by James Morton
Meanwhile, in London in January 1879, Elliston had appeared before Magistrate Vaughan in Bow Street on a charge of conspiring with Weiberg, with a view to Elliston’s extradition to Victoria to face trial under the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the warrant was defective, which meant that the case could only have been tried at the Old Bailey. Not only would this have been extremely inconvenient but Weiberg had escaped. Sir George Lewis, representing the Victorian Government, withdrew the warrant, and Elliston, who had been living in his home town of Ipswich and had applied to be chief constable there, was discharged. He later sued P & O and received what was described as a ‘handsome settlement’.
Weiberg was not retrieved for five months, by which time he had persuaded a friend, Joseph Pearce, to buy a boat, The Petrel, with a view to taking off to South America. They were hardly out of Port Phillip when she began to leak. She was beached at Queenscliff and the pair made off into the bush. When Pearce returned to his old lodgings, the police questioned him and he gave up Weiberg, who he said was probably in the Waratah Bay area. On 16 May Weiberg was captured near Cape Paterson. Both he and Pearce went on trial for theft, with an alternative charge of receiving. Weiberg went with the story that a bearded stranger had given him the money. The confession he had sworn before a magistrate in October 1878 had been extracted from him by an offer not to prosecute him in return for Weiberg giving evidence against Elliston.
The crowd was very much on Weiberg’s side and when a not guilty verdict was announced, there was great applause. Unfortunately for Weiberg, the foreman of the jury then added the words ‘to the first count’, which was the theft. Both he and Pearce were found guilty on the second count of receiving. Based on the principle that without receivers there would be no thieves, receiving carried a maximum penalty of ten years, and simple theft a maximum of five. In the event, they received five and two years respectively.
After Weiberg’s release, there were reports that he drowned in Waratah Bay when, having left his wife, he was sailing to New Zealand. However, at Port Phillip in late November 1883, the police boarded the cutter Neva, which was owned by Weiberg’s brother, Matthew Olsen, looking for more gold. There was none, but Olsen did have a large number of £10 notes. He assured the police that his brother had not drowned. In December 1893 there was a report that a prospector in Waratah Bay had found Weiberg’s skeleton, but there were other stories he had been seen in Sweden, where he had bought a hotel. In any case, £4000 worth of gold sovereigns was never recovered.
One of the great criminals who flourished in the last decade of the nineteenth century was Augustus Howard; or Gus Everingham, or Charles Vivian Doyle, or George Sims, or a host of other names for a man who led a team of thieves, blackmailers, confidence men, murderers and robbers, two at least of whom spirited gold from the steamship Alameda. Possibly born in England—the American police thought he was the son of a Sydney stonemason—he had a brother, Burton Howard (also known as Brisbane Doyle), who was said to have spent some time in a prison in Samoa. Augustus Howard was certainly in Australia by 1882, when, using the name George Sims, he escaped from Braidwood Gaol in the Southern Tablelands between Canberra and Batemans Bay, leaving behind the only other prisoner, an Aboriginal man.
In 1891, along with James Casey, and going under the name Roger Watson, Howard again escaped from prison, while awaiting trial on forgery and bigamy charges. At the time, he was described as being around twenty-five years, 5 feet 7 inches, with dark brown hair and eyes, a short, thick nose and a full chin, and a light, small moustache. He and Casey had had help, a new rope having been thrown over the 29-foot prison wall either during the night or in the early morning.
In 1892 he served a short sentence in Melbourne for theft. It was then off to America, where he set up a series of long-term confidence tricks, which in the second half of the 1890s included fleecing the Denver businessman Willard Reed Green over non-existent shale sites in New South Wales. It was the usual sort of tale. The pair were to travel together to New South Wales to see the sites but Howard kept putting off the trip. Eventually Green went on his own and found nothing. Unsurprisingly, he took umbrage and began proceedings against Howard.
Meanwhile other gang members James Kelly and Jim ‘Strap’ Murphy had skipped bail in October 1898 to take part in a warehouse robbery in Melbourne. James Kelly robbed the National Bank of New Zealand in Auckland of £250—Kelly and another man then cashed the notes in San Francisco. Members of the Howard gang robbed a wagon belonging to the Anglo-California company in San Francisco and got away with $10 000 in gold. It was then that Howard decided Willard Green should be killed on his way back to America on the SS Alameda, and he gave £5000 to James Casey to murder him and throw him overboard. Casey kept the money and set about another, less dangerous, plan.
In May 1899, on a voyage from Sydney to San Francisco, £5000 worth of gold disappeared from the Alameda. In Sydney, the purser had counted the thirty boxes in which it was stored. The trapdoor to the storeroom was then shut, barred and locked. Seals were put on the locks, and the keys were placed in the ship’s safe. The Alameda sailed on 11 May and landed in Auckland two days later. There, the seals were examined and found to be intact, and it was the same at Honolulu. But two days later, the chief steward wanted some wines and spirits that were kept in the strongroom to prevent the crew getting at them, and found the locks were broken, the gate lock opened, the bar removed and the trapdoor opened. The purser, who was with the steward, found only twenty-nine boxes. The captain, chief officer and chief engineer also did a count but there were still only twenty-nine. When the Alameda landed at San Francisco, detectives were waiting and they made a search of the vessel but could not find the missing box.
There were a number of theories about how the trick had been worked. The purser, Fulcher, on the steamer Mariposa, sister vessel of the Alameda, believed the missing box had never been on board. Another theory was that it had been on board but was carried to the stateroom of a man, Wilson, known to be part of the Howard gang; it was carried off at Honolulu and Wilson then sailed for the East. The police also discovered that the lock on the door of the Alameda‘s strongroom could be replaced without removing the seal, and another suggestion was that gang members had bought a bunch of keys while the boat was docked in Sydney and replaced the lock.
There were also all sorts of stories about Gus Howard himself. He had become ill after his troubles with Green but should recover in a month or so; he was in Canada; an arrest was imminent. Another theory was that he had left San Francisco in 1900. Whichever, if any, of these was true, he never seems to have been caught.
There was one final twist to the Howard story. His daughter Eva, variously known as Nulda Olivia and Magda Petrie, took up with Milton Franklin Andrews, one of a number of people to have been suggested as the author of magicians’ bible The Expert at the Card Table, and certainly a billiards and poker hustler. In 1905 he and Eva, using the name Brush, went to Sydney where he spent some time depriving gamblers of their money with a succession of trick shots and sleights of hand.
They also latched on to William Ellis, variously described in the newspapers as ‘an Australian sportsman’, ‘a horseman’ and ‘a crooked jockey’. Married with three children, he was known as Friday because a pony he either trained or strapped was named Robinson Crusoe. At the end of the couple’s Sydney stay, he went with them back to San Francisco. Whether, as some suggest, he was initially besotted by Nulda, whether they intended to pull off some horseracing or poker swindle, or whether it was a version of the old seduction con the Ginger Game, they attacked him viciously—Andrews had a different version in which Ellis tried to rape Nulda. In another version of the story, the heroic Ellis disarmed the pair after they attacked him one lunchtime while he was eating marmalade, and went to the police. In yet another, they left him for dead and took £1000. When he came to he told the police ‘in his quaint cockney accent’ where they could find Andrews, who was want
ed over the death and robbery of Eugene Bosworth in Connecticut, and the death of Bessie Boulton in a quarrel over Nulda in Colorado.
On 6 November 1905 the police went to McAllister Street, San Francisco, where they found both Nulda and Andrews dead. He had shot her and then turned the gun on himself.
In the early days of the pearling industry, there was the usual illicit trade in stolen gems. Just as a great deal of gold never reached the mine owners’ tables, snide (or fake) pearls never reached the lugger owners’ decks but instead provided a handsome second income for the divers. By 1910 it was estimated that only one in three harvested pearls reached their rightful owners. At the beginning of the twentieth century, filched pearls were traded in the Continental and Roebuck hotels in Broome, and one of the bigger traders was Mark Leibglid, who sometimes described himself as a jeweller. In 1905 Broome was buzzing with rumours of the discovery of a valuable pearl, a rosea pink-tinted one, which came to be known as the ‘Ill-fated Pearl’. It was said to have been lost and it eventually did for Leibglid. His body was found, with a ring on his finger that had been flattened as though he had had a severe blow on the hand. Curiously, his boots were unbuttoned. Early reports claimed that he had been ‘speared by blacks’. It was thought he had been attacked when taking an evening walk on the beach.
After his killing, on 31 August, much was made of his interest in snide pearls but he was generally a popular man, who traded in the ‘Foreign Quarter’. His friend JJ Wilkinson wrote to the Boulder Evening Star, ‘The fact is, sir he did no more than what is being daily done up there and if he went out to see a “stone” he did only what hundreds have done and will do’. Perhaps Leibglid was overgenerous, or perhaps the standard method of pearl buying in Broome was to go late at night to a disused junk moored in the bay.
Quite who devised the scheme to lure Leibglid to the junk, called The Mist, and rob him has never been made wholly clear. Certainly, Charles Hagen, a Norwegian bushman who had once run a billiard saloon in the town, was in need of money. He was unable to repay a loan and had been talking of skipping. Some accounts have him persuading his drinking companion Pablo Marquez, a ‘fly, half sovereign barber’ who had considerable property interests in the area, to help him. In turn, Marquez recruited Simeon Espada, described in the politically incorrect manner of the time as ‘Full blooded Filipino savage and desperado’, who nevertheless described himself as being part of the crew of the Tanikotoko, in whose dinghy Leibglid travelled to The Mist. Other accounts have Espada as a much more prominent player.
In any event, Leibglid was fed stories that the pearl had been found and that he could buy it for around £500. On 31 August the trio had gone with Leibglid in the dinghy to the The Mist, with a view to his buying the pearl. It was his third appointment to do so. On the first occasion, Hagen had failed to appear; and on the second, Espada was late because he had ‘dallied with a Delilah of the coloured bars’. According to the not necessarily wholly reliable Marquez, when Leibglid boarded The Mist, Espada produced a glass stopper from a lemonade bottle, wrapped in a handkerchief, which he said was the pearl. Leibglid had asked, ‘Why do you make a fool of me?’ Espada had then hit him with a slingshot and when he fell in the water, calling for help, jumped in after him and tried to drown him. Hagen and Espada had then battered the unfortunate man, and Hagen had wiped his bloodied hand on his trousers. They tried to drag the body into deep water, but there was a crowd gathering on the beach, so had pulled the dinghy into the mangroves. On the night of the killing, Leibglid’s shop was looted.
The inquest opened on 5 September in Perth, and the coroner excluded the press unless they gave an undertaking not to publish the evidence until after the inquiry had finished. Fremantle detective Harry Mann was sent north and, on 18 September, the first of the trio to be pulled in was Marquez. Under questioning, he stood his ground for some hours but then told Mann that he had been on the boat merely as an interpreter for Espada. He said he had not had any part in killing Leibglid. Indeed, he had been so horrified he was quite prepared to give evidence against the pair, in return for an indemnity against prosecution, and, no, he did not want any reward money.
Although all the counsel for the defence were convinced that had their clients been tried separately there would not have been a case to go to the jury, Mr Justice Burnside ruled they should be tried together. Collectively, the evidence was fairly strong. As Marquez had told the detective, Hagen had blood on his trousers the morning after the murder, something he had explained as being paint. A publican’s wife had heard Hagen and Marquez concocting an alibi. Hagen had also suddenly come into money, which he could not explain. Hagen maintained he had been drunk in a Chinese gambling saloon when Leibglid was killed. However, crucially, he was unable to give a satisfactory explanation of how the bloodstains came to be on his clothes. He claimed he had been lured into a trap by Marquez, who had turned against him when he, Hagen, had given some information to the police.
Marquez more or less stuck to the earlier statement he had made to the police. Espada admitted that he had struck Leibglid, but claimed that both Hagen and Marquez had done the same thing. He said Marquez had told him that he had lost £1000 at gambling and needed money for his wife. Espada said that Marquez had used the slingshot to kill Leibglid. He added that Marquez had told him he had sold to a Japanese man most of the gold that he had taken from Leibglid. He claimed Marquez had also told him, ‘I don’t care. I’ve no relations in this country. Don’t care if I’m dead or not. I killed a man in Hong Kong before, and was not caught. I’m not afraid of anyone in Broome.’
Despite the judge summing up in favour of Hagen, it is easy to see how a jury convicted them all on 21 November. A week later, Marquez made a statement that Hagen had had nothing to do with the murder and that it was another white man who had been involved. The appeals were the first to be heard by Western Australia’s new Supreme Court, sitting in Perth, and were dismissed.
The executions on 14 December were a disaster. The official executioner, Burrowes, who had hanged the last five men to be executed, had died in late 1903. At the January 1904 execution of Ah Hook, a Chinese man convicted of killing a number of men in Carnarvon in a row over a Japanese prostitute, the new executioner had been visibly upset and declined to undertake any more work. Yet another executioner had to be found.
On the scaffold, Hagen, as the white man, was given the privilege of going first and he made a fifteen-minute speech professing his innocence. He blamed his defence lawyer RS Haynes, father of the great 1920s barrister Arthur Haynes, for failing to call, presumably as an alibi, a Chinaman whose name he did not know, and complained that Harry Mann had rigged the case against him, breaking his alibi. He concluded, ‘Not too tight, gentlemen, I am going, goodbye.’
Things went from bad to worse. By the time Espada and Marquez were brought to the scaffold, they were quarrelling. All this thoroughly unnerved the hangman. He failed to properly secure Espada, who now managed to work his hands free, and tried to clutch the rope to haul himself up it. Nor did the hangman notice that Chief Warden Webster, who was acting as his assistant, had his foot on the trapdoor, so that when it opened he fell through, seriously injuring himself. By now, the hangman, who had also put the knot in the rope under Espada’s chin instead of under his ear, was ‘terribly affected and cried like a child’.
In December that year, a diver from Manila, Victor Nabor, was sentenced at the Broome Sessions to three years’ imprisonment for receiving a pearl knowing it to have been stolen. The pearl was found on a lugger and weighed 41 grains. Almost a perfect pearl, Nabor hid it in a coil of rope when the police searched the lugger, and afterwards it was stolen from its hiding place by some other person unknown. It is believed that this was the gem Leibglid had expected to buy the night he was murdered.
The story goes that the pearl then passed into the hands of a Chinaman who committed suicide and then into those of a Rabbi Davis. He drowned when the Koombana went down in a storm off Port Hedland in
March 1912, and so the pearl acquired its nickname. It was never seen again.
Jewey Freeman and Shiner Ryan Raise the Bar
4
In the autumn of 1914 Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman and Ernest Joseph ‘Shiner’ Ryan began to plan what would be one of New South Wales’s most famous crimes—the Eveleigh Railway Workshops robbery, a wages snatch at their factory in Redfern. This would be the first time in Australian criminal history a getaway car was used. Prior to that, escape had been on foot, on a racehorse or with a horse and buggy. In America in 1909 a car had been used in a robbery for the first time in Santa Clara, California, the men having hijacked a car and fled. Members of the public chased the car in their own vehicles, and when it broke down, the robbers were captured. In France, the anarchic Bonnot Gang had used motor cars from 1911 and there had been sporadic use of cars in England. Now it was Australia’s turn.
Both Ryan and Freeman had rich criminal pedigrees. The dark-haired, blue-eyed, 5-foot-4-inch Ryan, robber and safecracker and undoubtedly South Australia’s greatest criminal of the early part of the twentieth century, was born around 1885. Women who found him attractive thought his face glowed; less spiritually, he had body-wide tattoos, including a cross, an anchor, a pierced heart, the word love and a flag. In 1902 in Adelaide he was convicted of larceny, and sentenced to a birching and to being kept in a reformatory until he was eighteen. He escaped within a month but was recaptured at Broken Hill and received three months for vagrancy.