Leigh Straw Libros

Josie de Bray, aka Madam Monnier, aka Marie Louise Monnier, was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. A returned soldier tried to shoot her dead in her brothel in 1917 and her 'bungalow' was at the centre of underworld violence in the 1920s. She returned to France before WWII to visit family and was bombed repeatedly out of homes there and captured by the Germans. She was a prisoner of war and one story has her in a concentration camp. She survived, returned to Perth in 1947 and took up business again in Roe Street, having made a fortune from the rent collected from her brothels while she was a prisoner of war, up until her death in 1953.

In August 1925, Audrey Jacob shot dead her former fiancé, Cyril Gidley, in full view of hundreds of guests at a charity ball in Perth’s Government House. When she was arrested, she still held the gun in her hand. It was a open and shut case of wilful murder—that is until Jacob assigned prosecutor Arthur Haynes to her defence. His ability to play the press and the jury for sympathy would lead to a sensational result. Not only did Jacob escape the gallows, she was found not guilty of Gidley’s murder. Straw, the author of a number of books about notable Australian female criminals, tells a story that is rich with first-hand newspaper accounts from the day.