Martha Rendell was hanged at Fremantle Prison in October 1909, about three weeks after a jury in Perth found her guilty of the wilful murder of Arthur Morris, the teenage son of the man she lived with. The Crown's case was that she had killed him by applying spirits of salts, a household name for hydrochloric acid, to his throat while claiming to treat an illness. Police also held her responsible for the deaths of two of the boy's younger sisters, Annie and Olive, who had died earlier in the same household. Those two deaths were never charged. The children's father, Thomas Morris, was tried with her and acquitted.
The case was a public sensation in Perth. Crowds cheered the verdict, and the press treated her guilt as settled. She said she was innocent until her death. More than a century later the historian Anna Haebich, who studied the surviving records, described the case as one of gaps and silences, called the poisoning theory implausible, and placed the trial inside a moral panic about women, marriage and the care of children. The WA Police Historical Society, by contrast, still presents the case as the murder of all three children by Rendell. Rendell is remembered as the last woman hanged in Western Australia.
Rendell left no diaries or letters in her own hand, Haebich notes, and little of her life before Perth is recorded. Haebich, writing in the academic journal TEXT in 2015, described her as a tragic and quite ordinary woman from a working-class family in Adelaide, in South Australia. Seven of her thirteen brothers and sisters died before they reached the age of three, Haebich wrote, and Rendell suffered losses of her own.
In Adelaide she became involved with a married man, Thomas Nicholls Morris. Haebich wrote that Rendell left her own children and her partner to follow him to Perth, where she worked as a domestic servant while she waited for him to leave his wife. Traces Magazine, an Australian history magazine, described the Morris marriage as unhappy and quarrelsome and said the Morris family moved from Adelaide to Perth, with Rendell following them.
The break came, by Traces' account, after a violent quarrel in which Morris turned his wife out of the house. She left her five youngest children behind. Haebich gives the length of the wait as about ten years and says Morris finally set up house with Rendell and brought six of his children with him. The two accounts differ on the number.
Rendell lived with Morris and the children in East Perth as though she were his wife. The children were told to call her mother; Traces says Morris required this of them under threat of being beaten. Haebich notes that the claim to be Morris's wife and the children's mother, made while the two were not married, was later used against Rendell at her trial. The Conversation, in an essay by the author of the book Murdering Stepmothers, described her as a middle-aged, working-class woman who lived "in sin" with the children's father as his de facto wife, and said that she nursed the younger children through bouts of diphtheria and typhoid and through their final illnesses.
The family doctor, in Haebich's account, visited regularly during those illnesses. He praised Rendell's devotion and raised no suspicion at the time. The WA Police Historical Society says that several doctors treated the children and that only one of them doubted the cause of death.
Three of the Morris children died in that house over about 15 months. Traces Magazine names them as Annie, aged nine, Olive, aged five, and Arthur, aged 15, and says the deaths were put down at the time to diphtheria or to what it calls throat afflictions. Haebich also gives Arthur's age as fifteen. The children were buried in the ordinary way, and for some months nothing more happened. Haebich wrote that all three had been decently buried before anyone raised a suspicion.
Annie and Olive were young girls when they died. Arthur was a teenager. They belonged to a large family that had already been divided by their parents' separation. Their mother, who had left the household before Rendell moved in, was living elsewhere in Perth.
The deaths came to official notice in April 1909 through one of the surviving children, the dead children's brother. According to Traces Magazine, he developed a sore throat after drinking a cup of tea that month, became frightened and ran away. Neighbors noticed he was gone and asked where he was, and his father reported him missing.
The WA Police Historical Society says the boy was reported missing in early April 1909 and that neighbors were concerned. Detective Sergeant Harry Mann and Constable Lamond found him at his mother's home. There he told them that his stepmother had killed his brother and sisters and was trying to poison him, and that this was why he had run away.
Haebich puts the same moment differently. In her 2015 essay she wrote that the murder allegation was first made by an aggrieved stepson who had recently been reunited with his estranged mother, and that the police endorsed it. In The Conversation she went further and suggested that the whole murder theory may have been a story concocted by the dead children's aggrieved brother. That is her reading of the record; the police account and the jury accepted his allegation.
Mann and Lamond led the inquiry. The WA Police Historical Society says they were hampered by two things: the time that had passed since the deaths, and the uncertainty of the doctors about what the treatment the children had received would actually do. Against that, the police established that Rendell had bought large quantities of spirits of salts while the children were ill, and none after the last death.
On July 3, 1909, the bodies of the three children were exhumed. The police historical society says the post-mortem examinations showed signs of poisoning. Traces Magazine says the autopsy on Arthur found poison. Mann then asked the state Department of Health to carry out experiments, which the society says supported the poisoning finding.
A neighbor became an important witness. According to the WA Police Historical Society, she said she had seen Rendell, through a window, applying something to Arthur's throat.
The police found no clear motive. The society's account says the only explanation they could offer was Rendell's infatuation with Morris and her anger at the children's disobedience. Because the case was so unusual, the papers were later sent to the Criminal Investigation Department at New Scotland Yard in London.
A coroner's inquiry was held. Its records are among the very few official papers that survive; Haebich wrote that, of the official sources, only the records of the coronial inquiry and those of Rendell's last days in the condemned cell remain. Most of what is known about the trial therefore comes from Perth's newspapers.
Rendell wore a veil at the inquiry. The Perth paper Truth published a photograph of her veiled face with a witch-like face scratched onto it, and ran headlines that Haebich quoted, including "ASTOUNDING ALLEGATIONS OF DEVILISH DEEDS." The West Australian took a more sober line and printed near-verbatim reports of the proceedings. Haebich described the papers as competing with one another but united about Rendell's guilt.
A few small details from those reports took on great weight. Haebich and The Conversation both mention a small bottle with a squeaky cork, said to have held the acid, which the children had heard; in The Conversation's words, the bottle took on the proportions of a murder weapon. The newspapers also covered an auction held at the house where Rendell had lived.
Rendell and Thomas Morris were jointly charged with the wilful murder of Arthur Morris. Only his death went to trial. The trial was held in Perth in September 1909, before an all-male jury, in what The Conversation called a feverish atmosphere.
Rendell spoke very little. Haebich wrote that she "muttered only a few words in evidence." The Crown Prosecutor, in a phrase Haebich quoted, told the jury it was "idle to speculate about how the accused came to use the acid." Haebich read that remark as a sign that the prosecution leaned on stereotypes rather than proof, and The Conversation said there were no precedents for such a poisoning, no forensic or medical proof of acid poisoning, and no eyewitnesses. The police historical society's account of the neighbor's evidence is at odds with that last point.
The jury found Rendell guilty of the wilful murder of Arthur Morris. Traces Magazine notes that the verdict came even though no clear motive had been shown. Crowds cheered the verdict, Haebich wrote, and applauded the sentence of death. The Conversation compared the case with that of Louisa Collins, the last woman hanged in New South Wales; both women were said to be serial poisoners, both were found guilty by all-male juries, and the essay described both trials as technically flawed and prejudiced.
The jury acquitted Thomas Morris. According to the WA Police Historical Society and Traces Magazine, it was believed that he had not known what was happening until after the deaths. The society adds that he had lied to the police and to the coroner, and that the jury wished to find him guilty as an accessory after the fact, a verdict that was not open to it.
Rendell was sentenced to death. A spiritual adviser stayed with her until the end. The Conversation describes him as a sympathetic Reverend and her spiritual adviser to the end, and Haebich says the letters Rendell left were written for her by this adviser and proclaimed her innocence. She went on denying the killings.
She was hanged at Fremantle Prison at 8 a.m. The WA Police Historical Society and Traces Magazine date the execution October 6, 1909, and Traces says it fell on the first anniversary of Arthur's death. Haebich, in her 2015 essay, gives the date as October 9, 1909, and writes that the hanging came with "unseemly haste," twenty days after the verdict. The police historical society says she showed no remorse. Traces records her last words as "I will die brave."
Haebich calls her the third and last woman hanged in Western Australia. Traces Magazine describes her as the only woman hanged in the state.
Rendell was buried in Fremantle Cemetery, according to Traces Magazine and Haebich. For many years she was remembered in Perth as a cruel stepmother. Haebich first met the case in a museum display at Fremantle Prison, and her own experience as a stepmother led her to look into it.
That view has been challenged. The Conversation noted that she is now more often remembered as a woman wrongly accused and hanged. During the centenary of her execution in 2009, Haebich wrote, a vigil was held at her grave on the anniversary, and a lecture Haebich gave at Fremantle Prison had to be repeated because so many people wanted to attend.
Haebich's book Murdering Stepmothers: The Execution of Martha Rendell was published by UWA Publishing. The University of Western Australia described it in 2011 as a work of fiction based on the true events of the trial and execution, told through five characters, and announced that it had won the 2011 Margaret Medcalf Award, a prize of 1,000 dollars for work that makes substantial use of archival sources such as those held by the State Records Office. In her essay Haebich explained that the documents would be the scaffolding of the book and her imagination would drive the narrative. Its narrators include a photographer, a detective, a doctor and a Reverend who campaigns for a reprieve; Rendell herself is kept silent, because the sources do not let anyone speak for her with certainty.
Haebich set the case against the Perth of its time. After the gold rush of the 1890s, she wrote, settlers, Labor politicians, medical reformers and women's groups alike held up the chaste wife and devoted mother as the ideal, and anxiety about the care of children was high; she cited a 1907 children's law and the opening of Perth's first children's hospital in 1909. A woman living unmarried with another woman's children, and nursing them through fatal illnesses, stood against that ideal.
Rendell was convicted of one killing only, that of Arthur Morris. The deaths of Annie and Olive Morris were never tried. The WA Police Historical Society states that she killed all three children, and Haebich and The Conversation both record that it was widely believed she poisoned the two girls as well. Those two deaths are attributed to her, not proven against her in court.
Whether she killed Arthur is itself disputed. Haebich, the historian who has studied the case most closely, argues that the poisoning theory was implausible, that there was no supporting circumstantial or eyewitness evidence, and that the allegation may have begun with a resentful brother. The police account rests on the purchases of acid, the exhumations, the animal experiments and a neighbor's evidence. No court has re-examined the verdict.
The date of the execution is given as October 6, 1909, in the police and magazine accounts and as October 9, 1909, in Haebich's 2015 essay. The number of Morris children who moved into the house is given as five by Traces and six by Haebich.
Before 1907: Rendell, from a working-class Adelaide family, follows Thomas Morris to Perth and works as a domestic servant.
About 1907: Morris's wife leaves the household; Rendell sets up house with Morris and his younger children in East Perth.
About 1907 to 1908: Annie, Olive and Arthur Morris die over about 15 months; the deaths are put down to throat illness.
April 1909: a surviving brother runs away; police find him at his mother's home, and he accuses Rendell.
July 3, 1909: the three children are exhumed.
1909: coroner's inquiry; Rendell and Thomas Morris are jointly charged with the wilful murder of Arthur Morris.
September 1909: Rendell is found guilty and sentenced to death; Thomas Morris is acquitted.
October 6, 1909 (police and magazine accounts) or October 9, 1909 (Haebich): Rendell is hanged at Fremantle Prison at 8 a.m. and later buried in Fremantle Cemetery.
2009: centenary vigil at her grave and a lecture at Fremantle Prison.
2010 to 2011: Haebich's Murdering Stepmothers is published and wins the 2011 Margaret Medcalf Award.