Quite apart from minor hold-ups—such as the time he organised the bail-up of a poker game and then doublecrossed the victims in the negotiations for the return of their stolen jewellery—the bludger police pimp, thief, putter-up, drug dealer, jury fixer and, for some unaccountable reason, Australia’s ‘favourite larrikin’, Joseph Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor was involved in three, possibly four, robberies that ended up involving murder charges.
A failed jockey—both too heavy and, even for the time, too crooked—Taylor began his criminal career as a member of the Bourke Street Rats, the most famous of Melbourne’s pushes in the early years of the twentieth century. There he was taught pickpocketing, shoplifting and blackmail, until, by 1913, he was moving into bigger, if not always better, things.
For the first of his major jobs, he had a partner from Western Australia. Of a ‘quintette’ named as ‘bad’ by the Perth police in 1903—in reality they were all fairly small time—there was only one, Harold ‘Bush’ Thompson otherwise known as Bairstow, who really made the headlines in the east. After his skirmishes in Western Australia, Thompson travelled to Adelaide, and then gravitated to Melbourne to join up with Taylor.
He was charged with assault and robbery in July 1912, when he and another man, who was never charged, were alleged to have knocked down a Samuel Boland and his friend Dougall McDougall in an alley off Flinders Street. Boland said he and McDougall had been drinking in the Westernport Hotel when Thompson approached them, and that when they left the hotel, he and a second man followed them. Thompson was granted bail after the committal proceedings but fled to Perth, where he was arrested at Goodwood races. Sent back east in September 1912, Napthali H Sonenberg, solicitor of choice for any halfway decent criminal of the time, defended him. At his trial in November, Thompson had an alibi that in the afternoon he had been at the races and was in a billiard hall at the time of the robbery. He was acquitted.
There were much bigger things to come. On 6 January 1913 commercial traveller Arthur Trotter was robbed of £215 and shot dead in the bedroom of his home in George Street in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It was thought he had been drinking in a sly-grog shop and brothel that Taylor’s wife, blonde Dolly Gray, ran, and had been boasting of the money he carried. That evening he was followed home. His wife, Beatrice, told the police:
We saw two men in the room and my husband called out, ‘What’s your game?’ The taller of the two men replied, ‘We want the money.’ My husband said, ‘What money? There’s no money here. This is murder.’ One man said ‘Shoot the—!’ Suddenly my husband jumped out of bed and hit the man who was pointing the revolver at him. The burglar then fired and when my husband fell he said to the other man, ‘Get the — money.’ The smaller man ran to the bed where Mr Trotter had been sleeping and turning over the mattress, he took the money. The other man covered me with a revolver and told me to keep quiet. They then ran away out of a back door.
The taller man of the two was about 5’ 6” in height, of slight build and fairly well made. He wore a brown felt hat. The smaller man was 5’ 4” high and of similar build to his companion. He wore a cap but I cannot distinguish his clothes.
I think I would know the voice of the first man if I heard it again. It was that of a youth just entering manhood.
A week after the robbery, with the police saying they had no clues, the sales of guns had tripled. Householders were buying neat little Belgian guns, meaning that, over time, there would be more weapons on the market for the likes of Taylor.
Western Australian police still regarded Thompson as a relatively minor criminal who was not up to a ‘big job’, but in Adelaide in 1906, he had received a three-month sentence for assaulting the police and his fingerprints had been taken. They were found on a windowsill at Trotter’s home and Thompson was arrested, along with his girlfriend Flossie Harris, in a house in Jones Lane off Little Bourke Street. Thompson was, reported the newspapers, given ‘a vigorous examination’, whatever that may have meant. There was other evidence: he had been seen loitering nearby, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and was known to carry a pistol. Squizzy Taylor and Dolly Gray promptly decamped to Adelaide.
Fingerprinting was still in its infancy worldwide and it had not been until the previous year that the admissibility of fingerprints as evidence in Australia was finally decided. Victoria’s sole fingerprint expert, Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter of the Criminal Investigation Branch, told the court he was certain the print was Thompson’s even though it did not tally with the one taken while he was awaiting trial in South Australia. Although the prosecution had experts from South Australia and New South Wales to back Potter up, Thompson’s counsel, George Maxwell, blew smoke all round the court, asking how Potter could tell the difference between the fingerprint of a Chinaman or of a Mongolian. The jurors were given a magnifying glass and asked to compare the prints themselves. Thompson had done what he could, by rubbing his fingers on a cell wall to smooth the skin and taking a bite out of one finger.
From afar, Squizzy Taylor arranged other matters. Thompson’s girlfriend Flossie, who was at one time suspected of being the smaller person involved in the robbery, alibied him to an extent and Mrs Trotter was no longer so confident in her identification. After retiring for four hours, and to great applause from the public gallery, the jury acquitted Thompson, who was again loudly cheered in the street outside.
He left for New Zealand, where he served a short sentence for theft, and then in August 1913 went to Charters Towers in Queensland, where he was arrested for being an idle person. The charge was withdrawn when he undertook to leave Queensland. He had with him a doll from a Christmas pudding that he claimed was his mascot of twenty years. And so Thompson continued his peripatetic life, with, after returning to Melbourne, ticket snatching at the Easter meeting at Williamstown racecourse in 1914, and being charged with attempted pickpocketing in 1915. He and a James Darcy hid in a crowd returning from the races, removing wallets from people boarding trams.
Perhaps the Western Australian police had been right all along and Thompson was not a big-time crim. On the other hand, over the next decade, Squizzy Taylor, now generally thought to have been the second man in the Trotter robbery, acquired an almost iconic status.
First came the Trades Hall robbery.
EXECUTION OF JACKSON
Melbourne, Jan. 24.
The execution of John Jackson for the murder of Constable David Edward McGrath in October last was carried out at the Melbourne Gaol at 10 o’clock this morning. Jackson, who was shot in the leg in the shooting encounter with the police at the Trades Hall, Carlton, when Constable McGrath was shot dead, limped on to the gallows, and when asked if he had anything to say, exclaimed in loud, firm tones: ‘I only wish to thank the gaol authorities and warders for their kindness to me, one and all.’ In less than twenty seconds Jackson was a dead man. He weighed 10st. 1lb, and was given a drop of 7ft. 11½in., his death being instantaneous. He certainly died bravely. For some time prior to his execution he had been penitent, and took a deep interest in the ministrations of the Rev. Forbes. Jackson was 51 years of age, and leaves a widow and two children for whom he showed the utmost devotion.
This had been John Jackson’s first and last conviction; he was a man the police regarded as a master of his craft and one of the most talented safebreakers of the time. Along with his offsider Edward Parker, better known as Patrick Hegarty, he had been suspected of the June 1907 robbery at the Victoria Mint—when some £1300 of gold was taken—particularly after well-known fence and putter-up Thomas Glanville admitted that he had bought the gold from them. It had been stolen hours after a local businessman, EM Pascoe, had deposited it at the mint. Glanville said that the robbery had been executed with a duplicate key taken from the original supplied by a police constable but the locksmiths said this was impossible. On 13 June Senior Constable Barclay was fined £2 for not taking sufficient care to guard the safe. He had, it appears, failed to lock the door to the office containing it. Glanville had offered to sell Pascoe’s gold back to him at a reduced price but this had been refused. However, in October the government refused to compensate Pascoe. When depositing the gold, he had signed an indemnity absolving the mint for any losses.
In early 1912 Jackson and Hegarty were again arrested, this time for a robbery at the jewellers Webster & Cohen in Little Collins Street. Now, in accordance with the new procedures, on their arrest their fingerprints were taken. On 14 February no evidence was offered against Jackson but Hegarty was not as fortunate. His fingerprint had been found on a ginger beer bottle at the shop. Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter gave evidence that the print matched Hegarty’s. Potter, who claimed to have already examined 29 000 fingerprints, was given a thorough going-over regarding the reliability of his tests.
Hegarty was found guilty, and Judge Johnson sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment, to be followed by detention in a reformatory prison. Hegarty appealed and the chief justice held that, while he believed Potter to be honest, he could not accept that no two people’s imprints could possibly be alike. The other two justices dissented and Hegarty’s conviction was upheld.
In May 1912 Jackson went on trial for a jewellery robbery in January 1905 at Ayres, Henry and Co in Swanston Street. Three safes had been cracked and some watches stolen. On the face of a watch that had been left behind was a thumbprint, which Potter and Inspector Childs, the New South Wales fingerprint expert, said was Jackson’s. However, Jackson, with no previous convictions, produced a magnifying glass for the jury to examine the prints, telling them that he made his money gambling and had never set foot in the shop. He also did well with the judge, who told the jury that they had to be sure that Potter was right about the print. It would, he said, be very hard to convict a man on a print taken seven years earlier. Jackson was acquitted.
His last great success was probably the ‘Eight Hours Day’ robbery at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building. The takings from a union carnival, said to be between £300 and £400, deposited in a safe at the Trades Hall on 26 April 1915, were stolen during the night. The thieves had also helped themselves to biscuits, cheese, wine and stout in the secretary’s office. No charges were brought but it was generally thought that Jackson was involved, and that, with his regular offsider Hegarty doing time, his new helpmate was Richard Buckley.
Quite what induced Jackson to go on the October Trades Hall robbery in which Constable McGrath was shot is a mystery. He should have been comfortably off for the present and he was always the number one suspect in any similar job that went off in the city. He should have called it a day while he was ahead and, indeed, his solicitor Napthali Sonenberg had offered to invest Jackson’s savings in a newsagency for him but he had declined. Perhaps he had come to believe that, at the age of fifty-one, he was untouchable.
This time Jackson’s offsiders were Alexander Ward and, once again, Buckley, who had a long record of violence. Buckley had been sent to the Jika Reformatory at the age of fifteen and from then on it was one sentence after another, until in December 1883 he was sentenced to four years and ordered to have three whippings, one a month in each of the first, third and sixth months of his sentence. This was for a street robbery in which a mattress maker, William Murray, was robbed of 25 shillings. He identified Buckley, then known as Summers, at a very rudimentary identification parade. Buckley called an alibi in the form of a mixed-race prostitute, Emma Thomas (also known as Quin Ding), and a thief, Ah Chong, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, were not believed. Sentencing Buckley, the judge told him:
It is monstrous that respectable persons can not be allowed to walk in the public streets of Melbourne in broad daylight without being assaulted and ill treated. I have to inflict such a punishment as will not only be a warning to you, but will make others tremble.
Buckley had received the whippings before he received a free pardon in January 1885. He was given no compensation and it left him a bitter man. By February 1897 he had eleven previous convictions when he received six years for a post office robbery. In April he received a further sixteen years, to be served consecutively, for another receiving charge and for beating an old man who was the acting caretaker on premises he had robbed. He had been found not guilty of yet another armed robbery. Now he told the judge about his wrongful conviction for which he had had no compensation and this time he was asking for some leniency. The judge thought he was being lenient:
If I liked I could order you to be kept in irons for three or four years for the way in which you assaulted the old man Stewart or I could order you to be flogged.
Buckley had known Alexander Ward while in Pentridge, when Ward was serving fourteen years, imposed in September 1902, including twelve for shooting at a police constable with intent to kill. They had tried to escape, which merely added to their sentences.
In the roman à clef Power Without Glory, Frank Hardy placed Snoopy Tanner, a thinly disguised version of Squizzy Taylor, firmly at the scene of the October Trades Hall robbery. In his version, it was orchestrated by bookmaker and fixer John Wren (John West, in Hardy’s novel) to get the union account books that could tell him where illegal payments were going, as well as the ballot box from a recent election. West and Tanner waited around the corner on the night of the burglary, monitoring its progress. However, a contemporary journalist, Hugh Buggy, who closely followed Taylor’s career believed this was one of the few such occasions he was not actually a participant. It may be that Jackson thought there would be similarly rich pickings in the Trades Hall as those from a few months earlier. Unless Hardy’s theory was correct, even if the robbery had been successful, they would have been disappointed. There was only £30 in the safe.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on 2 October, while making his rounds, Sub Inspector Charles McKenna heard tapping, which seemed to him to come from the Trades Hall, as he stood on the corner of Victoria and Lygon streets. When he and Senior Constable Warren went to inspect the premises, they saw two windows open. Warren stayed there, while McKenna ran to Russell Street police station, from where Constables Dent and David McGrath were sent to help Warren. They climbed in through a window, McGrath switched on the lights for the hallway and courtyard, and they began to search the building.
Papers, account books and registers were scattered through the typographical office, lending some credence to Hardy’s theory. As well, the safe had been ripped open at the back. McGrath called out that he was a police officer, and the answer was a volley of shots, one of which hit him in the throat. A total of twenty-six shots were fired by the robbers and police, and Buckley was hit in the neck and thigh. For a time, it was thought he would not survive. Jackson was hit in the leg. Ward managed to climb out of a window and was found edging along a parapet.
At their trial for McGrath’s murder, Jackson ran the unpromising defence that he had shot at the constable to save his own life. Buckley, in a statement to the jury, said that he tried to find an opening at the back of the hall on the top floor. He could not do so, and came back. He rushed past McGrath and did not fire a shot until he was out of the passage. He fired in the air, and not to shoot any of the constables. Ward in his statement claimed he did not know why he took the revolver with him, but that it was certainly not to kill anyone. He was outside the building and knew nothing about the shooting; he had never fired a shot. After retiring for nearly six hours, the jury foreman told the judge that they had agreed on a verdict in the case of one man, but had not been able to agree in the case of the other two and there was no chance of their agreeing. His Honour then said that he would take the verdict arrived at.
The Foreman: We find John Jackson guilty.
Before passing the death sentence, the judge told Jackson there was no hope that he could look to. The final decision did not rest with him, but he urged Jackson to make the best of his time on earth. Ward and Buckley were remanded for a retrial. Jackson appealed.
Meanwhile, on 29 November the Crown had asked for a special jury, an application that Mr Justice Hood granted. It did them no good. On 13 December the jury again disagreed. The general opinion has always been that this was due to Taylor’s interference. However, in his summing up Mr Justice Hodges did leave open the possibility of a not guilty verdict. He told the jury that if the accused did not fire a shot but authorised the firing, they were equal participants with Jackson. If they had been determined to shoot, if necessary, they were equally guilty. If the jury felt that there was such a plan but that one had abandoned it, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. If the jury thought their intention was simply to frighten, then they were not guilty.
Finally, at the third trial, bargains had been struck. No evidence was offered on the murder charge, and Ward and Buckley pleaded guilty to committing a felony, for which they received five and six years’ hard labour respectively. Given their records, these were remarkably lenient sentences that more than wiped out Buckley’s wrongful whipping. After his release, he became a Taylor stalwart.
When Jackson’s appeal came before the State Full Court on 17 December, it was clear from the outset it was going nowhere. His counsel, Mr McFarlane, argued that when Jackson came face to face with McGrath, the officer had shot him through the leg and that as he was about to shoot him again, Jackson had aimed at the officer’s hand or arm but had instead fatally shot him.
Chief Justice: His business was to surrender.
McFarlane went on to argue that McGrath had no right to fire the second shot.
Chief Justice: If he could not otherwise arrest him he had the right to shoot.
There was never going to be a reprieve. Sonenberg offered to put £100 of his own money into trying to take things to the Privy Council but Jackson asked him to give it to his wife instead. He was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol, less than two hundred yards from the Trades Hall. James Cosgrove, serving ten years commuted from the death penalty for a 1909 rape, acted as executioner, so receiving a partial remission of his sentence.
There may have been doubt about Taylor’s involvement in the Trades Hall robbery but there is no doubt that on 29 February 1916, he and another of his gang, John Williamson, hired a taxi driver, William Patrick Haines (who worked for the Globe Motor and Taxi Company at Camberwell and Essendon, and was the grandson of the first prem ier of Victoria, William Clark) for a drive in the country. With them, they took false number plates, suitcases, and wore glasses as a disguise. The intention was to rob a bank employee who was taking money from Doncaster to Templestowe Bank, which had a branch in Bulleen. Haines apparently would not go along with their plan and was shot. At about 11.45 that morning, his body, covered with a blanket, was found inside the cab. Nearby was a partly dug grave and at a waterhole, false moustaches, dungarees, spirit gum and the glasses. Three witnesses who had seen the pair with Haines gave detailed descriptions.
Within days, Taylor and Williamson were arrested at Flemington racecourse, on holding charges of ‘being without means’. Now witnesses came forward to make positive identifications, and it was a small step to a charge of murder.
The prosecution particularly relied on the fact that the taxi was hired to collect a man, named L’Estrange from Cliveden Mansions. There was no L’Estrange at the flats, but opposite Taylor’s home was a shingle for a well-known solicitor, L’Estrange. Taylor had refused to answer the police questions and there was now what might be described as a rather poor attempt at verballing. The police matron said she had heard Taylor say to Williamson, ‘They cannot very well pot us if they do not identify us’.
Taylor set about putting together an alibi and also having the prosecution witnesses spoken to. The man for that was another offsider, Henry Stokes, who went to see Taylor in the Melbourne Gaol. Would Stokes say he had seen him at around 11 a.m. the day Haines was shot? Of course he would, and he would do better than that, he would find some more witnesses. One of them was a barmaid, Alice Bell, who was prepared to say she had been with Taylor the night before. Then there was a barber who said Taylor had come over to his shop in his pyjamas to be shaved. When questioned, Williamson had told the police that he had slept at the place where he lived, and that he did not get up until nine o’clock when he then had a conversation with the woman of the house.
At the trial in April, Mr Justice Hood dealt fairly with the so-called verbal, saying of the ‘pot us’ comment, ‘[It] is either a perfectly innocent remark or an admission of guilt. It might be said by an innocent man.’ Regarding the witnesses, he was less happy:
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 Court’, 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.