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1917: Told to Dig a Hole in the Dark: the Stepson Who Undid Eugenia Falleni in the “Man-Woman” Trial at Darlinghurst

Annie Birkett married Harry Crawford in Sydney in 1913 not knowing that Crawford had been born Eugenia Falleni and had lived as a man for twenty years. A neighbour told her in 1917. That October the pair went picnicking at Chatswood and Annie never came home; a charred body was found in scrub off Mowbray Road the next morning, still alive when the fire was lit, the doctor said. It lay unidentified for three years. Falleni told her son she had run off with another man.

The boy remembered other things. Days after his mother vanished his stepfather took him to The Gap and tried to coax him to the cliff edge; a week later he led him into scrub at night, told him to dig a hole, then threw the shovel away and took him home. In 1920 the son went to police. The body was matched through its false teeth, and among its effects he knew his mother’s shoes, one sole mended by his stepfather. Tried at Darlinghurst in what the papers called the “Man-Woman case”, put into the dock first in a suit and then in a dress, Falleni was convicted in two hours.

Sentenced to death, later commuted to life, Falleni told the judge: “I am not guilty, your Honor. I know nothing whatsoever of this charge.”

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