Skip to main content
Menu

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

The sensational denouement of the case

The Yarra Boot Trunk Tragedy, 12 January 1899

by Joanna Gilmour, 12 January 2016

Olga Radalyski prison records, on loan from the Public Record Office of Victoria.

Throughout Victoria on 12 January 1899, newspapers were reporting on the sensational conclusion to a grim and sordid murder mystery that had fascinated the community for weeks. The so-called 'Yarra Boot Trunk Tragedy' had unfolded about a week before Christmas 1898, when some neighbourhood boys noticed a wooden box floating in the river at Richmond. The police retrieved the box, which had 'previously been secured with a wire cord... and weighted with a large stone to sink it.' The naked body of young woman - found to have been pregnant when she died - was inside.

With no clues as to the deceased's identity, it was decided that she should be displayed at the Melbourne morgue in the hope that a member of the public might recognise her, or provide information of use to the investigation into her death. Plenty of people thereafter took the opportunity to view the corpse, although whether they did so out of a sense of civic duty is debatable. In one instance, the Age reported that 867 people had visited the morgue over a two-day period in the first week of January 1899 - by which stage the victim had been decapitated and her head preserved in metho so that the remainder of her decomposing body could be buried. 'Every class of the community was represented amongst the callers; every age except the very young, and both sexes', the article stated. Two days later, visitor numbers had spiked to 2000 in one day - not including children, 'of whom there were many'. 'The ostensible object of all these visitors was to try to identify the woman’s face, but it was perfectly evident that most of them went from mere idle motives', the paper opined.

On 12 January, after a month of considering various theories along with legitimate lines of investigation, the police were given the information they needed when a woman named Thekla Dubberke came forward and confessed to being an accessory to the murder. Dubberke, 21 years old, was described as a domestic servant in the employ of Madame Olga Radalyski, a fortune teller and masseuse supposedly of noble Russian origins and the chatelaine of a dubious tenement in Osborne Street, South Yarra. Among the services Radalyski offered from her premises were those for young women 'in trouble' - and it was from one such 'treatment' that the now identified victim, Mabel Ambrose, had died on 14 December. Mabel’s boyfriend and the cause of her trouble, Travice Tod, a local estate agent, had orchestrated the placing of her body in the trunk and its subsequent dumping in the river.

Tod and Radalyski were promptly arrested, tried and found guilty of murder, but then had their death sentences commuted to imprisonment with hard labour. Just as quickly, wax figures of the primary players in the Yarra Boot Trunk Tragedy were exhibited at Kreitmayer’s Waxworks on Bourke Street in a display highlighting 'the dark side of the hidden life of the marvellous city of Melbourne.'

More about the history of the Melbourne morgue.

© National Portrait Gallery 2024
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia

Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

This website comprises and contains copyrighted materials and works. Copyright in all materials and/or works comprising or contained within this website remains with the National Portrait Gallery and other copyright owners as specified.

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. The use of images of works of art reproduced on this website and all other content may be restricted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Requests for a reproduction of a work of art or other content can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

The National Portrait Gallery is an Australian Government Agency