by James Morton
The youths said that Bonke had been training for a boxing match and the tracks were made when they went for a training run together. Convicted but with a recommendation for leniency by the jury, Gordon received a year and Bonke, who had previous convictions, two years. The credit for the expert tracking and convictions went to Virgo, rather than Wiltshire.
Between 28 and 30 May 1935 the Great Ghan Robbery took place, when 34 pounds of gold disappeared from an unwatched, elderly safe in the brake van of the Northern Express, travelling between Alice Springs and Quorn in the Flinders Ranges. The major portion of the gold consignment was from the Tennant Creek Granites, Tanami and Winneke mines, and had been delivered to Alice Springs by car the previous Sunday.
There was speculation about insiders being responsible, using a piece of wire and then a duplicate key to open the safe. Another safe in another carriage, which was guarded and carried £2500, was untouched. Detectives were immediately sent up from Adelaide but, apart from going along with the duplicate key theory, they made no progress whatsoever. No arrests were made, nor was any gold recovered. It did, however, lead the police to comment that if police armed guards were put on the trains, this sort of robbery would soon end. This time, someone had to suffer though, and the company fined one train guard 10 shillings and another 15 shillings for carelessness.
This was the third large robbery from a mail train on this line. In December 1926 £5000 of the Queensland National Bank’s money was stolen. In March 1931 a parcel containing £1000, consigned from the Townsville branch of the Queensland National Bank to the Cloncurry branch, was removed from a mail bag between Townsville and Cloncurry. It was thought that James Short had masterminded both robberies.
In 1935 the hotel ‘barber’ Herbert Kopit, also known as Colbert after his Egyptian father had deserted him and his mother, served a six-month sentence in Queensland. On 2 April the next year, in what became known as ‘The Horror on the Rocky Mail’, he climbed several steps in the criminal pantheon.
In March he had stolen an all-lines first-class railway pass and was placed in a sleeping compartment on the Bundaberg–Brisbane mail train. His fellow passengers, Harold Edward Speering and Frank Costello, were already asleep when Kopit boarded. When the next morning the conductor, Thomas Boys, looked in as the train approached Brisbane, he found Kopit trying to steal from them. Both woke up, and Kopit killed them with a tyre lever and then bashed Boys, who survived but suffered irreversible brain damage.
At the inner-north suburb of Wooloowin, Kopit left the train with all the money he could find and, wearing Speering’s coat and trousers, made his way to Murwillumbah. It was then on to Casino and the train to Sydney, where he stayed at the Doncaster Hotel in Kensington and bought himself some women’s clothes. He then caught the express train to Melbourne.
Three days later Kopit was arrested in Little Collins Street, dressed as a girl in a grey frock and white straw hat. When he had tried to check in to a hotel, he had given his name as Miss Williams but the young desk clerk, Doris, suspicious of the woman’s deep voice, whiskers and hairy hand, thought Kopit might be a sex pervert and had contacted the police.
Kopit was returned to Queensland for his trial. It had been announced he would arrive at the South Brisbane terminus, but instead his police escort removed him at a level crossing at Moorooka, some miles from the city. Several hundred spectators had gone to the South Brisbane station, but even when Kopit failed to appear, they were not convinced they had been cheated and waited patiently for the best part of an hour at the station exits.
A series of remands began, at one of which the handsome and debonair Kopit wore a white carnation in his buttonhole. At his trial, at the end of June, his ingenious if unpromising defence was that he was insane at the time of the killings but immediately afterwards became sane again. His principal witness, Dr Julius Streeter, leader of the Douglas Social Credit Party, had written to offer his services, saying:
The case offers the opportunity of educating at least some of the judiciary at least with regard to scientific determinism and may help on the inevitable conclusion that a very large proportion of ‘criminals’ are manufactured by the defective social and economic system and most are cases for psychological treatment rather than for vindictive punishment.
Streeter told the court that Kopit claimed he had had religion ‘belted into him at school’. He had been in trouble over cruelty to animals: ‘This is a sadistic tendency which Kopit did not seem to understand.’ At the age of fourteen, he had been sent to a reformatory in sight of a lunatic asylum. As a result, so said Streeter, Kopit had had an obsessive fear of insanity:
From our point of view this is not murder but a peculiarity of behaviour which we attempt to account for. As soon as the conductor was struck down his actions in killing the other two men were done in a demented condition. The dementia lasted only from the time he saw the conductor until he killed him.
On the other hand, the government medical officer said that he had examined Kopit a dozen times and could not find symptoms that would indicate insanity.
Unsurprisingly, Streeter’s defence failed, with a wholly unim-pressed, and seemingly ineducable, Mr Justice Macrossan commenting:
The plea of supposed insanity rests on the evidence of Dr Streeter, who wishes to educate me among others. I sincerely hope his form of scientific determinism will never saddle the administration of criminal law in Queensland. Very often students of psychiatry mislead themselves in their zeal to arrive at conclusions not warranted by the facts established.
Macrossan summed up for eighty minutes and, on 26 July, the jury retired for only half that time before convicting Kopit. Asked if he had anything to say, Kopit replied that he wished to thank his counsel and solicitor for what they had done on his behalf, adding, ‘It has been done without any help from me and they have done all they could.’ Sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, he attempted to commit suicide at the beginning of August, cutting his neck and forearm with a broken piece of safety razor. The authorities regarded it as a sham attempt made in an effort to be sent to a mental hospital.
Five years later, Kopit decided to appeal, citing as grounds that he had evidence proving it was impossible for him to have been guilty of the offence, and that the evidence given against him was both irrele vant and inadmissible. He did not want legal aid and would not be calling witnesses. He did, however, want to be present at the hearing. He had not appealed before, he said, because there had been ‘high tension and public agitation’ surrounding his trial. The court rejected his application within ten minutes, saying it was frivolous and vexatious and that he merely wanted a day out of prison.
In April 1942 Truth, which thought he should have been a candidate for the rope, gleefully reported of the man:
His hair is cropped and stubbly; the skin of his face is yellow and lined; his teeth, decayed, have to be often treated by the gaol dentist; his eyes are weak and bleary; he is not over-particular about hygiene; never smiles now, seldom talks … he is sullen, morose, evil tempered, and thoroughly unpopular with his fellow prisoners.
In fact, over the years, Kopit made up garments for other prisoners, taking particular care that his own clothes were well cut, pressed and spotless. In March 1951 he died, aged thirty-nine, in Brisbane General Hospital, to which he had been transferred suffering from acute asthma.
The Brisbane correspondent of the Maryborough Chronicle thought it had been:
A brief but terrible story of a life which started in squalor, and ended in the dread misery of a death without a friendly smile to lighten the dark road of oblivion.
The train conductor, Boys, had died the previous year.
On 28 March 1936 in Queensland, the Eidsvold-Cracow mail car was held up, the target being the £1400 Cracow goldminers payroll that the National Bank of Australia had sent. The driver, Charles Williams, had one passenger, Mrs Violet McDowell, who got out to open a wire gate some 53 miles from Eidsvold. While she was out of the
car, a masked man holding a rifle approached Williams and demanded the pay. He forced Williams out and drove off, leaving him and Mrs McDowell at the gate. As he sped away, he threw her purse out of the car.
John Howard, a 37-year-old assistant engine driver, was arrested in mid-April, when he was seen passing £5 notes with numbers that matched those that had been stolen. The next day, he took detectives to an old post hole in the scrub, where he dug up a treacle tin containing around £1000 in notes.
At the end of the committal proceedings Howard threw in his hand, saying there was nothing he could do and might just as well plead guilty straightaway. On 12 May, when he appeared before Justice Brennan at Rockhampton and was asked if he had anything to say, he replied:
There is very little to say. I did the job all right and it’s no use being sorry now. If I had not been caught I don’t suppose I would be sorry at all. I can only say I will never do anything like this again.
Judge Brennan: Not for a while anyway… In a way it was in keeping with the greatest traditions of such robberies under arms and you took advantage of the occasion when you knew wages were going to Cracow. Had the young driver been a more seasoned man and put up a fight you would probably be here today on a charge of murder.
He then sentenced Howard to seven years.
Mail-train robberies in Queensland, and other states, did not die with the conviction and death of James Short. In 1938, when Henry Loftus and Harry Donaldson took part in the last great American train robbery, attempting to rob Southern Pacific’s Apache Limited and killing brakeman WL Smith in the process, train robberies in Australia were still going strong. On the evening of 31 August 1938 robbers took £3000 from the Mount Isa mines payroll as it was being transported there from Townsville.
When the train arrived at Mount Isa at 7.15 a.m. two mail bags were found to be missing. The locks on the mail van had been changed to locks for which the thieves held the keys and they evidently had plenty of time to carry out their plan. They had carefully cut the string around the neck of the bag under the seal, and then retied it so skilfully after removing the notes that it was not until the string was examined very closely that the cut was discovered. One theory was that two men on horseback had carried out the robbery. It was thought that it occurred after Cloncurry, as the locks on the mail van were apparently intact when the train reached the station there. Those responsible for the robbery evidently knew the Townsville—Mount Isa line, the train’s schedule and the train crew’s duties.
A month later, the guard, Francis Walsh, was arrested but the prosecution case was hopeless. For a start, and finish, there was evidence that the keys were regularly left unattended in the guard’s van. Walsh said he had left the van to hunt down a jumper, and in the October the magistrate refused to commit him for trial. Walsh later sued the detectives for £50, his legal fees, and £2000 general damages, claiming the police had told him they were sorry but they were under instructions to arrest someone and he was that someone. At the end of Walsh’s case, it was submitted that he had failed to show an absence of reasonable cause for the arrest, and his claim was dismissed with costs.
Earlier, in the late 1920s, Sydney had been plagued by an influx of lone Grey Shadows. The name derived from the original robber who wore a long grey coat, but very soon there were a number of Shadows on the scene, including Owen Glyndwr Evans, who was deported to England in 1931 after serving two years for a series of around 100 burglaries. There were also wannabes, such as Herbert Granville, who pleaded guilty to a number of burglaries and left behind a note in a car he had rifled. It read ‘Beware of the lone wolf and the grey shadow’, but no one believed he was the man himself. Another claimant was Clarence Jones, who told one victim, Ethel Molloy, that he was the real thing and the man the police had just arrested was not the Grey Shadow. The magistrate was not impressed. ‘Grey Shadows and Blue Shadows are becoming so common that they are a nuisance to the public,’ he told Jones, sentencing him to three months for stealing a motor car.
Black Shadows were also becoming a menace, and one anonymous Black Shadow bailed up at gunpoint two taxi drivers in quick succession in Leichhardt and Darlinghurst on 8 September 1929. He seems to have run inordinate risks for little reward, since the total haul was £3. What was peculiar was that the robber, who used the same words, ‘Bail up for the Black Shadow,’ in both robberies, wore different coloured clothes for each. It was thought he had an accomplice who drove behind the cabs and provided the change of clothing, which made the proceeds even more risible.
But as one Shadow disappeared, another emerged. In August 1929 a man claiming to be the real Grey Shadow held up Arthur Hunt, the licensee of a Darling Road wine saloon, his wife and a friend, stealing a little under £20. Hunt would later tell the police that the man had boasted, ‘There was not a detective clever enough in Australia to catch him and that he was itching to shoot someone’. If it was indeed the Shadow, he was remarkably indiscreet because he also told Hunt he was a timber worker and was married with four children.
Hunt’s attacker may have been putting down a false trail because the man considered most likely to have been the real Shadow was a 29-year-old salesman, Thomas Herbert Skinner, who was arrested after robbing shopkeeper Richard Woods in Rozelle in early 1930. Chased by the police, he shot one constable in the groin and got away, but was caught after a fingerprint on the lens of a pair of spectacles, dropped after the robbery, was identified as his. Skinner fought it, claiming he had been at the cinema with a Vera Lee and that the whole case against him was a frame-up, but was he sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. Whether he was the real Shadow or whether the fad had run its course, the Shadows faded away into the night.
Another man suspected of being the real Shadow was New South Wales career criminal Joseph Harold Ryan, who in August 1929 was acquitted of beating and robbing 80-year-old Henry Wheale of £27 and another man, James Stewart, of £15. Ryan may not have been the real Shadow but was certainly in the frame for what became known as the Mudgee train robbery.
On 8 April 1930 the Mudgee mail train left Central Station, Sydney, as usual a bullion box in the guard’s van containing a bag with £4600 in cash and around £13 000 in cheques and securities. In the van along with the guard, Albert Squires, was Kenneth Allen, an armed porter acting as an escort. About 11 p.m. the train left Emu Plains station, with Squires closing the door on the platform side and Allen sitting in a corner. It was then two masked men with slouch hats and duster coats entered the van from the opposite door and held up the guards—some reports have Squires being bound and gagged. They then broke open the iron strongbox.
As the train approached the tunnel on the Glenbrook side of Sydney, they slid the strongbox across the floor of the van and threw it off the train through the open door. Then, with the train approaching a speed of 30 miles per hour, they jumped off as it entered the tunnel. Squires had the train stopped as soon as possible but the robbers were long gone. The police at Penrith set out for Glenbrook but it was another hour before the Criminal Investigation Branch officers were informed. A search of the area the next morning produced nothing. The guard’s van was detached from the train and sent back to Sydney to be finger-printed. The bag was not found for another six months, by which time, from a forensic point of view, it had been ruined by water.
Squires and Allen gave as much of a description as they could of the robbers—young, agile and that, from the way they dealt with the box and their escape, they clearly knew what they were doing. At first it was thought no Australians were capable of such a daring robbery and that American criminals were involved. For a time it was even suggested that the D’Autremont brothers, who in 1923 had robbed a train in Oregon, had been responsible. This was always highly improbable, even given lax prison security, for, at the time, the brothers were serving life sentences in America. Others in the frame included the, always suspect, Italians—the guards thought the men had Italian accents—but when it came to it, it seemed to be good old Aust
ralian planning.
Then, on the night of 30 April–1 May 1931, the Canberra mail train was robbed at Queanbeyan and £10,000 was stolen. The Commonwealth Bank had sent the money with an escort to Central, where it was put in a mail bag in the guard’s van. The train stopped at Queanbeyan at 4.15 a.m., the bag and other sacks unloaded and left on the platform for transfer. They were then put on a truck and driven to Canberra, where it was found that the Commonwealth sack was packed with old telephone directories instead of the money. It was clear the bag had been swapped. It had at times been left unattended; for example, when a changeover took place at Goulburn. However, detectives decided that there had been insufficient time for the exchange to take place there and thought it had taken place before the train left Sydney. This time, though, the numbers of the stolen banknotes had been taken.
‘Round up the usual suspects’ may be a cliché but generally the police know that there is only a limited number of people who are capable of committing a sophisticated crime. Remove from consideration those in prison and there is a relatively small pool for detectives to fish in. In addition, there are always a number of dobbers who will pitch in for the reward money, and for immediate or future favours.
Following this philosophy led the police to a farm near Mulgoa belonging to George Morris, known as the Ambling Ape because of his resemblance to boxer Primo Carnera, was dug up and £6000 of the Canberra money was found. But something curious happened. The money was placed on a blanket and counted. It was then left, and when the police returned, there was another hundred in different notes on the blanket. No one ever explained how it got there.