speaker 1: one died so already while this is dragging on for
Speaker 1: the last fourteen years. One of these people, one of
Speaker 1: the McPherson's in fact, has died. Leading the ten plaintiffs
Speaker 1: in this case is a respected former Victorian magistrate called
Speaker 1: Ian Christopher Elger, and he was a magistrate for several years,
Speaker 1: well known around the traps. Mister Elger and two of
Speaker 1: his siblings and seven others just last week launched Supreme
Speaker 1: Court action to try to get their share of their
Speaker 1: relatives money of George Watson's money. This will be interesting
Speaker 1: to see what happens, and it will be interesting because
Speaker 1: it's a case where the government has held the money
Speaker 1: for fourteen years. It's a case where the money has
Speaker 1: grown notionally at least from the original amount of say
Speaker 1: two and a half million to probably a million dollars
Speaker 1: more than that. If you think of compound interest over
Speaker 1: fourteen years, even at low interest rates like you know,
Speaker 1: three and a half four percent, it does grow appreciably.
Speaker 1: And also those people will have the opportunity to demand
Speaker 1: or sue for compensation. They have not only missed out
Speaker 1: on the interest that they could have earned, they've missed
Speaker 1: out on opportunity. They have not been able to use
Speaker 1: that money to invest in other ways, and they could
Speaker 1: legitimately claim, and I suspect they will that. You know,
Speaker 1: if they'd got the two and a half million back
Speaker 1: in the day fourteen years ago, they could have done
Speaker 1: quite a lot with it. And it might be that
Speaker 1: this squabble, this legal squabble, is ultimately about more like
Speaker 1: four or five million than about two and a half
Speaker 1: and that makes it quite interesting. But buried underneath this
Speaker 1: modern court case, in our own time, in our own
Speaker 1: year of twenty twenty six, is a story of human
Speaker 1: frailty and passion and heartbreak and as I said, crimes
Speaker 1: of the heart that dates back a century to the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. And that is the story of George Watson's mother,
Speaker 1: the woman whose real name was Annie McPherson, the woman
Speaker 1: who was actually born in Victoria in eighteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: who grew up in I think the inner northern suburbs
Speaker 1: of Melbourne, and she became a nurse. So she was hardworking,
Speaker 1: respectable person. In those days, young ladies as they were called,
Speaker 1: would tend to go towards nursing or teaching as a
Speaker 1: profession because so many other things were not open to them. Now,
Speaker 1: in those days, of course, a lot of women got
Speaker 1: married quite young. They would get married in their early twenties,
Speaker 1: and in those days, unlike now, women in their mid
Speaker 1: to late thirties were regarded and often called old maids
Speaker 1: or spinsters. These are the strange, old cruel words that
Speaker 1: we used about people not that many decades ago. And
Speaker 1: there is no doubt looking back and interpreting Annie McPherson's life,
Speaker 1: that in her thirties as a nurse working in hospitals,
Speaker 1: that she for whatever reason, hadn't met anybody and married them.
Speaker 1: And it is clear, because she did have a child,
Speaker 1: that she did meet someone with whom she had a
Speaker 1: passionate affair, and she got pregnant in late nineteen twenty nine.
Speaker 1: So what we've got here is the world's going to
Speaker 1: hell in a handbasket. Wall Street has collapsed in October
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty nine. People are being laid off in
Speaker 1: factories all over the world, including in Melbourne. Big bank loans,
Speaker 1: international loans have been called in and suspended. Things are
Speaker 1: very tough, and in that period just before the Christmas
Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty nine, this nurse Annie McPherson, I think
Speaker 1: by then back in Melbourne having worked in Bendigo and
Speaker 1: possibly Ballarat. I think she's back in Melbourne by then
Speaker 1: she falls pregnant. Now we don't know who the father was. This,
Speaker 1: of course, is the glitch or the obstacle that has
Speaker 1: prevented her illegitimate son's estate being divided among her distant relatives,
Speaker 1: because no one knows who daddy was. Now, if you
Speaker 1: were a novelist or a screenwriter, you'd dream up some
Speaker 1: scenario and you would say, let's get the DNA onto it,
Speaker 1: and you'd be able to sort of crack the case.
Speaker 1: Possibly in the real world it's not that easy. But
Speaker 1: if you were a screenwriter or a novelist, let's look
Speaker 1: at the facts here, that few sketchy facts we can
Speaker 1: line up. Who would a nurse be likely to have
Speaker 1: an affair with in the late nineteen twenties, Well, I'm
Speaker 1: saying a doctor. Who would a nurse be unable to
Speaker 1: marry if she became pregnant as many people used to
Speaker 1: they get pregnant and then get married in those days,
Speaker 1: lots of them. Well that would be because the father
Speaker 1: of her unborn child would be already married. That would
Speaker 1: be a big problem, a massive problem, a massive social problem,
Speaker 1: because not only would she be sort of ruined and
Speaker 1: lose a job and lose her reputation, etc. Etc. But
Speaker 1: the married father of the child would also in a
Speaker 1: respectable profession like medicine or the law, would also have
Speaker 1: those sort of problems. They probably would lose their livelihood
Speaker 1: and would end up in a VD clinic on the
Speaker 1: other side of the country doing something much less profitable
Speaker 1: and much less pleasant. And if you were pursuing this theory,
Speaker 1: you would say, Okay, a doctor that she worked with
Speaker 1: or she met through medical work in working in hospitals,
Speaker 1: let's say at Bendigo, where she did work in the twenties.
Speaker 1: Now there's another clue to this. Annie McPherson called her
Speaker 1: child George Thomas Watson. Watson is the name Watson is
Speaker 1: the name that she allocated to this non existent father
Speaker 1: or husband, the one she said she married in Scotland.
Speaker 1: She said that she or someone very like her married
Speaker 1: George Watson, forty two year old chef from Western Australia.
Speaker 1: She was very keen on this name Watson. Third thing,
Speaker 1: she said she'd gone back at Scotland, place she'd never been,
Speaker 1: that she'd gone back there and married in the city
Speaker 1: of Dundee in nineteen twenty six. That gives you a
Speaker 1: third triangulation. A man called Watson, probably a doctor or
Speaker 1: possibly a doctor, and he's Scottish and he has a
Speaker 1: connection with the Dundee district. Okay, let's look at the
Speaker 1: possible people who could fit this profile. A quick look
Speaker 1: at the government gazettes of the late twenties suggests that
Speaker 1: there were four doctor Watson's registered to practice in Victoria
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen twenties, at around the time that
Speaker 1: nurse McPherson became pregnant. And there's this one, and there's
Speaker 1: that one. But there's only four of them. And one
Speaker 1: of those court would catch a novelist's eye or a
Speaker 1: screenwriter's eye, because that one a recently eminent person. He's
Speaker 1: a tuberculosis expert, and he'd come to Australia from overseas,
Speaker 1: so he came with some sort of reputation. This man
Speaker 1: was called doctor Henry Watson. He was Scottish, tick Scottish.
Speaker 1: Not only is Scottish, he was educated initially at the
Speaker 1: University of Aberdeen in eastern Scotland. Aberdeen is a city
Speaker 1: rather close in social and commercial ties to the smaller
Speaker 1: city of Dundee. In fact, Dundee and Aberdeen are very
Speaker 1: much linked in economically and socially because of the building
Speaker 1: of a railroad between the two back in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and the building of the rather famous tay Bridge
Speaker 1: tay Tay Bridge, which meant that people in both cities
Speaker 1: could travel up and down on the train, and that
Speaker 1: people from Dundee would go to Aberdeen to university, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. A close link, and there's every
Speaker 1: chance that a young doctor who studied at the University
Speaker 1: of Aberdeen in fact may well have come from Dundee
Speaker 1: or from any of the districts between Dundee and Aberdeen,
Speaker 1: because otherwise, why if he came from somewhere else, why
Speaker 1: would he not go to Glasgow or to Edinburgh. It
Speaker 1: makes sense that if you're from Dundee, you would go
Speaker 1: to Aberdeen. And doctor Henry Watson was from Aberdeen. He's
Speaker 1: quite a big shot. He'd made his name during World
Speaker 1: War One as a tuberculosis expert and he came to
Speaker 1: Australia and he married I think in the very early twenties.
Speaker 1: He married a widow an Australian widow called Marjorie Bush.
Speaker 1: And Marjorie Bush had two sons who were, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of semi grown. They were young adults, and I
Speaker 1: don't think either of them made old bones. I think
Speaker 1: one Patrick died at the age of twenty five and
Speaker 1: the other one lived longer but didn't grow old. I
Speaker 1: don't think this would suggest that doctor Henry Watson, who
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen eighty, so he gets to Australia
Speaker 1: when he's about forty in about nineteen twenty, that he's
Speaker 1: married a woman of at least his own age. He's
Speaker 1: married a woman of early middle age who already has
Speaker 1: two semi adult sons. It turns out that Dr Morgan
Speaker 1: and his widow wife, the widow he married, did have
Speaker 1: a daughter in the early nineteen twenties, so they did
Speaker 1: have a child between them. They then at some point
Speaker 1: worked in the region of Bendigo. There is a reference
Speaker 1: to Dr Morgan living at or practicing at the town
Speaker 1: of Talbot. Now Talbot is one of the old Gold
Speaker 1: Territories gold areas, and it's sort of between Bendigo and Ballarat.
Speaker 1: Very loosely speaking, that's out near Maryborough, but it's in
Speaker 1: that region, so a doctor from there could easily have
Speaker 1: used Bendigo or Ballarat hospitals for more serious cases. He
Speaker 1: would probably travel to those to see certain patients and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth, and there he would naturally
Speaker 1: meet nurses who are on duty. Now we know that
Speaker 1: our nurse Annie McPherson was a nurse at Bendigo, and
Speaker 1: it's conceivable she also nursed at Ballarat. That gives us
Speaker 1: a putative connection between these people. This is strictly a
Speaker 1: circumstantial thing, circumstantial case that is interesting for a writer
Speaker 1: creating a story. I doubt it would carry much weight
Speaker 1: in a legal sense because it is fairly flimsy. It
Speaker 1: is purely, purely circumstantial, and yet to me convincing. We
Speaker 1: have the name Watson, the name that nurse McPherson adopted
Speaker 1: for herself. Two years after her baby was born. She
Speaker 1: changed her name to Watson and used the name Watson
Speaker 1: for the rest of her life until she died at
Speaker 1: the age of ninety four back in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: If you go to her grave and see her headstone,
Speaker 1: it's got Annie Watson. Secondly, she claimed to have married
Speaker 1: a Manka Watson in Dundee. Why pick Dundee if she's
Speaker 1: making stuff up for a bogus birth certificate, why did
Speaker 1: she not say I met a man called Wilson from Wales,
Speaker 1: or I met a man called Kezale from Canada or whatever,
Speaker 1: or a man called Robertson from Rhodesia, But she didn't
Speaker 1: It was specifically a Scott called Watson from Dundee, the
Speaker 1: eastern part of Scotland. One of the things I've worked
Speaker 1: out over years of looking at criminal stuff is that
Speaker 1: people tend to do similar things. Killers nearly always and
Speaker 1: police rely on this. Killers nearly always dump or berry
Speaker 1: bodies in an area they know, an area they have
Speaker 1: been to before. They do not go to some totally
Speaker 1: unmapped part of the state where they'd never been and
Speaker 1: dump a body. They go somewhere they know, somewhere where
Speaker 1: they camped once, or they went fishing, or they were
Speaker 1: taken there as kids on skill camps or something. The
Speaker 1: homicide squad regard that as a total fact in doing investigations.
Speaker 1: Good tip if you're pulling a murder, take the body
Speaker 1: somewhere you've never been. It will help you in your defense.
Speaker 1: The second thing is that rational liars. We're not talking
Speaker 1: about lunatics here, who just rave on rational liars who
Speaker 1: want to be believed and who want their liars to
Speaker 1: stand up and to stand scrutiny. They don't make up
Speaker 1: complete fantasy. They just take the truth and twist it.
Speaker 1: They edit the truth. They start with the truth and
Speaker 1: just tweak it. And they say, yes, I was driving
Speaker 1: a blue Commodore with mom bombs on the aerial, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't on the Tuesday, I drove it on the Wednesday.
Speaker 1: So they tell the truth about the car, but they
Speaker 1: alter the day or whatever it might be, just fiddle
Speaker 1: with the truth. It's very hard for ordinary, rational, logical
Speaker 1: people to completely make up a completely fantastic, completely bogus scenario.
Speaker 1: We all of us, if we are sane and moderately sensible,
Speaker 1: we all rely on real things which we then tamper with.
Speaker 1: And in my view, Anny McPherson, when she was cooking
Speaker 1: up what was a lifelong lie, a lie that she
Speaker 1: wove around her newborn son, a lie that stayed with
Speaker 1: him for all of his eighty years, that she relied
Speaker 1: heavily on the truth, she just tampered with it. And
Speaker 1: if I were a novelist or a screenwriter, or perhaps
Speaker 1: an enterprising lawyer. I'd be looking at the possibility that
Speaker 1: a doctor Henry Watson might have had his wicked way
Speaker 1: with Nurse McPherson. With that scenario, which is completely circumstantial,
Speaker 1: has any basis in truth, It could never be proven
Speaker 1: except with some sort of complex DNA analysis, and I
Speaker 1: doubt very much if there's any DNA available to do it.
Speaker 1: So that is that Life and Crimes looks forward to
Speaker 1: the result of the Supreme Court action launched by the
Speaker 1: ten heirs of the estate of the late George Thomas Watson,
Speaker 1: who you'd have to say died a lucky old bastard.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald
Speaker 1: Sun production for true crime Australian. Our producer is Johnny
Speaker 1: bur For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun
Speaker 1: dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew rule one word.
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