The Unlikely Murders of Caroline Grills

Never was there a less likely killer than Caroline Grills. She was in her 60s when she was finally arrested, and responsible for the deaths of four people.

Her weapon of choice was poison, specifically thallium that was sold at the time as an effective rat killer. Stereotyping may want you to paint her as a scary woman, creepy and unsettling. But she was entirely the opposite.

Grills was a short, rather dumpy, woman known in her family as Aunty Carrie.

Before her conviction, the most that people could tell you about her was that she delighted in visiting her family, in-laws and friends, and plying them with tea, cakes and biscuits. Little did those people know, this was the vehicle for her poison.

The Victims

As far as we can tell, Caroline Grills, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother in her 60s, started killing in 1947. She began with her own stepmother Christine Mickelson aged 87, before taking out two of her relatives by marriage Angelina Thomas and John Lundberg. Grills also murdered her sister-in-law Mary Anne Mickelson.

What stopped her killing spree were the victims that got away, including another sister-in-law, that relative’s daughter, John Downey. It was John who finally brought Grills to justice. He had previously been sick after having Aunty Carrie shower him with tea and cakes, and after reading a story in the newspaper (thallium poisoning at the time was all the rage), he grew suspicious. His own symptoms, including hair loss, blindness and loss of speech, matched the effects of thallium.

Then he saw Caroline Grills slip something into the tea she was bringing him. He managed to slip a sample of the tea away, and took it to the police to be tested. At the time, thallium was almost untraceable, and was a preferred method of killing that had gripped the area. The police were able to find thallium in the tea, and this prompted them to test other members of the family who had died after suffering from similar ailments to John Downey.

Arrest And Trial

Caroline Grills was arrested and taken to trial. The jury took less than 15 minutes to decide her fate, sentencing her to die on the 15th of October 1953. In the end, they did this only on the attempted murder charges, as her other victims could not be properly tested for thallium, and were ultimately weakening the case. Still, it seemed she would pay for her crimes. Then, Grills’ sentence was commuted to life in prison, and she died at Sydney’s Long Bay prison on the 6th of October 1960, less than seven years after her trial.

Why?

So why did this little old woman, later known by the inmates of Sydney’s Long Bay prison as Aunt Thally after her preferred killing method, decide to murder four of her family members? What drove her to the point of no return, where she actively targeted those close to her for death?

We may never know.

What we can tell you is that Caroline Grills seemed to have a life not so dissimilar from many people at the time. She married around the time she was 18, and had five sons and a daughter with her husband, Richard William Grills. Two of her sons tragically died. She inherited a house from her father, and in her later years, was known to frequently visit friends and family, always bringing tea and cakes to share. Witnesses at her trial later noted that Grills always seemed particularly eager to bring drinks and food with her, and was known to volunteer to help with food preparation for events and celebrations.

During her trial, Grills made many people in the court uncomfortable. She appeared in two minds about the charges laid against her. At one moment, she claimed the police had pressured her relations to convict her, and that she was innocent. She said that she ‘helped to life, not kill’. Yet at the same time, she occasionally bursts into fits of uncontrollable laughter, which led the courts to label her as a malevolent killer.

There are so many mysteries surrounding the life of Caroline Grills, and at this point, it seems answers are ever distant. This disquieting case rippled throughout Sydney’s social circles at the time as people struggled to guess whether it was anger, revenge or even envy that had pushed Aunty Carrie to kill.

Without the killings, she was everything a matronly figure might be — small, dumpy, and with a passion for tea and cakes.

Do you know of a case similar to the murders of Caroline Grills?