Nellie Cameron

Nellie Cameron (born Ellen Katherine Kelly; 1910 – 8 November 1953), known as "The Kiss of Death Girl", was a notorious Sydney prostitute in the 1920s and 1930s, who was featured extensively in the 2011 Australian television mini-series Underbelly: Razor.

Cameron was associated with the cocaine-fuelled ravages of the razor gang violence of that era, commonly associated with her contemporaries Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, both criminal entrepreneurs who controlled much of Sydney's illegal sex industry and Sly-grog distribution during that period.

In 1926 Cameron ran away from home,[10] caught a train to the city, seduced a married tram driver, and began living with him in Woolloomooloo.

[11] When Cameron began her career in prostitution in 1926 in Sydney's Surry Hills and Woolloomooloo districts at the age of fifteen, she was a blue-eyed blonde.

[17] Within weeks of Bruhn's death, Cameron began a series of relationships with a successive string of other Sydney criminals: Ernest Lyle Connelly (1903–1969), shot in Womerah Avenue, Kings Cross by rival gunman and future husband, Guido Caletti (or Calletti) in February 1929;[16][18] New Zealand–born housebreaker and standover man Alan Edward (Ted) Pulley, later shot dead by illegal bookmaker Florrie Riley at Wentworth Street, Glebe on 6 March 1937;[16][19] and Francis Donald (Frank) Green, (1902–1956),[20] Caletti's rival for Cameron's affections.

[33] During 1951 Cameron began living with William Francis Donohue (born about 1922), a wharf labourer,[32] at 17 Denham Street, Taylor Square.

After severe illness and suffering from depression, Nellie Cameron committed suicide through gas asphyxiation at her Taylor Square flat on 8 November 1953.

[36][37] Nellie was buried as Ellen Katherine Bourke on 10 November 1953 in the Botany Roman Catholic Cemetery,[38] now known as Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park.

[1] She was survived by her estranged husband Charlie Bourke, her mother, Mrs Lillian Cameron[39] and her adopted daughter, Janice.