Les's Open Salon Blog

The weakest link is an unfit mother (Anne Robinson)

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 22:10:39 -0400

Anne Robinson was a reporter and television personality who was born on Merseyside in 1944. From 2000 she established a strong public profile on both sides of the Atlantic with the television quiz show The Weakest Link — much talked of in its day for the calculated insolence of its approach. Robinson was at that time a personable woman in her middle fifties; her function in the programme was to fascinate viewers with her rudeness towards contestants.

Robinson boarded at a southern Catholic private school till she was sixteen, leaving with four ‘O’ levels which included Cookery and Religious Instruction. She briefly attended a finishing school in Paris, and after a desultory year back on Merseyside had various small jobs in London television and journalism. She made the best use of her looks to win a position on the Daily Mail during 1967. (This by her own account, though the photographs show her to have been a rather dumpy 20-year-old; she has been one of those women who have grown more handsome in their forties: a fact which has its part in explaining the late peak in Robinson’s public career.)

In 2001 she published an autobiography called Memoirs of an Unfit Mother which is essentially an extended and not very coherent exercise in self-justification. The book has little worth as self-analysis, and was no doubt intended to cash in on Robindon’s TV fame while it lasted. It has value for the account it gives of certain professional circles in London during the last third of the twentieth century. Robinson uses it to develop her view of some of her family, to explain her career, and to try and provide a perspective on the alcoholism of her late twenties and thirties — which she tends to talk up as a force external to herself which explains her marital breakdown and the loss of her daughter’s custody to the husband she had married in 1968 (Charles Davies of the Daily Mail, who later became Murdoch’s editor at The Times).

Robinson misinforms as she sees fit; name-drops fearlessly; takes her opportunity to deliver various crushing retorts decades after the minor slights which prompted them; lavishes on herself many vague testimonials and some unearned qualifications. She freely launches attacks on those groups — teachers, lawyers, ‘the Establishment’, and men as a class — whom she blames for her numerous mistakes. Her account of an episode in which she masturbates a casual acquaintance is emblematic of the relationship she claims with the world: innocent on her part, exploitative on the part of the world. The reader will judge for himself the credibility of Robinson’s claim that she was just a passive naïf:

“I was still a Catholic Crosby girl at heart. And when one day I was put to the test, I treated the episode exactly as a nice Crosby girl could be relied on to do. I hardly knew Ned and couldn’t imagine how he had got my phone number. He was an American who had lived above a gang of us when we briefly shared the furnished flat in Queen’s Gate. … Ned was a voice coach on an American movie being made in Britain. In the call he fixed a date with me. I imagined we were going out to dinner and dressed accordingly. He sailed into my flat in Sloane Square and within seconds he had dropped his trousers and asked me to ‘pull him off’.

“I had no idea what was happening. I held on to his anatomy like I would an old piece of piping. He came, hauled up his trousers and announced he had another appointment. After he left I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t imagined it all.”

It’s a good tale anyway. She relates other parallel episodes, in which she confesses to taking this or that unhappy step not because she decided or wanted to, or got anything out of it, but because she was the innocent dupe of circumstance:

“It was in the autumn of 1969 [about twenty months after her wedding] that I fell into an affair. I say ‘fell into’ because typically I didn’t sit down and plan it. It was not calculated. He was a member of the Insight team. Tall and gregarious. If not a titled barrister he was built along the same lines. He was also married. It began with the odd lunch date. We somehow contrived to spend an evening together in Leicester. I prepared myself for the night to come by arriving at the hotel several drinks ahead. That way I wouldn’t have to think too long and hard about what I was getting into. I simply wanted someone to hold and cuddle me who wouldn’t the next morning be listing my shortcomings. Sex wasn’t the point, uncritical companionship was. I didn’t realise that my chosen companion was a man unhappy in his home life who took his pleasures as they became available.”

And so the lapse. The taking pleasures as they become available is always someone else’s fault. Robinson is ever willing to extend to herself a generosity of interpretation which she notably withholds from others.

The fact is that by her own report she goes through life exploiting people. Many of those around her try to communicate this truth about herself (a psychiatrist, her mother, her daughter, her second husband, her friend Jill Foot), but Robinson records their efforts while maintaining her determination not to hear. She spends much of her energy on frightening her more vulnerable acquaintance into silence. Despite many conventional claims to the contrary in the ‘self help’ style, Robinson’s capacity to learn from experience seems limited indeed. The point is attested in her book’s dedication, which is addressed in part to her mother: “who taught me that the biggest time saver is money. And if you rack up enough of it, you can spend the time saved shopping”. It is just this aggressive vacuity that causes so much unhappiness in her life, and in the lives that come into contact with hers. So brazen is her empty materialism, and her ignorance of herself, that the reader is left wondering whether she is conscious of how her book displays her: as self-centred, acquisitive, ruthless, vapid.

She married an unsuitable husband in part to secure her job at the Daily Mail, and the pair took a free honeymoon in Teneriffe on the understanding that they would silently repay the travel company with a laudatory article in their paper — an article which was never written. Robinson recounts that she was unfaithful at least twice during her short first marriage, procured one abortion and flirted with a second (lower-middle-class convent girl though she was). Both she and her husband hired private detectives to spy on each other during their run-up to divorce, and Robinson’s prospective second husband (another journalist, John Penrose) was provoked to testify against her during the custody case over her infant daughter. Either on the verge of marrying this selfsame John Penrose in 1980, or some time afterwards, Robinson consulted the loathed solicitor who had earlier represented her first husband, thinking to herself “who better to seek advice from about protecting my assets from the next husband?” She shared financial arrangements, including a bank account, with Penrose until her work became more lucrative than his, and then she insisted on separate finances — and at last separation altogether. Finding herself alone, however, she engineered his return after a couple of years. Another lawyer she employed had to threaten to possess her house before she paid his bill. All these facts she piles up against herself as though there were nothing in the least reprehensible about them. At numerous points, as with the lawyer just mentioned, she represented herself as sexually available to men, and then affected outrage when they took a nibble at her bait. She makes no bones about her view that men are fools to be bilked for all they are worth.

In all her treacherous behaviour Robinson never betrays any real moral sense. She assuages her guilt with a general and unconvincing mea culpa in retrospect. Her massive egoism apparently has its main source in nothing more mysterious than her own nature. Her stance has been — and it persisted at the time she was writing her book — that she deserves as of right an outsize share of all the good things that life has to offer. She imagines that any difficulties in life exist only for the perverse, specific purpose of limiting Anne Robinson’s material enjoyment. She spends her adulthood cramming desirable things down her neck, applying as a concomitant of this that Thatcherite revision of the New Testament teaching: “Do one to others before they do one to you.” She is an example of the hard-nosed tele-age celebrity who senses that in an epoch dominated by mass culture notoriety is no less profitable than distinction. She is all surface and little substance, short on finesse, on accuracy — on most of the higher virtues, which she would no doubt dismiss as pretension, or a racket.

It also happens that she lacks most of the writerly graces. Her tin ear for the language leads to her commonly mismatching idioms without any notion of her violence. She is heavily reliant on obvious effects, stereotype, cliché. She shows us that she was a brutal reporter but never a thoughtful journalist, and that she never came within rocket range of being a serious writer. None of this would be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that she cherishes a fantasy of herself as a writer — dreams of emulating Brendan Behan whom, like others she mentions, she gives no indication of having read. She seems to believe that she has some literary claim on our attention, and there is a drab little episode where she trails around Manchester after Norman Mailer trying to add him to her collection of celebrities — but the great man has little to say to her. It is symptomatic of her philistinism that a passage beginning with the following words should have survived into her book despite the services of a paid copy-editor and what Robinson calls the “immense professional wisdom” of her sisterly commissioning editor at Little, Brown & Co.: “There is a story of George Orwell journeying to the north-east to chronicle the effects of poverty and deprivation during the worst years of the Depression … “ (p. 11). There is indeed such a story; it is called The Road to Wigan Pier, Wigan being a wellknown town about forty miles from Robinson’s birthplace in the English Northwest. There is no sign anywhere that Robinson has any acquaintance with Wigan Pier or with any other book by ‘Orwell’ (though his name is dropped twice again, later on). In a somewhat similar way, she repeatedly and confusedly invokes feminism, to which she had no commitment during its crusading days and whose theory she obviously has little detailed knowledge of. She drags it in as a vague, irrefutable underpinning to her run-of-the-mill selfishness. There are constant rhetorical mentions of The Female Eunuch but there is nowhere any knowledgeable account of it.

It is not kind to cavil at the ignorant, but Robinson aggravates the reader a good deal. A different kind of sloppiness, hard to admire in a career journalist, is her writing at the end of the millennium that the casualties of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings numbered 17 dead and 120 injured (p. 150), when the casualty figures had long been established as 21 killed and 162 injured. A journalist of Robinson’s hide may easily dismiss the difference as pedantic. What are a few dozen people dead or mangled to someone who is concentrated on shopping, bedding the next useable man, fixed on building her career out of any materials that come to hand?

And amid all this we have to battle Robinson’s unattractive prose, and ever and anon her wobbly grammar. The grammar is mentionable in a writer who is not above sallying forth in the English way to rout her social inferiors (as she believes them to be) with a sneer at their solecisms. It would risk the reader’s patience to list here Robinson’s numerous slips. A couple of garbled sentences may stand as illustrating her limitations as grammarian and stylist:

“I didn’t appreciate that to have introduced your spouse (former gifted drunk) to your newspaper (your boys’ own club) and then watch as those boys chose to promote her out of all recognition was hard to swallow.”

“The unsatisfactory explanation is that clever, grown-up, quick-witted, decent people frequently make decisions that are as irresponsible as those made by half-educated youngsters that at least gives them an excuse not to know better.”

In the new and debased civilisation which Robinson and her media colleagues have helped gift to us — in which intellectual life is experienced mostly at the level of an Oprah ‘special’ or a gig with Michael Parkinson — grammar, like fact, has low priority. The main thing always is to be promoting yourself and your attitude. You are not going to succeed on the greasy pole anyway if you know so much that it inhibits your climbing.

Robinson’s sanitised résumé is presented to us as part of her publisher’s blurb: “She began her Fleet Street career at the Daily Mail in 1967, before moving to the Sunday Times, where she stayed for a decade. In 1979 she joined the Mirror, and was made assistant editor the following year, the only woman in Fleet Street in that position. Subsequently she became a star columnist. In 1993 she joined Today as a columnist, a position she would go on to hold at the Sun, the Daily Express and The Times.” It is hard to see the point of such nonsense when Robinson’s book undercuts it at such detailed length. It would not be gallant to set about determining how much of her résumé is strictly factual. Who wants to take a sledgehammer to such a fragile nut? We’re being taken for dopes, however, if we’re expected not to notice that the blurb blandly ignores the detail that we’re given as the meat of Robinson’s memoir. For example, the detail that she lost her Sunday Times job after being hauled off drunk by ambulance from one of the office lavatories; that she was eased out of the Mirror job simply by being dropped from the duty roster. Her book tells us that lying is the order of the day in Fleet Street, and there is nothing in her book to hint that she’s ever found it difficult to live in that ethos. She is proud of her feat in securing her job at the Sunday Times by claiming ‘A’ Levels she didn’t have — had not even thought of studying for. Later on, when she was working with the Liverpool Echo (a newspaper so provincial it’s not named in the blurb), she was too drunk to file her copy on a papal election and so it was written and filed by her husband. That’s an act of deception which in some fields of writing would be regarded as fraud and perhaps met with dismissal. In writing her column for the Daily Mirror she is not above conveying “The happy picture of a busy wife and mother struggling with the everyday ups and downs of normal life”. (‘Having it all’, ‘juggling the work-life balance’.) Even though she is in fact a recovering or not-recovering alcoholic whose only child lives in another country and sees her on access visits once a fortnight. Censoriousness is of course unattractive, but we are entitled to our dislike of Robinson’s cheerful greed, mendacity, egoism. We’re entitled to reflect that it’s parenting such as hers that has left us our present parlous civilisation. She betrays no inkling of any betrayal that may be involved in her falsifications to readers — of how her lying might influence the attitudes and lives of millions of readers.

It becomes obvious from Robinson’s own recital that she has made a practical success of her life through calculation, duplicity, determined social climbing, the judicious outlay of cash and sexual favours: all of which amount to what she would call ‘realism’. Despite her repining at the female lot, she made a career by pushing herself forward as “the unashamed crumpet”. Her conviction all men are rogues gives her the licence to behave in whatever way’s advantageous. She would like us to see her as Moll Flanders in retirement, as the madam with a heart of gold. She’d be wholly indifferent to our view of her as a dreary parasite. She has the money in the bank to prove she’s not as dreary as we are.

Robinson has represented in Britain the more repellent kind of American-style media performer: self-indulgent and self-promoting, obvious, shallow, unprincipled. At the same time she’s embodied the Thatcherite new Briton, hard and mean. She would protest that there is nothing wrong with any of these attributes — that they are normal constituents of life and biological assets. You’ll make your life much harder if you leave them out of your toolbox. She has made a career out of gratifying our lowest expectations, out of that low fascination which serves as the base of modern mass entertainment. A person behaving badly in public, triumphant and unabashed about abandoning every scruple, every hint of traditional manners — that’s the best we should look for.

Robinson’s egomania is absurd and wearing. It causes her (for instance) to draw close parallels between herself and Margaret Thatcher on the one hand, with Diana Spencer on the other. She learns from these successful women — and also from Robert Maxwell, the fraud and suicide with whom she’s had dealings. The lesson is that no fraud is so outrageous that it cannot be carried off. She almost gives the impression that modern British history has consisted largely of Anne Robinson’s biography, with a few elections and royal weddings tacked on at the margin. As we trudge through her chronicle, her permanent discontent — actuated by her native vanity, greed and unawareness — emerges as her chief characteristic.

Since one could easily conclude that Anne Robinson is mere performance, it is necessary to note that behind the patchwork tats of unscrupulous behaviour which she offers as her life, there hangs a more sombre and solid backdrop of unscrupulousness: the real person. This is the actuality which her nature will not acknowledge, to which indeed she appears to have no psychical access. Constantly reminding us of her supposed abilities — how she is a brilliant prospective journalist, the golden girl with the huge talent and a glittering future — she grows ever less believable. Not much of her alleged talent is manifest in her book. On a sober assessment she seems a near-empty vessel, maladroit in thought and language, out of touch with her own fundamental confusions. However, the fact that she seems not to notice (for instance) her assumption that worldly success equates with ability does give us insight into the world she inhabits. Most of the notable people she has to do with are worldly successes — and that is all. Thatcher, Diana Spencer, Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Greaves and other, lesser lights have all discovered some trick of bullying or flattering or otherwise pleasing people so that they (the masses) are willing to shower money and adulation on these heroes. It’s noticeable that individuals who have a bit more substance to them tend to be silent around Robinson (at least she does not report their saying much). Her own father and brother fall into this category; as do Mailer and Michael Foot. Is it our imagination that these people, having listened to Robinson prattling on about herself in her perfumed accent, fall silent rather than battle against such mind-jamming noise?

The success of an individual like Robinson is real — in her case it expressed itself at the end of the millennium (as she tell us) in the form of hundreds of thousands of pounds each year in salary, and more offers of work than she could possibly accept. Her book leaves us a bit puzzled about this result. In the real world such an outcome is often attributable to charm: to some particular way a person has of inspiring affection or confidence or admiration, any of which forms of approval the opportunist may convert to cash. Because the setting in which this charm operates is normally social and physical — it is a matter of finding people fun at dinner parties and brushing your breasts up against them in quiet moments — it can be difficult to convey in print, except for a writer of talent. Robinson’s writerly charms are minimal; writing (as we have seen) is not her medium. For all her repeated nervous assurances about her brilliance, her book suggests that her cognitive ability — her IQ — is about the middle of the range. Her general knowledge in such traditional areas as history, politics, the arts, languages, seems rather below average, though she would no doubt score better on ephemeral knowledge: on consumer goods, contemporary fashion and celebrity, television and the like. Where she appears to win every contest is in her pushiness: in sheer selfish drive.

Capacity and content aside, her mind is wholly unattractive. It offers us neither the æsthetic pleasures of subtlety, quickness, originality; nor such moral qualities as tolerance, breadth, judgement. The nature of Robinson’s characteristic thinking may be demonstrated by this anecdote which rises out of her final months at the Sunday Times — a yarn she presumably repeats because she fails to recognise the point that glares out of it:

“One day in the newsroom I turned to see another reporter mimicking my drunken speech. In a period when my memory was so frequently wiped out by the effects of my drinking it is interesting how acts of cruelty and acts of kindness stand out vividly. The reporter who mocked my condition would years later ask for an appointment to see me when I was a newspaper executive, in the hope of getting some work. If he had been any good I would have used him. But sadly he was no more talented ten years on than he was when he was enjoying my state that day.”

Vengeance is mine, saith the trull.

This is one of numerous passages where she writes like the vengeful, unconsciously self-revealing ignoramus she is. Apart from publicly triumphing over any she feels have injured her, Robinson throughout her retrospect sheets home her troubles to a domineering mother, to gender prejudice in her profession and to alcoholism. No question but that each of these has been an influence; however, these emphases deliberately miss the point. The key fact about Anne Robinson is that she has caused massive inconvenience and distress to those around her through her own defects of personality, that she has manufactured human misery out of herself, whether as a result of poor maternal training, her own chemical imbalance, or a combination of these and other factors. Her chief vice has been the untruthfulness in which her book is so eloquent. We may say, finally, that there is no stronger argument for education than a person as ill-educated as Anne Robinson. And this reminds us to mention an odd detail. One of her book’s photographs appears to show Robinson receiving an honorary degree, though neither the text nor the blurb refers to such an event. It is hard to imagine her letting that opportunity for self-advertisement slip. It is equally hard to imagine any reputable institution bestowing such an honour on her, even though she apparently has the contacts to pull the strings, and would be willing to pay an institution handsomely for public recognition ….

No doubt we should dismiss her from our minds as nothing more than a vulgar, crowd-pleasing entertainer. It is painful to think of the national media in the hands of such dangerously thoughtless individuals, and frightening to record (as illustration of the point) that Robinson — then a hopeless alcoholic and briefly preoccupied with screwing one of the defence lawyers — was in 1975 sent to Lancaster by the Sunday Times to cover the trial of the ‘Birmingham Six’.

Robinson chunters on in her book for what seems more than its actual 105,000 words. Towards the end of Memoirs of an Unfit Mother she makes a desperate and unfamiliar attempt to think. This is not successful. After striving hard for some nugget of wisdom, she offers the thought that “biology decrees that we will never entirely rid ourselves of being women”. We can only agree. And so she concludes, with most of her delusions still thick about her head — on a shopping spree in New York which she believes validates the trail of errors that she has so depressingly, unwittingly documented.

The Canley Heights killings

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:08:49 -0400

Canley Heights is a suburb in Sydney’s southwest. During the first years of the millennium it threatened to become a chief range for Australia’s violent murderesses.

On 31 January 2006 the patriarchy met its match there in the form of two 14-year-old girls. Having refused to pay a taxi fare on arrival near their destination, the girls robbed and repeatedly bashed about the head their disabled driver. It was found afterwards that their victim had died of a heart attack, so perhaps the girls offered no more than a few love taps to the skull, though there was mention of “massive head injuries”. Anyway, they left him to die while they stole his mobile phone and drove off in his vehicle, which they soon crashed into a parked car. He was found lying beaten in a darkened street at about 2 a.m.

Naturally the girls cannot be named. They were Pacific Islander cousins whose families lived in Liverpool and Canley Heights. Both were said to be from violent backgrounds, with plenty of alcohol and drugs about, so no doubt it was understandable for them to kill a person who was scraping an income by doing them a service they didn’t deserve. Their victim can be named. He was 53-year-old Youbert Hormozi: divorced and, having been separated from his two children, living a lonely existence. He had suffered a stroke which had paralysed his left side. Though not truly fit, he’d returned to work the week before his death because, his employer said, he had nothing else to do. He had been robbed at gunpoint several times, and was known as a driver who would pick up fares that more cautious cabbies wouldn’t touch. His manager described him as “a very simple man”.

Naturally in the first instance the wily police arrested a nearby youth on suspicion of the murder. The girls where caught, however, when they were detained the evening after by railway security at a station following robberies that had no connection with the cabbie’s death. They had armed themselves with a knife and embarked on a succession of robberies at two stations, taking $50 from one victim. In an attempt to intimidate witnesses, one of them was heard to boast “I’ve been on the news. We killed the taxi driver”. That led to their apprehension.

When the pair were arraigned in the children’s court, they exercised their female right of “choosing” not to appear — as if they could make the court go away by refusing to acknowledge it. In due course, however, they were given six years each, with parole in three and a half. Their judge thought it “important for them to have an opportunity for rehabilitation”. No doubt he was right, though the dead Youbert Hormozi would not be rehabilitated. With time served, the South Seas Thelma and Louise were expected to be out after no more than 19 months, in August 2007.

•

A couple of years afterwards police charged a 29-year-old woman in the same suburb with the murder of her two children. Screams were heard from the back of a dwelling in McKibbin Street, and a neighbour called triple-0 saying she could see a woman as she attacked a 3-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy. They were already dead from multiple stab wounds when their father came home from work ten minutes later. The murderess had slashed her own wrists and was taken to Liverpool Hospital where eventually she was charged at her bedside.

The family was Vietnamese, and reportedly quiet. According to Supreme Court papers the woman had given her two children rat poison and an unidentified pink liquid before smothering and then stabbing them. She pleaded not guilty to the murders by reason of serious depression — not a common mental-illness defence. Naturally the woman cannot be named. Her lawyer told the judge that she’d decided life was not worth living after she learned about her husband’s affair, or supposed affair. She’d left him a note accusing him of betraying her with another woman. She said this had forced the murders on her:

“I have to go away because I don’t want to witness the situation in which my husband betrayed me. … I take away my own life [because] I don’t want to witness the situation in which my children live lonely by themselves. … I don’t want to take away their lives ... however ... living without love, to me life is just only selfishness and betrayal. Let my children and myself leave in peace.”

The children’s father gave evidence through a court interpreter that he had bought Valentine’s Day flowers for a female friend a few days before, but had said nothing about the woman to his wife. The couple had barely been speaking in recent days. He admitted he’d slapped her during an angry argument the day before. He denied threatening to leave his wife, and claimed he wasn’t having any affair. He and the other woman were just friends.

Since the alleged filicides the wife had been diagnosed with “major depression”. For all that, a forensic psychiatrist testified on behalf of the prosecution that the defendant was not psychotic and should have known the difference between right and wrong. The psychiatrist supported the prosecution view that the defendant had killed out of revenge and anger because she’d formed a suspicion her husband was having an affair and was about to abandon her. The defendant was pathologically jealous and intent on revenging herself. “She was considerably angry the night before. From her account she destroyed the wedding photos and had not slept very well that night. And in the morning she made a plan to take her life and the lives of her children. There was a degree of planning. She purchased the rat poison ….” The psychiatrist thought there might have been “a degree of malice in her behaviour. If she killed her children, her husband would suffer.” There were also doubts about the seriousness of the defendant’s suicide attempt.

The trial is still under way, and the defence has yet to present its case in full.

•

The alleged filicide had happened in early 2008. At that time it seemed that Canley Heights had also been visited by a parricide; the event in question had taken place in April 2001 but hadn’t come to light for six years and was not adjudicated till a full jury trial in 2009.

Because 70-year-old Ederino Beltrame had a history of heart troubles, his GP didn’t bother to view his body before issuing a death certificate. The policeman who was called to the house by Ederino’s daughter Daniela, aged 55, took a look at the body and found no suspicious marks or injuries. Likewise the ambulance officers who turned up. Daniela Beltrame told them that her father had been “a bit off colour” the previous evening. He’d woken up dead in bed that morning. The constable examined the dead man’s medicines before calling at the GP’s surgery nearby. The doctor issued the certificate sight unseen. He wrote on it “cardiac failure”.

So far so good. (According to one newspaper two forensic experts were called in but found themselves unable to say whether the death was really due to natural causes or whether smothering could have been involved. But this can’t have been at the time of death since no one was suspicious at that stage. It seems rather that they were asked their opinion much later when evidence was being collected for a delayed inquest. That was long after Ederino had been cremated. If that was so, the pathologists must have been going only on what people were then saying about the death.)

In the days immediately after Ederino’s demise, Daniela had her father cremated and uncovered a will which left his whole estate to her. Once the debts had been paid, she sold the Canley Heights house and went to live in Italy. There she stayed for the next five years or so, only returning to Sydney in 2006 at her older daughter’s urging. As things developed, that return was odd indeed; and her daughter’s urging was even more so.

All might have been well had not this daughter — Ederino’s grand-daughter Romina, who was 23 at the time of his death and his principal nurse — suddenly come forward six years after the event with a witness statement that she’d seen her mother suffocating the old man. What follows now is her story of the night Ederino died.

Romina said she’d been woken in the small hours by her mother calling for help from the old man’s room. Supposing that her mother was being attacked, she went in, only to find that her mother was suffocating the old man with a pillow. She was straddled on top of him on the bed and seemed to Romina to be beside herself, stuffing a pillow into Ederino’s face. She called to Romina: “Help me, help me; he won’t die; he’s a demon.”

The young woman thought her mother the demonic one — she looked “very evil, it was like she was possessed”. Romina expostulated with her, tried to push her off the old man and grabbed the phone to call for help. She noticed that her grandfather was bound from the upper chest down with cling wrap, and that this wrap strapped him to his bed. When Romina started to cut the wrapping her grandfather said to her in Italian, “Bless you, my child” but her mother shouted, “What are you doing, it’s taken me hours to do this!” and she pushed her daughter out of the room, saying Ederino “had to go”. “It’s either him or me. If I stop now he’ll call the police and they’ll throw me in jail.” Romina said she left the room in a shocked state and sat in the lounge, where she was soon joined by Daniela and was told, “He’s gone.” They drank a cup of coffee together and her mother completed her explanation. “I’ve suffered a lot.”

All this was according to the daughter’s evidence as she eventually gave it in the Supreme Court. Romina said she’d delayed her report to police till January 2007 out of concern for her mother, who had attempted suicide twice already, and had threatened a third attempt if anyone spoke about Ederino’s death. In the years that followed she missed her mum and begged her to come back to Australia from Italy. However, someone somewhere must have had doubts about the death, for events were moving independently towards an inquest. Romina in time was subpoenaed for this, and at that point she decided the best thing was to get the whole tale off her chest; so she told it to police.

The inquest was aborted by this information from Romina, which obviously pointed to murder. So it was that Daniela Beltrame found herself charged and on trial in the New South Wales Supreme Court. She pleaded not guilty to the murder. Likewise to the charge that she had tried to bully her second daughter, Loretta Appleyard, into false testimony for the inquest. It was alleged that Beltrame had confronted Loretta with a number of written statements and demanded she sign them. Specifically, she wanted Loretta to lie about Beltrame’s having forged the grandfather’s will. When Loretta declined, her mother produced a typewritten document which spelled out Loretta’s many reasons for wanting to kill her grandfather. Beltrame asked her to sign this paper, but instead Loretta reported her bullying to police.

Beltrame had at first denied forging her father’s will (just as she denied the two other charges of murder and suborning a witness). But before the trial began she changed her plea on the forgery count to ‘guilty’ — when it became clear that the physical evidence against her was overwhelming.

At trial it was alleged that “Beltrame had been jealous of her adopted brother, John, since he was brought into the household when she was 12 years old. The jury would see evidence that Beltrame had attempted to persuade her father to cut John out of his will and had later forged wills that made her the sole inheritor of Mr. Beltrame’s estate.” Evidence was laid in due course that the signature on the will was forged, and that the document had been typed on Beltrame’s typewriter. Further, her computer’s hard-drive showed that someone had used it to search the web for details about forging documents, and about poisoning, lethal injections, deprivation of oxygen and air embolism. When she came to defend herself, Beltrame admitted that she had looked at these sites, but she said she’d done so only to relieve her feelings, not to gather information which she put into effect against her father.

It had come out at the committal that relations between Ederino and his daughter had been “strained” for a long time. At least one of the arguments between them had turned violent. She’d rowed with her father over the house and his will one night when friends were at dinner with them, and had screamed at him: “You put me on this world just to make me suffer.” To which he’d responded by retreating to his bedroom, saying as he went, “Go away, you slut.” At that she’d bitten his arm. The same doctor who signed the death certificate was shown a photo of his patient’s arm taken some weeks before death. It had bite marks and bruises on it. The doctor couldn’t recall ever seeing such an injury. Had he known there’d been a history of violence, he would have examined Ederino’s body minutely, he said.

Beltrame was sent for trial at the Supreme Court in March 2008, but the hearing did not come on till almost a year later. There it was alleged that she’d been motivated by greed combined with “some deep bitterness and resentment” towards her father. There was a definite gender dimension to the family feuding. Beltrame resented her father’s closeness to her adopted brother John, which perhaps was heightened by the latter’s being in gaol for strangling a 17-year-old prostitute. The way the family behaved was consistent with the mother’s having kept her two daughters under her close domination, turning them, but without complete success, against their grandfather. It seems likely that the adoptive and then criminal brother was the object of similar treatment, and no doubt there was talk in the household about the fact that if Ederino’s estate went to John, both grand-daughters would be disinherited. Perhaps this generated hostility towards the invalid, and a wish to be rid of him so long as he could be despatched without suspicion. In all the reporting there was no mention of Romina and Loretta’s father, whether he was dead or disappeared; there may have been another source of gender hatred in Daniela’s relations with him.

In light of all this family strife it was a sour irony when it emerged towards the end of things that the father’s true will had in fact left all his estate to Beltrame — apart from $30,000 for the adopted son. This meant that her forgery and all the bullying and blackmail, as well as any alleged murder, had netted Beltrame no more than $30,000 — “hardly a huge amount”, as the judge commented.

If there was a gender element in the family’s squabbles, it seems more than probable that something gendered crept into the jury’s deliberations. After all that had been alleged, and after only a day and a half’s discussion, the jury of 7 women and 5 men were able to find Beltrame not guilty of murder.

She was convicted on the forgery charge (which she’d admitted) and on that of inducing her younger daughter to give false testimony. Her sentence for these lesser offences was a non-parole period of 34 months. Since she’d been in gaol since February 2007, this meant that she’d go free after another eight months, at the end of 2009.

It is a central fiction of our legal system that a jury is always right.

For all that, some may wonder privately whether her acquittal does not place Daniela Beltrame with Carol Matthey and many another woman who is a beneficiary of special and unwritten rules that cover females when it comes to the law. These special considerations are applied by the police, by judges, and in this case perhaps by a jury — they are a relic of the traditional gallantry which feminists have claimed to despise, but which they have exploited in order to go beyond equality and so entrench special privileges for women.

Romina by her own testimony had not actually been present to see her mother kill her grandfather. She had seen him bound in wrap. She had seen her mother straddle him with a pillow over his face, but at that point she’d left the bedroom. She’d testified that her mother had come from his room and had said, “He’s gone” — and there was no doubt as to Romina’s understanding of these events. The ‘not guilty’ verdict inevitably casts doubt on her credit. Beltrame said that Romina’s evidence was “a despicable lie” but she didn’t explain what its motivation might be.

What was it that persuaded the jury to take their lenient view? Was it the force of Beltrame’s personality? Romina’s long delay in coming forward? something intrinsically weak in the daughter’s presentation? Was there some sense of a fierce dynamic among the women of the family, which suggested to jurors that Romina had a motive for giving false evidence against her mother? Those of us who weren’t at the trial cannot say, and none of these questions is discussed in the coverage.

Beltrame had agreed that she’d maintained “a vindictive and sometimes violent relationship with her father”, while nonetheless asking the jury to believe that he died of natural causes. She said her internet research into murder methods was mere recreation. Her forgery of the will was admitted, and her fears about her father’s intention towards herself and her adoptive brother about their inheritance had been completely wrong. The jury agreed that she’d suborned Loretta. Where in all that, and in the circumstantial evidence connected with Beltrame’s flight to Italy, did they find the space to conclude that she, and not Romina, was the one telling the truth?

Perhaps there’s a clue in her claim that Ederino “treated her with utter disrespect and encouraged her children to do likewise”. May that have struck a chord with some among the jury? At an inchoate and emotional level it may also have seemed unjust that her father “had a loving relationship with her adoptive brother” — a man who was serving a long gaol term for the manslaughter of a woman. Her anxieties about the loss of the house, unfounded though they were, may have resonated with any kitchen-sink feminist on the jury, especially as Beltrame claimed to have made a financial contribution to the mortgage as a younger woman, when she’d been living with her parents and working, between the ages of 16 and 24. There was an insinuation too that though Beltrame was now living with her father again (at his insistence), he’d had plans to oust her so that he could move in a girlfriend. Significantly, this girlfriend was a woman Ederino had met through his gaol visits to John. Was that plan an actuality or was it just another product of Beltrame’s fevered jealousy? Apparently the jury tended towards the former. Neither her jealousy nor her violence nor her dishonesty over evidence and the will proved that she had murdered her father, Beltrame told them.

We notice in all this that classic tendency of women to blame men for anything and everything that is unsatisfactory in their lot. If you can get rid of the man who is nearest to you, you can fill up the silence that his absence leaves with all sorts of vividly-imagined allegations that will sound right to other women. Nonetheless, that any sympathy for Beltrame should rise to the level of a jury’s giving her the nod to commit murder, is extraordinary indeed.

We may say that Beltrame silently employed the ‘Thelma and Louise’ defence. There was an implied argument in everything she said that a mean old man had ruined her life, and therefore deserved whatever came to him, a violent death included. It is frightening to pose the possibility that the jury’s decision in this case rose from some unformed perception that any ageing man is merely a relic of the patriarchy, and deserves whatever punishment is inflicted upon him.

The determined Beltrame obviously impressed the jurors. Like Farah Damji or Wendy Titelman or Norma Khouri (all discussed elsewhere), she seemed to be one of those women who grow more passionate and virtuosic in their denials, the stronger the factual evidence that piles up against them. Whatever the case, it is from legal outcomes like this — as well as those in such cases as Matthey’s and Fitchett’s and Farquharson’s — that ordinary people are able to go on clinging to the myth that all the trouble in the world derives from men, and that women and girls are gently law-abiding.

THE CANLEY HEIGHTS MURDERS

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:08:40 -0400

Canley Heights is a suburb in Sydney’s southwest. During the first years of the millennium it threatened to become a chief range for Australia’s violent murderesses.

On 31 January 2006 the patriarchy met its match there in the form of two 14-year-old girls. Having refused to pay a taxi fare on arrival near their destination, the girls robbed and repeatedly bashed about the head their disabled driver. It was found afterwards that their victim had died of a heart attack, so perhaps the girls offered no more than a few love taps to the skull, though there was mention of “massive head injuries”. Anyway, they left him to die while they stole his mobile phone and drove off in his vehicle, which they soon crashed into a parked car. He was found lying beaten in a darkened street at about 2 a.m.

Naturally the girls cannot be named. They were Pacific Islander cousins whose families lived in Liverpool and Canley Heights. Both were said to be from violent backgrounds, with plenty of alcohol and drugs about, so no doubt it was understandable for them to kill a person who was scraping an income by doing them a service they didn’t deserve. Their victim can be named. He was 53-year-old Youbert Hormozi: divorced and, having been separated from his two children, living a lonely existence. He had suffered a stroke which had paralysed his left side. Though not truly fit, he’d returned to work the week before his death because, his employer said, he had nothing else to do. He had been robbed at gunpoint several times, and was known as a driver who would pick up fares that more cautious cabbies wouldn’t touch. His manager described him as “a very simple man”.

Naturally in the first instance the wily police arrested a nearby youth on suspicion of the murder. The girls where caught, however, when they were detained the evening after by railway security at a station following robberies that had no connection with the cabbie’s death. They had armed themselves with a knife and embarked on a succession of robberies at two stations, taking $50 from one victim. In an attempt to intimidate witnesses, one of them was heard to boast “I’ve been on the news. We killed the taxi driver”. That led to their apprehension.

When the pair were arraigned in the children’s court, they exercised their female right of “choosing” not to appear — as if they could make the court go away by refusing to acknowledge it. In due course, however, they were given six years each, with parole in three and a half. Their judge thought it “important for them to have an opportunity for rehabilitation”. No doubt he was right, though the dead Youbert Hormozi would not be rehabilitated. With time served, the South Seas Thelma and Louise were expected to be out after no more than 19 months, in August 2007.

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