Looking for Rose

21/07/2022

What is it about corridors that makes it so spooky? I always think of those Victorian novels where a daunting house-keeper in black dress shows an orphaned child to their room, in a new house. Here is the palace hotel in Kalgoorlie, a few weeks ago

17/06/2021

I’ve started transcribing the handwritten notes from Rose’s Supreme Court trial in April 1936.

At first I didn’t even try as the faded handwriting was almost illegible, but I’m finding it’s slowly becoming easier.

I transcribed a bit from Ray Healy, a Yalgoo local who worked at the shop were Rose bought weevil poison (arsenic) a few months before Hector died.

She also ordered a black mourning dress, three months before her husband died from arsenic poisoning. Said her aunt was sick. 😳

18/03/2021

Still here! Still looking! There’s been a few more people looking at the page and there’s not much to report. Anyone good at deciphering old world handwriting? I want to look at the transcript of the trial, and it’s illegible scrawl.

30/12/2020

Yalgoo railway station. Assuming where Hector would have set off for work, with a poison-packed lunch.

29/12/2020

"Frankie, just take the photo." This is about 20m away from the Main Street of Yalgoo, on the main drag. Out the back of the shire buildings. After staying at the very well equipped caravan park.

29/12/2020

Just picking up the threads of the Yalgoo story and wondering where to next. Life has got in the way and Yalgoo didn’t give any hard leads TBH. I’m going to share some photos while I work out what the next step is. Here's Paul and Frankie posing under duress.

29/12/2020

Here Frankie is, out the back of Yalgoo, on our trip in October. Check out the wildflowers. The town is very transient and we didn't get leads on Rose, but a better understanding of where all the dramas happened.

Some observations:

1. Yalgoo is SMALL. I still couldn't work out where Rose and Hec lived, though I suspect it was on, quite literally, the wrong side of the railway tracks. The centre of town has sort of migrated away from the railway, unsurprisingly.

2. There were a lot of hotels for a town that small. Men drank a lot.

3. Rose and Hector were blow-ins and would have been there only for a few years. My great-grandmother had four children, a drunken husband, was running a shop and still took Rose in just after her husband died, in a tiny house. This would have been a big ask.

02/10/2020

My great-grandmother Margaret Rodan said, on first seeing Mt Magnet, “my heart sank, and never rose again.”

100 years later, it’s easy to understand how a young woman, brought out from Ireland, just-married, would have been overwhelmed and despairing.

Her husband Michael was the licensee for the Commercial Hotel, a big place. She ran it. She had five children, and one baby died. Mick was charming and loved his children, but drank.

She begged him to sell the hotel and buy a newsagency in Geraldton.

Instead he got off the train in Yalgoo, and bought the run-down general store. Maggie didn’t talk to him for months. (Now, she’d probably leave him. Then, she had precisely zero options)

And that’s the shop where Rose bought the poison that killed Hector...

30/09/2020

This is where Rose (allegedly) bought the poison ☠️ killed Hector.

Yalgoo, now and then, was a transient place. Rose and Hec were blow-ins, and it’s as though they barely left a trace.

McDonnell isn’t a name that is up there with the shire presidents or road board chairmen, he was a ganger. Probably barely noticed by the families that ran the place.

The people that run the general store have never heard of the story, they’re originally from Chile.

There are plenty of signs of my ancestors though.

30/09/2020

Yalgoo. This tiny old courthouse is where the inquest was held. Tiny, and next to it is the old police station.

11/09/2020

A LEAD! AND EMAILS OF FRUSTRATION!

I’m revving up the hunt for Rose, as I’m heading to Yalgoo in a few weeks.

I’m trying to tee up people in town to speak to about the Black Widow and have rung the pub, the shire president’s wife (the very kind Cindy Payne), and a relative Roxanne Morrissey, a cousin who lived on a station in Yalgoo until relatively recently.

Everyone has been friendly, happy to chat, and I’ve really enjoyed piecing together the family tree. Major drawback - no one has heard of old mate Rose.

BUT.

I’m wondering if we might have better luck in Leeds, UK. Another researcher found a John McDonnell, who for various reasons, I suspected was related to Hector, the poisoned husband.

Sent a message in ancestry.com, and GOT THIS BACK... and a strange email with just one letter from a Lois McDonnell, who I’m presuming is related to John and perhaps pressed send too early?

Please John and Lois, check your emails and tell me more. I hope you’re both OK.

I also had a chat with possible descendent of one of Rose’s (many) other partners, which has given rise to another theory ... which I’ll talk more about later.

12/07/2020

Update: researchers have found the children died from diphtheria, a disease which is now both preventable and treatable. Robert and Clara went on to have at least two more children.

Not Rose 🌹 related, but intriguing and tragic. Flora, George and Hubert De Burgh were 3, 7 and 5, when they died on June 4, and June 7, 1865.

I noticed their grave in St Luke’s churchyard, Gingin.

Heading back from family holiday up north, so Rose hunting has paused, but we stopped in Gingin for a break.

I wonder what the tragic story was. They were “all the children” of Robert and Clara De Burgh.

I hope the parents managed to survive their terrible loss.

05/07/2020

Passing through Geraldton and thinking of Rose. After she was acquitted of murdering Hector McDonnell in April 1936, in Perth, she wasted no time finding love again.

In September, she married John Forrest Jeffery, at the registrar office in Geraldton. John came from a family of farmers in Yuna. Some of his descendents came forward after hearing the radio interview the other week, a bit surprised at hearing he had been tangled up with someone like Rose.

Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t take.

27/06/2020

Interesting week. I did an interview on local ABC in Geraldton, which rustled out a few leads.

There are also signs that Rose may have married AGAIN and popped up in Katanning.

Rose had a daughter by her first marriage, Thelma, who was born in South Australia in 1924.

Bizarrely, Rose seems to have lied and told a detective that her daughter was born out-of-wedlock. She wasn't. Thelma was born six month after her mother's wedding to Alfred Tuller. Rose, you're a strange old thing.

I'd love a look at the certificate, you need to pay to register with Geneology SA. I'm wondering if there are any other options?

24/06/2020

Here’s Rose and Mac in happier times. Maybe their wedding? A day at the races?

Hector McDonnell was born in Leeds, but was described by my grandmother as ‘dour Scot’. He and Rose were married at St Patrick’s church in Fremantle in 1932. She lists herself as a spinster (Reader, she wasn’t).

She had a daughter from a previous relationship, so Hec definitely knew she’d been married before. Less than four years after the marriage, he would be dead from arsenic poisoning.

23/06/2020

I’m hoping the notice the Can You Help? section in the West Australian will flush out all the older people not on social media, who will have heard of this story. I had to be persuaded to include my details so fingers crossed 🤞 re reponses.

22/06/2020

I'm looking for information about a woman called Rose Mary McDonnell. She was accused of murdering her husband in Yalgoo, a tiny town in the Mid West of WA, in 1936.

My connection to this story is she was accused of buying the arsenic that poisoned her husband, from my great-grandparents Margaret and Mick Rodan’s general store.

There was an inquest, and a murder charge, and various juicy revelations about her character. Rose had more than one husband, often at the same time. Some of those husbands also seem to have disappeared...

I suspect there are still plenty of other people in the Mid West who heard this story growing up, and I want to get these stories down... and find out what happened to Rose.

22/06/2020

22/06/2020