William Coulter and Phillip Treffene were illegal gold buyers on the Kalgoorlie goldfields, trading in stolen bullion. When Detective-Inspector John Walsh and Sergeant Alexander Pitman closed in near Boulder on 28 April 1926, the two men shot them dead, then cut up and burned as much of the bodies as they could before dumping the rest down a mineshaft.
At trial, the pair claimed the shootings were a freak accident, a shotgun discharging as Treffene stumbled while fleeing. The jury took four hours to reject the story, returning a verdict of guilty and adding that they bitterly regretted the accomplice who had helped dispose of the bodies was not standing trial alongside them.
In the condemned cell, Coulter let slip a stranger secret: for years he had buried stolen gold bars across the goldfields, marking a chosen tree with a notch and pacing out the distance with a length of string he always carried. He never told a soul where the bars lay, and with his death the locations, worth thousands of pounds, were lost for good.
Coulter and Treffene were hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1926, within minutes of each other.
Both protested their innocence from the gallows. Coulter said, “I am innocent of the crime that I have been charged with,” while Treffene called it, “purely and simply an accident.”
