On the evening of December 1, 1935, a man in Leongatha, in the Gippsland dairy country southeast of Melbourne, saw another man cycling past with a small girl perched on the front of his bicycle. He was ninety yards off and could not make out the rider. The girl was six-year-old June Rushmer, who had asked a man she knew from her father's work for a ride home from the park. Her body was found the next day less than two kilometers from her home, bound, gagged and strangled. The man she knew was Arnold Karl Sodeman, thirty-five, a laborer on a road repair crew, and a witness had seen him riding toward the reserve where she was found. When police took him in, he confessed not only to June but to three other girls, and the police of Victoria learned that for five years they had been arresting the wrong men.
The first was Mena Griffiths, twelve, taken from a playground in Melbourne on November 9, 1930 and strangled in an empty house. A man named McMahon was arrested for her murder and was still in custody when, on January 10, 1931, Hazel Wilson, sixteen, a girl with tuberculosis, was abducted and strangled at Ormond. Both girls were gagged with their own clothing and had their hands tied behind them. Then nothing for four years. On New Year's Day 1935 Ethel Belshaw, twelve, the youngest of four children of a Leongatha family, went to buy an ice cream in the seaside town of Inverloch and was found strangled and bound. Sodeman was her family's neighbor and had sometimes had tea with them. Police questioned him; he admitted he had spoken to her that day and said he had left her alive, and nobody pressed him. They charged a teenage boy who had given contradictory accounts of his movements instead, and the case against him collapsed within days. In each of the first three killings a different suspect was arrested, and one was convicted.
Sodeman was born on December 12, 1899 in Hawthorn, Melbourne, and had lived, by every outward account, an unremarkable life: married to Bernice Pope, one daughter, steady laboring work, a heavy drinker. His confession was consistent across all four: he had been drinking, an urge came over him that he could not explain, and he remembered little of what followed. His family history gave the defense something to build on; his father and his grandfather had both died insane. At his trial for June Rushmer's murder in February 1936, the defense argued episodic insanity brought on by alcohol and a childhood head injury, and the leading psychiatrist in the country gave evidence that he should be spared on that ground. The jury rejected it and convicted him. The appeals failed, and in April 1936 an English King's Counsel was engaged to put the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which refused to intervene.
He was hanged at Pentridge prison in Coburg on June 1, 1936, aged thirty-six, the second of the eleven people executed there after Melbourne Gaol closed. The autopsy found leptomeningitis, a chronic inflammation of the membranes around the brain which, the pathologists wrote, could cause severe congestion of the brain when aggravated by alcohol. It was the physical condition the defense had argued for and the jury had not believed, and it has been cited in Australian legal and medical writing ever since as the case of a man hanged whose insanity plea may well have been sound. It did not answer for Mena Griffiths, Hazel Wilson, Ethel Belshaw or June Rushmer, whose families had watched the police charge three other men first. Seventy-five years after Ethel Belshaw's death, Leongatha marked the anniversary; in 2024, when the town was in the news for another killing, the national press went back to Sodeman.