by James Morton
The prisoners and their witnesses are all people of a very inferior type. One is living in adultery. They are mixed up with pony racing, a thing defined in this court as being attended by thieves, spielers and fools where fools think they might make money.
He then added:
If the defence is right it kills the Crown case; if it is willfully untrue then the only conclusion can be that the prisoners are guilty and these witnesses have come to court to commit perjury. If you are satisfied of the prisoners’ guilt you should say so. If not you should equally say so. If you believe the story for the defence it is extremely strong. It is for you to decide.
The jury decided they were not guilty.
Angus Murray, born Henry James Donnelly in Adelaide in 1882, joined Taylor’s gang shortly after the Haines murder acquittal. By the time he was twenty-one, not only had he burgled the home of the chief justice, Sir Samuel Way, he had also robbed Government House. At that point, he was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for a series of robberies.
He escaped from the fearsome Yatala Stockade Prison and was not recaptured for a year. However, his success as an escapee was not a reflection of his intelligence, for, after a number of successful burglaries, he wrote to the newspapers with details of how he had executed the jobs, which led to a further sentence. While in prison in Fremantle, he met up with a Robert David Bennett, who was serving a sentence for the rape of a young girl whom he had infected with venereal disease. Most men in prison can make a good case for their innocence and Bennett convinced Murray of his. Murray, on his own release, paid to have Bennett’s claim investigated, and also left money with the Salvation Army to pay his fare to Melbourne, where in 1916 he had teamed up with Taylor.
On 18 September the next year, Murray, Bennett and Taylor robbed the Middle Park branch of the ES&A Bank. Murray was to enter the bank, while Taylor was the observer and organiser. In theory, it was to be an easy raid.
The bank teller was the only person on the premises and Murray, wearing a large pair of motorcycle goggles as a disguise, ordered him to lie on the floor. He bound and gagged him, and was rifling through the safe when a messenger from another bank arrived. The messenger knocked and, getting no reply, looked through the letterbox. He then ran off to find a telephone to call the police. Taylor had left a horse and cart at the rear of the bank to take Murray to a waiting car that Bennett was driving. The next day, the car was found abandoned in Albury, and the police caught Murray and Bennett in the local post office, where Murray was in the process of posting £480 to Sydney. Naturally, Taylor was never charged.
The trial judge said he regretted he was unable to declare the men habitual criminals, as their previous offences had not been dealt with by the Victorian courts, but he was able to achieve the same end by ordering their detention in a reformatory. The sentence would be fifteen years’ hard labour, with subsequent detention in a reformatory at the governor’s pleasure. He hoped it would be many years before they were at liberty, as surely no government would be so foolish as to let them out, as the Western Australian government had done with Bennett.
Bennett served most of his term but Murray’s confidence in him was sadly misplaced. After his release, Bennett was hanged on 27 September 1932 for the rape of a 4-year-old girl he had lured into a disused house. The last person allowed to make a speech from the Victorian gallows, Bennett spoke for nine minutes. Meanwhile, Murray had had additional troubles of his own.
In the winter of 1923 Taylor decided it was time for the release of his old friend Angus Murray, then in Geelong Gaol. He set about planning his escape and on 24 August, Murray made his break. A rope with a hook, as well as a fretsaw and some money, had been smuggled into the prison, and Murray cut through the bars of his cell and hooked the rope to the outside wall. As he scaled it, he touched an alarm wire. Nevertheless, he managed to get away and, as the Victoria Police Gazette reported, was then, carrying a travelling rug and a small brown case, on his way to a safe house. The police thought he would return to Melbourne and roadblocks were set up, but instead he remained at Geelong for a week before he was driven to the city.
Although Taylor lived for a number of years after it, the robbery of the manager of the Commercial Bank in Glenferrie six weeks later marked the beginning of the end of his career. Murray had been at large for less than two months when, on 8 October, he and the lame Richard Buckley robbed Thomas Berriman as he followed his usual Monday routine of taking a bag of notes to the Glenferrie railway station, to catch the 11.13 to Melbourne. The previous May, two bank clerks had been peppered and threatened with a pistol in Spencer Street, and thieves had made off with £2750. Now Berriman carried a gun.
Taylor’s plan was simple. Berriman would be attacked as he walked to the platform. The bag, together with any gun he was carrying, would be snatched, and Murray and Buckley would jump into the waiting car. The driver was to be Taylor but, when it came to it, our hero preferred to skulk outside the police headquarters in Russell Street, so setting up a cast-iron alibi. Buckley, now sixty years old, was still on parole from the Trades Hall sentence. As Berriman came down the ramp, Buckley asked him if he could carry his bag, which contained more than £1850, and Berriman replied, ‘No thank you, old man, I can carry it myself.’
When Buckley then tried to take his bag from him, the brave, if foolish, Berriman refused to hand it over and was promptly shot. Murray, wearing a grey suit and a yellow fedora, helped Buckley as he limped along to the getaway car, from time to time turning and waving his revolver at pursuers.
Two days after the robbery, two women telephoned the police to say they had seen two men burning a briefcase in a yard at 443 Barkly Street, St Kilda. In the early hours of 11 October, the police broke through the doors of the five-roomed detached cottage. When they called out, ‘Hands up,’ Murray replied, ‘They are up.’ Taylor was in bed with his girlfriend, Ida Pender, but of Buckley there was no trace. It was thought that he had been staying with Taylor, but that night he had been out ‘tomcatting’, and on his return, seeing the police, he disappeared.
Berriman had been taken to a private hospital, where he died at 8.45 a.m. on 21 October 1923. The surgeon had not been able to locate the bullet to remove it. As he lay in bed, he positively identified Buckley as the gunman from a photograph and Murray as being with him. The coroner returned a verdict of wilful murder against both and, perhaps somewhat speculatively, a charge of accessory before the fact for Taylor. The trial was scheduled for November but Murray wanted an adjournment to February, with which the police were happy because they thought it would give them more time to find Buckley.
On 11 November Taylor was granted bail with two sureties of £500 and went to live at the Queensland Hotel, Bourke Street. He did at least have the courtesy to try to assist his former employee. Almost immediately after his arrest, he had attempted to have Murray rescued from prison and now, out and about himself, he tried again, on 31 January 1924. This time, a warder, who they had planned to bribe with an offer of £250 and a £7 a week pension if he should be dismissed, told the police of the approach. In turn, they seized a car outside the prison, arrested the four men in it, including Taylor’s brother Thomas, and confiscated a rope ladder. There were, in any case, suggestions that Taylor was not being wholly altruistic in his efforts to free Murray—it was thought he might crack and divulge details of the Melbourne underworld. Truth, for one, thought it was rather fortunate for Murray that the escape attempt had failed.
The trial was a foregone conclusion. The prosecution alleged that the information about how easy it was to rob the bank came from a former employee who had met Murray in prison and, although Murray denied it, there is no doubt it counted against him. After retiring for an hour and a half, the jury returned a verdict of murder, and Murray was sentenced to death on 22 February 1924. His appeal was heard before the full court on 6 March, with the trial judge, Mr Justice Mann, sitting as one of the judges. ‘When Death’s Wings Fluttered Over Gloom of Criminal C
ourt’, headlined the Truth when it had previewed the trial. Now the wings flapped furiously. Meanwhile the evidence—as opposed to suspicion—against Taylor was very thin indeed and really relied on the fact the pair had stayed in his home. On 3 March the charge against him of being an accessory was withdrawn.
On 5 June 1924 all the men found in the car outside the prison were acquitted of conspiring to release Murray, and Taylor was found not guilty of harbouring him. In the witness box he had given a virtuoso performance, claiming the police were hounding him:
I receive no credit for my good deeds to say nothing of the charitable institutions I have assisted and the woman I tried to save recently and the Soldier Boys I got jobs for….
And so on, ad nauseam.
A fortnight before his execution, Murray gave a statement to a news paper:
I want to let people know, and especially my relatives in South Australia, and those who knew me as a boy, that I am not guilty of the crime for which I have been sentenced. Tell them that, although I have been a pretty bad lot, goodness only knows, I have never committed murder, nor sanctioned murder. I did not shoot Berriman, nor was I near the place when he was shot. I was wrongfully convicted. Some witnesses at the trial convinced themselves that they had seen me at the house in St. Kilda, and afterwards at Glenferrie, but they just convinced themselves, and we know that people can do that. From the time I escaped from the Geelong Gaol I never left St Kilda except for a fortnight I put in at Port Melbourne. I used to go down on the beach pretty well every day, and would read a book or play with the children there. Some of the newspapers have really convicted me by the way in which they have created feeling against me. I tell you I was astounded when the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, with not even a recommendation to mercy. How different it was with the Pearce [sic] Brothers and those connected with the Trades Hall shooting. Mr. Gorman, my solicitor, pointed out in the court that in no case that he could find had a man in company with another, as I was said to be, received the full penalty of the law, when that man did not commit the murder. Mr. Gorman did all he could for me, but it made no difference.
Here I am, my life is fast drawing to an end. I have but thirteen days to live. Sometimes I hear the clanging of the clocks, and it sounds to me like the hammers of death, but I intend to face my fate bravely and keeping a-smiling. What else can a man do? At night I hear the tramp of warders’ feet. I like to see those who know me. It brightens up the day; but I have had to stop the visits of some women friends. They weep, and I don’t like that. Colonel Albiston of the Salvation Army, sees me frequently. He is a good friend to me. Sometimes I think of old days in Adelaide, when life was full of hope. Alas, they are gone. The turning point in my career was when as a boy I was arrested in Adelaide and sentenced for housebreaking. Among those whose houses were robbed, you remember, was the late Chief Justice (Sir Samuel Way). I got a taste of prison life then that rankled ever after. I couldn’t go straight after that. Why should I expect mercy now? I have exposed the penal system on two occasions, and they have remembered me for that.
I have only a few days more left of me of air and light and food and sensation, all that goes to make up life. Then I will be no more. On the shadow of the scaffold I want to say good-bye to all my friends. These are my parting words:—I am not guilty.
Taylor and anti-hanging groups tried to organise a reprieve for Murray, and a petition with some 70 000 signatures was presented. A march was organised in which Taylor drove in an open car, graciously receiving the tributes of the crowd, who respectfully doffed their caps. He was with Ida Pender and their baby. Truth reported that he provided his handkerchief for use as a nappy.
None of it did Murray any good, including a last-ditch attempt to show that he had a child who was a ‘congenital idiot’, and that his father, uncle and an aunt had all committed suicide, which the author ities did not believe added up to his being of unsound mind. In the death cell, he wrote to the man—certainly not Taylor—who had financed his appeal, apologising for presuming on him. When he broke his dentures, the prison doctor, Clarence Godfrey, offered to make him a replacement set as a matter of urgency but, according to Truth, he declined, saying, ‘Doctor, do you really think it worthwhile?’
He was hanged on 14 April 1924. Earlier, Truth had been at its sanctimonious best:
In the Great Beyond there is a whole army of men who have gone forth from the earth through the gibbet and the gallows. Angus Murray will not lack for company in this land.
Now it thought he had been game:
So he died
Give him his due
Poor, wretched, wayward, careless, dangerous criminal
Angus Murray knew how to die.
As for Richard Buckley, he was in smoke and remained there. Some thought this might be permanent but over the years there were reported sightings of him, now known as the Grey Ghost, in the United States, in Europe and in other Australian states. One story had him dying in London under the name of Henry Freeman, an early alias. In fact, he never travelled very far. When he was finally arrested, in 1930, it was found he had been living in Richmond and then Collingwood, before moving to Bowen Street, Ascot Vale, with his granddaughter, Pat, taking occasional nightly exercise, dressed as a woman.
There was now a Labor government in office and Buckley’s death sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. He was released in 1946, suffering from dropsy and not expected to survive more than a few months. Like so many other early-released criminals, Buckley found life on the outside much healthier, and surprised everyone by not dying until 15 September 1953, aged eighty-nine.
Between the Wars
6
The Kerry-born Irish robber Hugh Martin, highly regarded by his contemporaries, arrived in Australia in 1926. He had a false passport and was possibly on the run from IRA informers.
Apparently without any convictions in Ireland, he first worked hold-ups in Sydney, including, on 10 August 1930, a bus in Camperdown on which a plainclothes policeman was said to have been a passenger. From April to October that year, there were more than forty armed hold-ups in the city; not all of these could have been Martin’s work but a good number of them were laid at his door. The bus hold-ups generally took place on the last run of the day or, conversely, early in the morning. The stolen sums seem negligible by today’s standards but, given a working man’s weekly wage was around £3, they provided a more-than-adequate living for the robbers. Often, Martin did the jobs in his shirtsleeves and returned to the scene to mingle with the gawpers. Then, late in 1931, he moved to Melbourne.
Around 9 p.m. on 20 November that year, he led a team that attacked Roy Fitzpatrick, the manager of the Swanston branch of G J Coles & Co, when he, along with two assistants and Plainclothes Constable Charles Derham acting as an escort were taking £980 to the bank. They were about to get into their car in Flinders Lane when the ambush took place. In the melee, Derham was shot twice in the head and, although he survived, lost the sight in one eye. It was, said Sergeant Ripper with only a smidgin of hyperbole as he outlined the case for the prosecution at the committal proceedings:
A carefully planned and premeditated crime, revealing an utter disregard for human life, which was probably unparalleled in the history of Australia.
Ned Kelly, where are you?
The police had quickly rounded up some of the usual suspects, including James Adams, known as ‘Snowy Lancaster’. But there was no sign of Martin, who had actually gone back to Sydney before returning to Melbourne. Martin had intended to hold up the Black Maria and release his colleagues, but when he approached the vehicle, he saw armed police surrounding it. On 31 December he was filling his car with petrol at the Strathfield service station, having again returned to Sydney, when he was arrested, an informer having dobbed him in. Martin was a walking armoury, wearing a belt with two fully loaded pistols, and with a small Colt revolver, also fully loaded, in his trouser pocket. A fourth gun was found in his overcoat. When his lodgings wer
e searched, another revolver and a rifle were found.
Finally, seven men—Martin, Adams, James Scott, Harold Williams (alias Hobbs), Lawrence Stanway and the Brewster brothers, Robert and William—were charged. Martin was charged with four hold-ups in Melbourne, ‘covering a period of several months’.
Committal proceedings were heard at the end of January 1932 and a 13-year-old newsboy, Joseph McGregor, told the magistrate that he had seen Adams with a pistol, standing over Derham. Stanway was also pointing a pistol at the officer, and Williams had three men bailed up against a wall. He saw Williams take a leather bag, Adams fire a shot at Derham, and the three men jump into a waiting car. Under cross-examination, he denied he had been told he would get a share of the reward money and a trip in return for his evidence.
Asked how he came to identify the men, he said he had picked Stanway out of a book of photographs of criminals. When it was pointed out that Stanway was not in the book, McGregor, who admitted he had made a mistake and that it was Adams, then burst into tears and fainted. He was carried out of court without finishing giving his evidence. A second newsboy, Stanley George, pointed out Robert Brewster, Stanway and Williams as the three men he had seen after Constable Derham was shot.
The result was not an unmitigated triumph for the prosecution. The jury acquitted the Brewster brothers and Scott, and disagreed over Lawrence Stanway, convicting Adams, Williams and Martin. On 11 April 1932 the three were each sentenced to twenty years and fifteen lashes. Martin’s appeal, in which he said that his co-defendant Harold Williams was not involved in the crime, was dismissed.