ACTING on a report received the previous night, Mounted Constable Rowland Ripper set out from Heyfield in Gippsland, Victoria, early on the morning of Saturday 25 November 1916, heading 50 kilometres northwest to Licola. He arrived at the homestead of grazier Thomas McMichael shortly before 8 am, and was confronted with the body of McMichael’s twenty-two year old wife, Isabella, which lay on the verandah ‘just to the left of the front door’, her ‘skull and face bones shattered and the contents a mass of pulp’.
Ripper noted that the body lay on its back, leaning slightly to the left and with the legs ‘spread apart’. The right arm was ‘thrown over the face’. The hair was loosened and a gaping wound was visible on the left side of the head. A shotgun lay across the legs, the stock resting on the right boot and the muzzle crossing to the left leg at the level of the knee. Ripper observed that ‘both hammers were down and … two recently discharged cartridges were in the breech. The trigger-guard of the gun was upwards …’ He noted that the body was fully clothed and that there was a wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand.
Looking onto the verandah was a bedroom window. Below it was a makeshift seat made from a fencepost resting across two wooden crates. Under this seat were four pairs of boots. A pair of spurs was also lying on the verandah, ‘one partly protruding from under the deceased’.
Dr Best, medical practitioner for the district, was summoned and performed a post mortem examination at the homestead. ‘In my opinion,’ he said, ‘death was caused directly from a gunshot wound.’
Ripper recorded the effects of the gun:
A quantity of brains and blood was beneath and around the head; the floor of the verandah was spattered with blood for a distance of nine feet [2.7 metres] in a north westerly direction. A lady’s hair comb was lying on the garden path about nine feet [2.7 metres] in a south westerly direction. Blood was spattered on the spouting of the verandah about seven feet [2.1 metres] from the ground and also on the roof of the verandah underneath for a distance of seven feet [2.1 metres] in a north westerly direction.
Ripper searched the house and found it neat and tidy. He later reported to his senior officer, Superintendent Fowler, ‘I could find nothing that would show how the deceased actually met with her death.’
Fowler had been in the district longer than Ripper and was aware that only a few years earlier McMichael had claimed the insurance for his previous house when it had burned down, killing his then-wife and three of their children. ‘The affair was closely investigated,’ reported a newspaper of the time, ‘but no light could be thrown on the origin of the fire … a verdict of accidentally burnt to death was returned at the coroner’s inquiry.’ This new death raised obvious questions for which better answers were needed than Constable Ripper was able to provide. Fowler contacted CIB headquarters in Melbourne and asked for a detective to be sent at once.
Thomas McMichael, thirty-nine, was known throughout the district as a prosperous grazier and a good neighbour. In 1914 he married Isabella Ferguson from the town of Seaton, near Heyfield, and the couple moved to an extensive property at Licola in the picturesque valley between Mounts Wellington and Useful. Their house was a four-room weatherboard, which they shared with Norman, Thomas’s thirteen-year-old son from his previous marriage, and Lizzie Ferguson, Isabella’s nineteen-year-old sister, who frequently stayed with them. On occasions when Isabella was absent, visiting family at Seaton, Lizzie kept house for Thomas. Two weeks before Isabella’s death, the couple’s one-year-old son Jack died at the Sale hospital after ‘an operation for internal complications’. Of the child’s death, Thomas noticed that his wife ‘took it very well’. Isabella’s family too, noted that she ‘never seemed despondent or worried’.
Thomas gave his account of the fatal day to the police. It was corroborated at relevant times by the witnesses involved.
At noon on Friday 24 November 1916, neighbouring graziers Henry Sweetapple and Fred Grimme arrived for lunch at the McMichaels’ home. Both men knew Isabella well, Sweetapple for four years and Grimme ‘since she was a child’. Lunch was a pleasant affair. Norman was present but Lizzie was away, visiting family at Seaton. To both visitors, Isabella ‘appeared just as usual’ and, in their separate statements, each man commented positively on the McMichaels’ marital relationship, Grimme remarking: ‘I frequently visited … [and they] lived happily together always …’ As a general indication of Isabella’s demeanour, Grimme added that she was ‘friendly to all her neighbours’.
Norman, who attended the nearby Licola State School, usually came home to eat his lunch at noon and then returned for the afternoon classes. On Friday afternoons, however, he received a music lesson from a teacher in Glenmaggie, 30 kilometres away. Today Fred Grimme was to drive the boy there, where it was planned he would stay the weekend with relatives and return on Sunday. Lunch was concluded at 1 pm and, at a quarter past, the pair departed in Grimme’s car. Thomas and Sweetapple went out onto the road to see them off. Then the two men sat down in the shade of a tree, chatting.
After half an hour, they heard Isabella calling. Thomas got up and walked toward the house, and Isabella suggested it would be a good afternoon to wash the car. Thomas asked her to bring the key down to the shed where the car was garaged. He and Sweetapple then ‘walked down to the garden and looked at the vegetables; then got over the wire netting fence’ and went into the woolshed. Thomas lay down on the shearing board with his head against a bale of wool: ‘Sweetapple sat alongside of me. I dozed off to sleep.’
After a few minutes Isabella appeared. ‘What about doing the car?’ she asked. She had brought the key. ‘The three of us got into the car,’ Thomas recalled, ‘and I took it out to the hose.’ They alighted from the car and Thomas turned on the tap. He ‘flicked the hose once or twice’, splashing Isabella with water. She laughed and, looking to get her own back, said, ‘What about you doing this?’—offering him the soap and sponge so that she could take the hose.
‘I have some potatoes to cut in the garden,’ Thomas replied, getting clear of the hose as she took it from him. ‘All right,’ she said and went on hosing the car. It was now 3 pm. Sweetapple said goodbye and left the couple to it.
‘I was in the garden not half an hour,’ Thomas remembered, ‘and then came back to the car. My wife … had completed the hosing and asked me … [to move the car] out of the water so that she could dry and polish it.’ It then started to rain so Thomas shifted the vehicle back into the shed, where Isabella gave it a polish. Thomas greased the wheels.
Afterwards, the couple went up to the house. Thomas fetched himself a glass of whisky and brought Isabella ‘a little drop of port wine’. They sat on the verandah on the makeshift seat, watching the rain and talking about ‘nothing in particular’.
It stopped raining about 5 pm and Thomas said he would go and plant the potatoes. Isabella was at first keen to join him but, on reflection, the ground being ‘a bit mucky’, it was decided Thomas would go alone.
He went into the bedroom, ‘removed my trousers and damp shirt and put them on the back of a chair near the window. The window was right up to its full height’. When he had changed, he came back onto the verandah. He sat down again with his wife and they talked for a few minutes before ‘a blue satin bird came into one of the fruit trees in the front garden’. Thomas got his gun and loaded a cartridge into the left barrel:
… but as I closed the gun the bird flew away … I then took the cartridge out, put it back in its box and laid the gun and … [box of cartridges] on the [dining room] table … I said, ‘Bella, if you can shoot that bird, I’ll skin it for you.’
I went and got some stove wood, put a couple of pieces on the fire in the stove and the balance in the box alongside. I then walked out of the back door.
Isabella had gone into the kitchen and, as Thomas passed the window, she said ‘Come here.’
‘What is it?’
‘Look here,’ she said, showing him a basin of stew. ‘Do you think we can eat that for tea?’
‘Yes, easily,’ replied Thomas. He then set off to the lower paddock:
… for a stroll around and a look at some calves and sheep. I left the house about twenty to six. I was away about 20 minutes when I heard two shots in quick succession … I took no notice. My wife had [previously] shot out of the gun … and knew how to handle it …
I strolled on and then went home. I came in at the gate on the northwest side, put a fowl out of the garden through the gate, closed it, walked through the gate and along the back of the house; tied my dog up, went inside the house by the back door and through to the dining room. When I got to the end of the table I saw the feet of my wife lying on the verandah. Her head was near the edge of the verandah and the feet pretty close to the door. The gun was lying across her legs, the muzzle towards her head with the trigger-guard upwards … She had been shot through the head.
When the police asked him what he did next, Thomas replied, ‘I did not go onto the verandah or touch my wife or anything … There was a pool of blood on the edge of the verandah. I was positive my wife was dead.’ Nevertheless, he went into the bedroom overlooking the verandah and, leaning through the window with a lighted candle, checked ‘to see if there was any mistake’.
What prevented Thomas from entering onto the verandah and touching his wife’s body? Was the emotional impact of the scene too great for him to intrude on it? Or was the decision perhaps prompted by a previous experience of police questioning?
Thomas changed his clothes and drove to his father’s property to fetch his brother. The journey across Licola was about 2½ kilometres, and Thomas arrived there at 7 pm. His father was away on business, but his brother William, and a workman known to the family, Percy Dargie, were outside the house and met the car as it pulled up.
‘He seemed cut up,’ said William, remembering how Thomas appeared:
He did not get out of the car. He told us that his wife was dead … something about a gun … [lying] close to her [body]. He was crying and I didn’t ask him many questions. He asked Mr Dargie and me to go with him to Heyfield.
The men agreed. William went as far as Glenmaggie, where he collected his own car from another brother, Arthur, who had borrowed it. Together they went on to Heyfield, arriving at 9.30 pm, and notified Dr Best of the death. The pair then joined Thomas and Dargie, who were waiting at the police station for Constable Ripper, who was out on other business. He came in at 10.30 pm having already received word of Isabella’s death, presumably via a message from Dr Best. Ripper had been to the post office ‘and notified the coroner by telephone and also the Superintendent of Police’. Ripper now took some particulars from Thomas. It was close to midnight when the interview concluded and Thomas indicated his intention to drive to Seaton, about 16 kilometres northwest of Heyfield, to break the news to the Fergusons—Isabella’s family. Ripper had no objection and Thomas departed on his own.
William and Arthur kipped that night in Heyfield and just after sunrise collected Ripper, taking him to Seaton before they made their own way home. From Seaton, Ripper travelled with Thomas and Isabella’s sisters, Annie and Lizzie. (Since McMichael had a motor car, Ripper’s trooper horse was on this occasion spared the journey to Licola.)
At the homestead, Ripper made notes of his observations. Thomas ‘did nothing’. Annie, the elder sister, prepared some breakfast, which she served in the dining room; Lizzie assisted. While in the kitchen, Annie noted Isabella’s preparations for the previous evening’s meal: ‘I saw some cold stew, some lettuce salad, sheep’s brains, and vinegar and sugar, ready mixed, to put on the salad.’ After breakfast, the women swept and tidied the house. Neither woman went onto the verandah to view their sister’s body. Annie recalled, ‘I looked out the door but only saw the lower part of a body dressed as a woman lying on the verandah. I did not care to look at the body.’
Following his post mortem examination at the homestead, Dr Best brought Ripper back to Heyfield in his car. Undertakers took possession of Isabella’s body at Licola, and Thomas, Annie and Lizzie returned to Seaton.
That Saturday night Ripper met the Melbourne train as it pulled into Heyfield. Piggott was on board and from the moment he arrived he had questions, grilling the constable for detail. Ripper pointed out that Isabella McMichael’s life was insured for £200 and that one premium was paid only a few days before her death. The constable also passed on information from Superintendent Fowler as to the circumstances of the death of McMichael’s first wife.
In 1913 Thomas McMichael’s then-wife, Annie, was thirtynine years of age. They had been married for ten years and their children were Norman, nine; Annie, seven; Alister, six; and Jeanie, fifteen months.
The family lived at Glenmaggie in a house of seven rooms. The north-eastern room was the living room, with a piano and fireplace. On the evening of Wednesday 26 March, Thomas’s sisters, Nellie and Violet, visited for the evening meal. Afterwards Nellie played piano and Thomas brought out his violin and accompanied her. Nellie remembered: ‘Mrs McMichael and Violet were washing up the dishes. Mrs McMichael came into the room and we talked … she seemed happy and contented playing with the children.’
Thomas’s sisters left just after 8 pm and the McMichael children were put to bed. Norman, Annie and Alister had a bedroom which they shared; Jeanie slept in her parents’ room.
Earlier that week, Thomas had made arrangements with grazier Peter Ferguson’s son, Jack, to go north to Licola where they would meet up with other stockmen for a cattle muster. Thomas had to be at Ferguson’s at 5 am on Thursday, so he set his alarm clock for 3 am. It was Easter week and as a special treat for Norman he was to accompany his father on the trip.
Thomas and Annie had lately taken to sleeping in the living room where the fireplace gave them the benefit of its warmth until its embers faded. ‘We were in bed when it struck nine,’ Thomas remembered. Although the alarm went at 3 am, ‘we laid in bed til 20 minutes past … I was first to get out and put on my clothes’.
While he was dressing, Annie re-lit the fire and filled the kettle. ‘She lighted the fire for me,’ Thomas recalled, ‘to make me a cup of tea.’ He went out to the paddock to get his horse while Annie woke Norman and told him to get dressed. Thomas returned after a few minutes, saying he had decided not to wait for the kettle to boil but would have a cup of tea when he reached Ferguson’s. Promising to be back no later than Monday, he and Norman left Annie at twenty minutes to four, ‘standing in front of the fireplace, her back to the fire’. She said she was going back to bed.
Sharing the saddle with his young son, Thomas rode to Ferguson’s farm and remained there, breakfasting and discussing stock matters with Jack, for an hour. At 6 am they went out to the stable and fixed a jinker to Thomas’s horse. The younger members of the Ferguson household were now beginning to stir. Thomas recalled that, as he, Jack and Norman set out in the jinker heading northward he ‘saw Lizzie Ferguson look out of the window. She is 14 or 15 years of age’.
At exactly that time, back at Glenmaggie, farmer Daniel Rahilly was driving his cows along a track that passed by the McMichaels’ house. In the bright morning he saw that the house was gone: ‘All the rooms were down, the debris was smouldering.’ Gingerly, he approached the hot ruin. ‘I did not see any signs … to believe that there was anyone burning in it.’ He concluded that the occupants must have fled to the nearest farmhouse—his dad’s—less than 400 metres to the north-east. Deciding to call on his father, Rahilly found that the McMichaels were in fact not there and that his father, having just woken, was oblivious to there having been a fire nearby. The nearest telephone was at Bishop’s, a neighbouring property. Rahilly set out to raise the alarm.
Ten kilometres away, in his Heyfield surgery, Dr Heffernan, then district GP, received the call from Mr Bishop at 8.30 am and relayed it minutes afterward to Mounted Constable Duncan Stewart. Stewart set out at once to the McMichaels’ property, where he met up with Rahilly at 9.30 am: ‘The building was then in ruins … A certain amount was [still] smouldering … I noticed in the fireplace the remains of a log still burning. There was a kettle in front of where the fire had been …’
The men lifted away some sheets of iron roofing and found ‘several patches of bones’. Stewart couldn’t tell for sure if they were human, though in the ruins of the floor he found what he thought was part of an adult’s leg bone and ‘some mere fragments of skull’. The smaller patches, he said, were so ‘much charred I could not identify them as human. I sent a message to Dr Heffernan to come out … With the aid of Daniel Rahilly, I carefully collected each separate patch of bones …’.
At 10 am Heffernan arrived by motor car and was confronted with ‘several small heaps of remains’. In one pile he identified portions of an adult’s ‘charred liver’ and from the bone remnants was able to identify this deceased as a female. He confirmed the other piles comprised the bone fragments of three children, including an infant.
As to where in the house the remains were found, Stewart later reported:
The infant bones were resting on the wire mattress of a double bed, lying close to where the wall had been. It was impossible to tell … in what position the adult was. The two children’s remains—one was on the mattress of the cot, the other between the cot and where the wall had been.
Thomas and Ferguson meanwhile had travelled some 20 kilometres. They were nearing Glen Falloch on the road to Licola when a horseman caught up to them, shouting ‘For God’s sake stop!’ They pulled over and saw that it was Annie’s brother, Harry Monds. ‘Mr McMichael,’ he said, ‘your house was burnt down last night and we can’t find your wife and children.’ Thomas appeared ‘dumbfounded’. ‘It couldn’t be burnt last night,’ he said at last. ‘I left my home this morning.’
The men turned the jinker around and returned to Glenmaggie. As they travelled, Ferguson observed that Thomas was ‘very quiet’. He said only that his wife had made the fire to get him breakfast but that he had told her, ‘Ferguson will be waiting. I’ll have breakfast with him.’
They arrived at the scene at 2.30 pm and several of the neighbours came up to them. Thomas turned to Ferguson, saying, ‘The worst has happened—they have recovered some of the remains.’ Leaving Norman in Monds’ care, Thomas went to Heyfield to report to Constable Stewart and Ferguson went with him.
In his inquest deposition, Thomas stated that the house, its contents and the lives of his wife and children were all insured. In answer to a question about the wood used in his fireplace, he replied, ‘I don’t know anything about redgum wood for sparks.’ He also said there was no fender in front of the fireplace.
Dr Heffernan deposed that ‘Having known the three children and the mother, I think the remains are similar to those of persons of their sizes and ages.’ He recalled that he had looked in at the McMichael’s home on a cold afternoon in February that year and had taken away the memory of Annie McMichael ‘sitting at the fire playing with her children’.
Finally, Constable Stewart reported, ‘I have made exhaustive enquiries in this matter. I have found nothing of a suspicious nature. Thomas McMichael, his wife and family were well and favourably known.’
For the duration of his investigation, Piggott lodged with the unmarried Constable Ripper at the residence attached to the police station. For their travel needs, Ripper had his trooper horse and a second animal was provided for Piggott.
On Sunday morning Piggott rose early and called on Dr Best to ask his thoughts on the previous day’s post mortem examination. The detective listened, making no comment and recognising that, as he was responsible for the investigation, he could leave no observation to chance. Time was already slipping away. Piggott learned that the body had been prepared for imminent burial—the funeral was to be that afternoon at Glenmaggie, 16 kilometres away. He and Ripper set off at once to see McMichael and request to view his wife’s body. McMichael consented.
‘I then went into a little church at Glenmaggie,’ Piggott recalled, ‘and in the presence of Constable Ripper caused the coffin to be opened.’ Piggott noted a plate on the coffin inscribed with the name ‘Isabella McMichael’. The horrific nature of her injuries did not escape Piggott, but it was the traces of the cause of her death that he needed to see.
He reported:
Between the right hand corner of the mouth and the front of the chin was a circular gunshot wound. The burning from the discharge was acute. The right eye was intact, but the left eye had fallen back into the head … The gunshot wound appeared a little over one inch in diameter—the burning of the discharge was irregular in shape and extended about half an inch around the wound.
These were critical points. To Piggott, both the wound shape and the extent of burning suggested that ‘the muzzle of the gun at the time of discharge would be not more than 6 inches [15 centimetres] from the face’.
When they returned to Heyfield, Piggott occupied himself for the rest of the day examining the weapon. It was a Hollis double-barrelled breech-loading gun. Piggott found it ‘of good make and sound in every particular’. He discovered that the right-hand trigger needed a pull of about 3½ kilograms to cause its discharge, the left about 4 kilograms. ‘I tried the gun in every way,’ he later told the coroner, ‘and it will not go off by a blow or jar to the mechanism. It is in first class order.’ Piggott found something else too. Below the shank of the hammer there was something that resembled a speck of blood. This too was suggestive, but it was too early to comment. For the moment he would keep his counsel—he needed to know more.
On Monday Piggott and Ripper set out early. On horseback the journey from Heyfield to Licola was arduous and time-consuming. The destruction of two bridges in the floods of the previous September necessitated wide detours through creek beds, and after the rain of recent days the mountain track was treacherous with slush as it twisted sharply along a ledge rising 100 metres above sea level. Adding to the hazards, the road was shared with motor vehicles, which the horse riders occasionally encountered.
At the end of this road was McMichael’s house, built of bark and saplings. Since McMichael had remained in Glenmaggie for the day, the house was unoccupied and the police were unhindered in their inspection of it. Piggott had an interest in joinery, and noted the house’s construction: how the saplings, placed horizontally, bound the bark into position. He then devoted the entire morning to an inspection of the verandah—or, more exactly, the array of blood and human tissue that still lay scattered about it. Ripper assisted, noting at Piggott’s instruction all the measurements of points where blood was splashed, sprayed or had otherwise fallen.
On the garden path in front of the verandah were more blood splashes. Here, Piggott picked up two small cartridge wads, one of cardboard, which had lain over the gunpowder; the other of thin felt, which was positioned over a thicker wad—which was missing. Piggott scratched in the dirt and almost at once ‘picked up seven pairs of shot’. The number of shot pellets retrieved was of little relevance, but finding the wads would confirm the number of cartridges discharged. Piggott later reported that ‘Constable Ripper and I lifted the surface of the path—panned off the dirt—and removed 55 pairs of shot in all.’ It was Ripper who found the missing felt piece. This accounted for the wads from one cartridge. The wads of the other cartridge were accounted for by Dr Best, who located them in what remained of the victim’s head.
Piggott was keen to check McMichael’s statements about cutting potatoes and washing the car. He checked the woolshed where the car had been garaged, and went down to the garden. He also took a careful look inside the house. In the McMichaels’ bedroom he found some clothes—a white shirt and a pair of dungarees lying on the floor beside the washstand. The shirt had some dried spots on it. Piggott took both pieces of clothing with him.
The next day, Tuesday 28 November, Piggott and Ripper returned to McMichael’s home and this time McMichael joined them. Piggott told Ripper to ‘place the things in that verandah in the same position as you found them’ when he first saw the body. Ripper obliged, setting out four pairs of boots under the seat on the verandah and a pair of spurs a short distance from them. With McMichael looking on, Ripper next showed Piggott the position of the body. ‘It lay partly on the back with the feet separated about 18 inches [46 centimetres] and the head in a pool of blood … Across her legs was the stock of the gun down toward the foot, the muzzle crossing the left leg nearly to the knee.’ Ripper placed the gun down on the verandah in the way he found it on the body. Piggott saw that the trigger guard was facing upward, which accorded with the picture of events taking shape in his mind.
For whole minutes, Piggott pored over the scene. At a slight angle from the seat, there ‘still remained a lot of congealed blood and brain matter and it was then that I noticed the blood on … the four pairs of boots’. Piggott had a camera. He took photographs of the verandah to record the position of particular blood splashes and the position of the shotgun.
In Melbourne two days later, Piggott presented a number of exhibits to the government analyst, Charles Price, for testing: ‘a double-barrelled breech loading gun, a man’s white cotton shirt, a pair of blue dungarees, four cartridge wads in a tin box and an envelope containing a number of discharged shot.’
At the inquest held in Heyfield on 21 December that year, Price declared the results of his tests. He confirmed that the felt wads corresponded with those found in 12-bore Nobel smokeless cartridges. Similarly, the shot pellets corresponded in weight to what would be found in these cartridges. Of the shotgun, Price confirmed:
On the right lockplate … near the hammer … [was] a small dark brown stain. [It] … presented a congealed appearance and was partly hidden by the hammer … [and] extended over an area of about 1/5 of an inch [5 millimetres] in length and ⅛.8 of an inch [3 millimetres] in width. I removed a minute portion of the stain … and proved by chemical test that it was … blood. It appeared to be recent. From the appearance of the congealed spot the blood must have fallen from above on the right lockplate and run down to the foot of the hammer when the gun was in an inverted position.
Price found no blood on the dungarees, though he found traces of a leather varnish containing iron oxide, which he attributed to saddle wear.
On the front of the white cotton shirt, however, he noticed ‘four reddish brown irregular smears’, including one on the right side measuring around 9½ millimetres by 3 millimetres; the other three were about 7 millimetres by 3 millimetres. There was also a brownish spot on the left sleeve, 1½ millimetres in diameter. He removed some portions and ‘by being submitted to microscopical and chemical examination I found them to be due to the presence of blood—the blood was mixed with a fibrous tissue and a substance similar in structure to brain matter’.
For McMichael this was an ominous discovery, as the presence of blood and brain matter on the shirt (which he identified as his) would appear to be inconsistent with his statement of events, particularly that he did not go onto the verandah or venture near his wife’s body when he found her dead.
During the inquest it was also disclosed that McMichael had made a number of trips with Lizzie Ferguson to Melbourne, Ballarat and other towns that necessitated overnight stays.
These trips were, McMichael said, all with his wife’s knowledge and consent. For example, one trip was so that Lizzie could inspect land for which the purchase had to be applied for in person. There was nothing, Thomas McMichael insisted, in ‘these suggestions’ about his sister-in-law and himself. When questioned, Lizzie corroborated that view, saying that her sister Isabella had in fact asked her on occasion to travel with Thomas. A trip to Melbourne—on which Lizzie and Thomas stayed overnight at the Victoria Coffee Palace—to buy a motor car in January that year was one such occasion.
In relation to her tidying up at the Licola house with her sister Annie on the morning of 25 November, it emerged that Lizzie entered the bedroom of her sister and her brother-inlaw and placed his tan boots near the washstand. While there, she saw some clothes on the chair—a pair of trousers and a shirt—which she placed on the floor near the washstand.
A further point to emerge during the inquest was a letter written by Isabella and mailed to a relative in the days after the death of her infant. In it Isabella observed: ‘How dull and miserable it is without the child.’ Beyond this, no other notes or letters were discovered by which to indicate Isabella’s state of mind prior to her death.
The coroner, Charles Grey, Police Magistrate, called for the last witness and Detective Piggott took the stand. He began by detailing the scene of death. Its mathematical precision was a novelty for the court but was greeted by reporters with some weariness. Yet this was the first instance of blood-spatter analysis in Australia’s forensic history; it was also illustrated photographically, and bore momentous consequences for the people involved.
On a verandah post, five feet four inches from the front door, was a very heavy splash of blood which carried on in an angle of about 60 degrees to the wall plate,† striking the plate, then on to the iron roof, passing on to the end verandah post and dropping in its flight; showing that the main force from the explosion through the head carried the blood and the brain matter from a very low angle and at the angle of 60 degrees [carried it] 15 inches [38 centimetres] from the front door.
The detective passed his photographs to the coroner for inspection. These too were a novelty for the court, as the Victoria Police did not at this time have an official photographer or even a photographic department. These were Piggott’s images and are the earliest Australian example of photographically documented blood-spatter analysis. Piggott continued:
On the same post was a second heavy splash of blood. This splash was altogether different from the first splash—or swish—of blood and its action was altogether different to the first. This blood was thicker, contained hair tissue, small portions of bone and skull and the splash in this case was regular and splashed out in all directions—this splash was caused by the head which was then in pulp coming in contact with the verandah boards. With the weight of the body, the blood and brain matter splashed on to the side of the building, onto—and under—the seat, onto the spurs, onto the four pairs of boots which stood immediately along the wall at the end of the box, up and onto the window sill—the window was then open—and onto the rail of the sash and small splashes on the sill in the inside of the room. Immediately inside this window and up against it was a wickerwork chair.
Australia’s first case of blood spatter interpretation: Piggott’s 1916 photographs of the McMichaels’ verandah showing the position of the shotgun at the scene of death, and Piggott’s markers noting the blood splashes. Below the latter photograph he wrote: ‘1—first splash caused by the explosion of the gun; 2—2nd splash caused by head hitting ground.’
To the suggestion of suicide, Piggott quickly acknowledged the problem:
It is impossible for the deceased to have pulled the triggers with her fingers. [Based on the position of the gun,] she could not reach them and to cause both barrels to discharge she would have had to place both fingers through [the trigger guard]. Had she done so, the gun would never have dropped from her grasp.
It was also clear that the gun was not fired by means of the deceased’s feet because ‘she had shoes on and the shoes would prevent the toes manipulating the triggers’.
Armed with Price’s test results showing blood on the shirt and rifle, Piggott explained that he had returned to McMichael’s home and interviewed him again. For the court, Piggott now recounted that exchange. He’d asked, ‘Can you give me any suggestion as to how your wife met her death?’
McMichael: ‘No.’
‘Have you or she any enemies?’
‘No.’
‘Have you any reason to believe that she committed suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to believe that it is an accident?’
‘Well, I know she wouldn’t take her own life. I would not have left the gun with my wife if I thought she was in such a state of mind that she might destroy herself—she gave no indication of this.’
‘You didn’t shoot her,’ Piggott replied.
To the court Piggott explained that he had detected below the shank of the gun’s hammer ‘a small speck of blood’ which he found ‘had dropped on to the front of the right hand lock. It ran down about 1/5 of an inch [5 millimetres] towards the hammer axle. It then thickened or congealed … Ripper showed me the position of the body and … the gun … The trigger guard was up’.
The blood-flow confirmed ‘that the drop of blood came from the deceased’s head after the gun had fallen’, proving, said Piggott, ‘that the gun had the trigger guard up and that it was not fired by any other person but by the deceased’.
Piggott had noticed the construction of the McMichaels’ home. The front of the house consisted of bark ‘held in position by horizontal small saplings’. However, one horizontal beam was held in position by ‘an upright piece of sapling … two feet five inches [73 centimetres] from the floor’. This upright was on the side of the door going out onto the verandah and projected from the main wall of the bedroom. Using a photograph, Piggott showed the coroner: ‘Its outer corner is rounded. The height of this stick—or spike—is in keeping with the angle of fire … when the gun is placed on the corner of it.’
Resuming his account of interview with McMichael, Piggott said he took the firearm out onto the verandah and called out for the grazier to follow him. ‘This gun went off at an angle of 60 degrees,’ Piggott explained to him. ‘Your wife’s chin was close up to the muzzle. I know this because the burning is so defined. The gun can be fired like this.’ Piggott then placed the trigger on the stick and demonstrated. Asked if he had any comment, McMichael offered none.
Referring to the fatal afternoon, Piggott said: ‘I confirm McMichael’s statement that he did cut some potatoes that day; also as to his washing the car and his movements about the garden. I said to him: “How were you dressed that day?”’
‘I had a pair of blue dungaree pants on, an old pair of tan boots and an old white shirt.’
Piggott pointed to the shirt that the government analyst had tested, and said: ‘Are you sure that you were wearing that white shirt and these clothes that afternoon?’
‘I am.’
‘Did you go near to or touch the body when you saw it?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘I want an explanation from you as to how these four bloodspots got on the front of your shirt and this spot on the shoulder looks like brain tissue.’
McMichael gazed in surprise. ‘I cannot account for that blood,’ he said. For a while he was silent. Then, concerned that he had not spelt out in his earlier statement something that had now taken on significant implications, he said: ‘I am going to tell you something which might look black against me—but I’m going to tell you. I now remember while cutting the potatoes I got wet. I came to the house and took off my white shirt—that shirt. I placed it on the wickerwork chair at the open window.’
Piggott confirmed that he subsequently interviewed Annie and Lizzie Ferguson ‘who remembered clothes being on that chair’ when they arrived at the house on the Saturday morning. Lizzie also stated that, in tidying up, she took the shirt from the chair and placed it with the dungarees and boots next to the washstand.
Piggott indicated his view that the shirt was splashed through the window. He continued:
‘I examined the tan boots. There was no blood on them nor was there blood on the trousers or on McMichael’s hat and had he been holding the gun in any position he must have been splashed considerably.
‘On this reasoning,’ Piggott concluded, ‘I say that McMichael did not fire the shot or shots and that the deceased caused the fatal explosion. I say from my reasoning that the gun was placed on the stick by design and exploded.’
Questioned as to a motive for Isabella’s suicide, Piggott suggested it was due to her husband’s relations with her sister Lizzie. ‘I am convinced McMichael is fencing on that point,’ he remarked.
The coroner, Mr Grey, disagreed, seeing no motive for suicide in the evidence submitted. Nevertheless, he commended Piggott for ‘the close investigation’ which had cleared McMichael of the suspicion of murder. ‘McMichael,’ Grey said, ‘was the victim of circumstances. After the tragic death of his first wife, it was only natural that in the second case searching inquiries should be made.’ The coroner’s finding was that Isabella McMichael died from ‘a gunshot wound accidentally inflicted by herself’, her death ‘due to misadventure’.
The inquest at an end, Piggott’s photographs were handed back to him. They would not become part of the official file: only the depositions were kept. The idea that photographs were an important record of evidence—and therefore as worthy of preservation as witness statements—was yet to be universally recognised by Australian courts.
Piggott pasted the images into his scrapbook. Under the photograph showing the blood-stained verandah post, he wrote: ‘Not murder but suicide’ and underlined the word ‘suicide’.
In 1922 Thomas McMichael married Lizzie Ferguson. He died, aged forty-nine, in December 1925. In 1937 Lizzie remarried, becoming Lizzie Thomas. Her second husband also predeceased her, and Lizzie herself died at Kew, Victoria, aged eighty-five, in December 1982.
