Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures with unflinching clarity: a young woman too proud for servitude, too restless to stay still, drawn by temperament toward the edges of lawful life.
Her drift into counterfeiting feels almost inevitable; a single act of defiance carries her out of her mother’s alehouse and into the company of coiners who see her recklessness as a useful tool. In the annals of true crime, few portraits are as vivid as this one: a girl barely twenty, pushing false money through London’s streets with a freedom she mistakes for power.
Georgian justice has a particular cruelty reserved for women convicted of this offence, and the machinery of that law is already turning. Hear her story read aloud from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; every word preserved, every detail intact, waiting for you now.
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The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Mean parents: today ‘mean’ usually suggests cruelty or stinginess, but in eighteenth century usage it simply meant humble or of low social standing. Barbara’s parents were not wicked; they were poor and unremarkable, the kind of people the law barely noticed until their children crossed it.
Mantua-maker: a dressmaker who specialised in the mantua, a loose flowing gown fashionable in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was one of the few skilled trades open to women, and an apprenticeship to one could have set Barbara on a very different path.
Utter: to utter false money had nothing to do with speaking. In legal language it meant to put counterfeit coins into circulation; to pass them off as genuine in a transaction. The crime of uttering was considered a form of petty treason against the Crown, because the monarch’s image and authority were stamped upon every coin.
Vend: to sell or distribute. Paired with ‘utter’ in the text, it underlines the commercial nature of the offence; coiners operated in networks, with some people manufacturing the forgeries and others, like Barbara, sent out into the streets to move them.
Petty treason: a legal category that has no modern equivalent. It covered crimes that violated a bond of allegiance or obedience: a wife killing her husband, a servant killing a master, or a subject counterfeiting the king’s coin. The penalties for petty treason were deliberately more severe than those for ordinary felonies, and for women the distinction carried a uniquely horrifying consequence.
Faggots and brushes: bundles of sticks and dry kindling used to build the fire at an execution by burning. The word ‘faggot’ today carries entirely different connotations, but in this period it referred simply to a bound bundle of firewood; the mundane fuel of an extraordinary punishment.
St. Giles’s Pound: a public pound near the parish of St. Giles in the Fields, used for impounding stray livestock. The area around it was notorious for poverty, gin shops and criminal networks; it was exactly the kind of place where a young runaway could vanish into a new and dangerous life overnight.
Discover: in this context, to discover someone meant to reveal or expose their identity to the authorities. Barbara refused to discover those who taught her to coin; she would not name them, even under the weight of her own conviction.
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About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
Among the most chilling cases in Australian criminal history, the story of Caroline Grills stands out for its sheer domestic horror. Known to her family and friends as ‘Aunt Carrie,’ this seemingly warm and generous woman spent years poisoning those closest to her with thallium, a tasteless and odourless rat poison that slowly destroyed her victims from the inside out. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, Grills operated in plain sight across suburban Sydney, attending to the sick and dying with cups of tea laced with death. Her case remains one of the most disturbing examples of serial poisoning in the country, a reminder that the most dangerous killers can sometimes wear the most familiar faces.
A Beloved Figure in the Family
Caroline Grills was born in 1888 and spent most of her life in the working-class suburbs of Sydney. By all outward appearances, she was a devoted wife, a loving mother, and an attentive relative who went out of her way to care for family members in their time of need. She was short and stout, with thick spectacles and a warm smile that put everyone at ease. Neighbours and relatives alike described her as generous and kind, always the first to arrive with food and comfort when someone fell ill.
It was precisely this reputation that made her crimes so effective and so difficult to detect. In post-war Australia, families were tight-knit and relied heavily on one another. The idea that a beloved aunt or mother figure could be systematically murdering her own relatives was almost unthinkable. Grills exploited this trust with a calculated patience that would not be fully understood until years later, when the bodies had already been buried and the survivors were fighting for their lives.
The First Deaths: Suspicion Buried with the Victims
The poisoning spree is believed to have begun in November 1947 with the death of Christina Mickelson, Grills’ stepmother. The elderly woman was 87 years old and had been in declining health, and when she passed away, no one questioned the cause. It seemed like a natural death, the sad but unremarkable end of an ageing woman’s life. Grills had been at her bedside throughout, dutifully preparing meals and cups of tea.
Not long after, in January 1948, Angelina Thomas died. A relation of Grills’ husband, she too had been elderly and in apparently failing health, and again Aunt Carrie had been the devoted caregiver in attendance. Then came the death of John Lundberg, Grills’ husband’s brother-in-law, in late 1948. Each time the pattern was the same: a period of mysterious illness characterised by hair loss, numbness in the extremities, and severe gastrointestinal distress, followed by death. And each time, Caroline Grills had been present, hovering with her teapot and her sympathetic smile.
At the time, thallium poisoning was notoriously difficult to detect. The symptoms mimicked a range of natural illnesses, and unless a doctor specifically tested for the substance, it could easily be mistaken for everything from influenza to nerve disease. Thallium was also readily available in Australia as an ingredient in commercial rat poisons, making it terrifyingly easy for Grills to obtain her weapon of choice without arousing suspicion.
A Pattern Emerges
By 1949, the death toll in Grills’ extended family had begun to attract quiet whispers, though no one dared voice their suspicions openly. The fourth confirmed victim was Mary Anne Mickelson, Grills’ sister-in-law, who died that year after suffering the same agonising decline as those before her. Like the others, she had been under the attentive care of Aunt Carrie.
What made Grills particularly dangerous was her apparent lack of traditional motive. She did not stand to inherit vast fortunes from her victims. There were no bitter family feuds or obvious grudges. Some criminologists have since speculated that Grills derived a perverse satisfaction from the power she held over life and death, enjoying the attention and gratitude she received as a devoted caregiver.
Whatever her internal motivations, the external reality was devastating. Four people were dead, and Grills showed no signs of stopping. In fact, she appeared to be escalating, expanding her circle of victims to include not just elderly relatives but younger and healthier family members as well.
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Grills was not operating in a vacuum. By early 1953, thallium poisoning had become a serious public health crisis in New South Wales. In the thirteen months leading up to her arrest, there had been 46 reported cases across the state, ten of them fatal, with five of those deaths believed to be murders. At any given time, multiple victims were being treated simultaneously in Sydney hospitals. The situation was alarming enough that in late April 1953, a group of Australian poison experts convened in Sydney for an emergency meeting, the first of its kind in the country, to pool clinical, chemical and analytical data on thallium poisoning and attempt to find an antidote. Poison experts around the world had been searching for one for years without success. Caroline Grills was not the only person poisoning with thallium in Sydney, but she would prove to be the most prolific.
The Survivors Who Broke the Case
The turning point came when Grills began poisoning relatives who did not die. In the early 1950s, several family members began experiencing the telltale symptoms of thallium poisoning: their hair fell out in clumps, they suffered excruciating pain in their limbs, and their vision deteriorated rapidly. Among those targeted were Eveline Lundberg, Grills’ own sister-in-law, along with Eveline’s daughter Christine Downey and her husband John Downey, all regular recipients of Aunt Carrie’s famous cups of tea.
It was within this circle that Grills was finally caught. A suspicious family member, already partially blinded from a previous poisoning, noticed Grills slip her hand into her dress pocket and move it over a cup of tea she had just prepared. He quietly switched the cup, decanted the tea into a bottle, and handed it to police. Laboratory analysis confirmed what the family had feared: the tea contained a lethal dose of thallium. Caroline Grills was arrested on 11 May 1953.
The Trial That Shocked Sydney
The trial of Caroline Grills in October 1953 became a media sensation across Australia. The image of a kindly grandmother deliberately poisoning her own family captivated and horrified the public in equal measure. Newspapers dubbed her ‘Aunt Thally,’ a darkly humorous nickname that belied the gravity of her crimes.
Prosecutors made a calculated decision about how to proceed. Although police charged Grills with four counts of murder, relating to the deaths of Christina Mickelson, Angelina Thomas, John Lundberg, and Mary Anne Mickelson, and three counts of attempted murder, they chose to try her on a single count: the attempted murder of Eveline Lundberg. It was their strongest and most direct case. The intercepted cup of tea was damning physical evidence, thallium had been found in Grills’ dress pocket, and a witness had seen her administer the poison with his own eyes, before that sight was also taken from him.
The murder charges were not abandoned entirely. The judge permitted evidence of the four suspicious deaths to be introduced during the trial as similar fact evidence, allowing the prosecution to establish Grills’ pattern of behaviour and intent without needing to mount four separate murder trials. Once she received the maximum available sentence, pursuing those additional prosecutions was deemed unnecessary.
Grills professed her innocence throughout, claiming police had pressured her family to testify against her and insisting she had lived to help, not to kill. Her behaviour in the courtroom, marked by outbursts of laughter, did little to help her cause. On 15 October 1953 she was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to death.
Her appeal was dismissed by the Court of Criminal Appeal in April 1954, and in September that year her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a decision that reflected evolving attitudes toward capital punishment in Australia during the 1950s. She would spend the rest of her days behind bars.
Life Behind Bars and a Grim Legacy
In prison, Grills reportedly maintained her cheerful and sociable demeanour, earning a measure of popularity among fellow inmates. It was said that she continued to make tea for other prisoners, a detail that carries an almost unbearable irony given the nature of her crimes. Whether her fellow inmates were aware of the full extent of her history is unclear, but the image of Aunt Carrie bustling about with her teapot in the State Reformatory for Women is one that has endured in Australian criminal folklore.
Grills gradually lost her eyesight during her years in prison and became increasingly frail. She died on 6 October 1960, still incarcerated, without ever having publicly expressed remorse for her crimes. The true number of her victims remains uncertain; while she was charged in connection with four deaths and several attempted murders, some investigators believe she may have been responsible for additional deaths that were never formally linked to her.
The Thallium Poisoning Legacy in Australia
The case of Caroline Grills had a lasting impact on Australian law and public health policy. In the wake of her trial, authorities moved to restrict the sale of thallium-based rat poisons, recognising the extraordinary danger posed by a substance that was both lethal and virtually undetectable. The case also highlighted significant gaps in forensic toxicology at the time, prompting improvements in post-mortem testing procedures across the country.
Grills’ crimes also contributed to a broader cultural awareness of poisoning as a method of domestic murder. In the decades that followed, her case was frequently cited in discussions about the particular dangers posed by killers who operate within the home, exploiting bonds of trust and familial obligation. Her story served as a grim warning that evil does not always announce itself with violence or aggression; sometimes it arrives with a smile and a cup of tea.
The case of Caroline Grills is one of many dark chapters profiled in the Dark Stories series, where we explore the lives and crimes of Australia’s most infamous criminals in no particular order. From suburban poisoners to outback outlaws, these stories reveal the shadows lurking beneath the surface of ordinary Australian life. One day, we plan to rank these criminals once and for all, settling the debate about who truly stands as the most notorious figure in the nation’s criminal history. Until then, the tea is served, and the stories keep coming.
Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inheritance, stripped of everything that might have held him steady.
As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, Perkins drifts into the kind of company that haunts the margins of Georgian England: drinkers, gamblers, idlers whose appetites outrun their means. His is the sort of true crime story that begins not with malice but with dispossession; a young man living as though he still possessed his father’s fortune while owning almost nothing at all.
What follows is a life pulled further and further from solid ground, carried across oceans and through the gears of a justice system that does not forget. Listen now as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals delivers this restless and melancholy account in full.
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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Mother-in-law: today this means your spouse’s mother, but in the eighteenth century it was the standard term for a stepmother. When the text says Perkins’s mother-in-law had him turned out of the house, it means his father’s new wife; not some distant relative by marriage, but the very woman who replaced his mother under the same roof.
Groat: a small silver coin worth fourpence. To say someone was ‘never a groat the better’ means they gained absolutely nothing; not even the most trivial sum. It was a common way of expressing total exclusion from any benefit or inheritance.
Cast: in legal language of this period, to be ‘cast’ meant to be found guilty at trial. It sounds almost casual to modern ears, like being tossed aside; and in a sense it was exactly that, the court casting you out of ordinary life and into the hands of punishment.
Upon the rake: to go ‘upon the rake’ meant to go out carousing; drinking, gambling, chasing trouble through the streets. A ‘rake’ was a dissolute young man, and the phrase captures the reckless energy of young men looking for anything but honest work.
Shuffle-board: not quite the gentle cruise-ship game of today. In Georgian alehouses, shuffleboard was a tavern pastime played on long wooden tables, and it was closely associated with gambling, idleness, and the kind of company that led to worse things.
Crown piece: a large silver coin worth five shillings. In this account, the alehouse owners had marked a crown with particular scratches or notches so it could be identified if stolen from the till; a trap that snapped shut on Perkins.
Transportation: the sentence of being shipped to the colonies as forced labour. It sounds almost merciful compared to the gallows, but in practice it meant being sold to a planter and worked in conditions little different from enslavement; and returning without permission was a capital offence.
Vulgar pleasures: today ‘vulgar’ suggests crude or obscene, but in this context it simply meant common or low; the cheap amusements of ordinary people. Drinking, gaming, skittle-playing: none of it was scandalous on its own, but together these pastimes marked a young man as someone drifting toward ruin.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
The unsolved murder of Betty Shanks in 1952 remains one of the most disturbing and enduring cold cases in Australian criminal history. On a quiet September evening in suburban Brisbane, a young woman was violently beaten to death just a few hundred metres from the safety of her parents’ home, and no one has ever been held accountable. Her killing sent shockwaves through a city still settling into peacetime life, and even decades later, it continues to haunt investigators, amateur sleuths, and the people of Brisbane who remember a time when the suburbs felt untouchable by violence. This is the story of Betty Shanks, the investigation that could not solve her murder, and the silence that followed.
Post-War Brisbane and the Quiet Streets of the Inner North
By 1952, Brisbane was a city in transition. The war years had transformed it from a provincial capital into a strategic military hub; American GIs had flooded Fortitude Valley and the CBD, and the social fabric of the city had been stretched and reshaped in ways that lingered long after the troops went home. Peace had returned, but normalcy was still being negotiated. Housing was tight. Families were rebuilding. The suburbs, particularly the leafy inner-north pockets like Wilston and Grange, represented the aspirational heart of that recovery: quiet, respectable, safe.
Betty Shanks was 22 years old, a bright and well-liked young woman who worked as a clerk for a Commonwealth Department. She lived with her parents at their home in Grange. By all accounts, she was modest, dependable, and deeply embedded in the rhythms of ordinary suburban life. She caught the tram to work. She came home in the evenings. There was nothing in her routine that should have placed her in danger. And yet, on the night of 19 September 1952, the short walk from the tram terminus at Grange to her parents’ house became the last journey she would ever take.
The Night of 19 September 1952
Betty had been out that evening, attending a night lecture in the Brisbane CBD. After the lecture, she was driven part of the way home by her lecturer, then boarded a tram at Windsor and alighted at the Grange terminus, as she had done countless times before. From there, it was a walk of only a few hundred metres through quiet residential streets to her family home. The route was familiar. The streets were lit, if dimly. The homes she passed were occupied by families she likely recognised. It was an unremarkable journey on an unremarkable night.
She never made it home. Betty’s body was discovered the following morning in the front garden of a house at the corner of Thomas and Carberry Streets, Grange, just a short distance from her own front door. She had been savagely beaten and kicked, with police finding no evidence of robbery. Her belongings were intact. The motive, like the killer, remained invisible.
The Investigation: Every Lead Gone Cold
Queensland Police launched what was, by the standards of 1952, a significant investigation. Officers canvassed the neighbourhood extensively, interviewing residents of both Grange and Wilston, tram conductors, passengers, and anyone known to have been in the area that evening. The crime scene was examined, though forensic science of the era was limited; there was no DNA analysis, no CCTV, and fingerprint technology was rudimentary at best. Detectives relied on witness testimony, but it was devastatingly scarce.
Several persons of interest were identified in the weeks and months that followed. Among them were men known to Betty through social or professional circles, as well as local figures flagged by neighbours. One name that recurred in community whispers was never substantiated with evidence. Another suspect, a man reportedly seen near the tram terminus that night, could not be conclusively placed at the scene. Each line of inquiry was pursued, and each, in turn, dissolved into ambiguity. No one was ever charged.
One detail that adds a striking layer of institutional context to this case is the presence of Inspector Frank Bischof at the crime scene. Bischof, photographed during the early investigation, would later become Queensland Police Commissioner and a controversial figure in the history of Queensland policing before the Fitzgerald Inquiry. In the Betty Shanks case, however, his presence is best understood as a historical side note rather than evidence of any particular failing in the investigation.
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The Tram Terminus Question
One of the most confounding aspects of Betty Shanks’ murder is its proximity to public space. The Grange tram terminus was not an isolated location. Trams ran regularly. Passengers boarded and alighted throughout the evening. Conductors were present. The surrounding streets, while quiet, were residential and populated. How could a young woman be attacked and killed just metres from a public transport stop, on a route flanked by occupied homes, without a single reliable witness coming forward?
The answer likely lies in the nature of 1950s suburban life after dark. Streets were poorly lit by modern standards. Most residents were indoors by the time Betty alighted from the tram. The attack may have been swift; a sudden ambush from a laneway or garden hedge, carried out by someone who knew her route or who had followed her from the terminus. Sound carries unpredictably in suburban streets, and what might have been heard could easily have been dismissed as a domestic disturbance or an animal. In an era before triple-zero calls and neighbourhood watch programs, the gap between a cry for help and a response could be fatally wide.
The tram angle has been revisited many times. Investigators looked at whether the killer might have been a fellow passenger, someone who rode the same route and followed Betty on foot. They examined whether a tram employee might have known her routine. None of these avenues produced a breakthrough. The tram, which should have been a cocoon of safety delivering Betty to the edge of her own neighbourhood, instead marked the boundary between her life and her death.
Reinvestigations and Cold Case Reviews
Betty Shanks’ case has never been officially closed, and it has been revisited several times by Queensland Police and independent researchers. Cold case reviews in the 1990s and 2000s brought modern forensic techniques to bear on the surviving evidence, though decades of neglect had degraded much of it. DNA technology, which has revolutionised cold case work in Australia and globally, offered limited assistance here; the original crime scene processing did not preserve biological material in ways compatible with later analysis.
Journalists and true crime researchers have combed through witness statements, coronial records, and police files released under freedom-of-information provisions. Each reinvestigation has added texture to the story: new theories about suspects, new readings of the available evidence, and new frustrations at the gaps in the original investigation. Some researchers have pointed to the limitations of 1950s policing culture, in which certain lines of inquiry may have been abandoned prematurely or in which the era’s social dynamics discouraged witnesses from speaking freely.
Despite these efforts, no reinvestigation has produced sufficient evidence to name a suspect, let alone secure a prosecution. The case remains listed among Queensland’s most significant unsolved homicides, a designation that carries both institutional weight and a quiet admission of failure.
Betty’s Family: A Grief Without Resolution
It is easy, after so many years, for a victim to become an abstraction; a name in a case file, a photograph in a newspaper archive, a footnote in the history of Brisbane crime. But Betty Shanks was a real person, with a family who loved her and who lived the rest of their lives in the shadow of her murder. Betty’s parents lost their daughter in the most violent and inexplicable way imaginable, and they never received the closure of knowing who was responsible or why.
Betty’s younger brother carried that burden forward. The Shanks family home, the very place Betty was walking toward when she was killed, became a monument to absence. Every anniversary, every newspaper retrospective, every cold case review reopened the wound without healing it. For families of unsolved murder victims, grief does not follow a linear path; it circles endlessly, caught in the orbit of unanswered questions. Who did this? Why? Were they ever caught for something else? Did they live out their life unpunished, walking the same streets Betty once walked?
The human cost of an unsolved murder extends far beyond the victim. It radiates outward through family, through community, through the collective memory of a city. Betty Shanks deserved justice. Her family deserved answers. Neither has been delivered.
Decades of Silence
As of now, no one has ever been charged with the murder of Betty Shanks. Although various theories and alleged suspects have emerged over the decades, no officially accepted suspect has been identified, no deathbed confession has resolved the case, and no DNA match has materialised. The person who killed Betty on that September night in 1952, only a few hundred metres from her family’s doorstep, either died with their secret or is still alive and extraordinarily old, carrying a truth that no investigator has been able to extract. Decades of silence. That silence is not peace; it is its own kind of horror. It is the sound of a case that was never closed, a family that was never given answers, and a city that has never quite forgotten the night a young woman stepped off a tram at Grange and vanished into violence.
This article is part of the Dark Stories series profiling Australia’s most infamous criminals, unsolved cases, and the darkest chapters of the nation’s history, presented in no particular order. From suburban murders to organised crime empires, from colonial atrocities to modern-day mysteries, we are building an archive of the cases that shaped Australia’s relationship with crime and justice. One day, we will rank them: the most shocking, the most consequential, the most haunting. Until then, we keep telling the stories that deserve to be remembered, because forgetting is its own form of injustice.
