Out author and former detective Alicia Bennett reopens a vintage Brisbane murder in Death Before Dishonour. Evelyn Hartogh investigates.
Around 4pm on the 10th of January, 1947, workers in the heart of the city heard a woman screaming from the dental and doctor’s surgeries in Albert Street, near Wallace Bishop on the corner of Albert and Adelaide Streets.
The occasional scream was not uncommon in the days when patients were anesthetised with ethyl chloride (a drug that caused people to struggle and thrash their arms and legs before the anesthetic took effect). A general assumption was made that the person screaming was simply undergoing a medical procedure and reacting to the pain.
Nobody investigated the source of the screams, and they all came to regret this dearly. On the 11th of January 1947 the corpse of 19-year-old Bronia Armstrong was discovered in the Albert Street Brisbane Associated Friendly Society (BAFS) offices. In the days that followed this gruesome discovery, locals called the BAFS sign ‘Bronia Armstrong’s Final Struggle’.
Author Alicia Bennett delivers a gripping story reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, another novel based on a real-life murder, which re-invigorated the ‘based on a true story’ genre.
Much like Capote’s cross between journalism and narrative, Bennett’s no-nonsense, yet sensitive and suggestive style allows the reader ample space to ponder the many unanswered questions regarding Bronia Armstrong’s murder and the charging of her boss, Reginald Brown, with her ‘wilful murder’.
During the trial it was alleged Brown had made numerous unsuccessful sexual advances towards Armstrong. The prosecution suggested Brown murdered Bronia Armstrong after he had raped her.
The post-mortem on Armstrong revealed she died a ‘virgin’ with an intact hymen. This is rather unusual considering she had a number of boyfriends and the freedom to spend unsupervised time with them. However, she also had a couple of girlfriends with whom she spent far more unsupervised time (thus it could be suggested that the post-mortem’s conclusion she died a ‘virgin’ only reveals a heterosexual bias in medical reportage of the era).
Brown was the only person who ever suggested Bronia had committed suicide with ethyl chloride. However, the post-mortem concluded that Armstrong died of asphyxia, most likely from someone sitting on her chest and pressing a pillow over her face.
The ethyl chloride atomiser bottle found next to her body was not the cause of her death because no traces of the compound could be found in her body.
Brown also claimed to have been assaulted on the evening in question, although his attackers were never found and his statement to police had been met with much scepticism. Brown’s injuries on his hands and knees (which he claimed were from the assault) were consistent with those a person may have incurred while sitting on someone and suffocating them.
Guilty or not, Brown’s reputation was in tatters and after serving nine days of his sentence, he hung himself in his prison cell, leaving behind a note protesting his innocence.
His suicide brought the murder of young virgin Bronia Armstrong back to the front page and further traumatised the city of Brisbane.
Filled with archival photographs of Brisbane in the 1940s and official police photographs of evidence, Death Before Dishonour offers a far more intriguing insight into criminal investigation than any of the current television murder shows.
Death Before Dishonour by Alicia Bennett, Murder Trails Series Crime Casebook #6 published by Jack Sims (www.murdertrails.com.au ).
Out author and former detective Alicia Bennett reopens a vintage Brisbane murder in Death Before Dishonour. Evelyn Hartogh investigates. 
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