In April 1953 John Downey of Redfern, whose sight was failing from a poison nobody had yet named, watched the family's favorite visitor carry a cup of tea to his mother-in-law, Eveline Lundberg. Caroline Grills was sixty-three, short and cheerful behind thick dark-rimmed glasses, the relative who came with cakes and biscuits and always made the tea herself. Downey saw her slip a hand into her dress pocket and pass it over the cup as if dropping something in. He switched the cup, poured the tea into a bottle and gave it to the police. The analysts tested it on April 13. It held thallium, the heavy metal then sold over the counter across New South Wales as rat bait.
The symptoms had been running through the Lundberg household for months: hair coming out in handfuls, burning pain in the limbs, failing eyes. Mrs. Lundberg and her daughter Christine Downey fell ill when Grills visited and got better when she stayed away. By the time the tea reached the laboratory, Mrs. Lundberg was headed for blindness.
Grills was born Caroline Mickelson in Balmain, Sydney, sometime between 1888 and 1890, the daughter of George Mickelson, a laborer, and his wife Mary, born Preiers. On April 22, 1908, she married Richard William Grills. They had four sons, two of whom died young, one of typhoid caught while he was working as a lifesaver at Maroubra beach. The family moved through a string of rented houses in the city and around Randwick while Richard worked as a real estate agent, and after her father died in 1948 she inherited his house at Gladesville and moved into it.
Police traced the poisonings back to 1947. Her stepmother, Christina Mickelson, died that year at eighty-seven. Angelina Thomas, eighty-four, a family friend who left her holiday house in the Blue Mountains to the Grills couple, died too, and so did two in-laws, John Lundberg and Mary Anne Mickelson. Exhumation of two of the bodies found traces of thallium. Writers on the case have tied the stepmother's death to the Gladesville house and Mrs. Thomas's to the cottage she left behind, but the deaths of John Lundberg and Mary Anne Mickelson had no clear motive.
Grills was arrested on May 11, 1953, and charged with the attempted murder of Mrs. Lundberg and Christine Downey. She was later charged with the four murders as well, and with the attempted murder of John Downey. Sydney was already frightened of thallium. Between March 1952 and her arrest there had been forty-six reported thallium poisonings in the state and ten deaths, and more cases surfaced after she was in custody, among them the rugby league footballer Bobby Lulham. The police believed they had a circumstantial case on the murders, but the Crown went to trial on one count only, the attempted murder of Eveline Lundberg, the charge built on the cup of tea.
The trial opened in the Central Criminal Court in October 1953 before Mr. Justice Brereton, who let the prosecution put in evidence of the four deaths to show a pattern. Her counsel, P. Hidden, presented her as a kind woman caught in circumstantial evidence and turned on by her own relatives. Grills said the police had pressured her family into testifying and that she had "helped to live, not kill." She laughed aloud at points in the evidence. After seven days the jury retired on October 15 and came back in twelve minutes with a verdict of guilty of administering thallium to Eveline Lundberg with intent to murder her.
Brereton told her that "under the guise of friendship and loving kindness, but with apparent motiveless malignity," she had condemned her sister-in-law at least to blindness and possibly to death, and he directed that a sentence of death be recorded. As she was taken from the dock she turned to the police and asked, "Is that all?" Her appeal argued that the evidence of the other deaths should never have gone to the jury. The Court of Criminal Appeal, Chief Justice Street with Justices Owen and Herron, dismissed it unanimously on April 9, 1954, Street holding that no one could read the evidence without concluding that a poisoner had been at work inside a small family circle. The Executive Council commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in September 1954. The murder charges were not pursued, and no court ever ruled on any of the four deaths.
At Long Bay the other prisoners called her Aunt Thally, a pun on the fairground Aunt Sally. In October 1960 she was taken from the prison to Prince Henry Hospital at Randwick and died there. The Townsville Daily Bulletin of October 8, 1960, reported that she had died the day before, aged seventy, of pneumonia, and described her as a convicted murderer, which she was not. Later accounts give the date as October 6 and the cause as peritonitis from a ruptured gastric ulcer.