Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  Curiously, in the trial for the George Street robbery, the jury had added a rider, ‘exclusive of actual violence’. Kenslow’s advocacy practice in prison must have continued to stand him in good stead because in March 1932, still acting for himself, he had another three years knocked off his ten. He had argued that he should only have been found guilty of stealing, because robbery was defined as stealing with actual violence, something the jury had specifically excluded. He wanted more of a reduction, saying that because of time served he was only benefitting by two years, but now he had pushed his luck too far. ‘You are very fortunate in not having been sent to gaol for life,’ said Mr Justice Henchman. ‘I cannot understand why the jury brought in a verdict excluding the count of violence.’

  At the beginning of his sentence, Kenslow worked as a tailor but then became the prison’s cook. He was released in 1937, and went to the Truth to tell about the conditions of, and unjust punishments handed out in, Boggo Road. Three other recently released men backed him and the paper demanded a full public enquiry but none ever took place.

  A murder that has never been solved took place in Adelaide on the afternoon of 5 February 1927, when jeweller Captain John Hindmarsh was decoyed to his death in the Grosvenor Residential Hotel. Having been told that SM Dutton, who had booked a room at the hotel, was too ill to come to his shop, Hindmarsh took £180 worth of diamonds to the hotel. He was robbed, gagged and died of asphyxiation. His body was placed under a sheet on the bed and was not discovered until the next morning, when at first it was thought to be Dutton’s.

  Two fraudsmen, Ronald Reynolds and John Baxter, were charged with the murder, mainly on the basis that a torn envelope on which was written ‘S Dutton’ and the room number, 304, was found in their room. The charges were dropped for lack of identification evidence, and instead the pair were charged with, and convicted of, receiving and obtaining goods by false pretences. Each man was sentenced to two years. Reynolds was not pleased and compared the judge with Judge Jeffreys, who had presided over a number of biased trials after the English Civil War. As they left Adelaide Gaol in October 1928, they were arrested again, on additional shopbreaking charges. In 1934 Reynolds hanged himself while serving five years in Yatala. Baxter disappeared from view.

  What was described as the last trial for the crime of robbery under arms—but, almost certainly, was not—took place in Adelaide in 1932. Leonard Conlon and John Patrick Carslake, a pair of Melbourne thieves, robbed George Freer and Mary Donaldson in a street hold-up.

  They both had records going back to September 1925, when, along with George Clifford, they received three years’ imprisonment for housebreaking. They had used a young boy to make fictitious enquiries as to whether a householder was in, and when he reported there was no one at home, they burgled the premises. In January 1928 Conlon was accused of a break-in at Tarlee railway station and using a motor car without the owner’s consent. In 1928 Carslake had served a four-year-eight-month sentence for a smash-and-grab at a jeweller’s in Melbourne. He had originally been sentenced to four years, then appealed and found his sentence increased. In 1930 Conlon went to prison for eighteen months for the theft of a suit. In May 1932 he had undertaken to leave South Australia but had not done so.

  This time, their target was more ambitious. As Freer and Donaldson took a bag containing almost exactly £1000 to the bank, Conlon tried to take it from them. A bystander named Chenoweth immediately tackled him and, getting the worst of the struggle, Conlon called on Carslake, waiting in the car, to shoot the man. His offsider obliged but missed and shot Conlon in the leg.

  Carslake, displaying a fine grasp of semantics, told the police that he had not intended to use the gun to kill, but only to frighten him, adding, ‘I couldn’t shoot a man. I might be a thief but I am not a villain.’

  A week later, Conlon was found under a bed in a farmhouse at Geranium, around 200 kilometres from the city, where he was staying with his girlfriend, Evelyn Symes. Immediately, he did the decent thing, saying she knew nothing about the robbery or the £80 he was found to have with him. ‘She doesn’t even know what you want me for,’ he told the police. Back in Adelaide, he told the court he could not defend himself because of the terrible pain he was suffering. He was transferred to Adelaide Hospital, where a bullet was removed from his leg, and a few days later he was sufficiently recovered to marry Ms Symes, with police officers as witnesses and the bride’s mother watching the ceremony. It was fortunate they had been able to honeymoon in advance, because a few minutes after the marriage, he was whisked off to gaol.

  At the trial in October, Conlon claimed he told the police he had been shot by an Eric Brown following a blue in a card game. As for the money, he had won that on a horse in the Australian Hurdles. Carslake claimed an identification parade had been rigged against him.

  Mr Justice Napier agreed with the jury’s verdict:

  It is obvious you have been rightly found guilty of robbery under arms. It was a crime carefully planned and carried out with great audacity in broad daylight. The serious aspect of these crimes is the facility with which they can be committed by those who are willing to take the risk. It is almost inevitable that one successful crime shall be followed by others unless the court uses the powers entrusted to it by imposing punishment which will discipline others from following the example.

  The pair were sentenced to eight years apiece with hard labour, along with a whipping, which brought remonstration from reform groups. A deputation saw the chief secretary to protest the sentence, particularly the whipping which, said the leader Mr ML Collaton of the Iron Workers Association, was degrading not only to the prisoners but to the man who had to administer it. This was particularly so, he claimed, because it was doubtful whether the judge would be prepared to carry out the whipping personally. This last point was perhaps not his strongest; in many legal practitioners’ experience, many a judge of the day would have been delighted to do so, if permitted. The intervention helped neither man and the whipping sentence stood. The following year Carslake was thought to have developed tuberculosis, and there was another appeal to have the whipping dropped and Carslake removed to hospital. It was unsuccessful. After serving their sentences, they disappeared from view.

  In February 1935 Matthew Walsh, and others, were charged with the murder of elderly Edgar Whitfield during a botched nighttime robbery of £5000 worth of jewels at Caris Bros in Hay Street, Perth. Walsh had put a stranglehold on Whitfield, who lived at the back of the shop and did general cleaning duties, breaking his neck.

  Walsh fled to Melbourne, where he worked as a barman in St Kilda, from where he was extradited in July, stopping in both Adelaide and Kalgoorlie with his escort on the way back. Much of the time he spent playing cards with an offsider jockey, Keith Gill, who was facing a vagrancy charge but who later became a prosecution witness. He and Gill had been depositing large amounts of money in banks and the police alleged it was proceeds from the stolen jewellery. Defended by Arthur Haynes, Walsh was perhaps fortunate to be only convicted of Whitfield’s manslaughter. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was another offsider, Stanley Flynn. A cockatoo, Cyril Thomas Brennan, received ten years. A fourth man, Charles Silverman, or Lazarus, established an alibi that he was playing bowls in Leederville and was acquitted, but sentenced to six years for receiving some of the stolen jewellery.

  A year later Brennan was granted a retrial. This time he was charged again with murder and robbery, but Walsh gave evidence that Brennan had nothing to do with planning the robbery and had refused to take part. Brennan was acquitted of the murder charge and a nolle prosequi was entered on the charge of robbery. But the police were not finished with him and, in September 1936, he was charged with living on the immoral earnings of Pearl Walters, who had been a prosecution witness in the murder trial. Brennan had been seen in a Chinese gambling den and later with Walters at her Roe Street brothel. He claimed he did not know she was a prostitute. The magistrate thought he would be failing in his dut
y if he did not give Brennan six months with hard labour.

  In January 1943 Walsh married in gaol. His bride was a lodging-house keeper who also worked in a milk bar. Described as ‘32, a vivacious brunette’, she was in no mood to discuss matters with a journo who visited her William Street home, telling him, ‘It’s no concern of yours or of anybody else if I have to wait five or 20 years for my husband’s release.’ She had been visiting Walsh from the beginning of his sentence.

  Having avoided a murder charge in Brisbane when his victim unexpectedly survived and then decided not to give evidence, George ‘Spadger’ Bray made his way to South Australia, where he worked as an enforcer for Louis Zammitt, the local two-up king. In 1942 he served a short sentence for a cigarette rort and two months later was in trouble again when, at the Adelaide Police Court, he was given twenty-one days for wilful damage to property. After that, he ran into serious trouble, along with his offsider, 52-year-old Allen George Coffey (alias Bourke, Davies and Costano), both generously described as munitions workers.

  Released from his wilful damage sentence on 9 November, it was less than a fortnight later that Bray and Coffey robbed the wealthy Shepki Kiazim. Armed with tools to jimmy the window, they broke in and took away a huge haul: gold, watches, jewellery, clothing, furs and cash. Both were arrested in early January 1943 and some of the stolen property was recovered. On 6 January both men were charged with robbery with violence and committed to stand trial. The pair also faced an additional robbery with violence charge. This time the loser was shearer William Francis O’Donnell, who was relieved of an assortment of items including (and probably most importantly) a ration book at the former betting shop at 177 Hindley Street where Bray was posing as ‘Mr Fimeri’ and that he was using for gaming, sly-grogging and the Ginger Game. In the first week of April, Bray and Coffey received seven years apiece.

  Where Bray went Coffey was sure to follow, and before the robbery charges, the pair had been arrested on suspicion of robbery–murder, after Horace Heysed, Edward Pate and Alan Davies (who was AWOL on a forged pass) were killed with an axe on 11 December 1941 at the Hindley Street premises, which were then set on fire. The evidence against them was thin. Arnold Patrick Fimeri, described rather grandly as a sportsman and horse owner, told the court he had at one time leased 177 Hindley Street to a relative, Julius, who was a registered bookmaker. When racing ceased during the war, he had allowed Bray to use the premises, provided he kept them clean. And that was about all there was against the men. At the inquest, both Bray and Coffey exercised their right not to give evidence and, despite considerable suspicion, the coroner refused to commit them for trial.

  The Great Train Robbers

  7

  However lax the gold escorts might have been, it was not until 3 June 1926 that a guard was killed. Even then, it was cash rather than gold that 23-year-old bank clerk John Roger Greville was escorting when Melburnian Royston Rennie shot him during a robbery on a Guildford to Perth train.

  The plausible Rennie, whose real name may have been Hope, had arrived in Western Australia on 5 May. He had been brought up in Victoria, where he had been sent to an industrial school, or reformatory, for a minor theft. Telling the staff he was an airline pilot, and using the name TA Hope, he visited the National Bank in the Perth suburb of Maylands on a number of occasions, under the pretence of transferring funds from Melbourne. He knew that a guard escorted money on the train, as he had often travelled on it at the same time as Greville. Coincidentally, he said; reconnoitring the lie of the land, said the prosecution. Three days before the robbery, he obtained a gun.

  On 3 June Rennie joined Greville and 17-year-old Douglas Favas in a compartment on the train, and began talking about aviation. While Favas was looking out of the window, Rennie shot Greville and, when Favas tried to stop him making off with the bag of money, beat the boy unconscious before leaving the train at Perth station, with not only the money but also a watch and chain. He was arrested three days later, travelling east in a first-class sleeping compartment. Detectives found the bank’s money in his suitcase, as well as medals, possibly including either a Military Medal or a Military Cross.

  Rennie gave a series of explanations about the shooting being an accident: how he intended only to frighten Greville; how he had not known there was a bullet in the barrel; and how he had intended to give himself up but, at the last minute, decided to take the train east. He had, he said, only used the false name to save his family back in Victoria embarrassment.

  With Frank Shaw defending him, Rennie more or less ran that defence at the trial before Mr Justice Northmore in July 1926, with the embellishment that he had become obsessed with carrying out the robbery and this had rendered him insane. When his counsel began to cross-examine the arresting officer about the medals found in Rennie’s possession, the prosecutor indicated that if this line of questioning continued, he would want to re-examine the witness, as possession of the medals suggested bravery. The judge indicated he did not think bravery had anything to do with good conduct, but the prosecutor then asked the officer whether there was anything in Rennie’s service record to suggest he had been awarded a military decoration. There was not.

  Insanity was not a defence that, without strong medical evidence to back it up, appealed to the jury, and when it took a mere forty minutes to find him guilty of wilful murder, Rennie collapsed in the dock. He was sentenced to death.

  At the time, the Western Australian public was generally in favour of the death penalty but there was considerable sympathy for him after he claimed that he had joined the Australian Imperial Force, having lied about his age, and been buried in a trench in France when a mine exploded during the war. Truth, which at the time was campaigning against the death penalty, defended him vigorously and withheld his real name for ‘humanitarian reasons’. However, many would have thought Rennie callous in the extreme. On the day he was sentenced, he wrote to the Railway Department asking for a refund of part of his £17 fare to Sydney, saying he should only pay for the section of the journey before his arrest.

  Rennie applied for leave to appeal and Perth’s Daily News now wrote of a beautifully penned, pitifully worded appeal by ‘the young Geelong man who, under the name of Royston Rennie, awaits death at Fremantle gaol, under sentence of having murdered John Rodger Greville’. Blaming one’s lawyers has always been the last resort of the condemned man in death penalty cases, and Rennie declared his wish to give evidence on oath. He said Shaw had stopped him doing this at the trial, so showing the jury ‘only one view of the case’.

  Of the crime itself, he wrote:

  When I took the pistol from my pocket I was naturally excited; and was grasping it very tightly, and when pointing it towards the man I gripped my hands tightly, and in so doing accidentally pulled the trigger. I was stupefied when I saw what had happened. I had intended to strike the man with the money with my clenched fist, and get away, and could easily have done so; but I could not bring myself to do so mean an act.

  Rennie told how he enlisted at sixteen, and was injured when a dugout in which he was sheltering was blown up and a falling beam had hit him. He had suffered from attacks of memory loss at intervals since:

  The last turn I had was while I was at work. I remember nothing from being in my office at Newport until I came to myself on the Karoola coming to Fremantle. I could not communicate with my wife as I did not know where she would be, so I tried to find employment and get back home, but I could not, and was practically destitute! I was worried and nearly frantic about my wife, whom I worship, and decided if I could not get money honestly I would steal it and get home as quickly as possible. My heart and mind have been torn to pieces at the sorrow and misery I have caused Greville’s relatives. I would not cause hurt to anything on earth intentionally.

  Chief Justice Sir Robert McMillan, Mr Justice Draper and the trial judge, Mr Justice Northmore, speedily dealt with his appeal, deciding that Rennie had revealed nothing that would justify their interference an
d that the law must therefore take its course. In any event, the appeal had been lodged outside the statutory time limit.

  In January 1921 the incumbent hangman, 66-year-old James Croucher, had drowned himself in the Swan River, near Bunbury Bridge, with a bag of stones weighing around 40 pounds tied around his neck. He had informed his wife, Minnie, he was going to kill himself and was remorseful that he had not told her about his job before he married her. A new hangman, described as a short, stocky, clean-shaven man in his fifties or sixties who wore no mask, was brought in from the eastern states to do this one job. He hanged Rennie on 2 August 1926.

  Rennie was reported as saying as he was being led to the scaffold, ‘This is the last daylight I will see.’ He refused drugs, and said he was sure ‘his Maker would forgive him his great sin’. His wife, who had visited him in the death cell, had already returned to Victoria.

  In 1928 more than £3000 was stolen from the train to Alice Springs before it had departed from a construction camp north of Oodnadatta, South Australia. Every fortnight, following paydays, Frank Jones, managing director of Wallis, Fogarty Limited, storekeepers at Oodnadatta, acting in his capacity of travelling postmaster, visited the construction camps on the North-South line to collect money from the men to be deposited at the Commonwealth Savings Bank.

  At about nine o’clock on 3 July, after collecting the money and doing business for his firm, Jones joined the train at the 61-mile construction camp. The bag of money was placed on the seat in the travelling compartment of the brake van and was subsequently stolen.

  Mounted police officer William Virgo was assigned a black tracker, Bob Wiltshire, to help him find the loot and the robbers. Within twenty-four hours, Wiltshire and Virgo found two pairs of sandshoe tracks, one from a new pair and the other from an old and worn pair. They followed the tracks along Hamilton Creek, where they found a bag buried in the sand. Also in the creek, Wiltshire pulled out about £1600 from a rabbit warren. He continued along and found a gum tree with marks on its butt. He climbed the tree, put his hand in the hollow and found more money in an oatmeal bag. He then traced the tracks back to a tent occupied by Ray Gordon and Ezra Bonke.