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Psycho
at his bedside—whereas a decade earlier, Jon George Rallo, the Hamilton city hall supervisor who in 1976 murdered his wife and children, had used
Torso,
the book about the Dick murders, as a how-to-do-it manual. The mutilated body of Sandra Rallo was found wrapped in garbage bags in the Welland Canal; her daughter, Stephanie, in Jordan Harbour. The body of Jason, 6, has never been discovered.
    In the late 1940s, Evelyn Dick had been accused of murdering her husband by chopping off his head and all four limbs. (The victim’slarge penis was his only remaining appendage, leading to the refrain:
How CouldYou Mrs. Dick?
Local wags answered their own question:
Hard to do.)
She was found guilty of the ghastly crime, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. In the midst of their investigation of the “Torso” murder, the police came upon the perfectly preserved body of a healthy, newborn baby boy encased in cement in a suitcase in Evelyn’s bedroom closet. He had been strangled. She was found guilty of that crime, sent to Kingston Prison for Women, released after twelve years and then vanished into thin air.
    â€œIt’s all so improbable” was Richard Johnston’s summary of the situation. How could Evelyn Dick have become Elizabeth Delamere? How could she have perpetrated such a masquerade? How could Evelyn Dick have had the intellectual capacity to become a famous writer?
    I saw how unsettled he was, but my mind wandered back to the improbable accusation in a recent biography that Graham Greene had once murdered a woman, stuffed her body into a trunk and left the trunk at a railway station in London.
    There is also the exceedingly curious case of Juliet Hulme, which was made into the film,
Heavenly Creatures.
At the age of 15, the frail, tubercular English-born Hulme was sent in 1954 to New Zealand by her parents; they hoped the climate in the Antipodes would improve her health. There, Hulme formed a close friendship with Pauline Parker, whose mother objected to the closeness that developed between the two girls. When the mother took steps to separate them, the two friends brutally murdered the older woman—they hacked her to death in a public park. Hulme, who claimed to be on medication that was mind-altering, was convicted of murder and sent to prison/After that, she disappeared from public view. When the film, based on a true story, appeared forty years later, it was a hit on the art-house circuit. Journalists proceeded to track down the real Hulme. She had become Anne Perry, the highly successful writer of Gothic mysteries, who lived in comparative isolation in the English countryside.
    Hulme had transformed her life experience into fiction. Was it so strange that another supposed killer, Evelyn Dick, had done the same? Delamere wrote of wronged, often overly passive women who, after great struggles, took charge of their lives. All of the heroines in her early novels murder someone.

    Had she been writing about herself? That was Richard’s very justifiable question. What did those narratives reveal, he was asking, about the relationship between art and life? Could repulsive behaviour be the foundation of great writing? Is all art a grand fraud?
    Evelyn Dick was renowned as a very evil woman; Elizabeth Delamere was a very famous writer. What are the connections between the two strands? Or are there any links at all? Perhaps Evelyn Dick was a very damaged but ordinary—not evil—person? Perhaps she became Elizabeth Delamere to compensate herself for the injustices she endured? Despite my close association with her, I am left with many unanswered questions when I think of the supposedly sullied goods that became, in the eyes of the world, golden.
    As I envisioned it, my melancholy task was to sort through Elizabeth’s fragments of autobiography, assemble them in the most appropriate order and then find the best way to make the entire narrative flow smoothly. I hope I