Life
Arthur Brown was born in Merinda, Queensland, on 20 May 1912 and moved to Townsville with his parents when he was four. Following the separation of his parents he moved to Melbourne, Victoria with his mother where he remained until he got a drivers licence when he moved back to Townsville and obtained work as a meatpacker. He was exempted from military service in World War II as his job was listed as a Reserved occupation and in 1946 became a maintenance carpenter with the Queensland Department of Public Works where he was known to his workmates as a polite, immaculately dressed man, who ironed knife-edge creases in his work uniforms. He was nicknamed The Scarlet Pimpernel based on the verse from the play as he could be anywhere at any time due to flexible work hours and self supervision.
In 1944 Brown married Hester Porter (Née Andersen) following her divorce and became a stepfather to her three children. According to Hester's older sister Milly, Hester later told her that she was afraid of Brown and that she had caught him molesting a child and was trying to prevent him from being alone with children. Hester once gave a female relative the "prized" lacework she'd inherited from her mother saying that she didn't want "his next lady love to get it". When asked whom she meant, Hester had replied "Charlotte, of course". On 15 May 1978 Hester, by now bedridden with arthritis, died after hitting her head in a fall and Hester’s younger sister Charlotte, who had five children, moved in with Brown. The couple married later that year. Some members of Hester’s family believed Brown had killed her. One relative recalled that Brown wasn't grieving the day Hester died but was "shaking with fright" and looked worried. Brown told family members that he had paid for a post-mortem that found the death to be an accident but investigating police found this to be untrue and believe the family doctor had written out a death certificate without examining the body, which Brown had had cremated.
In 1982 another of Hester's sisters told her parents that Brown had molested her while a small girl after which many more of the Anderson extended family came forward to say they also had been molested. Following legal advice that taking the matter to court could be traumatic for the victims, the incidents became a family secret. It was not entirely secret as an entry in Christine Millier's diary dated 23 January 1991 and produced at his trial in 1999 reads: "Kids and I went for walk to Strand. Arthur Brown drove by and the kids called him "rock spider", shouting it out. Eventually they told me what a rock spider was".
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