Murder on a Lonely Road

Ronald Eastwood

In the early hours of Friday, 24 November 1944, the bodies of two men were found shot to death, in Templestowe, an outer-northeastern suburb of Melbourne. Nowadays it is an expensive, bushy, residential locale that still has a rural feel. Back in 1944, the area had a scattered population and was full of fruit orchards. In the 1940s, to take a trip to Templestowe would have been considered ‘going bush’.

Initial newspaper reports labelled the killings ‘Tragedy on Lonely Road’. The lonely spot in question was Manningham Road and a cyclist on his way to work discovered the scene.

The body of 22-year-old labourer Roy Pugh was found ‘huddled’ in the back seat of a taxi with a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead. Mr Pugh hailed from Collingwood, a gritty, inner-Melbourne suburb, so the dead man was a long way from home.

The other dead man, taxi driver Harry Nicholls, 43, was found five metres from the cab and had multiple bullet wounds.

Police quickly established that Mr Pugh was known to them and had a criminal record. It was noted in newspaper articles that police believed his death was the result of an underworld dispute.

Mr Pugh had been convicted for a number of offences in his short life, the most recent for wounding with intent. He had received a two-year sentence and ‘10 strokes of the birch’, according to a report published in The Advocate.

A birch is similar to a cane and the punishment, known as ‘birching’ – essentially whipping or flogging someone across the buttocks – was used in Australia into the 1960s. An article in The Argus, dated 23 September 1886 titled ‘Birching at Pentridge’ explained the practice to readers as ‘the whipping of offenders against decency under 21 years of age’ and ‘an invention for the cure of the worst larrikin’. Newspapers such as The Argus and The Advertiser regularly ran stories about court-ordered birchings, mostly for juvenile offenders.

There were two others in the cab that evening – a young woman, Dorothy Grace Maxwell, 23, and Ronald Eastwood, 19. It didn’t take police long to pick up the pair and they were taken for questioning to Russell Street Police Headquarters.

Initially Eastwood claimed that he and Pugh had been pushed into a taxi at gunpoint by men he didn’t know, and he had been able to jump from the taxi. When police told him they had reason to believe that he had been in the car when Pugh was shot, he tried to blame a known criminal for the killings. However, the man he chose to blame was in jail at the time of the shootings.

From the statements given by Eastwood and Miss Maxwell, police pieced together the events they believed occurred that evening.

Eastwood and Mr Pugh were childhood friends and had been drinking together at the Retreat Hotel in Nicholson Street, Abbotsford, on the afternoon of 23 November. Deciding to keep the good times rolling, the pair intended to carry on to a party when Mr Pugh, a married man, remembered he had a date to meet his girlfriend, Miss Maxwell, who was known to them as ‘Maxie’.

Pugh phoned for a taxi from a telephone booth in Collingwood and then both the men and Miss Maxwell were picked up from an inner-city house where Miss Maxwell had been staying.

Police believed the taxi driver, Mr Nicholls, was persuaded to drive out to the northeast under the false premise that he was transporting a patient to hospital. Mr Nicholls was on an emergency call-out roster that night. The husband and father of an eight-year-old son received the despatch to pick up some people in Fitzroy. Pugh had stated when calling for the taxi that he needed to take his wife to hospital.

The men instructed the driver to go to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and when Miss Maxwell first entered the taxi, she was told by Pugh, ‘You’re supposed to have diphtheria.’

As Mr Nicholls headed toward the hospital, Eastwood pulled a gun on the driver with the intention of taking the taxi.

‘Put it away, there’s too much traffic,’ Pugh allegedly told Eastwood and the pair started to argue.

Miss Maxwell told police that Eastwood, who was in the front seat, turned around and a shot was fired at Mr Pugh.

By this stage the cab was on Heidelberg Road, which is, and also was in 1944, a major arterial, hence Mr Pugh’s concern that another car or passer-by would see them trying to hijack the taxi.

Eastwood claimed that when Mr Pugh had called for the taxi when they were in Collingwood, he had pulled out a gun and proposed that they hold up the driver. Eastwood ended up with the gun because he couldn’t drive and they had agreed that Mr Pugh would take over the cab once they had menaced the driver. He also said that his friend had grabbed for the gun and that had caused the shooting.

However, Miss Maxwell told detectives that the pair had been friendly the whole time and that even when Eastwood fired the gun, he was calm and collected.

Miss Maxwell, terrified after seeing her boyfriend shot, leapt out of the taxi as it was moving slowly along the road. She said a cyclist gave her a lift back to Carlton.

According to Eastwood, he then told Mr Nicholls to ‘follow the road’.

The driver kept on driving. ‘He did not speak anymore. He was very silent,’ Eastwood’s statement said. He claimed they drove out past Heidelberg and when the car slowed, Mr Nicholls tried to jump out. Eastwood tried to stop him, and Mr Nicholls was shot and killed.

Eastwood’s statement was read out at the coroner’s inquest into the deaths on 8 December 1944 and the details were published in the Saturday edition of The Argus the next day:

The car was almost stopped, and he tried to jump out the side. I had been doing a bit of thinking on the way out about what I was going to do. I intended to put him out and drive the car as far as it would go. He jumped out before it was stopped and got almost on the road, and I lost my head and the gun was pointing in his direction, and I pulled the trigger and the gun went off. I just pulled the trigger as fast as I could go, and the gun went off several times. The taxi driver fell back against me in the front seat. The gun was then empty.

The post-mortem examination of Mr Nicholls found that he had been shot at least four times in the back; one of the bullets had penetrated his lung.

Eastwood told police he ‘half-dragged and half-carried’ the driver’s body to where it was eventually found the next morning.

Walking along the dark, lonely road, Eastwood asked directions to Heidelberg train station, and got off the train at Victoria Park in the city. He had dumped the gun but never revealed its whereabouts to police.

In the morning, Eastwood, a waterside worker, went to work as usual and was arrested later that day at a billiards club in Johnston Street, Fitzroy.

It turns out that Miss Maxwell may have had a lucky escape in more ways than one because Eastwood told police when being questioned that he and Pugh both intended to ‘have a go at Maxie’ after they had driven her into the bush. Eastwood described Miss Maxwell as ‘Pugh’s sheila’ to the police officer.

When the time came for Eastwood to stand trial for murder, the story was somewhat of a sensation for the newspapers. One report in The Argus described that Eastwood was frequently ‘overcome with emotion’ while he was in the witness box. ‘He swayed and seemed likely to collapse,’ the 23 February 1945 report said.

When sentencing Eastwood, Mr Justice Martin dismissed the attempts by the defence to suggest the accused was not to be blamed for carrying a loaded revolver around.

His defence lawyer said Eastwood was a product of the ‘firearms age’ and that he could not be wholly responsible for what occurred.

Mr Justice Martin said, ‘The young man of today has many privileges which his father did not have, but being allowed to roam at will with a loaded revolver is not one of them.’

Eastwood was acquitted of murder but charged with two counts of manslaughter and on 28 February 1945, he was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment.

Meanwhile, the community rallied around the slain taxi driver’s family. The Argus reported that a group of anonymous Australian soldiers in Papua New Guinea were so moved by the tragedy where Graeme Nicholls, now aged nine, had lost his taxi-driver father that they sent him a parcel of handmade gifts.

Graeme’s teacher at Bentleigh East primary school, Miss Marjorie Macdermid, wrote to the newspaper so that they could publish a thank you. The newspaper printed the article ‘Kindly Soldiers Remember Fatherless Boy’ on 15 March 1945.

Recently this lad, Graeme, aged 9, was the delighted recipient of a parcel from New Guinea. On opening it he found a very original moneybox, made from two coconuts beautifully polished and carved. The box contained 5/ [shillings], some New Guinea coins, and Christmas and New Year greetings from anonymous sympathisers. These kindly soldiers, themselves enduring the hardships and hazards of a New Guinea campaign, yet found time to interest themselves in bringing happiness to a small boy so cruelly deprived of a father. Perhaps from your columns they may learn of Graeme’s appreciation.