Brutal Butchery at ‘The Boulder’:

‘The Truth’  Saturday 11 April 1908, Westralia had hardly done ringing with the climax of the Day Dawn murder sensation of Harry Smith  of his crime of murdering his mate Clinton—the hanging only took place three weeks ago—when there occurs a tragedy in the very heart of a thickly populated centre. Boulder City, a cold, cruel murder, the real motive for which may for ever remain a mystery, followed by the self-destruction of the murderer.

There exists at this stage no official evidence that the murder was first committed by the suicide, but on the face of the discoveries made some 22 or 23 hours after the estimated time of the death of the principals in the tragedy, those very logical, conclusions have been arrived at by the investigators.

The Murdered Woman  –  The Principals in the Crimes

Peter Crameri, a well set-up. brawny young man of about 26 years of age, the Victorian born son of the old (and respected) proprietor of the Half Way House Hotel on the Kalgoorlie-Kanowna road. Peter Crameri, a native of Switzerland, has for some five weeks past been resident of house in King street, Boulder, the second dwelling from Lane street. Living with him as paramour under the name and description of “Mrs Peter Crameri, jun” since his original occupancy of the house was Mrs Titmus, an alias of Mrs. Adelia Parolo. It was under the latter name that the woman was filling the post of cook and general servant at Crameri senior’s Half Way Hotel on the Kanowna-road late last year and until January last. The proprietor’s son was kept busy in a job as handy man about the hotel yard and bar and in the fulfillment of one of his duties as wood gatherer and carter to the pub became a somewhat familiar figure to folks driving past the house, and to residents of Kanowna.

The Scene of the Tragedy

There was not a multiplicity of women about the hotel that, in his off-duty hours, when scarcity of customers the passing trade being the only source of revenue upon which the pub existed, threw the domestic servant and the knock about handy man, young Peter, together, it was only in the natural order of things that a friendship should be formed between the pair.  Some passing by lookers in say that Crameri’s son became extravagantly infatuated with the woman “Mrs. Parolo.  Crameri sen. looked with a cold disapproving eye upon the amour. He told his son that he would not countenance his marriage with the woman, and, when Mrs Parolo’s services were dispensed with (the father deeming it wiser to get her out of his son’s way) the son apparently listened to the expressed wishes of his father.

At all events a few weeks ago Peter junior (who left home and secured work on the Ivanhoe mine) visited Peter senior, and asked dad for the funds necessary to enable him to travel to the Nor-West where another son is located. Crameri senior provided the money, but young Peter did not leave the fields and very probably with the funds provided by the father, set up house-keeping in King street, Boulder. Neither young Crameri or Mrs. Parolo were otherwise than temperate when living at the Half Way Hotel and sobriety further appears to have been a feature of their subsequent domestic partnership life. These positive facts will wholly kill any intended pulpit or platform moralising concerning the association of the controlling influence of the cursed drink with the tragedy of Saturday last.

‘The Woman Tempted Me’

Peter Crameri

From the outset, in their residence in their King-street home, Peter Crameri and his “wife” the neighbors identified as “Mrs. Crameri” from the first an apparently lived the simple and happy life.  So far as enquirers have ascertained they did no entertaining in their house, the only callers at which were journeymen tradespeople. More recently however, about five or six weeks ago for the first time, quarreling between the man and the woman became of fairly regular occurrence.

The neighbors however were content to listen, making no effort to ascertain the whys and where fores of the barneys. The inherent curiosity of their sex, however, asserted itself among the women folk of the neighboring dwellings, but they ascertained little or nothing in across-the-fence gossips with “Mrs. Crameri. All that the now murdered woman would vouchsafe in the way of confidences to the neighboring wives, when they talked over the back-yard fences, was that her man would never hit her, that Crameri, was a good man to her. “And yet. remarked the wife of one neighbor. “I know, for I saw them, the poor woman got her black eyes on two or three occasions’. The woman seemed really infatuated with the man. She’d never tell us anything about the squabbles we heard so often of late. Lately she told us that she had ideas of going to her children over in the Eastern States, but that her man said that if she did he would follow her and shoot her.

The Night of the Deed.

The same neighbour, whose remarks were quoted in the previous paragraph, will probably be called upon in the course of the inquest proceedings to furnish her  version of the row heard by her early on  the night of Saturday last. The neighbor, Mrs. McCallum, tells at about 9 o’clock on Saturday night, she heard sounds of quarreling in the Crameri dwelling. The last sounds  distinguishable were four knocks as if a man were hitting a table with a hammer, and it was quite possible that these four noises were the reports of the revolver shots fired by Crameri at the woman at close quarters and at himself. That at least one of the two, or three shots fired by Crameri at his paramour, was dispatched at close quarters, is evidenced by the fact of the back of the woman’s blouse being scorched by the flash of the revolver fire.

The House of the Horror.

The Crameri dwelling is one of four rooms, a weatherboard cottage, with a front veranda, the house being situated some few feet away from the footpath, the block on which it stood being picket fenced. An old dead vine runs along the front of the dwelling, the front windows of which and their green blinds bear the evidence of regular cleaning attention.

The front door of the house opens into a sitting-room, about 10 x 12, which, as were the other three rooms, was found cheaply and sparsely furnished, yet an air of neatness and cleanliness, bespeaking the careful housewife, pervaded the whole dwelling. A made-up sofa was in position under, the sitting-room front window. A fireplace on the south west side of the room separated a second sofa, an improvised couch, from the other. In the centre of the room was a very small table, covered by a cheap cloth, and upon which were only three volumes, an album, a dream book, a songster and a lamp. The remainder of the front room furniture consisted of one chair and a rocking-chair.

Off the sitting room is the bedroom, in which a double bed is the chief article of furniture. Through the doorway the kitchen is reached, and in there everything was spick and span, and scrupulously neat, the air of tidiness strongly attesting that the woman of the house was a housekeeper who took a pride in the cleanly condition of her home. On the kitchen table was found a teapot, cup and saucer, and milk jug, and some slices of bread and butter, providing the suggestion that one or the other of the two occupants of the house had not partaken of the evening meal at the time the neighbor heard the last noises on the Saturday night.

Discovery of the Tragedy.

Had the Crameri’s neighbors, who heard those last eventful noises an Saturday night, promptly reported the incident to the police it is possible that in his or her dying throes either the man or woman might have thrown some light upon the causes of the tragedy. “But” says the neighbor’s wife, “we thought it only just another quarrel between the pair, and took no great notice of it”. Next morning (Sunday), though, we noticed that the back door of the house was wide open and there was such an air of quietness about the place that, remembering the noises of the previous night, we thought then of sending for the police.

Adelia Parola

We would have done so, too, had not our little girl said that she had seen the woman about the back yard of the premises. However, as neither my husband nor myself noticed either Crameri or his wife about all day, and heard no sign of life next door, Mr McCallum went to the Boulder Police Station on Sunday evening, about 7:15 o’clock and reported the row we had heard the previous night. Upon McCallum making his report. Detective Porter and PC Molloy were promptly detailed by Sergeant Kelso to investigate. Their discoveries were of a sickening and revolting nature. Entering by the front door, which was closed, an almost overpowering stench assaulted their olfactory nerves. There, across the improvised sofa, in the corner of the room, with her head upon her left arm, in a kneeling position, lay Crameri’s paramour dead, under her body and on either side of her being an immense accumulation of blood. At the head of the sofa was a milliner’s paper bag in which was a new hat of the Dolly Varden type purchased, it transpires, only the evening previous, at Brennans in Burt street. The marks of revolver bullets were found in the back of the blouse top of the woman’s costume, and her face bore a somewhat peaceful expression. At the foot of the sofa, with his head towards the doorway leading into the kitchen, Crameri was also dead, his throat and face being almost unidentifiable, so covered were they with blood. The revolver with which he had evidently done his paramour to death, and then ended his own life, lay on the floor near his legs. Dr Bridgeford, promptly summoned, could only pronounce the life in both bodies to be quite extinct. The half of the room in which lay the two inanimate bodies resembled shambles. Foul-smelling, putrefying blood covered the sofa and floor under the body, the task of the police officer was a sickly one.

A Theory re the Last Row.

The last quarrel, destined to result so tragically, between Crameri and the woman, probably occurred, where its fatal climax was reached, in the homely little sitting room. Possibly Crameri returned home late to tea. There was discovered an indication that the woman had been, sitting reading at the little table in the front room early in the evening. It is theorised that a struggle between the pair had ended in Crameri firing twice or thrice into the back of the woman at very close quarters and that he then committed suicide with the same revolver.  A suggestion of dramatically sentimental element is imported into the tragedy by reason of the discovery of the last literature perused by the murdered woman. As stated, the books on the sitting-room table included a songster.- The album was just one of the ordinary strongly bound receptacles for photos, and a number of old-fashioned pictures of people, taken to be relatives of the woman, were in it.  The songster was a well-thumbed copy of one of the six penny song book containing the music hall ballads and comic song crazes of the Australian stage old and new. Marked upon by means of a pair of spectacles that song book lay face upwards at the pages giving the words of the hackneyed ballad,

“Ring Down the Curtain, I Can’t Sing To-night”

How closely and with what appreciative sentiment the murdered woman probably read the words of that ballad may be the better realised when it is stated that one letter found among her effects was from a daughter on the New South Wales side, pressing her to return to Sydney and make a home for her children, one of whom was being educated in a convent school in Queensland.

The following are the words of the song,

“Ring Down the Curtain, I Can’t Sing Tonight”:
One evening in a theatre, I happened by chance to stray,
Twas crowded with beauty and fashion,
Who came there to see the new play, A singer stepped forth to amuse us,

When suddenly there came a cry, As a messenger gave him a letter,
He read it, and said with a sigh:
Ring down the curtain, I can’t sing to-night! My heart is breaking!
Amid all this light; My little one’s dying My pride and delight.
So ring down the curtain, I can’t sing to-night.

The clock on the mantel was ticking The moments, as they flew by
O’er a cradle a mother was bending, and praying her child might not die.
But far away at the theater, The thousands who came to the play,
Were silent, though many were weeping As sadly the singer did say:—

Possibly the poor woman had crooned over those lines, and sung them from her heart, thinking of her absent little ones, within an hour previous to the curtain being “rung down” so cruelly and cold bloodily upon her own life.

In a spare room of the kitchen investigations revealed the presence of an apparently new bicycle, a tub half full of water, as if someone had very recently taken a bath in it, and shelves well stocked with meal table edibles, fruit. There were also found in the spare room numerous empty hop-beer bottles while in the kitchen were a number of full bottles of the same beer.  At the back of the dwelling is an outhouse of the lean to description, and in it were found Crameri’s working clothes, and washing utensils.

At the Morgue

The bodies were conveyed to the morgue on Sunday night, the policemen detailed for the work, anything but relishing the duty. The two bodies, the clothing of which was so clotted and soiled by foul smelling blood bore a sickening appearance on the slabs in the morgue. On Monday morning when, in company with the father of Crameri, Crameri senior, a tall stout Swiss of about 60yrs stood outside the morgue for a minute or two upon arriving and then had to go in and identify the bodies of the man and woman on the slabs “Those are they” he said. The Coroner gave an order for their burial, the inquest was adjourned until Tuesday, the 14th inst.

That illicit relations existed between Crameri and his victim there can be no questioning. The poor woman’s maiden name, at least that furnished by herself for the purpose of  banns of marriage between herself and Crameri, read in the Roman Catholic Church at Boulder, by Father O’Gorman, six Sundays back was Bidley Meehan, and she declared the place of the nativity to be West Meath, Ireland. (It was also stated that later on her name was Bidley Titmus and that she left her native land at the age of 16.

The reason why the intended matrimonial alliance between the pair, foreshadow by those banns, was never celebrated, is probably just the missing link in the chain of circumstances leading up to the tragedy, which would also supply the key to the motive for his crimes of murder and suicide. The letters found among the murdered woman’s effects indicate that she was a widow with several children, two of whom reside in Queensland and two in Sydney.

The Fatal Weapon.

Only on the morning of the tragedy did Crameri purchase the revolver with which he shot his paramour and self. He procured it at McKenzie’s store in Kalgoorlie, paying 65shillings in all for the six chambered weapon and a box of cartridges. Tracing his movements the police have discovered that he subsequently called at Sheehan’s grocery in Piesse street Boulder, and, prior to paying Sheehan an account for groceries delivered to his house induced the grocer to credit him with 2shillings  as a set off against a dozen of “fresh eggs” supplied him which were not of prime quality. A sum of £12 odd was found in one of Crameri’s trousers pockets.

The Funeral.

On Tuesday morning early the two bodies were conveyed from, the morgue near Boulder railway station to Green wood’s undertaking establishment, and at 10.30 a.m. the small procession started. The body of the man was in the hearse whilst a coffin-carrying cart was requisitioned for that of the woman. In a cab following were the father of Crameri and a friend, whilst Peter Zappa and another followed in a trap. A large number of people watched the funeral.

Ex Victorian writes: I know the Crameri’s well; they are relatives of Crameri the big produce merchant of Maryborough (Vic.) Peter Crameri, at present hotel keeping on the Kanowna road, was in the same line of business at Chinaman’s Flat near Maryborough,Vic. He was also engaged in wood carting. My experience of the unfortunate son was that he was a quiet, unassuming fellow, hardworking, and one who rarely drank. Toowoomba, where the murdered woman is supposed to have formerly resided, 100 miles from Brisbane, is one of the most important centres of Southern Queensland. It is the centre, of a rich pastoral and agricultural district, carrying a population of some 20,000 people.

Both Adelia Parolo and Peter Crameri are buried in the Boulder cemetery.