The Mareos' Life Before the Fatal Weekend

Nevertheless, there was clearly another side to Mareo's professional life. The Duchess of Danzig had not been a financial success and its director was receiving no income at the time of his wife's death. Mareo's last job (according to the theatre's manager) had been 'to bring back some of the glamour of the days when depression was unheard of by conducting an overture during 'the several tedious minutes' in which audiences would otherwise suffer through the 'credit titles'¹⁸ at the St James Theatre. Since this was now the period of the talkies it is unlikely that audiences would have greatly appreciated the anachronistic supplement of live music. Moreover, as Ngaio Marsh famously observed, with the onset of the Depression, '[a]ll over Australasia one seemed to hear the desolate slam of stage doors'.¹⁹ Thus Mareo's job at the St James lasted only six months. Two weeks after losing this job, Thelma was dead.

As the Crown made clear at the first trial, the apparent glamour of Mareo's life in fact rested on an unhappy marriage. Indeed according to the Crown's main witness, Freda Stark, the Mareos' marriage was all but over: page 17

After the play [The Duchess of Danzig] finished we had a party out at Dixieland [on 13 October 1934]… It wasn't a very pleasant evening. We left before it was finished. — I mean Thelma and I left. We went home — to No. 1 Tenterden Av. When we got there we went to bed. In Thelma's room. I was staying there for the weekend. I remember the accused coming home — about an hour after us. Mrs Mareo and I were in bed when he came home. He was very drunk. He burst the door open. He came in and swore at Thelma. He said 'You bitch, you have insulted me in public. Here was I looking for my bloody wife and making a b—fool of myself. He told me to get out of bed, and go into Betty's room. I went to get out of bed but Thelma clung onto me. I did go into Betty's room. I was there only a few minutes when I heard a row in the front room. I heard a bang and Thelma came running down the passage to my room with Mr Mareo following her. She was crying, and holding her face. She said to me 'Don't let him get me.' I think Graham came into the room too while she was there and Mr Mareo, but I couldn't be sure. Mareo tried to bring his wife back to her room but she clung onto the bedclothes and wouldn't let go.

Mr Mareo went back into the front room himself and we followed. He said 'Look at you, you dirty drunken bitch. I used to drink tea till I met you. You b— prostitute, get out into the streets where you belong.' Thelma said she would if he would give her back her [savings of] £500 [that Mareo had spent]. He said 'I can't, it will take me two years to pay it back.' He said 'You bought me with your £500.'

Mareo's condition at that time was that he was very hysterical. Graham was there in addition to Mrs Mareo and myself. Graham had to hit him in the chest - like to knock him down on the bed to quieten him. After he had quietened down Graham took him into the next bedroom. I stayed in with Thelma. For about - not more than half an hour. Then Mr Mareo came in and said he was quite all right and wanted to go to sleep. After that I went back to Betty's room and spent the night there. The Mareos were in their own room.²⁰

A few months later, on the Saturday night of 17 February, the Mareos had another argument. Again Thelma and Stark were in bed together when Mareo came home drunk. On this page 18second occasion, however, Eleanor Brownlee, who had been assisting Mareo with several of his musical and theatrical projects, accompanied him. Mareo came into their bedroom and, according to Stark, said

'I'm shot.' 'Eleanor has brought me home.' He meant he was drunk. Mrs Mareo said 'She can't stay the night. You knew Freda was staying here.' Mareo replied 'Oh, she can sleep anywhere.' He then left the room and went to the bathroom. Mrs Mareo and I went out to see Eleanor. We got up and went out to see what Eleanor was doing. She was in the sitting room, in her pyjamas, making up a bed between two chesterfield chairs. There was conversation. While that was going on we heard a bump — out by the bathroom. Thelma went down to the bathroom and we followed. I did not see the accused. I knew he was in the bathroom. Thelma went into the bathroom. She did not stay in there. Mr Mareo told her to get out. He said 'Eleanor can look after me.' Miss Brownlee pushed her way into the bathroom then. Thelma said 'You can't come in.' She said Mr Mareo was undressed. She did go into the bathroom. Mrs Mareo said then 'Oh, well, if that is the case I will leave' and she walked out of the bathroom. She said 'Oh come on, Freda, we won't stay the night here,' so I took her to my place in Prince Street. As she was going out of the door she said 'This is sufficient grounds for a divorce.' She said 'Oh, did you hear her call him Eric?'²¹

The next morning Thelma and Freda returned to the house with a suitcase and the intention of packing the former's possessions, but instead stayed the night. The following day Mareo gave Thelma a letter from Eleanor Brownlee apologising for the events of the previous evening. After reading the letter, Stark testified that Thelma said, 'That doesn't alter the fact. She won't be allowed to come to the house again.'²² Even before this incident, Thelma had chastised her husband for his relations with Brownlee when he had been employed at the St James Theatre. According to Stark, Thelma had objected to 'Eleanor doing Mr Mareo's washing and cleaning out his dressing room at the Theatre… [o]n a number of occasions'.²³ Thus, according page 19to A.H. Johnstone for the Crown, Mareo planned to replace his wife with Eleanor Brownlee:

A very experienced man of the world found a young girl who could be an extremely useful assistant, whose mission in life — at that time, at any rate — seemed to have been to perform every possible kind of service for him, menial or otherwise. He seemed almost to have cast some spell upon her. Her qualifications were similar to those of his own wife. They were both university graduates and they were musicians. Was it not that his own wife was now an encumbrance? And so, at the end of March, we find him [having lost his job at the St James] out of employment, married, an addict to drink, taking veronal every day, £500 of his wife's money spent… His wife was nothing to him sexually or financially.²⁴

One month after the bathroom incident on 20 March a Dr Walton called on Thelma at home because '[s]he was in a highly nervous irritable worried condition' and prescribed her a sedative.²⁵ Four days later Mareo surprised Thelma and Stark in bed for a third time, when, according to the latter,

[a]ll of a sudden he burst in the door and said 'what are you doing?' He seemed in a very excited state and he had been drinking. When he calmed down he said 'Oh, Thelma I want to tell you something.' He said 'Freda, hurry up and go home.' I went home.²⁶

Two days later on the Friday afternoon of 22 March Thelma visited Dr Walton at his consulting rooms. Dr Walton testified that Thelma's 'nervous condition' had deteriorated even further and that in particular '[s]he seemed to be unhappy in her married life. She said that her husband had made to her some unjust charges — untrue charges of some kind of perversion. She denied it'.²⁷ These charges had presumably been made on the third occasion when Mareo had surprised the two women in bed together. In one of his statements to the police, Mareo confessed that 'I did call my wife a Lesbyan [sic] on one occasion when I page 20found my wife in bed with Freda Stark' but he did not specify on which of the three occasions he had made this accusation.²⁸ Soon after this consultation with Dr Walton, Thelma went to visit Mareo at the St James. Stark was also at the theatre and according to her she found Thelma

in a very nervous state and… lying on a couch. She was very very pale and was trembling. Mr Mareo said to me 'Oh, all she needs is a feed'. As she got up to powder her face he wanted to give her a drink of brandy or whisky and she refused it.²⁹

Six days later on 28 March Mareo lost his job at the St James. At about this time his daughter, Betty, left home after having quarrelled with Thelma, and Mareo purchased twenty-five veronal tablets. On 6 April he bought twelve more tablets of veronal followed by a further twenty tablets five days later from another chemist.

At the start of the trial the Crown called a number of witnesses to prove that Thelma had been in good health before the long weekend of her death. Stanley Porter, an insurance agent, testified that when he visited her on the previous Monday Thelma was doing some washing at the end of the verandah in the washhouse and 'seemed in her usual spirits'. Thelma asked Porter 'if I would be going anywhere near the Post Office and if so would I post a letter for her'.³⁰ On the same day a grocer's assistant by the name of Kenneth Bark called at the house in the morning, took a written order from Thelma, and delivered it later that afternoon. Bark delivered another order three days later and on both occasions found Thelma 'in her usual spirits'. Boris Thornton, a butcher's assistant, also saw Thelma 'once or twice' that week and told the court that '[s]he seemed to be in good health, just as usual'. Finally, Hubert Smith, a violinist in Mareo's orchestra, thought that Thelma 'seemed to be in good health' because she was able to climb onto a verandah rail and pick beans.³¹