1914 - 1976

Dulcie Markham, born in 1914, was one of Bondi’s most famous criminals. In the 1930s,’40s and ’50s, she was the ‘femme fatale’ of the Sydney–Melbourne underworld, including being part of Sydney’s ‘razor gang’ milieu of organised crime. Reporters were fascinated with both her beauty and her gangster boyfriends and dubbed her “pretty Dulcie” and “the blonde bombshell”. However, because some of her husbands and boyfriends met with a sudden and violent death, she earned the more sinister titles “the Angel of Death” and “the Black Widow”.

She had a long criminal record that included 100 convictions in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. Her crimes included prostitution, vagrancy, consorting, assaulting police and members of the public, keeping a brothel, drunkenness and drunk driving, and she was given many prison sentences.

She was often described as Sydney’s most beautiful and most expensive prostitute. She moved to Bondi during the 1950s and loved it, but violence soon followed, as it’d done for much of her life. In 1955, she had an argument with a male visitor, and he threw her from the top of her block of flats. Despite sustaining fractured ribs, internal injuries and a punctured lung, she kept the underworld’s code of silence and told police she’d fallen down a flight of stairs.

Although some of her partners either died suddenly and violently or inflicted violence on her, Dulcie was ‘third time lucky’. In 1972, she married her third husband, sailor Martin Rooney, and they lived quietly and happily at 12 Moore Street, Bondi.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck only four years after the marriage, in 1976, when Dulcie was 62 and her days as a human headline were long gone. Her bedroom caught on fire, and she died of asphyxiation after falling asleep while smoking. Martin told reporters, “I loved the woman. She was a wonderful housewife and we both wanted to forget the past. She was Mrs Rooney, not pretty Dulcie Markham, and that’s how she’ll be buried.” Her funeral was held at St Patrick's Catholic Church in Bondi, and the eulogy was given by Detective Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell. She was cremated at Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park.

Courtesy the Justice & Police Museum Collection, Sydney Living Museums and the Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.