Eugene Falleni (25 July 1875 – 10 June 1938) (also known as Harry Leo Crawford and Jean Ford) was an Italian-Australian transgender man convicted of the 1917 murder of his first wife.
[3] In 1912, after a series of manual jobs in abattoirs, pubs, and in a rubber factory, Falleni entered the employ of a Dr. G. R. C. Clarke in Wahroonga, Northern Sydney,[1] as a general useful and sulky driver.
[10] Ultimately, an open verdict was returned at the inquest[11] and the remains were buried in a coffin marked 'the body of an unknown woman' at Rookwood Cemetery.
[14] They married at Canterbury in September 1919, with Falleni giving his name as Harry Leo Crawford, his place of birth as Scotland, and his occupation as mechanical engineer.
[15] In 1920, he visited his aunt[15] and reported that upon returning from a holiday weekend and discovering that his mother was missing, Falleni took him to The Gap, a notorious suicide spot, where he threw stones off the cliff and tried to entice the boy closer to the edge.
At night, about a week later, Falleni took him to scrub land near Manning Road, Double Bay, and asked him to dig a hole.
[18] Birkett's remains were exhumed,[19] but a second post-mortem, including x-rays, did not reveal any new information and her body was released to her family for burial at Woronora.
[23] The Government Medical Officer, Dr Palmer, repeated his testimony from the post-mortem that he believed the deceased died of burns and was alive when the fire began, due to blistering on the skin, but he could not say if she was conscious or not.
[24] Another witness supported the son's evidence that Falleni, who couldn't read or write, had asked others to look for mentions of a murder in the newspapers in the weeks after Birkett's disappearance.
[24] The prosecutor was given permission to treat Falleni's daughter Josephine as a hostile witness and submitted her earlier sworn statement to police as evidence: "I first remember my mother when about seven years of age.
Mrs. de Angelis died when I was about 12 years of age, and my mother took me to a little confectionery shop in Balmain, kept by a Mrs. Birkett, who had a son named Harry.
[2] A few days after the committal hearing, the magistrate, Mr. Gale, was criticised in a Sydney newspaper for personally escorting into the courtroom, and providing 'box seats' for, a popular actor and actress.
[27] At Falleni's trial for murder at Darlinghurst courthouse in October 1920, the ‘Man-Woman case’ created a press sensation, with the accused appearing in the dock first in a man's suit and then in women's clothes.
[1] The Crown's case followed the evidence presented at the committal, although the prosecutor was reticent when 'referring to the relations between the accused and the deceased' because 'there were some matters to which he did not care to refer to in the presence of women'.
[28] He was rebuked by the presiding Chief Justice, Sir William Cullen, who responded that 'if women came to a criminal court they must not be considered for a moment'.
[28] The prosecutor presented a dildo found in a search of Falleni and Lizzie's home in Stanmore, as evidence that he was 'practical in deceipt' about his gender.
"[32][33] In mid-October, Falleni lodged an appeal against the conviction,[34] the basis of which was: "...that the jury's verdict was against evidence, that the evidence tendered by the Crown was weak and merely circumstantial; that the case against the accused set up by the Crown was destroyed by the evidence of the Crown's medical witnesses; that the identification of the appellant with some person alleged by the Crown to have been seen in the neighbourhood of the place where a charred body was found was unsatisfactory, and that owing to nervous prostration at the trial, the appellant was physically unable to make a statement of facts, which would have answered the circumstantial evidence..."[35]The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the case finding that if the original jury 'came to the conclusion that the accused was the person who had brought about the death of the woman, no matter by what means, it was justified in finding a verdict of guilty'.
[36] Falleni's sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life[37] but the matter of his gender identity and the supposed deception of it was made much of in the popular press, which portrayed him as a monster and a pervert.
In February 1931, reportedly following an hour-long visit with the prisoner, Minister for Justice Joe Lamaro granted Falleni his freedom on the basis that he was nearly sixty years old and 'not of robust health'.
[39] Questions were again raised by the press about the case, as there was no certainty as to the body being Birkett's, the skull fractures and the effect of the fire, the possibility of poison and the lack of 'definite evidence that Falleni had taken the woman's life'.
[43] Falleni's funeral notice was announced under his final name and he was buried in the Church of England section of Rookwood Cemetery.
[44] In the intervening years, after the publication by the press and popular crime writers of a large amount of speculation and various contradictory accounts of his life (many of them propagated by Falleni himself, who had grown up believing that impersonating a man was a criminal offence), the case was largely forgotten until the appearance of a detailed biography of Falleni, titled Eugenia: A Man, was written by Suzanne Falkiner in 1988, after which his story was taken up in Australia by a number of artists, playwrights and short film makers, museum and photography curators, and academics with an interest in gender studies.
A play based on the life of Falleni by New Zealand playwright Lorae Parry premiered in the US at the State University of New York at New Paltz on 1 March 2012.