In honour of Halloween I’ll be running different house murder and ghosts stories this month from my book At Home with History.
When police found the body of Marion Hamilton, 68, in her Nanton Street home in 1975, they assumed it was death by natural causes. The widow suffered from dementia and lived in the rambling old house since the death of her elderly mother nine months before.
Marion had two guardians, both cousins, appointed to look after her. Olga Young had wanted to put her into a nursing home where she would receive around the clock attention; but Elouise Roads Wilson, Marion’s co-guardian told Young that she didn’t want the estate to be “depleted” by the cost of private care. So Wilson left her law practice in Victoria and moved in to the Nanton Street house to take care of her cousin.
Police came to the house after Wilson called to report Marion’s death. They found Marion lying behind the door of the room where she slept. There was no forced entry and nothing stolen.
George Shoebotham examined the body at the city morgue and found ligature marks around her neck. Either someone had strangled her, or she’d hanged herself with a thin cord or wire.
Police found a length of nylon string under a chair in the room. After discovering that Wilson was the sole beneficiary of Marion’s estate, police thought she’d got tired of waiting and charged her with murder.
The story got decidedly creepier. It turned out that Eunice Coote, Marion’s 93-year-old mother had died in the same house several months before. Apparently, she was dead for two weeks, lying in the same bed and decomposing, all the while Marion was trying to feed and care for her. Wilson’s defence lawyer argued that Marion may have killed her mother and later killed herself by looping the twine around her neck and tying the end of the handle of her bedroom door. But when the coroner exhumed Coote’s body, they found she had died from a heart condition.
Wilson, 47, told the jury that she became co-guardian after the death of Marion’s mother the previous March. She said she was the sole beneficiary to her $175,000 estate. Wilson told the jury that Marion had told her she wanted to join her dead mother. She said she often locked her cousin in her room to stop her wandering around the streets at night. On the night she died, she told the court that she and her husband Philip put Marion to bed around 7:00 p.m. and Philip took the bus to Victoria where he worked.
It seemed odd that a well respected lawyer would risk murdering her cousin for a relatively small inheritance. But then, it seemed even odder that she would leave her practice, her home, and her husband to take care of an aging relative. The police were also surprised that she didn’t break a window to cover up the murder as a botched robbery or that she left the string—the murder weapon—in the room.
Wilson’s defence at one point tried to implicate Wilson’s husband, arguing that strangulation was more of a male act; but the jury didn’t buy it, and found her guilty of second-degree murder.
