Chapter 8: Deep secrets1

Chapter 8

Deep secrets

She starts signalling with helio lamps. We do not answer but main-tain our speed and course 250 degrees. Steadily nearer comes our doom and we distinctly recognise the vessel as an Australian cruiser of the Sydney class.

That’s Sub Lieutenant Wilhelm Bunjies talking, one of 314 seamen who survived the naval battle between the Kormoran and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney in November 1941. Many of the survivors gave similar accounts of the battle to their rescuers. But all the accounts give only one side of the story. The other side of the story – the story from the Australians’ side – will never be given. There were no survivors on that side. Captain and crew of HMAS Sydney – all 645 – went down with the ship.

When, where and exactly how Sydney was lost may never be fully known. But there are many who believe HMAS Sydney may have been sunk after she surprised the Kormoran rendezvousing with a Japanese submarine, a nation that was not then at war, but, just 19 days later would enter the conflict with its attack on Pearl Harbor.

Suddenly, Australia, the nation that had never known war on its shores, was faced with the realisation that its naval defence was not impregnable and now there was the frightening prospect of an invasion by the Japanese.

The loss of 645 men from virtually every major town and city in the nation affected almost all Australians. And the sinking of Sydney was all the more traumatic because it came eight months after a victory parade through the streets of Sydney that celebrated her triumphs in recent sea battles. In July 1940, after sinking an enemy destroyer and weathering heavy air attacks the month before, Sydney heroically appeared on the horizon just as three British destroyers were about to be overwhelmed by two of Italy’s fastest cruisers. Sydney opened fire from 20 kilometres and scored direct hits on the fastest cruiser afloat, Bartolomeo Colleori, crippling it. Then she badly damaged the Colleori’s sister ship, Giovanne delle Bande Nere, sending it scuttling for safety. Under the command of 40-year-old Captain John Collins, the idol of his crew, it had come out of these engagements virtually unscathed. Australians dubbed the cruiser ‘Lucky Sydney’. She was popularly believed to be invincible.

Now she was coming home after escort duty along the coast of Western Australia, where the Zealandia was taking 1,000 troops of the Australian 8th Division to Singapore. In the Sunda Straight HMS Durban took over and Sydney turned for friendly Fremantle.

HMAS Sydney was under a new commander, Captain Joseph Burnett. A friend of Collins, he’d joined the Australian navy as a 14-year-old, the year before him, in 1913. Joe Burnett was at Jervis Bay Naval College where the contrasting personalities of the two were summed up in the college magazine’s analysis of their cricketing styles: Collins ‘the white hope of the team. Goes in to hit and keeps on hitting…Burnett, a very sound bat…and has the sense to wait for the ones to hit.’ Burnett had seen service in two wars. He had been in the North Sea during World War One, and he was Executive Officer on the battleship HMS Royal Oak during the Spanish Civil War. He’d been Deputy Chief of Naval Staff when given command of HMAS Sydney, and few were better qualified.

Late afternoon on Wednesday 19 November, less than a day from port, someone on the bridge spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. There was another ship in the neighbourhood and Sydney would have to check it out. She turned and headed that way. Almost certainly the ship would turn out to be a rusty old freighter, but there was a slim chance, too, that she could be one of the small fleet of German raiders, the Kormoran notably, which had caused real trouble at the beginning of the war. Heavily armed, almost the Australian cruiser’s equal in fire-power, she was larger than Sydney and could cruise at 18 knots. In the previous 11 months, in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and under various guises, the Kormoran had sunk 11 Allied ships. Now, however, the raiders’ ploy of sailing as cargo ships had lost its surprise element, and increased vigilance and aggression had made them less encountered.

The first sign that things were not quite what they seemed that Wednesday afternoon was the smoke plume. It increased, almost as if the ship wanted to disappear behind it and into the glare of the sun setting on the horizon. And the ship had altered course. That was odd.

Captain Burnett knew well the procedure to follow in instances like the one he was sailing into. Stay ahead to thwart submarines that might be hiding in the wake of the ship being inspected. Keep your distance. And position yourself so that you can’t be the target of torpedoes. They were basics. Then you asked the ship to give its four international signal letters. You then gave it the two inner letters of the Admiralty’s secret call sign and asked it to supply the outer two letters. If the ship didn’t, you fired a shot across its bows. After that the ship had better respond to your liking.

It was an uncomplicated system but it was not foolproof. As the Sydney had found, freighters challenged in this way often made a mess of it, not knowing the call sign or even how to show it. The crew of Sydney took up action stations as she closed in on the unknown vessel, guns for and aft trained, her amphibious aircraft fuelled and ready for take off.

‘What ship?’ Sydney signalled and the reply came – after a while – ‘Straat Malakka’. Burnett checked the code book for an outline of the Dutch freighter Straat Malakka. The ship he saw, as she came within range of his guns, resembled the outline reasonably closely. The ship’s signalled destination, Batavia[Djkarta], made sense too, although she had turned when Sydney saw her and was now steaming in completely the opposite direction to Batavia.

Burnett gave the order to signal ‘IK’, the middle letters of the Straat Malakka’s secret code. But IK was also the international code for ‘Have you suffered damage from cyclone, typhoon or tempest?’ That could be confusing to the skipper of the cargo ship. Burnett waited for the response and while he waited he broke the rules. He allowed Sydney to come alongside the cargo ship. It meant that he could bring his ship’s arsenal directly to bear on the Straat Malakka: eight 15-centimetre guns, four torpedo tubes. He had the cargo ship covered but Burnett would have been aghast at what happened next.

It was 5.30 and Burnett saw the Dutch flag the ship was flying hauled down and the German swastika run up in its place. At the same time camouflage screens fell to reveal six 13-centimetre guns, machine-guns and six torpedo tubes that now opened fire on him. The first salvo and the first torpedo from the Kormoran mortally wounded Sydney. Shells hit her bridge and gunnery control tower and put her two forward gun turrets out of action.

The aircraft on deck exploded in a mountain of flame and only her after-turrets, each with 15-centimetre guns, could return the fire continuing to come from the Kormoran. Convulsed by explosions Sydney turned and tried to ram the German ship before passing under the Kormoran’s stern and drifting, still firing but blazing from end to end, to the south.

She was last seen, a glow on the horizon, the Germans said, around 10 p.m.

Dying though she might be, HMAS Sydney managed to take the Kormoran with her. She hit the enemy’s bridge and then the engine room. Dead in the water, aflame, the Kormoran, under Captain Theobold Detmers, continued firing as the Sydney limped away until, at 6.25, he gave the order: ‘Cease firing! Abandon ship!’

Five hours later with most of her crew in lifeboats and on rafts the raider blew up.

That was the end of the battle, and the start of one of the great naval mysteries. What made Captain Burnett put his ship in such peril? Burnett, ‘a very sound bat…and has the sense to wait for the ones to hit…’? Why hadn’t he used her spotter aircraft to have a good look at a freighter acting a little oddly? Sydney’s gunners were renowned for their expertise. Yet somehow the ‘freighter’ had lowered its Dutch flag, dropped its camouflage screens to reveal its guns, hoisted the swastika and opened up a torrent of gunfire – all before Sydney’s gunners could react.

Wilhelm Bunjies, one of the German survivors from the Kormoran, told interrogators how his ship deceived the Sydney:

‘The cruiser keeps asking us for our name. She is so close that it is impossible to overlook her helio signals. We answer Straat Malakka and hoist the Dutch ensign astern. All disappear from deck, but behind the camouflage flag shutters everyone stands in feverish excitement and holds his breath. We can distinguish every single man on board; the bridge is full of officers. She is now travelling parallel to us…’

He didn’t say, however, that, as many still believe, the deception went beyond flying a Dutch flag and tricking up the raider to resemble a freighter.

He didn’t say, as some theorised, that Captain Detmers flew a white flag of surrender and lured Sydney close to allow a boarding party to launch its boat before running up the swastika and giving the cruiser a tremendous broadside. Captain Detmers was wary with his account of what happened. Had he lured Captain Burnett into the belief that the mystery ship was surrendering he could have been charged as a war criminal.

Other Australians believed that there was a German submarine. That the cruiser was torpedoed and the survivors machine-gunned.

Or – on the eve of Japan’s surprise entry into the war with her attack on Pearl Harbor – was a Japanese submarine involved? And did she sink the cruiser and kill all the Australian witnesses to its war crime? Just 19 days later, on 7 December, an Australian, Colin ‘Ike’ Treloar of Adelaide, attached to 205 Squadron, RAF, at Singapore, had been one of a crew of eight aboard a Catalina flying boat that came across a Japanese task force of 44 ships north-east of Malaya. Before its crew could report the sighting it was sent down in flames by Japanese fighter planes. A few hours later the Japanese attacked Malaya and Hawaii and over the next two days Thailand, The Philippines, Guam Island, Hong Kong and Wake Island. The war in the Pacific had begun and ‘Ike’ Treloar was the first official Australian casualty.

Or was he the 646th?

In 1997 a parliamentary inquiry into the disappearance of HMAS Sydney investigated these theories and others. It found no substance in them. Cynics were not surprised.

The 645 men from HMAS Sydney have been dead now for more than six decades. But the suspicions will never die.

The bathtub revelation of Claude Sawyer

Claude Sawyer saw something in his bath that made him think his nightmare could come true. He’d had this bad dream that the ship he was on, the Waratah, the pride of the Blue Anchor Line fleet, had foundered and sunk in heavy seas.

Now he was watching the behaviour of his bath water with keen interest. When the ship rolled, he later told the court of inquiry, the bathwater slid to a steep 45 degree angle and stayed that way for an unnerving time before sliding back to horizontal. He didn’t like the way the Waratah pitched in high seas, either, sometimes ploughing through waves instead of riding over them. Sawyer had strong misgivings. He thought it was time to get off.

Claude Sawyer was the only one of the Waratah’s 212 passengers and crew who had a premonition that the ship was doomed. All but he were lost when the ship disappeared at sea. Nothing was ever found of them, or the Waratah. Not a single piece of wreckage or flotsam was ever found. And not a single cause was ever satisfactorily advanced as to why she vanished.

She was the pride of the Blue Anchor Liner, a passenger–cargo liner built by a renowned firm of shipwrights and launched at the famous Clyde shipyards in 1909. The Waratah could cruise more than 300 knots a day, she had seven watertight compartments and 16 lifeboats. Her appointments were luxurious, the most expensive and lavish ever built for Blue Anchor.

Her maiden voyage from London to Sydney and back was a triumph. On her second voyage she left Adelaide with 10,000 tons of cargo, a crew of 119, and 93 passengers, almost all of them Australians from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Crossing the Indian Ocean, the Waratah ran into strong winds and the way she handled them caused Claude Sawyer to have his premonitory dream. On 25 July, when she reached South Africa, he disembarked at Durban and sent Mrs Sawyer a telegram: landed at durban, thought waratah top heavy.

The next day the Waratah headed for Cape Town, 790 nautical miles south. The following day, in heavy head seas, she passed a tramp steamer, the Clan McIntyre and they exchanged signals, identifying themselves. In the afternoon she made signal contact with the Union Castle steamer, Guelph, and that was the last that was ever seen of the Waratah.

Twelve days later, when she failed to arrive at Cape Town, there was no concern; heavy seas, in a day or two she’d be in. After a day or two they thought that perhaps her two sets of coal-burning engines had broken down and three warships went in search. They came back reporting no sign of her.

In Australia the families of the passengers were praying when the news came through from South Africa. The Blue Anchor vessel sighted a considerable distance out slowly making for Durban could be the Waratah. The news thrilled the nation.

In Melbourne, the seat of Federal Parliament, the Speaker was handed the cable, stopped the debate and read it as Members of the House sprang to their feet cheering. In theatres performances were stopped while the joyous news was announced.

The sighting was wrong. The ship was not the Waratah.

In the next three years numerous reports of sightings of the Waratah, its remains, or the bodies of its passengers, were investigated and found false. Search vessels were charted, criss-crossing the ocean for any trace of the liner. All fruitless. In December 1909 a court of inquiry began a 14-month investigation that looked into the possibilities that she had been powerless and had drifted to her doom in the Antarctic; that she had been wrecked on reefs; that she had been hit by a gigantic wave that swallowed her and sucked her down into the darkness of the ocean floor. No conclusion could be reached.

But the truth could surely be found in Claude Sawyer’s bathwater.

The canine clue to the Bogle–Chandler mystery

Can the clue to the Bogle–Chandler killings, one of the great murder mysteries of the 20th century, a puzzle that has baffled the best international forensic experts, be traced to the roly-poly stomach of a puppy dog?

A brilliant scientist and an attractive young woman found dead near a Sydney suburban Lovers’ Lane, their nakedness inexplicably covered – presumably – by their killer, Dr Gilbert Bogle’s and Mrs Margaret Chandler’s deaths remain the source of never ending speculation.

They died on that morning on New Year’s Day, 1963, it was mooted by some journalists, because of a devious security conspiracy involving atomic espionage: British Intelligence – or perhaps the CIA – wanted Gilbert Bogle out of the way. Others, among them the young newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch, believed the two were poisoned by a brittle, spurned lover of Bogle. Some wondered, was it an aphrodisiac overdose? A double suicide? A murder–suicide? Was it weedkiller? Did Russia’s master spy Kim Philby order Bogle killed to hamper America’s development of anti-missile devices? There was speculation about a mysterious death ray. Dry ice, perhaps. Was it LSD, the new and little known hallucinogen that was covertly manufactured, people whispered, at the CSIRO laboratories where Bogle was a star scientist? What about snake bites, or spiders, trapdoor, redback or funnel web? Nerve gas pellets concealed in Bogle’s car? Did a jealous man or woman inject them with a new, untraceable poison, or spray them with a toxic substance from a tropical shellfish?

None of these theories held up. Tests revealed nothing. Police, forensic experts and scientists around the world were fascinated by the challenge but all, eventually, confessed they were at a loss.

‘It wasn’t just a medical thing that went wrong,’ Dr John Laing the director of forensic medicine at the Public Health Department of NSW once said.

‘Specialists from all walks of life – detectives, civilians, university professors and me – we all delved into it. Nothing proved rewarding; everybody came to a dead end. There were magnificent theories but there was something wrong with each one. They didn’t fit the facts. Sherlock Holmes once said something to the effect that if it ever gets to that stage, then maybe the facts are wrong.’

So could it have been, perhaps, an accident?

It was around 7.45 a.m., and the first morning of the new year was already hotting up when the two teenage boys foraging for golf balls near the Chatswood golf course came across the body of a man, blue in the face, blood tricking from his nose, in the bush on a bank of the Lane Cove River in suburban Sydney.

It took police three hours to arrive. (Like the boys, they may have presumed the dead man was a derelict.) When they did get to the scene they were met with a gullet-heaving stench of excreta, vomit and death. The dead man – his wallet identified him as a Dr Gilbert Bogle of Turramurra – lay on his stomach, his arms spreadeagled, his legs extended and his shoes mudcaked.

Rigor mortis had set in. He was half naked, clad only in shirt, tie, socks and shoes. His trousers were neatly folded to cover his legs and under them was a grimy piece of carpet covering his nudity. His jacket covered his back, the sleeves following the spread of his arms. Semen was later detected on it but this fact (like others), was suppressed by the circumspect coroner. Clearly this wasn’t a suicide, or death by natural causes.

Then, a shout from a motorcycle policeman around 15 metres away, closer to the river.

‘Hey! Sarge! There’s another one down here!’

Around 11.30, when the first report of the discovery of the body came in, Bill ‘Bondi’ Jenkings had been drinking at a city pub with some Criminal Investigation Branch detectives, as you do early in the morning on New Year’s Day when you’re the Daily Mirror’s chief crime reporter. He raced to the scene just in time to be there when the second body was found. ‘In my haste to get over there I lost my footing and almost tumbled into the corpse,’ he says in his book, As Crime Goes By: The Life and Times of ‘Bondi’ Bill Jenkings. ‘I can still see her pretty face looking up at me.’

Margaret Chandler, her body still warm, was lying on her back in a slight hollow, a leg protruding from three sheets of a flattened-out beer carton put together to cover her nakedness. She might have been asleep, one hand languidly across her stomach under her right breast, but she too was nude from the waist down and a man’s underpants lay between her ankles. Her rose floral dress was rolled up to her waist and her strapless bra was pulled down to expose her breasts. Abrasions on her torso indicated she had crawled or stumbled around – or been dragged by someone. Her white panties and brown shoes and Dr Gilbert Bogle’s belt were down by the dry riverbed, just above water level.

And again the sickening sight and stench of vomit and diarrhoea, the smell and signs of violent physical purging in the weeds, reeds and tangled grass where both bodies lay.

Almost at once the blunders that would frustrate the forensic scientists began. The police were careless in the way they replaced the clothes and the beer carton parts after examining the bodies. They should have been more rigorous protecting the crime scene: ‘Before long the whole area was swarming with coppers and journos,’ ‘Bondi’ Bill recalled. And, crucially, it was a public holiday and the coroner couldn’t be found. The bodies were left baking in the hot summer’s sun until the middle of the afternoon when the stench was almost overpowering. Taken away, the corpses were refrigerated overnight and the autopsy performed the next day – more than 24 hours after the discovery and too late to trace possible poisons.

Poison, it was generally agreed, was the cause of death. The autopsy showed both victims had almost identical symptoms. And, it was also generally agreed, a third party had been at the death site. It was possible – just – to concede that Margaret Chandler, a nurse before she was married, might have covered Bogle’s body to keep him warm before he died. But Bogle died at least an hour before her so it was inconceivable that she covered it herself; that she found three convenient pieces of beer carton exactly the size to cover her, and then lay beneath them, her bra below her breasts, her skirt still furled around her waist and her arm resting across her stomach, waiting for death.

But if they were poisoned who did it, and what was their motive? The Bogle–Chandler mystery still intrigues armchair detectives. But today, perhaps, an equally fascinating aspect of the case is the glimpse it gives us into an Australia that came to an abrupt end around the time of the double killing.

On New Year’s Eve, 1962, Australia was the land of the Sunday Roast. Millions of people – certainly all practising Catholics – sat down after church on Sunday to an unvarying and eagerly awaited lunch. Very well done roast lamb and mint sauce, pumpkin, potatoes, and peas. There was no wine on the table or in the cellar. There was no cellar, and as for wine most Australians would have identified Riesling as the premier of South Korea – or was it Singapore? Marijuana was beginning to be heard of, but few knew much about it. The Australian Football legend, Jack ‘Captain Blood’ Dyer believed marijuana to be a sauce they put on spaghetti. Homosexuals were known, but it was also known that they were easy to spot – they had hair that needed a good cut, limp wrists, spoke in an effeminate way and wore suede shoes – and there were very few of them. Unmarried young men and women didn’t live together. They had sex, of a sort, in the back seats of cars at the drive-in movies or at the front gate where the goodnight kiss sometimes led to ‘heavy petting’. When it got past that stage it was time to think of getting married. Most married in their early twenties. And they stayed together even when the marriage was a failure.

All that was about to change, rapidly. The Bogle–Chandler deaths came just a year after Australia was introduced to the Pill – and swallowed it with hardly a second thought. The following year, 1964, an astonishing fashion craze swept Sydney: the topless look. Women boarded buses wearing hats (practically compulsory for all women over 25) frocks, stockings and high heels – but with their breasts exposed.

Two years later, the censor’s office, until then vying with the Vatican in its zeal to stop people from reading and seeing what the censor knew they shouldn’t read or see, collapsed almost overnight, thanks to the Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1966 landmark court case.

These dramatic social changes meant that by the end of the sixties unmarried teenage girls were ‘on the Pill’ and sleeping with – and increasingly, living with – whoever took their fancy. Porn newspapers and magazines were on sale at some corner milk bars alongside the Truth (More Shock Photos Inside!), Australasian Post and Pix and just below the counter with the Black Magic chocolate boxes, the Cherry Ripes and the jelly babies.

Today the main figures in the Bogle–Chandler case would, characteristically, be divorced or still single. Margaret Chandler, 29, and her husband Geoffrey, 32, would most likely be single, meeting partners in nightclubs, living together for a year or two perhaps, and agreeing to part when, as happened, they sought other lovers.

On the first day of the New Year of 1963, however, unaware that the revolution had begun, Australians woke up to news that would have them agog. Here was a Rhodes scholar – the secular equivalent of a saint – a brilliant scientist at the famous research laboratories, the CSIRO, a man who apparently could speak a number of languages and could play the clarinet – he could probably make a decent fist of Artie Shaw’s ‘Frenesi’ – a married man with four kiddies, here was this estimable and remarkable man, found dead with his trousers off and reputation in tatters.

And Margaret Chandler. She was the mother of two little kiddies – and she had been a nurse! More saintly connotations. Here was Mrs Chandler, also half naked, and found (but the public were not told this) with a man’s underpants between her ankles. Worse, far worse, it quickly emerged, her husband, also a CSIRO man, apparently didn’t give a hoot if his wife was having an affair with Dr Bogle – in fact he encouraged it! And he too was having a bit on the side.

On the surface Geoffrey Chandler and his wife Margaret seemed to be a happily married couple living in Croydon, a middle-class Sydney suburb. They had two small children, Gareth, two, and baby Sean, and common interests in dachshund dogs and veteran cars. He was a scientific photographer employed by the CSIRO, and she had been a nurse.

On the surface, Dr Gilbert Bogle, 39, a colleague of Chandler’s, was a seemingly happily married father of four, whose wife Vivien was the daughter of an Anglican bishop. A New Zealand Rhodes scholar at Oxford who got his doctorate of philosophy in physics, he had come to the CSIRO in 1960. There he was working – blazing a dazzling trail – on solid-state physics, specialising in masers, the precursors of lasers. His work was not classified top secret but its ramifications for military use were extremely significant.

Within a few weeks of the New Year Dr Bogle was to take a position with the Bell laboratories in America, the world centre for new engineering programs. The laser was developed at Bell and Dr Bogle’s expertise would have been called on in the further development of laser, and, probably, in advancing Bell’s anti-ballistic missile systems.

But 10 days before New Year’s Eve he met Margaret Chandler.

The Chandlers and ‘Gib’ Bogle were at a CSIRO Christmas barbecue at Murraybank and Bogle, Geoffrey Chandler later said, was in excellent form. He was clearly smitten by Margaret and there was instant rapport. ‘They struck a spark, one off the other. In a way I was flattered. At least two women had told me that Gib was a fascinating man and it is always gratifying to have one’s choice in one’s wife borne out by another man’s attentions to her.’

These three sentences from So You Think I Did it?, the book Geoffrey Chandler wrote in 1969, sums up the man’s breathtakingly cavalier attitude that he professed to have about other men and his wife. Chandler didn’t know Bogle well, but he must have known, from CSIRO scuttlebutt, that Bogle made a practice of seducing the wives of friends and colleagues. Bogle, he later learned from one of Gib’s former conquests, was a man who was apparently not particularly ardent, but who liked to ‘renew himself’ with other women.

Geoffrey Chandler, too, liked to renew himself. He was a member of the Sydney Push, described by Barry Humphries as ‘a fraternity of middle class desperates, journalists, drop out academics, gamblers and poets manqué and their doxies’.

Chandler was a little more circumspect, describing the Push as anti-authoritarian, republican, and humanist, but then warming to the ‘doxies’: ‘Casual love-making was part of the Push life…One of the attractions of the Push undoubtedly was that there were always a number of good-looking young girls around.’

Bob Ellis gushed that the ‘members of the Push loomed as Homeric giants, whose life was one long adventure, night after night, party after party, race meeting after poker session and tragic love after tragic love, following only the minute’s need or desire – arguing and drinking far into the night, taking round the hat for incidental abortions, offering no rebuff to anyone who showed up at midnight and wanted to sleep on the floor, and having their parties, parties, parties – all the parties I missed’.

At the time they met ‘Gib’ Bogle was having an on-and-off affair with a woman, Margaret Fowler. Geoffrey Chandler was ‘constantly seeing’ an attractive member of the Push, Pam Logan. And Margaret Chandler had come out of an affair with another single man who told police that Geoffrey Chandler had suggested that he visit Margaret when he was not at home.

Margaret Fowler was also at the barbecue and her husband, an academic, later told police that his wife had gone on at great length about how Gib and Margaret had gone off into the bush together and how her husband Geoffrey had not seemed to mind. She had discussed the party ‘ad nauseam’, he said, and said, ‘I pity…Bogle if he’s going to get mixed up with the Chandlers.’

Driving home from the barbecue Geoffrey Chandler could see his wife was excited. The following day, he said, as they lay in bed talking about Gib, Margaret wondered what he would be like as a lover. Geoffrey told her, ‘If you want to have Gib as a lover, if it would make you happy, you do it.’

That was Chandler’s style. ‘Margaret and I learned about love together,’ he wrote. ‘We realised in our relationship everything that love could mean. It may have been that when I made love to other women, as I occasionally did, I was testing myself against other standards.’

On New Year’s Eve, after the Chandlers had left their children with Margaret’s parents at Granville, the three met again at the Waratah Street, Chatswood home of Ken and Ruth Nash on Sydney’s North Shore. Ken Nash, a dapper man, was Chandler’s superior in the photographic branch at the CSIRO. The Chandlers, it transpired, had been invited at late notice – and only at the prompting of Gib Bogle, the star guest among the 22 who came – suitably dressed – to the party. Only Geoffrey Chandler declined to come in the stipulated jacket and tie for men. He wore what Ken Nash testily told the inquest was ‘sandals, casual slacks and some form of long shirt-like object that hung outside his trousers with an open-neck collar, although I had explained at great length that dress for the party was to be a frock-type dress for the women and jackets and tie for the men’. And he didn’t bring an original ‘work of art’ as guests were instructed. Gib Bogle brought his clarinet and a sketch parodying Picasso’s drawings, the ‘message’ behind which was later to be the subject of endless conjecture.

Inside the thirties suburban home Geoffrey Chandler looked around and didn’t much like what he saw: about 20 people talking quietly and not doing a lot of drinking. He slipped out around 11 a.m. and went to a Push party in Balmain. There he met Pam Logan and went to her bed-sitter in Darlington for about half an hour before returning to Chatswood to the Nash’s party at between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. in time for supper.

No-one seemed to have missed him and Mrs Nash told him cheerfully that Gib was going to drive Margaret home.

After supper Chandler, Margaret and Gib sat ‘in what I think Ken Nash called his den…it was at this time I should have said to Margaret, “Come on, we’re going home.” But I didn’t. So it was really I who forced the issue. I could tell that Margaret was somewhat disenchanted, and that what had started as a half joke, a possible experiment, had gone stale. She had been saying she was interested in Gib but really all she wanted was to get in the car and go home with me. And I think Gib felt the same way. But he was a man and he had said he would take her home, and he certainly wasn’t going to revert on this.’

Chandler asked Bogle if he still wanted to drive Margaret home. Bogle, he said, looked at him intently for a moment and then said ‘Right.’ It was taken for granted that Chandler would go to Granville to pick up the children, leaving the Croydon home empty.

Chandler mooched out of the house, not bothering to say goodbye to anyone, sat outside for a while smoking – waiting to see if Margaret might change her mind – and had a last cigarette in his car before starting the engine and driving his silver vintage Vauxhall to Pam Logan’s. He woke her up and she went with him to pick up the boys. The distinctive car was seen on the Parramatta Road between 4.45 and 5 a.m. by two witnesses. One of them recognised Chandler and said to his wife that the woman in the car wasn’t Margaret Chandler. At Granville, while Pam waited at a discreet distance from the house, Chandler picked up his children and they all returned to the Logan flat at Darlington. It was 6.30 a.m. There Chandler stayed until 10 a.m., when he returned to his Croydon home, tumbled into the empty double bed and slept.

At 1 a.m., there was a knock on the door. It was the police.

When Geoffrey Chandler slipped away from the party at the Nash’s around 11 his absence went unremarked. Ken Nash gave evidence at the inquest that he had become aware that Chandler was not in the house an hour later, some time around midnight (when Chandler was arriving at the Push party). Around that Auld Lang Syne time, Nash told the coroner, he had seen Margaret Chandler and Gib Bogle standing together a few metres from the back door. They were on the lawn, about a metre apart, just looking at each other.

‘Partly in jest, from a point of view of puckish humour, I switched off the light which spilt on to the lawn. They returned to the house immediately.’

The party went on with a few diehards staying until, at around seven in the morning, the Nash’s phone rang. It was Mrs Bogle. Did Ruth Nash know where Gib was? Mrs Nash lied. Gib had left a little while before, she told Mrs Bogle. Ten minutes later the last guest left – and perhaps 20 minutes after that Bogle’s body was discovered about five kilometres away. Ken and Ruth Nash went to bed not knowing that the party was well and truly over.

Fifteen minutes after Geoffrey Chandler had returned to the party and finally driven off, disconsolate, to wake up Pam Logan and go with her to pick up his children, Gib Bogle said goodnight to Ruth Nash, asked to take his Picasso home to show his children and beeped farewell in his Ford Prefect.

Margaret Chandler waited a few minutes and then also left. She got into Bogle’s car and they drove off and were next seen driving into Lane Cove River Park, five kilometres from the Nash’s around 4.30. Bogle drove across Fuller’s Bridge, turned to the right, off the road and on to a narrow dirt track, on the eastern bank of the Lane Cove River, a well-known Lovers’ Lane.

Why?

What were they doing on this squalid riverbank, littered with broken bricks, beer bottles, condoms and rusted cans? If they wanted to make love why not go to the Chandler’s Croydon home? Geoffrey Chandler had made it quite clear he would not be there. If they hadn’t wanted to do that, if they couldn’t wait, Bogle could have driven his car a minute or so further along the track where there was an open stretch of riverbank with little rubbish and a lot more privacy. (It appeared it was Rush Hour at the Lane Cove Lovers’ Lane by the time Gib and Margaret arrived.)

A witness told the inquest that he had seen Bogle seated in the car looking quite pale. Another saw the car a few minutes later, but it was empty. Ken Challis said he saw a couple in the Ford Prefect who were not there when he returned half an hour later. But he did see a muscular man in a dark T-shirt and long blond hair, who, Challis said, shot in front of his car and slithered down the bank and out of sight.

Another man, Eric McGrath, drove by the deserted car at around 5.10. A few hundred metres further on he came across a boy, aged around five. He asked the boy if he was lost and, as Challis appeared from the trees, the boy – who seemed stunned and kept repeating, ‘No. No. No. I want to go home!’ – ran away.

A courting couple saw the Bogle car but were frightened when they spotted a man in the bushes. They drove off.

Three hours later Gib Bogle’s body was found.

The other, other woman

One Sunday morning in 1959, in his little 1948 green Ford Prefect sedan, Gib Bogle pulled up outside the squash courts at Turramurra, not far from his home where he had left his wife and four children. On the courts a woman who had caught his eye, Margaret Fowler, was playing. She was 35, a librarian and fellow employee at the CSIRO. She too was an academic with a degree in physics and maths, and married to a professor of chemical engineering. She was about to begin an affair that would continue, on and off, until Bogle’s death.

Gib drove Margaret to a local park where ‘he kissed me a great deal. He did not undress me,’ she told police who interviewed her several times. ‘I said to him, “I’m frightened. This is very serious for me and it’s only fun and games for you.” (She was an intelligent but foolish woman with a masochistic itch Gib would quickly scratch.)

‘It’s too unequal,’ she said as Gib came back with a callous and glib answer: ‘Yes, but it would be fun all the same.’

They were petting in the Prefect for an hour and in that time Margaret Fowler fell in love with this man whose idea of fun was seducing desperate wives. A few days after their pash in the park she caught his train and already the pattern of their affair was clear. He admonished her:

‘You are a very possessive woman.’

She wasn’t, she insisted without conviction, but he brushed her denial aside. In any case, he told her, he was ‘interested in someone else now’.

This sort of brutal treatment was apparently not enough to dampen her ardour. For the next three years, and though he was often impotent and unsatisfying sexually, she was obsessed with him, took his cruel and cursory treatment and always came back for more.

Once, after lovemaking in his office, she told him: ‘You can’t treat me like this!’ He rapped: ‘I only like you when you don’t talk. Once you start reproaching me I don’t like you any more and it’s coming over me now and I’m going home. Get up!’

She slapped his face and that should have been the end of the affair, but whenever Bogle tried to end it, as he often did, she would threaten him. ‘I’ll die if you do!’ When she learned that the Bogle family was planning to move to the US early in 1963 she told a friend that she would take a fatal dose of the poison, phenobarb, but by November 1962, she told police, they made arrangements to live together in London. Bogle had told her they would share a flat together. (Presumably he would pop over from the US and meet her, as he had popped over to the Turramurra squash club.)

Margaret Fowler was interviewed by the police six days after the deaths but had an alibi. She was at another party, in Turramurra, several suburbs away.

She and her husband had left the party at 3.45 a.m. (about the time Margaret Chandler and Gilbert Bogle had left the Nash’s) and gone straight home. The police interviewed her four more times and she wrote a long statement about her involvement with Bogle.

Margaret Fowler left Australia for England immediately after the inquest. Her husband divorced her four years later claiming he had come home to find her and another man naked in bed. She died in 1977.

‘Two bodies in an almost normal anatomical presentation, but the people were dead and the authorities wanted to fill in that vacant little square at the bottom of the report,’ Doctor John Laing, the director of forensic medicine at the Public Health Department said years later. ‘So surely – and this is not an uncommon experience in a pathologist’s life – if anatomy won’t give you the answer it is obvious that the New Year’s Eve party must.

‘They overindulged, they were full of alcohol, they got themselves into a posture where they asphyxiated, that or they took sleeping pills and goodness-knows-what and went for a row without meaning to. So all we had to do was put the specimens in the bottles, send them to the government analysts and Bob’s your uncle.

‘Oh boy, how wrong can you be! It was not until the analyst sent back his magnificent document in which he said no poisons and, so help me, a New Year’s Eve party – no alcohol – that we realised we were up the original gum tree.’

One thing the post-mortem did reveal was that whatever killed Dr Bogle at around 5 a.m., that New Year’s Day, almost certainly killed Margaret Chandler a few hours later. And poison, it was agreed, was almost certainly the cause of death. But what poison it was impossible to tell.

When the City Coroner, Mr Jack Loomes, opened the inquest into the deaths, in March, Sydneysiders queued for seats each day, bringing with them flasks of tea and packed lunches and over its 15 days the media held the front pages for the sensational evidence that was surely to come as witness after witness – 50 in all – took the stand.

It didn’t happen. Chief among the witnesses was the government analyst Mr Ernest Stanley Ogg, who told Mr Loomes that he had examined the pair’s brains, hearts, livers, spleens, kidneys and blood. He had tested hair for arsenic poisoning, durata seeds (a poison used by Asian criminals) cocaine, henbane and Queensland conefish venom among many tests for known poisons. But, he said, there were thousands more available. ‘There are about 40,000 new chemical substances every year. The majority of them are toxic in varying degrees.

‘No-one can say these substances can be detected. No-one can say of any of these substances, that if they had been used to poison someone, they could be detected.’

Finally, to the immense disappointment of the public, Mr Loomes released his findings. The facts were, concluded the coroner, that ‘each of the unfortunate persons died an unnatural death’ and that they died because they stopped breathing after their hearts stopped beating; or because their hearts stopped beating after they stopped breathing.

Well, yes.

He also said that ‘every person who I felt could give any information as to the deaths of these unfortunate persons has been summonsed to appear…One would like to think feel that no stone has been left unturned to have all available evidence that could assist in any way placed before this inquest.’

Well, no.

In truth, he left unturned the stone of the spurned lover of Dr Bogle – Margaret Fowler – a woman many police considered the prime suspect.

On 27 May, it was Margaret Fowler’s turn to give evidence. She had no sooner sworn to tell the truth than her counsel and the counsels for both the Bogle family and Geoffrey Chandler objected to the truth being told. The coroner agreed with the three learned men, saying, ‘I feel her evidence could not now help in any way in the charge that has been placed upon me,’ at which many an eyebrow was hoist among Sydney detectives.

(On the same grounds the coroner also discharged Margaret Chandler’s self-described former lover, Bill Berry).

Nonetheless, the complexities of the love life that the deaths had revealed were laid bare at the inquest, and at one poignant moment, Geoffrey Chandler an urbane man, calm and collected, lost his composure. In answer to a question he said, ‘One tried to find a solution for these things…’

Mr Looms didn’t ask about the worm tablets for dogs.

Bill Jenkings, the veteran Mirror crime reporter reckons he knows how Margaret Chandler and Gib Bogle died. It was not murder, he says.

In As Crime Goes By: The Life and Times of ‘Bondi’ Bill Jenkings, he writes: ‘I have no doubt it was a stupid practical joke that badly misfired. This I base on my own investigations and the many frank discussions with that shrewdest of detectives, Jack Bateman…I believe that one of the guests at the party slipped tablets[the worm tablets] into cups of coffee Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler drank just before they left the party.’

Bateman, Bill Jenkings, says, knew who did it but said the evidence was circumstantial: it could not be proved in court.

Bateman was convinced that the person, knowing the couple were about to have a liaison, thought that while the pair were lovemaking the worm tablets would act, causing diarrhoea and vomiting. But the chemical in the tablets, arecoline hydrobromide, proved deadly.

The ‘joke’ that backfired theory is supported by Brian Hansen, a highly regarded writer, first as a specialist crime reporter and then as a sports reporter and author of 20 books. In The Awful Truth: The Inside Story of Crime and Sport, Hansen tells of a meeting arranged by John Bryan Kerr, the star radio announcer ‘celebrity killer’ who once dominated the Melbourne headlines. He and Hansen continued to stay in touch after Kerr served his time for murder and when Truth sent Hansen to Sydney to cover the Bogle–Chandler case he got a call.

It was Kerr and he claimed to have a contact who would reveal how the couple died.

Hansen says he was told to take a ferry to Manly where he went to a house and was met by a well-dressed middle-aged man.

The man gave him details of the case that Hansen knew to be true but had not been made public. He told him he was one of the dinner guests at the Nash New Year’s Eve party. He wanted it made clear that the party was perfectly normal.

‘There has been so much written about this ritual and that ritual and that we were a collection of ratbags doing all sorts of obscene things. It was just rubbish. We were simply a group of intellectuals having intellectual discussions over a few drinks and some good food.’

Then he told Hansen his theory, which he said, was shared by other dinner party guests but, he believed, had not been passed on to the police.

‘Gib fancied himself as a ladies’ man and was known to us as a bit of a smoothie. We knew he was having an affair with Margaret although she was much younger and less mature than Gib. They did slip away from the function late in proceedings. We all noticed including Chandler, nobody was surprised.’

He said a little later another member of the party also wandered off and he had no doubt the guest was following the couple. ‘He told me in strict confidence the identity of that shadowing guest…

‘The guest said that he and others, particularly the women, knew that Bogle kept a small hip flask in the glove box of his car. The flask was invariably filled with spirits for a social sip with his companion as they parked in convenient tail-light locations.

‘The flask wasn’t there when the police examined his car, because there was no mention of it being found or even that they knew of its existence. It is obvious to me somebody slipped something into the flask and it is pretty clear that this had to happen while they were at the party.

‘They couldn’t have been contaminated until after they left the party because the stuff had a stupendous effect on them. They certainly hadn’t consumed anything that toxic at the Nash’s or they would have died there. It is highly probable that somebody who knew about the flask loaded it up while they were still at the party.

‘…somebody anticipating they would be slipping off for a bit of slap and tickle decided to play a silly practical joke on them and poured some form of aphrodisiac into the flask. I think it quite possible the joker followed them in his car just to watch what transpired. What he saw was it all go horribly wrong. He couldn’t help because they were beyond help. He made the bodies decent and took away the flask for obvious reasons.’

In 1976 Ken Nash, the New Year’s Eve party host with a mischievous sense of humour, wedged a .22 calibre semi-automatic rifle between his legs, stooped his head over the barrel and squeezed the trigger.

The dapper man who was affronted by the casual wear of Geoffrey Chandler left a note for the neighbours apologising for the mess and the inconvenience to whoever found his body. One of the neighbours said Nash, widowed in 1974, had become a recluse for the last two years of his life. Once, however, Nash had invited him in for a drink and the two men had talked through the night about little else but the Bogle-Chandler mystery. Nash, the neighbour said, was obsessed by the case.

Nash killed himself on the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler.

Who dunnit – and how? The theories

A former senior detective involved with the case believed a jealous Margaret Fowler murdered the pair, says Marian Wilkinson in The Book of Leaks. ‘I’m satisfied in my own mind she did it. It never went out of my mind,’ she says he told her.

‘He pointed to her affair with Bogle, and that he had “wiped her” and to a report early in the case that said she was seen outside the Nash’s house party on the morning of January 1. He said he had not wanted the Fowlers to leave the country but there was nothing to hold her on, no evidence against her.’

•••

Keith Paull, who was at the Lane Cove death site on New Year’s Day and who later became the chief superintendent of the NSW police was interviewed after his retirement and said: I’m inclined to think that LSD might well have been a cause. But whether it was self-administered by force or trickery, it’s hard to say. At this stage I suppose we’ll never know for sure. There may still be someone out there who knows what happened – but it’s unlikely they’ll come forward now.’

•••

Two years after the deaths, the Hong Kong police force’s Director of Forensic Medicine reported two deaths which exhibited precisely the symptoms found in the Bogle-Chandler case. The two Asians died, he found, after taking ‘Japanese Chocolate’ – the Asian aphrodisiac, Yohinbine.

•••

Margaret Fowler and Geoffrey Chandler gave credence to an extraordinary theory by the widow of Dr Cliff Dalton, a friend of Dr Gilbert Bogle’s. Catherine Dalton’s husband, like Bogle, was an eminent New Zealand physicist, and had helped invent the first fast breeder reactor. He was a member of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in Sydney and died two years before Bogle in mysterious circumstances.

Catherine Dalton wrote a book linking the two men’s deaths. She believed Bogle was assassinated because he was poised to disclose Australian Atomic Energy Commission security leaks and CIA illegal activities in Australia.

Later, following revelations by the British intelligence officer Peter Wright, Geoffrey Chandler speculated that Bogle had been ‘eliminated’ as a Soviet agent.

•••

The respected journalist Marion Wilkinson, in The Book of Leaks, an investigative book jointly written with Brian Toohey, agrees with the conspiracy theory. She believes that the FBI, which

J. Edgar Hoover ordered keep files on the case, can shed light on the deaths, but refuses to release the files.

‘When Mr A.F.A Harper, head of Gib’s section at the CSIRO was called in at the last stages of the inquest he said in answer to questions…that Gib was not engaged in any research into what might be called a “death ray”. Nor was he involved in anything that might have international repercussions on the grounds of security…

‘But although the work in solid state physics was not classified [secret] it had classifiable possibilities. In any case it is the bulk of knowledge that can be vitally important, especially unclassified information, obtained when people are working in free fields where some sharp-eyed scientist can immediately see new values…it is possible that he had stumbled on to something during his research that someone or other did not want brought into effect or circulated among scientists.

‘This is speculation – but it is in my opinion a more valid theory than any other that has been advanced.’