them … their dress, their facial expressions … their personal interactions. And I could now see an uncanny resemblance between Rhys’ daughter – the woman who sat in front of me – and her grandmother, Edith McLeod.
Rhys’ daughter has continued to be part of the story, sharing her insights at various points in the journey. Most importantly, she gave me an entrée into Norma’s family, providing the contact details of a number of relatives I would later meet.
Someone once wrote that the only line of approach to a mystery was through “an intensive examination of the antecedents, background, temperament and development of those concerned in it”. The stories and pictures provided by members of Norma’s extended family would help me develop a fuller picture of her life and death. This would flesh out the little that I’d already learnt and lead me to new pathways of investigation.
The blurred image of Norma and the circumstances surrounding her tragic death were slowly coming into focus. Finally, Norma was becoming flesh and blood.
But before we look into what the family tales told me, I want to take us back to the case itself.
I’d already found the inquest files. I later discovered that the Victorian Public Records Office also housed police correspondence and reports in their enormous archives. Would Norma’s case be among them? And if so, what would they reveal?
Norma, taken around mid-1920s
Chapter Three
A tragic accident?
When I started looking through the Public Records Office database, I discovered there were 44 archived boxes of police correspondence for 1929 alone. My heart sank a little at the thought of possibly rummaging through 43 boxes before I got to what I was looking for. Even worse, what if I looked through them all and found nothing.
Oh well, it had to be done.
Days of trawling through mountains of ageing paper followed. My hands were dry from handling the dusty paper and my interest started to fade. Did the police files on Norma’s case really exist? Was I just wasting my time? Maybe, but I couldn’t stop … I kept thinking, just one more box and then I’d stop. One more box … and then … one more … THE box.
It was July 2015, just a few days before I’d found out about Norma having a living niece (and before I had an inkling that my life was about to change so catastrophically). I’d been through about a dozen boxes and there, in the middle of my last box for the day, was a thick bundle curiously tied up with pink string. It was the only case file tied up like this and it screamed at me like some kind of Alice in Wonderland label: ‘Read me’. I edged it out from the middle of the box carefully. When I saw ‘Norma McLeod’ on the front page of the package, the temptation to shout ‘Eureka’ almost overcame me. But standing in the quiet reading room, I had to contain myself.
Untying a knot apparently untouched for almost 90 years sounds like a simple gesture, but I’ve got a wild imagination and it led me to an image of big burly detective fumbling with fat fingers to tie the dainty pink string. In reality, it was probably an archivist, but that wasn’t going to stop me having my ‘moment’. As I released the string, once again that heady smell of old paper filled my nostrils carried by the dust that flew from the file. I was quite ready to, literally, get my hands dirty.
The bundle contained the official police reports, witness statements, outlines of proposed questions (presumably developed for the inquest), and a pile of letters sent from members of the public (some anonymously), offering numerous theories about Norma’s death. This would all help me trace the development of police theories and gain an insight into the public curiosity that surrounded the case.
There were no police photos in the file, which was disappointing. A picture is, after all, ‘worth a thousand words.’ I knew photos had been taken at the scene of Norma’s death; there was a list of the images that had originally been filed. That list tormented me with the thought of lost opportunities. It made no sense to me that almost every envelope from the letters sent to the police had been kept, but not the photos - probably standard procedure when archiving police correspondence, but incredibly frustrating for me. Anyway, I put aside this temporary grievance and focused on what I had found.
I had my hands on the police reports and thirty letters or notes from the public delivered to the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) between 10 September and 29 October 1929. Some of these would ultimately prove so pivotal to the case. In fact the very reason I’d been so desperate to find the police file in the first place was to find one letter in particular – a letter that I’d read about over and over again in the newspaper articles. That letter was written anonymously and signed “Asmodeus”. But we’ll get to that …
Throughout history, it’s been common for the police to receive letters from the public responding to prominent cases. The Jack the Ripper murders and, more recently, the killing of JonBenet Ramsey (which I’ll touch on later) are two prime examples. Some come from helpful citizens concerned about public safety, others come from those with their own, sometimes twisted, agenda.
Now I had access to the files, I could begin untangling the theories developed by the police and the public about Norma’s death. We’ll get to the crux of the case soon, but first we need to look at the initial theories and why they were dismissed. What follows is an outline of the first theory – accidental death.
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While apparently no one at Norma’s bedside on that Monday afternoon actually discussed what had caused Norma’s loss of consciousness, the initial ‘unspoken’ impression, according to Norma’s father, Major Norman McLeod, was that she’d had some sort of accident.
What was immediately visible when Norma was examined on her bed was a black eye, but no apparent cuts to the skin or external bleeding.
So when the tragedy was first reported to police headquarters by Dr Thwaites, it was thought that Norma had probably fainted while in the bathroom. Had Norma struck her head on the bath or on an old-fashioned marble-topped table that was in the bathroom? This was certainly the opinion offered to the press by Norma’s brother, Rhys, with one journalist reporting: “he personally held the theory that his sister had fallen when about to have a bath, and had struck her head”.
The Herald reported that a stranger, who had given his name and address to Major McLeod, had suggested that injury might have been caused by “a bedroom window suddenly descending on Miss McLeod’s head”. Who that stranger was, we’ll never know, but it seems like an odd thing to suggest – certainly not the first thing that would come to my mind - and the idea was soon dismissed. The McLeods’ neighbour Miss Gwilliam, the nurse who’d come to help Edith McLeod, stated that the windows were closed at the bottom and the sash cords intact, so that “neither of the windows could have moved without independent agency”.
The accident theory was initially accepted by both the press and the public, some not letting it go easily, even when challenged by the evidence (which we’ll get to). Maybe the ‘alternative’ was too horrible to contemplate, especially in such an affluent suburb and, more alarmingly for the McLeods’ neighbours, within the family home. You only have to think about all the publicity today about a recent rise in home invasions to know how unpalatable that idea is.
Out of the thirty letters sent to police, thirteen included some kind of accidental death theory.
