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Allen & Unwin. This Edition first published Sep 2008
Reviewed by Sally Roddom
True Crime
Author Anne Lovell found out by accident that her aunt, Connie Sommerlad,
had been murdered by John Trevor Kelly in 1939. John Kelly goes down in
Australian history with the dubious honour of being the last man to be
hung in NSW. Connie’s name had never been mentioned by any of the older
members of the family – her life, and death, had remained a secret. Why?
As Anne investigates her late aunt’s life, she discovers that it was not
the horrific murder that embarrassed the family into silence but something
quite different.
Connie and her younger brother Eric ran the family farm near Tenterfield
in NSW. John Kelly was their farm hand. One Saturday night in early 1939,
Kelly hacked Connie to death with an axe, attacked Eric with it and left
him for dead, jumped into the farm ute and headed for Brisbane. Here he
was quickly apprehended by the police and immediately confessed to the
murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging, and this was carried out 24
Aug 1939. So if her horrific murder was not the cause of the family’s
embarrassment – then what was?
In the 1930s marriage and religion were the backbone of society and a
woman having choices over her own life was virtually unheard of. So when
young Connie fell pregnant her choices were very limited. She chose to not
tell the family about her condition and had her son; who became a
horrendous embarrassment to Connie’s family when the truth came out just
before her murder. So great was the potential scandal that the family were
able to convince the doctor who did the inquest to omit the fact that
Connie had had a child and just to mention that she had not been sexually
assaulted. This meant that Connie’s "shame" would not be on the public
record.
The keeping of this secret affected the whole family right down to the
current generation. When the truth started to come out in the 1970s and
Anne Lovell began to investigate the story, she and her cousins were
amazed at the attitudes about a situation that no one would bat an eyelid
at today. It was actually considered as far worse to be an unmarried
mother than the victim of a heinous crime. CONNIE’S SECRET gives an
absorbing insight into another era, an era from not that long ago. There
is a lot more to the story to be discovered than I have revealed here. The
story is all the more poignant because this is a family member relating
all the events around Connie and her family and how their impact continues
to be felt by those who were involved, even today.
Dec 2008 review originally posted on Murder and Mayhem
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