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Horror In the Hamlet of Carcoar

Located in the central tablelands of New South Wales, almost 260 kilometres west of Sydney and around 50 kilometres southwest of the nearest major city, Bathurst, modern visitors to the scenic town of Carcoar often find it hard to believe the quiet streets could have such a dark history of violence and murder.

Sitting about 700 metres above sea level and surrounded by beautiful, rolling green hills, the town is recognised by the National Trust thanks to a number of classic surviving examples of 19th-century architecture. It was in one of these very buildings – the Carcoar branch of the City Bank of Australia, still standing but now housing a craft centre – that horror descended onto the town in the early hours of Sunday, 24 September 1893, when a robbery turned to tragedy – with a most unexpected perpetrator. Sadly, though, this was not the first time life had been lost in the quaint little hamlet.

Renegade convicts and bushrangers were a problem in the town – the third oldest west of the Blue Mountains – as far back as 1840, when a man was shot to death trying to stop the theft of a local racehorse. As a result, martial law was threatened, but things had calmed down by 1850 with the arrival of more police officers and a magistrate. In the years that followed, Carcoar became something of a banking and administrative hub, but there was still lawlessness in the air, and the town was the site of Australia’s first daylight bank robbery in 1863, when two of the notorious Ben Hall gang – Johnny Gilbert and John O’Meally – held up the Commercial Bank, which still stands to this day. The men were forced to flee empty-handed, though, when a teller fired a gunshot into the ceiling. That same year, Ben Hall himself held up a local Presbyterian minister, but let the man go unharmed. There was no major crime of note after that until hell broke loose in 1893.

By then, Carcoar could best be described as a modest town, the epicentre of a successful farming district. It claimed six pubs and two banks, including the City Bank, located on a hill on the main street. The branch manager at the time was a man named John Phillips, and on the fateful September night, the shy and nervous but well-liked and respected gent was preparing to leave Carcoar – he had accepted a promotion to lead operations at a much busier branch of the bank in Young. He was due to leave on Monday, 25 September.

His wife, Anne, and two young children, baby Gladys and three-year-old Dorothy, were going to stay behind in their rooms above the bank where they lived, along with their domestic servant Agnes McVicar who slept in the basement, until John Phillips could organise a house for them all to live in Young. While John was away, Anne would be kept company by her sister Susan Stoddart, and Susan’s friend Frances ‘Fanny’ Cavanagh. Both women were in their early 20s and had caught the train up from Sydney, arriving at the closest station to Carcoar, Blayney, at around 10pm on the Saturday night of 23 September. They were met at Blayney by John Phillips and his friend, the Reverend Frank Clark, and transported back to Carcoar.

Tired from their journey, the women had dinner with John and Anne, and then all four retired for the evening, as did McVicar – though the baby Gladys was unsettled all night and Anne was forced to get out of bed several times to attend to her.

Through her fitful sleep, Anne heard a strange sound some time between two and three in the morning. From her bed, she peered out through the room’s open door and was shocked to see a faint dash of candle light moving on the stairs in the hall. Scared, she woke up her husband.

The law of the day dictated that any bank managers who lived on the premises must keep a gun with them. John’s loaded pistol was under his pillow. Anne lit a candle and John grabbed his gun – which a court would later be told was not in working condition – before the pair ventured out of their room and down the stairs, where they found their dining room door ajar and light emanating dimly from inside. Looking through the entrance, they were shocked to see a man. The intruder wore a black mask over the lower half of his face, and in his hand he held a menacing hatchet.

Before the pair could do anything, the man turned and hit Anne Phillips in the hand, knocking the candle to the floor. At the same time, though, the woman managed to rip the mask from the intruder’s face. Chaos erupted in the dead of night. There was shouting and John Phillips was knocked over by the intruder. His wife cried out for him to hand her the gun so that she could shoot the bandit, but John could only fall to the floor, almost taking his wife with him as he let out a pained groan.

At that point, Anne’s maternal instinct kicked in and she ran back up the stairs for her children, crying out ‘murder’ to alert the others in the house.

As she reached baby Gladys in the bedroom, the intruder was right behind her, the hatchet still in his hand. He hit the woman on the side of the face with the weapon and she fell crashing to the floor.

By now, Susan Stoddart and Fanny Cavanagh had been awoken by the scream and the pair rushed to check on the children. Fanny picked up baby Gladys and started for the front door, but the intruder was upon her in no time. He lashed out viciously with the hatchet, and Fanny Cavanagh died on the spot. His blow also severed two of the infant’s fingers.

At this point, Susan Stoddart entered the room and saw her sister, lying groggily on the floor. She told Anne that she should remain there as she was in a bad way, but the intruder had other ideas. He wanted the money from the bank downstairs, and it was already clear that he would stop at nothing to get it. Brandishing the blood-splattered hatchet, the man demanded the keys for the bank’s safe, and Anne Phillips made her way unsteadily to her husband’s trousers and retrieved them from his pocket. The intruder grabbed them and left the room as Susan Stoddart tried to attend to her sister.

But the man returned within moments, angrily informing the women that they had given him the wrong keys. Trying to remain calm, Anne Phillips informed the intruder that, as her husband was no longer the bank manager for the Carcoar branch, he no longer had the safe keys. The intruder asked who had them, and Anne told him it was a Mr Healy, the new manager. Healy, she said when asked, was staying at one of the town’s hotels.

By this time, the housekeeper Agnes McVicar had been awoken by Anne’s scream of ‘murder’ and heard people moving around upstairs. She ran up, only to be confronted by the inert body of Fanny Cavanagh. She noticed blood all over the stairs and her heart started racing in fear for the children. She bolted to the bedroom, where she found the sisters Anne and Susan, as well as a strange man holding a hatchet and a candle. Agnes listened as Anne begged the intruder to leave them all alone, at which point the man turned around and saw Agnes walking into the room. He held the hatchet in the air as if he would bring it crashing down upon her at any time.

Perhaps realising that his plans weren’t working out as easily as they should have, the intruder started to back out of the room cautiously, telling the women that he would kill them if they followed him. The women remained silent until the anxiety became too much and Anne ran out to check on her husband. Susan Stoddart followed her down the stairs, only to find her friend Fanny, laying dead and bloody on the floor with the unconscious baby Gladys. It seemed like the walls were closing in around Susan, and she ran from the house screaming. Agnes followed her to the house next door, where the bank’s accountant Joseph Derwin lived.

The hysterical cries of the two women soon roused Derwin from his slumber and the group ran back to the house to investigate. The scene that confronted them was shocking. Anne Phillips was holding her moaning husband’s head in her arms while blood dripped out of it. Derwin checked the safe, but found that it was still secure.

Derwin soon sounded an alert and at the break of dawn, the men of the region set out to track down whoever had perpetrated the violent break-in. At this stage, it was believed more than one man had been involved.

The search was looking fruitless until it was reported that the local priest Reverend Clark’s horse and bridle had gone missing. Before long, searchers also found a dark suit and blood-covered hat stashed near Cowra, about 40 kilometres west of Carcoar. Soon after that, Reverend Clark’s horse made its way into Cowra without anyone on it. The searchers realised they should concentrate their efforts in the immediate vicinity. By this time, John Phillips had died as a result of the hatchet blow to his head.

It was 11 hours after the initial attack that police arrested a man for the murders of both John Phillips and Frances Cavanagh. At 1pm that day, Constable Meagher of the Cowra police force entered the local barber’s and laid charges against 25-year-old Herbert ‘Bertie’ Edwin Glasson, the handsome and popular son of one of the region’s richest families.

Glasson was a well-known figure in Cowra and its surrounding areas, so the arrest was a shock to the public. The young man had married his childhood sweetheart – musician Annie May Summerbelle – at the start of the year, and the pair were regulars on the local social circuit whenever they were in town, though they spent most of their time residing at the Hotel Metropole in Sydney. On top of that, Bertie – considered a harmless larrikin at worst – had won a number of prizes as a show jumper, but the general public were not privy to his more criminal exploits. Described as the black sheep of the wealthy family, Bertie had once almost brought shame to the Glassons when he was caught forging cheques worth £1200. The family used their influence to settle the matter before it came out in the media.

Indeed, Bertie had even offered to join the search parties out looking for the Carcoar murderer, declaring any person who would commit such a crime to be a ‘bloodthirsty scoundrel’. But his tune had changed by the time Meagher collared him, with Bertie loudly protesting his innocence before crying out, ‘I am mad! I don’t know where I have been or what I have done.’

His claim was backed up in part by a letter found in his pocket when he was arrested, the contents of which were later published in newspapers in Sydney. The letter, addressed to his wife still back in Sydney and written on the back of a concert program, said that he had found himself that very morning covered in blood in a paddock. Repeating the claim that he was ‘going mad’, Bertie added that he had no idea what he had done, explaining that he remembered leaving Sydney to go to Orange. He had no recollection of whether he had reached his destination or not. ‘I feel so terribly strange now, darling,’ he wrote, adding that it was ‘better for me to be dead than for you to have a mad husband’. He ended the letter saying that he intended to walk to Cowra and catch a train back to Sydney.

But the next train Bertie caught was to take him as close to Carcoar as it could, where he could face up for his horrific crimes. When the locomotive arrived in Blayney, Bertie was confronted by an angry mob hurling abuse at him. He was in shock, and restrained by handcuffs and leg-irons, and his stunned appearance quickly silenced the crowd. Accompanied by two police officers, Bertie was taken to the local holding cells, where he asked the man in command, Sergeant Boyd, what his restraints were for.

Even though there was only little hope that Anne Phillips would survive her injuries, the widow refused to leave town to seek better medical treatment. Unaware that her husband had passed away – the information had been withheld because of her already fragile state – Anne was taking solace in the fact that her family had survived their ordeal, despite the loss of her youngest daughter’s fingers.

It wasn’t long before the authorities started piecing together what had happened with the help of witnesses. Bertie, it transpired, had arrived in Blayney on the same train as Susan Stoddart and the murdered Fanny Cavanagh, and then he walked through the night to Carcoar. When he was later put in an eight-man line-up, Susan Stoddart was quick to identify him. With the sister of his victim screaming, ‘That is the man,’ at him, Bertie merely stared blankly and didn’t utter a single word.

On top of that, Anne Phillips had managed to stir from her daze enough to inform authorities that Bertie Glasson was the man who had broken into her home. She had recognised him when she ripped the black mask from his face, and had even spoken to him by name, telling him to leave the family alone.

As the story unravelled it became obvious that, whether actually insane or not, Bertie had money troubles. His bank account was overdrawn to the sum of £50, and Mr Derwin had asked him several times to rectify the situation. When the requests were only met with excuses and promises that the matter would be attended to, John Phillips had to take a strong stand; he served a writ against Bertie Glasson.

On top of that, one of Bertie’s business ventures, a butchery in Carcoar, was in trouble. The man who ran it, Tom Turner, had worked without being paid for three months. The bank had ordered the business be sold. It fetched £19, hardly enough to sort out the financial tangle.

When the inquest into the break-in and murders got under way in Carcoar, Bertie was still incarcerated. He was also acting rather strangely, appearing sedate and rational until anyone spoke to him, at which time he would become extremely bothered and behave violently.

The evidence offered up at the inquest didn’t seem to help Bertie’s case, either. A still-shocked Agnes McVicar testified that she recognised Bertie as the man who had threatened her with the hatchet. Susan Stoddart also confirmed that she was ‘positive’ Bertie had been the intruder, though she only gave evidence after asking for all of the attacker’s relatives to be removed from the red-brick courthouse first. She then told of the ‘bloodstained half-axe’ she saw Bertie wielding, adding, ‘I know his face. I will never forget it.’

While this was going on, Bertie sat silently and stared blankly ahead. Five days after it began, the inquest finished with the coroner J. Lithgow Cobb calling the crime one of the most ‘painful, dreadful and shocking ever recorded’. Bertie was then taken under police escort to Bathurst, where his trial began on 20 October 1893 in front of Justice Innes. The defence maintained that their client was insane.

Anne Phillips, meanwhile, was making a slow but steady recovery – though no one involved felt strong enough to give her an honest answer when she asked how her husband was doing. She would, of course, eventually learn the tragic fate of the man she loved, accepting that there was nothing she could have done about it.

The first witness called by the defence was Bertie’s wife, Annie. Looking frail and obviously shocked by the sight of her husband, she said that, yes, she knew her husband was facing financial difficulty, but she had no idea of the extent of the problem. She added that he had been behaving a little oddly leading up to the crime, adding that he hadn’t been sleeping well and had complained of pains in his head. Bertie, she testified, had also suffered from severe sunstroke a week before the attack at Carcoar, which caused him to cry and declare, ‘I am going mad.’

Later, she told of her husband’s departure from their residence at the Hotel Metropole on the Saturday before the murders, explaining that he had told her he was heading to Orange to collect some money owed to him.

Another witness for the defence, an old family friend, told the court that there was a history of insanity on Bertie’s mother’s side of the family. This claim was supported by a physician from Orange, Dr Kelty, who had treated Mrs Glasson when she had shown symptoms of madness. Kelty had even prescribed sedatives to the mother when she became suddenly aggressive.

In summing up, the defence contended that even if Bertie had committed the violent crimes of which he was accused, he had not been responsible for his actions. The prosecution, however, came back strongly, declaring that Bertie’s actions were premeditated from the start. The jury believed the prosecution, and it didn’t take long for Justice Innes to pass the death sentence.

Edwin Herbert ‘Bertie’ Glasson would never publicly accept that he was guilty, maintaining that he was ‘unconscious’ of any crime. He was hanged on Wednesday, 29 November 1893 at Bathurst Gaol. He was thinking of his wife to the end, admitting, ‘To think of her and what she has to suffer is awful.’

Annie May Glasson, however, did not attend her husband’s funeral. The only mourner at the lonely service was his brother, John.