The Mutilated Clay Doll

The following Australian crime is not nearly as mysterious as some: it is, officially at least, solved.  However, it has an odd, unsettling air that sets it apart from most murders.

On February 23, 1975, someone walking along Kennett River, near Apollo Bay, made a peculiar discovery--a crudely-fashioned clay figure of a woman was wedged in a tree near the bank of the river.  The doll, which was about 14 inches long,  was missing the lower half of the left arm.  About 15 feet away, washed up on the sand at the mouth of the river, was an equally strange, and far more gruesome discovery: the naked corpse of a young woman.  Her left arm was missing below the elbow.  

"Sydney Morning Herald," February 26, 1975, via Newspapers.com

The autopsy concluded that the dead woman was aged somewhere between 18-25, slim, of medium height, with black hair and blue eyes.  Her arm had been amputated some years before her death.  The body had been in the water for about 24 hours.  Curiously, that was about all that could be determined from the post-mortem.  Although authorities assumed they were dealing with a homicide, the coroner ruled that although he was certain the woman had not drowned, he was unable to say how she had died.

Although one would assume one-armed young women were a rarity in the area, authorities also had a surprisingly hard time learning the victim’s identity.  The motive was an equal puzzle, although the presence of the creepy homemade statuette near the body caused some to surmise that the dead woman had fallen into the hands of some witchcraft cult who used her as a human sacrifice.

In early March, police were finally able to give the corpse a name: she was 16-year-old Sharon Gaye Richardson.  Her mother, who lived in Brisbane, reported her as missing back in 1972.  (As a side note, it was learned Sharon’s arm was missing because she had been a thalidomide baby.)  Three months before her death, Sharon and her young son were in the King’s Cross area, where she worked as a housekeeper.  Later, she and the child moved to Melbourne.  (What became of her son is unclear.  The newspapers reported only that the child “recently returned to Sydney, where he was being looked after.”)

Five weeks before her death, Sharon and an unidentified man moved into a flat on Beach Road, Sandringham.  On February 20, the pair made a “hurried exit” from their flat, taking all their possessions except a few clothes.  On February 26--three days after Sharon’s body was discovered--their car was found at Sydney’s Mascot Airport.

The case remained cold until the summer of 1978, when Sharon’s mysterious boyfriend was finally apprehended: he was 40-year-old chiropractor Ernest William O’Brien, who was living in Sydney, where he had been operating two massage parlors.  The explanation he gave to police for Sharon’s death was as weird as the rest of this case.  According to O’Brien, on February 21, 1975, he found his “de facto wife” in their flat, dead.  She was lying on the bed naked, with her legs tied apart by belts.  He could think of no better way of dealing with this disagreeable situation than by wrapping the body in a bedspread, putting it in the trunk of his car, surrounding it with 12 bags of ice “because it was a hot day,” and dumping the corpse in the sea.

At O’Brien’s trial, the Crown medical experts--in a complete reversal from the initial findings--now stated that Richardson had drowned.  The argument was that during a quarrel, O’Brien had knocked Richardson unconscious.  Thinking that he had killed her, he then threw her into the water, where she died. The jury believed them.  In February 1979 O’Brien was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  As far as I have been able to tell, O’Brien never admitted his guilt.

It is unclear why O’Brien murdered his girlfriend--if, indeed, he did murder her.  The initial speculation that Richardson had been killed as part of some occult ritual had, of course, been long abandoned.  Her death was dismissed as merely a mundane domestic tragedy.

But then, how to explain the clay figurine with the missing arm?...