Murder In The Suburbs

After WWII, a crime wave washed through Sydney proving women killers can be just as ruthless as men. Sue Williams investigates a new book that uncovers the wives who killed their husbands and other inconvenient family members with rat poison.

- Sue Williams

By day, she seemed just another ordinary housewife, mother and wife living cheek-by-jowl with the neighbours in a rundown row of terraces in Sydney’s working-class inner west.

She looked like the perfect mum to her two children, and appeared to ignore the gossip that her husband, a known gambler and drinker, was secretly seeing other women. But in the evenings, when Yvonne Butler handed Desmond his favourite beef tea, Bonox, to keep up his health, she had exactly the opposite in mind.

For she was heavily lacing the drink with deadly rat poison and was actually killing her childhood sweetheart with kindness.

Their friends, family and neighbours in the tight-knit street where most had lived for over a decade were mystified about Desmond’s constant illnesses and his deteriorating mental health. Yvonne wrung her hands in despair. No one had a clue what could be going so wrong. So terribly, horribly wrong.

Years later, it was discovered that Yvonne was one of a number of women, in a short spell in the suffocating domesticity of Sydney in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who had turned to poison to rid themselves of the troublesome men, and women, in their lives. They were the quiet killers, the patient, cold-hearted women who watched and plotted and planned their deadly revenge for the perceived slights or wrongs that life had dealt them.

And, in most cases, they were caught far too late to save their victims.