The Goldfields Murders of 1926

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]This is Australian True Crime with Michelle [music] Laurie.

[00:00:03]Our old pal Michael Adams from The Forgotten Australia podcast joins us again to tell us about an historical crime. This time we're traveling back almost exactly 100 years to the gold mines of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. It's a classic wild west scenario [music] with lots of money to be made, lots of dodgy characters trying to get their hands on it, and an under-resourced police department tasked with keeping it all [music] under control.

[00:00:30]This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast [music] is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

[00:00:41]And a warning, this episode of [music] the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

[00:00:50]Michael Adams from Forgotten Australia joins us again, one of my favorite guests.

[00:00:54]>> Oh, thank you so much.

[00:00:55]>> Because you're just such a great storyteller. And also I love historical crime.

[00:01:00]It tells us so much about Australia.

[00:01:02]What are you talking about today?

[00:01:03]Talking about a case that I called Blue Murder on the Golden Mile, cuz it's about the killing of cops on the Golden Mile in Western Australia, which was the area around Kalgoorlie, which was called the Golden Mile at the turn of the century, because it was the richest place on earth. The gold rush had started in the 1890s, and by about 1900 Kalgoorlie was and Coolgardie and Boulder was producing a massive amount of gold, 1/3 of which was being stolen.

[00:01:33]Uh so it was yeah, the heist-o-rama back in the day.

[00:01:37]>> I always thought Melbourne was the richest place in the world during the gold rush.

[00:01:40]>> It was in the 1850s, but this was 50-odd years later.

[00:01:43]>> Ah, so they struck gold in Western Australia.

[00:01:45]>> Struck gold in Coolgardie first I think in 1891 or 92, and then very shortly after Kalgoorlie, and Kalgoorlie soon superseded it. It went from being, you know, uh a spot in the desert to I think maybe 2,000 people within a couple of years and then, you know, another 5,000 or so by the end of this end of the century.

[00:02:04]So, people flocked from all over >> to dig it up and they were sinking mines here, there, and everywhere.

[00:02:11]And then in 1906, it was reported this I think it was an English journalist reported on the the massive amount of systemic theft of gold. So, what was happening was miners would take ore out in their clothes and they'd either put it in dummy mines where it could then be found or they'd take it out to process it in sort of bush smelting plants. And then you could just take the gold to the the gentleman thieves who were sort of the fences, the organizers.

[00:02:40]They would then take it to the Royal Mint in Perth. No questions asked, no paperwork required. You just sold the gold. So, >> So, when you say they took ore, do you mean like they they were working for a company and when they found I didn't even know gold was called ore?

[00:02:55]>> Yeah, they they found the rock that had the gold in it.

[00:02:57]>> Right. They would just pinch it pinch it. Yeah, and then go and process it later or they'd put it in a dummy mine in a dummy mine.

[00:03:04]>> found it in my little mine. That's exactly right. Yeah. So, they estimated that in 1906, they were 1/3 of all gold was being stolen. It was worth a million pounds at the time, which is about 250 million dollars today. So, an enormous amount of money. So, there's big fortunes I would imagine big family fortunes still in Western Australia.

[00:03:26]They're actually based on this illicit gold. So, like, you know, one of the detectives said that um you know, a a bloke rocked into town with, you know, two two pennies to rub together and like 3 months later bought a house cash outright. So, there was big money to be made. So, they started a gold detection unit. So, they actually set up a a police force uh in Kalgoorlie-Boulder to stop people thieving gold. So, you know, they got the the miners then had to actually go into the to the, you know, mine operation area, undress, dress in work uniforms, go down, come back up, get, you know, back in out of their uniforms into their civvies so they couldn't spirit stuff away quite as easily.

[00:04:09]>> Yeah, I guess still possible but not quite as easy.

[00:04:11]>> Yeah, it wasn't as easy.

[00:04:12]>> This is reminding me of my great uncle who's very famous in our family. He worked at the abattoir and he used to walk out with chops in his pocket. Oh, nice. I know, right? So, it's sort of like that.

[00:04:23]>> Partially cooked by the sun they got home or at least warm.

[00:04:25]>> Yeah, on the tram. So, this is [laughter] the that mentality but they were a bit more ambitious than my Uncle Frank. Yeah. Yeah, they were doing pretty well. I love it. And the the cops got, you know, the power to actually, you know, search these dummy mines. So, they really clamped down and they were really successful. So, they set up this gold detection unit and by I think they had six cops full-time and within 15 years that they only needed two. Um that's how successful they'd been but there were still guys stealing gold and they there were these two veteran detectives, uh Detective Inspector John Walsh and Detective Sergeant Alexander Pitman. And they had both been in the gold detection unit, you know, almost from the start. They were veteran cops.

[00:05:05]Between them they had like, you know, 50 years experience and, you know, half of that was on the gold fields. So, they know knew what they were about. They lived in little huts, like little cottages in the gold fields, one in Kalgoorlie, one in Boulder. That was so that they could, you know, keep an eye on things.

[00:05:21]Their fam They were both family men.

[00:05:23]Both of their families with their sort of, you know, adult or teenage children were in Perth. So, they were remitting their money. I think Pitman was about 53 and John Walsh was about 64. So, they were they were long in the tooth. They were, you know, veterans. It seems like it was sort of not not an easy job but it's from what you're saying, I'm reading between the lines and thinking maybe by then it was sort of a pre-retirement job and that they were sort of on top of it.

[00:05:46]>> Yeah. Yeah, they knew what they were about.

[00:05:48]>> Yeah. And like um as far as I uh understand, um it was kind of a bit good cop, bad cop. Um John Walsh would take a fairly generous view of blokes. If he got an idea that you were stealing gold, he'd have a word, lay off, or we're going to bust you. Pitman was a bit more of a hardliner, so he, you know, maybe got had a few enemies. And you know, everybody sort of knew everybody. There were lots of blokes who'd been, you know, previously convicted, so they'd keep an eye on these guys. But the gold thieves would go to great lengths. Like this was a big business. Like they I got the uh WA police files for this case. 2 and 1/2 thousand pages from the 1920s.

[00:06:29]Uh includes like all the telegrams, the notes, the cables, the tips that had been report reported, uh interview transcripts. And it included like an annual report from a couple of years earlier. And they're talking about cases where they busted guys, you know, 300 oz of gold, which, you know, these days is, you know, quite close to a million dollars or more. But even back then it was, you know, a lot of money. So the gold thieves um would go to great lengths to evade the cops. And that could include actually monitoring the cops and also even breaking into the cops' huts to look at their records. So the cops operated completely on a need-to-know basis between each other.

[00:07:10]They didn't make notes that were intelligibly intelligible to anyone else. They didn't tell anybody what they were doing. So yeah, they would often go out on these stakeouts in the bush for like, you know, three or four days at a time. No one knew where they were. And then they'd, you know, they'd bust guys cuz people would set up these smelting operations in the bush.

[00:07:28]>> for these. Tell us about a smelter operation that you cuz you the heat the the level of heat you need, I would imagine, Yeah. to smelt gold. Hot. So you need to, you know, you're you're building a kiln out there. You've got sort of, you know, roasting pots to like roast the ore, crack it open, etc. So, it's a really little industrial operation. There's plenty of like, you know, scrubland out there. So, basically, they're hiding out in the scrub doing this and going out for, you know, a night doing it in the nighttime and then coming back in the day in the morning. And it's 1926 in Kalgoorlie.

[00:08:02]There weren't a lot of cars, and there was no real reason to be out of a nighttime. So, you know, these cops saw a car out after dark. It's, you know, there's a good chance that stole these.

[00:08:11]So, what they would do is they'd go out late at night or early in the morning to catch these guys when they were sort of, you know, either setting up or about to come back in with their stolen gold.

[00:08:20]So, anyway, on the 28th of April 1926, these two cops, and they operated on bicycles. They They rode out of town on their bicycles.

[00:08:30]>> the gold robbers had cars, and the cops had bicycles.

[00:08:33]>> Some of the Some of the robbers were also on bicycles or on horses or horse carts. So, you know, there weren't a lot of vehicles at this time in in the goldfields. There were some.

[00:08:44]>> government would spring for a cop car.

[00:08:47]Wouldn't you? You would. You would.

[00:08:49]Especially when they're when the crime they're looking at so lucrative.

[00:08:52]>> Exactly right. Yeah, you think they'd just be skimming a bit off the top for operations for the budget.

[00:08:57]>> yeah.

[00:08:57]>> I'm sure that the cops thought that. Why do we have to be on bikes, you know, when it's bitterly cold and all the rest of it, you know?

[00:09:03]So, they ride out of town, and that's it. They're just not seen.

[00:09:08]And no one's worried because they often go out of town on these stakeouts. They don't tell anybody where they're going so that it won't leak out. They're not keeping anybody apprised. They're not expected back at any particular time.

[00:09:21]And it's not until the 9th of May that the Sunday Times in Perth raises the alarm saying these two veteran detectives, Welsh and Pitman, aren't accounted for. There's some fears held for them.

[00:09:33]On the goldfields, the fellow police had gone to their huts, looked through the windows, seen that, you know, nothing had been changed.

[00:09:42]Eventually, they broke in. They looked through the occurrence book that they kept. There were just no clues as to where they'd gone. But, they saw that they hadn't taken any supplies. They hadn't taken warm clothing. And they hadn't arranged for their pays to be remitted to their wives in Perth. So, it was clear that they had gone out probably for a short stakeout and not returned. So, it was possible they'd gotten lost and succumbed to the elements. There were also there were like thousands of abandoned mine shafts.

[00:10:12]So, it was also possible that they'd, you know, been investigating one of these dummy mines, there's been some rotten timbers, it's collapsed, and they've gotten into trouble.

[00:10:21]>> Mhm.

[00:10:22]Most likely, though, grave fears were held that they'd stumbled upon some operation and they'd been been murdered.

[00:10:31]So, there was a massive search. They got cops coming in from Perth.

[00:10:35]Now, like I said, these two between them had, you know, 50-plus years. They'd worked in the CID in Perth. They'd worked in the goldfields. They knew all the detectives who were now investigating their disappearance. So, there was a very intense effort to find these guys. They sent out search parties.

[00:10:51]>> how police take it when a fellow officer is murdered, which is obviously what they were thinking worrying had happened at this point.

[00:10:58]>> Yeah, and with good cause. I mean, you know, these guys are doing their jobs.

[00:11:01]Yeah. Um, they're both family men, and, you know, they're They were also um offered humongous bribes continually by the goldfields. And these guys were uh reputed to be incorruptible.

[00:11:15]>> Clean skins.

[00:11:15]>> Yeah, there was no way they would take any sort of bribes. So, they were looking for them. They did get a report.

[00:11:22]They put out, you know, a call for any witnesses. They did get a report from someone who'd seen them riding out on the morning of the 28th going south. So, they knew that, you know, they were looking in possibly the right area, but they were just looking everywhere for them and they couldn't find them.

[00:11:35]And like like I say, there's thousands of abandoned mine shafts. They could be anywhere.

[00:11:39]>> you know, the Australian Outback is notorious, no matter which part of the country and what the landscape is, desert or or shrubbery, it's notorious for people disappearing.

[00:11:48]>> Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:49]>> One way or another. So, they disappeared on the 28th.

[00:11:53]The alarm had been raised on the 9th of May and then on the 12th of May a bloke and his friend who lived in Kalgoorlie were taking this guy's car out for a spin and they parked on the side of the road about 5 miles south of southwest of Kalgoorlie and I think the guy was going to take a leak and he kind of wan- wandered off into the sort of off the side of the the dirt road there and he smelled some bad stuff >> Oh, no. coming up out of a abandoned mine called Miller's Find.

[00:12:23]And he looked down there, couldn't really see much, but he thought this is, you know, it could be a dead animal, but I might have found the coppers. Went back to Kalgoorlie, it was dark by that stage, so the next morning everybody came out there. They brought um a special murder policeman out from W- from Perth and they also had a really old miner called Billy Batten who specialized in this sort of work. He'd rescued people and so forth from collapsed mines previously. So, he went down and the mine at the bottom of this shaft, it was just sort of stacked with crap. There was corrugated iron on the top and then there were bags of uh bricks and coal and ore and there was clothing including a um pair of tailored double-seated pants, gray trousers which did not belong to the police and these would become quite crucial. They found uh an a bloodstained saw, knives, etc. And this guy's down in this hole just surrounded by really angry flies and this stench and then he finds what's buried beneath it and it's dismembered arms, legs in wrapped in in Hessian sacks. It's all hauled up to the top.

[00:13:33]The police are weeping. There's no head for these guys, either of them. So, and they've been down there for like 2 weeks, so they're badly decomposed.

[00:13:42]They've been chopped up. They've been burned.

[00:13:44]Um so, they can positively identify one.

[00:13:48]And there's, you know, they have things like cufflinks and false teeth that they can and fingernails, which one of the cops had distinctly fingernails. So, there's enough to identify enough to for them to know positively that there's one body identified, so they could would only ever be able to prosecute based on one of the murders, but they know it's both of their mates.

[00:14:10]Let's talk about the find. I mean, the the miraculous nature of the find reminds me of Ivan Milat's victims.

[00:14:16]Yeah. Only ever found because motorbike riders happen to go off the That's right. Yeah. And find human remains.

[00:14:24]Otherwise, god knows what would have ever happened. But, similar here, if this guy hadn't happened to stop in that spot for a week, Yeah. If he'd maybe gone, you know, 2 weeks later, by then the decomposition might have been such that, you know, there was no smell, or there might have been rain. What they had thought was that the killers had intended to come back and actually detonate the mine and and cave it in, which case they would never have been found. So, it was quite extraordinary that they were found. What they didn't find were They found a lot of bits and pieces of this sort of out uh bush gold ore processing Okay, so that's what the garbage was from.

[00:14:59]>> That's yeah, all the bits and pieces.

[00:15:00]But, they didn't find all of it. There were certain parts like roasting pans and that just weren't there.

[00:15:06]Um and also the cops' bikes were not there.

[00:15:09]So, it was clear they hadn't been murdered there. All they really had to go on were these trousers.

[00:15:16]Um what they needed to find were the bikes. If they found the bikes, then they might find the murder site. So, for the next uh week or so, they were looking. They had Aboriginal trackers and they actually on the 18th of May, the same day that the funeral was held for these two police in Perth. 30,000 people turned out. That was one in five people in Perth at that time. So, a massive like outpouring of grief. And this was a big story all over Australia.

[00:15:41]So, the trackers found the bikes.

[00:15:44]And then they found close to the bikes, they found a camp. And at the camp, there was these missing bits of the gold processing kit. They also found tins of like empty food tins. And they weren't just your baked beans. They were fancy stuff like chicken, crab, asparagus. So, it's like, well, who in Kalgoorlie likes this fancy tucker?

[00:16:06]They also found tire tracks. The tires were Dunlop balloon tires, they were called. So, they were fairly unusual as well, particularly at this time when there weren't that many cars. So, they were looking for someone who had a car with Dunlop tires, who liked fancy fancy food, and also might have something to do with these, you know, tailored trousers that had been found in there, which didn't belong to the police.

[00:16:32]Is that what Sorry, I have been distracted a little bit by double-seated pants. I can [laughter] I've been thinking, I must ask him, what are double-seated pants and what's the significance of that? They're just really good cuz they they'd be well, but also they'd be hard wearing.

[00:16:48]They wouldn't wear out so easily. I think I could probably use some double-seated We all could, really.

[00:16:53]>> really. Is this a new trend? But in this case, what you're saying is added to the nature of the food that was found there and we've got these rather expensive pants, tailored pants. Tailored, yeah.

[00:17:03]>> Right. So, this is how they're effectively putting together a profile of who they're looking for. Exactly right. One other thing they'd found were footprints that were very small. And they thought, well, it's either a really small guy or perhaps a woman who's been, you know at this site. And at that camp they also found shotgun wadding, they found uh splashes of um blood, they found you know where a bush had been blown off.

[00:17:29]So there was strong physical evidence that this was the crime scene. And from the tracks they also saw that one man had staggered, another man had chased, a man had fallen.

[00:17:40]Earth had been scooped up and removed and so on. So the cops played it pretty close to their chest. Um so the newspapers had a lot of these details.

[00:17:52]But after you know a week or two we're like, "Well, why have the Western Australian police failed to arrest anybody?" But that's the thing when you've got the actual police files, you can see how they're working it out.

[00:18:01]They're interviewing people, they had a very good idea of who they were after, they'd had tip-offs about these three particular guys. And on the 6th of June at dawn, they raided a hotel called the Duke of Cornwall in Kalgoorlie and arrested the owner, Teddy Clark, who was this dapper little guy. He was known as Flash Teddy.

[00:18:21]He wore beautifully turned out clothing.

[00:18:24]He would keep his English complexion nice with lotion. And he'd brush his hair every half an hour. So he was a real dandy in a place like Kalgoorlie.

[00:18:33]While it was also you know rough and tumble miners.

[00:18:36]>> Very macho joint still to this day. Very much so. Um so he was known to be using the Duke of Cornwall Hotel. Yeah, he was making money out of beers, but if you wanted to sell some dodgy ore, his barman, Philip Treffene, who was this broken-down old miner, would take care of you. And Philip Treffene was in his 50s and had previously been a champion bicycle uh rider in in the goldfields at this time. So at the very same time they were raiding a um another uh guy's place. This was a guy called William Coulter. He he was a a bookie. He had a fair bit of money, but he was also had convictions for for dodgy gold. So, they when they raided the hotel, they found a shotgun.

[00:19:19]Uh they found various items had found various items down the mine shaft that had come from the hotel, like a tea kettle, curtains, and Philip Treffene, the barman, had had another pair of those trousers made for himself, and there was the receipt. So, it was like it was a pretty pretty good chain of evidence.

[00:19:38]>> Charlie Messina always says criminals are dumb. Yeah. And it's these sorts of things that you just think, "Dude." Mhm.

[00:19:46]You can It's like dropping your driver's license at the scene, which has happened. Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:51]>> Um the little dandy fella, um who owns the pub, or yeah, did he have small feet by any chance?

[00:19:56]>> Yeah. Oh, yeah. And also was well known to love his tin crabs and his tin of asparagus. He was, you know, fancy in his looks, but fancy in his taste.

[00:20:04]>> God. So, of course, Heage denied everything, said, "No, I don't do anything with dodgy gold." Philip Treffene was like, "I wasn't out there.

[00:20:12]I've never been out to this Miller's Find place. I was here in the pub." The other bloke, Colter, was also, "No, I was actually, you know, outside the other other pub in town doing my bookmaking." All of them denied it. The cops, like I say, had spent 3 weeks piecing this all together, so they knew that these guys were lying. So, they arrested Flash Teddy, and they arrested Philip Treffene. They didn't have enough to arrest Colter quite at this point.

[00:20:37]So, they took them into custody. Massive story, like the headlines are just like, you know, ghastly in terms of, you know, reporting the details of the crime. And the people were outraged, obviously. And it's incredible the amount of tips that had come in, which are in the police file, as well. So, there's, you know, people from like New South Wales saying that they've had visions, and all they all they all they WA government has to do is transfer the thousand-pound reward into them, and then they'll cough it up. You know, all people have had dreams, and all this sort of stuff. It's hilarious to read all this stuff. But the one amazing tip that had come through was by the anthropologist Daisy Bates, who was really famous in early 20th century Australia. But she had lived with indigenous people for 20 years.

[00:21:18]Katherine Hepburn was going to make a movie about her at some stage. I'm glad she didn't cuz these days Daisy Bates is recognized as this horrible racist.

[00:21:27]>> No.

[00:21:28]>> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, at the time she she wrote to the police and said, "I know who did it. It's this Aboriginal youth who came back into the camp and he said that this bloke had done it." And And you know, and she laid out why she should be in control of Aboriginal people of Western Australia cuz they respect and fear her, etc. And she did, you know, just a couple of years earlier put it out there that Aboriginal women were giving birth to children so that they could eat them.

[00:21:54]So, to the credit of the police and the authorities at this time, they just ignored Daisy Bates. And she'd written directly to the Western Australian governor because she was so, you know, well-known and and well-respected as this anthropologist. But that's just a side story. So, they had >> of a side story, by the way. That's [laughter] going to send me down a Google wormhole. So, they arrested these two. They stonewalled.

[00:22:18]And then Teddy's wife, Florrie, said to him, "Either you tell them, the cops, or I'm going to." So, Teddy Clark blabbed. Now, Teddy and Philip at that point had got as their defender a a barrister called Arthur Haynes from Perth. And this guy the previous year had gotten this young woman off on this murder case, which is absolutely insane.

[00:22:43]She'd shot her ex-boyfriend during a dance in the Government House ballroom in front of 300 witnesses, shot him dead with a revolver, and Arthur Haynes had gotten her off, acquitted.

[00:22:58]So, he was now going to be defending these guys.

[00:23:02]>> guy you want.

[00:23:03]>> He's the guy you want. So, he's defending Teddy Clark and Philip Treffene, and then all of a sudden he drops Teddy Clark and he takes up Coulter who's just been arrested because Teddy Clark, after his wife has opened her mouth, has decided he'll tell the whole story. His version is is that he was at the hotel, and yes they were involved in this, you know, gold operation out in the bush, and Philip and and William Coulter had been out in the bush and they'd come back and they'd said, "We shot those cops." And he'd freaked out and they kind [clears throat] of roped him, forced him into helping them cover it up.

[00:23:40]>> That's so interesting. So, the lawyer has chosen to represent the two men who I'm assuming deny any knowledge of it against the guy who's now giving evidence to the police. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they denied had originally denied all knowledge of it, but it would in the inquest it would soon come out that it was an awesome story of how it had all gone down. So, anyway, Teddy Clark's story was that he'd been roped into going out with Coulter to help dispose of the bodies. So, he you know, taking out various things from the hotel, and he reckoned he'd sat in his car, the one with the Dunlop tires, while Coulter had gone and done something, but he wasn't sure what it was. That would be sawing up two policemen, burning them, failing when that failed, wrapping the bits and pieces in thing and then loading it into the back of his car. He claimed that he didn't know exactly what was happening.

[00:24:32]It's like, yeah, sure.

[00:24:34]>> taking ages, all of that, for one thing.

[00:24:37]Ages. And the smells and noises and yeah, no one's doing that quietly. And he's claiming that he had no idea of what was happening while he was just waiting in the car for hours.

[00:24:48]So, they go to the inquest and Philip Treffene then tells his story. He He tells his story at the inquest and then at the trial as well. So Arthur Hines actually puts his two clients on the stand to tell the story.

[00:25:05]Truffaine reckons that he was out there um and they take a shotgun out with them because, you know, if if anyone came to bust them, they'd say, "Well, we were just out here hunting." So, anyway, it had been, you know, early in the morning, he'd been out, you know, doing his cooking up the gold and so forth and he'd been doing a bit of shooting like rabbits or whatever. And then all of a sudden the two cops had popped out of nowhere and he'd run with the shotgun over his shoulder and they'd said, "Stop." And he'd run and he sort of stumbled a bit and the gun had gone off once, the shotgun, and hit one of the cops and wounded him in like in the neck and the rest of the shot had blown the other guy's head off. So, he turned around, gone back and gone, "Oh." And he tried to help the the mortally wounded policeman, found that the other one was dead, freaked out, gone back to the hotel to see Teddy and Teddy had said, "We have And And Philip said he wanted to tell the police what had happened."

[00:26:04]And Teddy had said, "No, we have to cover this up." That was his story and he was sticking to it for the time being. Coulter, in the meantime, said, "I wasn't there at all. I'd come to the hotel and I'd heard about this and all I wanted was my money, my share of the gold. I didn't want anything to do with it." Teddy Clark had said that these these two had come to the hotel and confessed that they'd shot the cops in cold blood deliberately. So, it was He said, he said, he said, everybody was lying.

[00:26:31]>> Mhm. So, the trial in Perth went for a month. Some of the like some of the cross-examination of like Teddy's cross-examination, I mean, think went for like three or four days. Arthur Hines took him to pieces because initially he'd, you know, he'd denied all knowledge, he'd lied, he'd lied again on the statement, then he'd changed his story as had the other two.

[00:26:53]So it really came down to who the jury believed. It wasn't possible that Teddy Clark was stitching these two guys up to save his own skin, entirely possible.

[00:27:04]But also entirely possible that, you know, this guy whose trousers had been found down the shaft covered in blood had actually thrown them there after killing these police. Um so it went to the jury and the jury eventually found the two men guilty of willful murder of the one policeman cuz they'd only tried them on the one. So they were going to hang, but the jury actually made a very interesting comment which was they wished that Teddy Clark, who was supposedly then going to go on trial for being an accomplice, had been tried for willful murder also because they believed he was equally guilty and should be going to the gallows with these two guys. Wow, but police hadn't actually charged him with that by that stage. They hadn't had They'd only charged him with accomplice. Their entire well, a large part of their case was based on his testimony. And it was also rumored that he had put himself forward for the reward.

[00:27:55]>> Oh, I bet. I bet.

[00:27:56]>> [laughter] >> And he tried to get it and he actually They actually awarded it to him and then on appeal he was denied.

[00:28:03]So these two guys were on death row.

[00:28:05]Arthur Haines then launched a massive appeal trying to again take apart Teddy Clark's evidence and the appeal was denied.

[00:28:15]Then as as the fateful date, I think it was the 25th of October, approached, Philip Treffene then confessed. He confessed to a new story. He said that he and Coulter had both been out there.

[00:28:29]The cops had come out of nowhere.

[00:28:32]He'd shot one of the police through the hand and then Coulter had chased the other two chased them down and done them done them in cold blood. Coulter had said Coulter had stuck to his story the whole way say I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there, etc. Um Treffene said, "This is the truth." And the idea was that he was now trying to make his story align more with Teddy's story, so he'd be reprieved. No one was buying it. So, they both went to two Fremantle gallows.

[00:29:03]That was the end of them.

[00:29:04]>> Yeah.

[00:29:04]>> Because it sounds like that story fits the physical the forensic evidence. That remember you were saying that you know there was evidence of someone stumbling, somebody chasing, somebody all that. So, that second story seems to fit that evidence better.

[00:29:17]>> So so did Yeah, it did absolutely.

[00:29:20]But it also seemed that you know his his story was you know I shot the policeman but didn't intend to kill him. I just shot him through the hand, which is just you know when you shoot a shotgun at somebody >> Yeah.

[00:29:31]you're not shooting them in the hand.

[00:29:33]>> It's as likely as I was running away with the gun over my [laughter] shoulder and it happened to shoot him. But yeah, exactly. If Teddy Clark wasn't there, then what was all the fancy food doing out there? Why were there so many bits and pieces from the hotel?

[00:29:47]>> Yeah, so I would love to know how they explained that away in court. How his his But I guess they didn't have to because in police hadn't charged him with being there. Well, the the his story There was another story going around that the pants had actually like Arthur Haines claimed that you know his clients hadn't been there, but Teddy had actually taken the pants to wear them because he didn't want to get his his nice clothes all dirty. So, it was just a a torrent of lies.

[00:30:12]>> Mhm. And you know he was Arthur Haines was up against Hubert Parker, the Crown Prosecutor, and they'd gone head-to-head on this previous case the year before where he you know gotten this young woman Audrey Jacob off. This time Arthur Haines bottomed out. Hubert Parker won and and these two guys went to the gallows. Wow.

[00:30:31]So yeah, and you know Teddy ended up living as a recluse out in this forest.

[00:30:37]And he died like you know about 40 years later.

[00:30:40]>> What? Yeah, he was >> That shocks me. I assumed you were going to say and then Teddy's made millions and he lived on to have a great life.

[00:30:47]>> He he tried. He tried to continue work working and living in in the gold field, but he was kind of shunned to some extent. And it was weird because the yeah, there wasn't there was an outpouring of sympathy for the police, but it wasn't complete because there were a lot of people in Kalgoorlie and in the gold fields who didn't like the the gold police because, you know, >> Yeah. they they'd been busted themselves. So there was a story about them, you know, doing a a whip-round, a donation uh scheme for the, you know, the wives and families and like they raised like, you know, 4 pounds or something in the first week. So So Teddy thought maybe that he'd be able to continue on living, um but it didn't work out for him.

[00:31:25]>> I reckon that's because of his lack of support of the other two fellows that went to the gallows, don't you?

[00:31:29]>> so, yeah. I think people kind of felt, "Well, they they swung, you should have swung as well."

[00:31:35]>> him. And and you can't trust him. If if anything goes down, he will throw you under the bus immediately.

[00:31:41]>> Yeah. So that was 100 years ago this year and the WA police had a memorial um on the 28th, yeah, out at the site where they where the bodies were found. There is also a memorial in in WA to the fallen police. So it's not a story that's been forgotten and I was very pleased that, you know, gold detection uh detective serving have been in touch to say, you know, they've all listened to the podcast. I did a five-part podcast about this. So if you really want to get, you know, the 3-hour version, >> Yeah.

[00:32:09]>> go and enjoy all of its and pieces. So it's really been quite um quite a a a honor to be to hear from police who are very much invested in it.

[00:32:18]>> I can't believe there's still gold police. Yeah, there's still a gold detection unit.

[00:32:22]>> Gold What Tell me about that. What do they do? Well, I guess they're just doing the same thing, making sure that, you know, people aren't thieving the the good stuff. Yeah, right from BHP [laughter] or whoever owns the mine out there. Cuz I was going to ask you before if they're still mining gold.

[00:32:35]I thought they were still mining gold around Kalgoorlie.

[00:32:38]>> Yeah, there's still the gold detection unit in WA. So, yeah. And they hold this story very I mean, it was the worst murder of police since the Kelly gang.

[00:32:48]Um and you know, the next one I think there were two police shot in Sydney in 1931 by a deranged man. But this I mean, it was the cold-bloodedness of the murder and the unnecessary like, you know, these guys if they'd been busted they would have probably done a little bit of time. They might have gotten away with a fine. There was no need to do this. But then the dismembering and the desecration like, you know, chopping them up and burning them etc. was just, you know, full on.

[00:33:14]So >> of it reminds me of the terrible police shootings in Victoria.

[00:33:18]>> Wall Street, yeah.

[00:33:19]>> Wall Street and, you know, armed robbery armed robbers and was that. But again, it was cold-blooded. It was unnecessary.

[00:33:28]>> Unnecessary. And then yeah, just the the desecration of, you know, and then lying and lying and lying and all pointing fingers at each other trying to save their own miserable skins. So But there was, you know, even in 1926 there was a really strong movement to spare these guys' lives just on the basis of capital punishment being wrong.

[00:33:48]So they, you know, if they'd committed this crime these crimes, you know, a couple of decades later um they might not have their their their sentences might have been commuted.

[00:33:58]Might have been commuted. I mean, I think the last person hanged in WA was 1964. So maybe not actually would have been. They were still hanging people for a while a while there. And for that crime very hard to to lobby Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I don't think there was a lot of sympathy for these guys.

[00:34:15]>> No. Thank you so much. My pleasure.

[00:34:17]>> What are you working on at the moment?

[00:34:18]Can you give us a a preview of what's coming up on Forgotten Australia? Yes, indeed. So I'm going to be doing a little episode shortly about the murder mystery at the heart perhaps of Waltzing Matilda, the song.

[00:34:32]Really?

[00:34:33]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a really interesting theory. This is a a short a short one, but an interesting theory about it's sort of a a coded miss a coded account of the murder of this um shearer by other shearers uh during a labor dispute in 1891. And there's there's strong evidence to suggest that, you know, Banjo Patterson knew about this case and that it was in some way reflecting um that story. So, that one, but I've got some really major um mini-series coming up looking at the uh Savoy um fire in Sydney in 1975, which was deliberately lit and killed 15 people.

[00:35:14]>> 15?

[00:35:15]>> astounded that this case is not better known. Like, it's Yeah, guy was convicted of four of the 15 murders, spent close to 30 years in jail. So, I've looked right into that and I've talked to uh some family members of people who who died in the inferno. And also looked at how uh repeated warnings about, you know, fire traps were ignored before and after. So, like this fire happened the Savoy and the New South Wales politicians and fire officials, etc. who'd been ignoring warnings said, "Okay, we've got to do something about this."

[00:35:49]And then, of course, you know, the Luna Park fire happens. Then in 1981, the Rembrant Rembrant fire happens. And then 1989, the Down Under Hostel fire. So, I've kind of explored the links between these and they're like really strong. The same message continually, we have to do this, we have to do that, this can never happen again.

[00:36:08]But by, you know, the the 1989 Down Under fire, the the death toll was like 40. Yeah. Um and these were preventable.

[00:36:16]And Abe Saffron was connected with a lot of them. Yeah. So, so that's an interesting one. And yeah, a bunch of other sort of uh Australian murder stories. So, Brilliant. Hop on over to Forgotten Australia.

[00:36:29]>> Will do. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:36:36]If you [music] need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or contact 1800 Respect [music] on 1800 737 732 or 1800respect.org.au.

[00:36:51]Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 13 [music] 92 76 or 13yarn.org.au.

[00:37:07]The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded.

[00:37:15]They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present, and those emerging.