Gangland Robbers Read Free Page B

Griffin. Eventually, Griffin told Grant the whole story of the killings, and after a search, Grant and Lee found the missing money, which was returned to the Australian Joint Stock Bank. For their efforts, the pair were given £200 each and dismissed from their positions.
    Eight days after Griffin’s death, his grave was broken into and his head severed from his body. At the time there was considerable interest in criminals’ phrenology and it has been suggested that the theft was for scientific purposes. His skull is believed to have ended up in the home of a Rockhampton doctor but, despite a £20 reward, it was never retrieved. Cahill and Power are believed to have been the first Queensland officers to be killed on duty, and Griffin was the first man to be legally executed in Rockhampton.
    A number of others followed him to the scaffold in relatively quick succession. These included dubious jockey Alexander Archibald, bludger George Palmer and New Zealander John Williams, hanged for the murder, on 24 April 1869, of Patrick Halligan, one-time landlord of the Lion Creek Hotel at Rockhampton, which he had just sold to Archibald.
    Halligan, who regularly brought gold in from the Morinish field, had set out with more than £300 in coins and notes. When he did not return, a search party was sent out, and trackers found traces of blood, a bullet mark on a tree and two silver coins, as well as his hat and whip. On 7 May his badly decomposed body was found in the Fitzroy River.
    Three days after the body was found, a miner provided enough information for the arrest of Archibald, who promptly dobbed in Palmer, Williams and a Charles Taylor. If Archibald thought that by turning Crown witness he would not be prosecuted, he was wrong. It was Taylor who was allowed to turn Queen’s evidence and so escape the gallows. George Palmer had long been suspected of bailing up the coach running between Gympie and Brisbane. He hid out for some time before arranging with a local solicitor, JW Stable, to turn him in and so pick up the £700 reward on offer.
    On 16 January 1880 an attempted robbery of the Queensland National Bank took place. The robber, later identified as Joseph Wells, entered it at 10 a.m. and, armed with a six-chamber revolver, demanded money from the bank’s employees. Following a scuffle and the wounding of a Mr Murphy, who was helping to thwart the robbery, Wells ran off into the bush. He scampered up the so-called ‘robbers tree’, where he stayed until he was found and eventually lured to the ground. He was charged with robbery under arms and at his trial, held in Toowoomba, his counsel attempted the same type of ingenious defence that Woods and Carver had attempted in Melbourne seventeen years earlier—that to be convicted of robbery under arms, Wells had to have injured the man, or men, from whom he actually stole the money. It did him no more good than it had Woods and Carver. Wells was the last person to be hanged for robbery under arms in Queensland, when he was executed on 22 March 1880 at Brisbane Gaol.
    The transport of gold in the early days could be described as cavalier. In Western Australia, which did not have its gold rush until the 1890s, the ingenious, if flawed, theory behind what would now be seen as recklessness was that even if a robbery occurred, the villains could not get away. A police escort was expensive, and the National Bank was the first to organise gold deliveries with its own security escort, in the form of a couple of youths. Even then, the bullion boxes were simply placed on the floor of the carriage, with the escorts on each side.
    The journey by horse from Malcolm to Menzies, a distance of 70 miles, took fourteen to eighteen hours on a good day, and forty-eight hours if the roads were in worse condition than usual. Horses were changed every 8 to 12 miles. By coach, the journey could take up to four days. On occasion, the so-called gold escort was one man