Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inheritance, stripped of everything that might have held him steady.
As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, Perkins drifts into the kind of company that haunts the margins of Georgian England: drinkers, gamblers, idlers whose appetites outrun their means. His is the sort of true crime story that begins not with malice but with dispossession; a young man living as though he still possessed his father’s fortune while owning almost nothing at all.
What follows is a life pulled further and further from solid ground, carried across oceans and through the gears of a justice system that does not forget. Listen now as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals delivers this restless and melancholy account in full.
Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop. Subscribe via RSS
Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Mother-in-law: today this means your spouse’s mother, but in the eighteenth century it was the standard term for a stepmother. When the text says Perkins’s mother-in-law had him turned out of the house, it means his father’s new wife; not some distant relative by marriage, but the very woman who replaced his mother under the same roof.
Groat: a small silver coin worth fourpence. To say someone was ‘never a groat the better’ means they gained absolutely nothing; not even the most trivial sum. It was a common way of expressing total exclusion from any benefit or inheritance.
Cast: in legal language of this period, to be ‘cast’ meant to be found guilty at trial. It sounds almost casual to modern ears, like being tossed aside; and in a sense it was exactly that, the court casting you out of ordinary life and into the hands of punishment.
Upon the rake: to go ‘upon the rake’ meant to go out carousing; drinking, gambling, chasing trouble through the streets. A ‘rake’ was a dissolute young man, and the phrase captures the reckless energy of young men looking for anything but honest work.
Shuffle-board: not quite the gentle cruise-ship game of today. In Georgian alehouses, shuffleboard was a tavern pastime played on long wooden tables, and it was closely associated with gambling, idleness, and the kind of company that led to worse things.
Crown piece: a large silver coin worth five shillings. In this account, the alehouse owners had marked a crown with particular scratches or notches so it could be identified if stolen from the till; a trap that snapped shut on Perkins.
Transportation: the sentence of being shipped to the colonies as forced labour. It sounds almost merciful compared to the gallows, but in practice it meant being sold to a planter and worked in conditions little different from enslavement; and returning without permission was a capital offence.
Vulgar pleasures: today ‘vulgar’ suggests crude or obscene, but in this context it simply meant common or low; the cheap amusements of ordinary people. Drinking, gaming, skittle-playing: none of it was scandalous on its own, but together these pastimes marked a young man as someone drifting toward ruin.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
The unsolved murder of Betty Shanks in 1952 remains one of the most disturbing and enduring cold cases in Australian criminal history. On a quiet September evening in suburban Brisbane, a young woman was violently beaten to death just a few hundred metres from the safety of her parents’ home, and no one has ever been held accountable. Her killing sent shockwaves through a city still settling into peacetime life, and even decades later, it continues to haunt investigators, amateur sleuths, and the people of Brisbane who remember a time when the suburbs felt untouchable by violence. This is the story of Betty Shanks, the investigation that could not solve her murder, and the silence that followed.
Post-War Brisbane and the Quiet Streets of the Inner North
By 1952, Brisbane was a city in transition. The war years had transformed it from a provincial capital into a strategic military hub; American GIs had flooded Fortitude Valley and the CBD, and the social fabric of the city had been stretched and reshaped in ways that lingered long after the troops went home. Peace had returned, but normalcy was still being negotiated. Housing was tight. Families were rebuilding. The suburbs, particularly the leafy inner-north pockets like Wilston and Grange, represented the aspirational heart of that recovery: quiet, respectable, safe.
Betty Shanks was 22 years old, a bright and well-liked young woman who worked as a clerk for a Commonwealth Department. She lived with her parents at their home in Grange. By all accounts, she was modest, dependable, and deeply embedded in the rhythms of ordinary suburban life. She caught the tram to work. She came home in the evenings. There was nothing in her routine that should have placed her in danger. And yet, on the night of 19 September 1952, the short walk from the tram terminus at Grange to her parents’ house became the last journey she would ever take.
The Night of 19 September 1952
Betty had been out that evening, attending a night lecture in the Brisbane CBD. After the lecture, she was driven part of the way home by her lecturer, then boarded a tram at Windsor and alighted at the Grange terminus, as she had done countless times before. From there, it was a walk of only a few hundred metres through quiet residential streets to her family home. The route was familiar. The streets were lit, if dimly. The homes she passed were occupied by families she likely recognised. It was an unremarkable journey on an unremarkable night.
She never made it home. Betty’s body was discovered the following morning in the front garden of a house at the corner of Thomas and Carberry Streets, Grange, just a short distance from her own front door. She had been savagely beaten and kicked, with police finding no evidence of robbery. Her belongings were intact. The motive, like the killer, remained invisible.
The Investigation: Every Lead Gone Cold
Queensland Police launched what was, by the standards of 1952, a significant investigation. Officers canvassed the neighbourhood extensively, interviewing residents of both Grange and Wilston, tram conductors, passengers, and anyone known to have been in the area that evening. The crime scene was examined, though forensic science of the era was limited; there was no DNA analysis, no CCTV, and fingerprint technology was rudimentary at best. Detectives relied on witness testimony, but it was devastatingly scarce.
Several persons of interest were identified in the weeks and months that followed. Among them were men known to Betty through social or professional circles, as well as local figures flagged by neighbours. One name that recurred in community whispers was never substantiated with evidence. Another suspect, a man reportedly seen near the tram terminus that night, could not be conclusively placed at the scene. Each line of inquiry was pursued, and each, in turn, dissolved into ambiguity. No one was ever charged.
One detail that adds a striking layer of institutional context to this case is the presence of Inspector Frank Bischof at the crime scene. Bischof, photographed during the early investigation, would later become Queensland Police Commissioner and a controversial figure in the history of Queensland policing before the Fitzgerald Inquiry. In the Betty Shanks case, however, his presence is best understood as a historical side note rather than evidence of any particular failing in the investigation.
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The Tram Terminus Question
One of the most confounding aspects of Betty Shanks’ murder is its proximity to public space. The Grange tram terminus was not an isolated location. Trams ran regularly. Passengers boarded and alighted throughout the evening. Conductors were present. The surrounding streets, while quiet, were residential and populated. How could a young woman be attacked and killed just metres from a public transport stop, on a route flanked by occupied homes, without a single reliable witness coming forward?
The answer likely lies in the nature of 1950s suburban life after dark. Streets were poorly lit by modern standards. Most residents were indoors by the time Betty alighted from the tram. The attack may have been swift; a sudden ambush from a laneway or garden hedge, carried out by someone who knew her route or who had followed her from the terminus. Sound carries unpredictably in suburban streets, and what might have been heard could easily have been dismissed as a domestic disturbance or an animal. In an era before triple-zero calls and neighbourhood watch programs, the gap between a cry for help and a response could be fatally wide.
The tram angle has been revisited many times. Investigators looked at whether the killer might have been a fellow passenger, someone who rode the same route and followed Betty on foot. They examined whether a tram employee might have known her routine. None of these avenues produced a breakthrough. The tram, which should have been a cocoon of safety delivering Betty to the edge of her own neighbourhood, instead marked the boundary between her life and her death.
Reinvestigations and Cold Case Reviews
Betty Shanks’ case has never been officially closed, and it has been revisited several times by Queensland Police and independent researchers. Cold case reviews in the 1990s and 2000s brought modern forensic techniques to bear on the surviving evidence, though decades of neglect had degraded much of it. DNA technology, which has revolutionised cold case work in Australia and globally, offered limited assistance here; the original crime scene processing did not preserve biological material in ways compatible with later analysis.
Journalists and true crime researchers have combed through witness statements, coronial records, and police files released under freedom-of-information provisions. Each reinvestigation has added texture to the story: new theories about suspects, new readings of the available evidence, and new frustrations at the gaps in the original investigation. Some researchers have pointed to the limitations of 1950s policing culture, in which certain lines of inquiry may have been abandoned prematurely or in which the era’s social dynamics discouraged witnesses from speaking freely.
Despite these efforts, no reinvestigation has produced sufficient evidence to name a suspect, let alone secure a prosecution. The case remains listed among Queensland’s most significant unsolved homicides, a designation that carries both institutional weight and a quiet admission of failure.
Betty’s Family: A Grief Without Resolution
It is easy, after so many years, for a victim to become an abstraction; a name in a case file, a photograph in a newspaper archive, a footnote in the history of Brisbane crime. But Betty Shanks was a real person, with a family who loved her and who lived the rest of their lives in the shadow of her murder. Betty’s parents lost their daughter in the most violent and inexplicable way imaginable, and they never received the closure of knowing who was responsible or why.
Betty’s younger brother carried that burden forward. The Shanks family home, the very place Betty was walking toward when she was killed, became a monument to absence. Every anniversary, every newspaper retrospective, every cold case review reopened the wound without healing it. For families of unsolved murder victims, grief does not follow a linear path; it circles endlessly, caught in the orbit of unanswered questions. Who did this? Why? Were they ever caught for something else? Did they live out their life unpunished, walking the same streets Betty once walked?
The human cost of an unsolved murder extends far beyond the victim. It radiates outward through family, through community, through the collective memory of a city. Betty Shanks deserved justice. Her family deserved answers. Neither has been delivered.
Decades of Silence
As of now, no one has ever been charged with the murder of Betty Shanks. Although various theories and alleged suspects have emerged over the decades, no officially accepted suspect has been identified, no deathbed confession has resolved the case, and no DNA match has materialised. The person who killed Betty on that September night in 1952, only a few hundred metres from her family’s doorstep, either died with their secret or is still alive and extraordinarily old, carrying a truth that no investigator has been able to extract. Decades of silence. That silence is not peace; it is its own kind of horror. It is the sound of a case that was never closed, a family that was never given answers, and a city that has never quite forgotten the night a young woman stepped off a tram at Grange and vanished into violence.
This article is part of the Dark Stories series profiling Australia’s most infamous criminals, unsolved cases, and the darkest chapters of the nation’s history, presented in no particular order. From suburban murders to organised crime empires, from colonial atrocities to modern-day mysteries, we are building an archive of the cases that shaped Australia’s relationship with crime and justice. One day, we will rank them: the most shocking, the most consequential, the most haunting. Until then, we keep telling the stories that deserve to be remembered, because forgetting is its own form of injustice.
William Barton is born with restlessness in his blood. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, his father abandons him as a child, fleeing to Jamaica with a concubine and a hold full of goods; the boy grows up in his grandfather’s eating-house, surrounded by comfort he cannot bring himself to accept.
This is true crime at its most unsettled: a young man who cannot sit still, who trades a safe apprenticeship for the open sea and trades the sea for soldiering and trades soldiering for the road. Every turn of fortune that might have saved him only sharpens his appetite for the next dangerous thing.
Somewhere on the highways of early Georgian England, the machinery of justice waits for a man who keeps running toward it.
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals preserves every twist of Barton’s restless, sprawling life; listen now and follow him into the dark.
Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop. Subscribe via RSS
Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Convened with: today ‘convene’ means to gather for a meeting; in early eighteenth century usage it could mean to cohabit or consort with someone, often with a hint of scandal. When the text says Barton’s father ‘had long convened with’ his concubine, it means they had been living together as lovers, not that they held committee meetings.
Temporal laws: these are the laws of the earthly state, as opposed to divine or ecclesiastical law. When the source says Barton’s father was ‘addicted to every species of wickedness, except such as are punished by temporal laws,’ it suggests the man was a sinner but not quite a criminal; wicked enough for God’s judgment, but careful enough to dodge the hangman’s.
Bound him to himself: not a reference to ropes or chains. To ‘bind’ a young person in this period means to apprentice them; the grandfather formally took Will on as his apprentice, training him in the eating-house trade. It was both a legal contract and a family rescue.
Rubbed on: to rub on means to get by, to muddle through with difficulty. It carries a sense of grinding friction; life is not smooth, you are scraping along it. The phrase is all but extinct today.
Reconnoitre: borrowed from the French, this military term means to survey or scout out an enemy position. Barton, the old soldier, sends his companion ahead to assess the strength of a stagecoach the way an officer would assess a fortification. It tells you everything about how he thinks: robbery is just war continued by other means.
Blunderbusses: a blunderbuss is a short, wide-muzzled firearm designed to spray shot at close range. The name likely comes from the Dutch ‘donderbus,’ meaning thunder gun. Coaches carried them as defensive weapons; their spread of shot made accurate aim unnecessary, which was the point.
Uxorious: excessively devoted to one’s wife. It sounds like a compliment, but in this context it is almost a diagnosis. Barton’s devotion to his wife is presented as the very engine that drives him onto the road; he robs because he cannot bear to see her want. The word carries a faint note of contempt, as if love itself is a weakness when it leads a man to the gallows.
Quoth: simply ‘said.’ Already old-fashioned by 1735, it survived mainly in literary and legal writing. When ‘quoth Will’ appears, the narrator is giving Barton’s words a slightly theatrical air, as if recounting a scene from a stage play rather than a crime report.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
They call him the Golden Tinman; a man who robs alone and in company, whose scarred body carries the evidence of musket balls extracted from his flesh, and whose notoriety across the roads of early Georgian England is already the stuff of grim legend. In the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, John Trippuck stands as one of four men whose intertwined stories form a single devastating chapter of true crime from 1720: a highwayman, a footpad, a thief, and a housebreaker, each pulled toward ruin by separate hungers.
Trippuck is a man who has already bought his way out of justice once, a seasoned offender who believes that money and connections can always purchase one more reprieve. Alongside him are Richard Cane, barely twenty-two and desperate enough to rob a drunk stranger for the price of a marriage licence; Richard Shepherd, a ruined Oxford apprentice drawn into housebreaking by bad company; and Thomas Charnock, a well-educated young man who plunders his own master’s counting-house in pursuit of appearances.
Four lives, four roads to the same destination; the weight of Georgian justice gathers around each of them with quiet, inescapable patience. Their stories wait for you now in the full chapter from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, read aloud in every unsparing detail.
Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
The Golden Tinman: a nickname modelled on the earlier ‘Golden Farmer,’ another notorious highwayman. In this era, such colourful aliases clung to criminals the way tabloid headlines cling to them today; they made a man famous and marked him for capture in the same breath.
The Ordinary: not an adjective here but a title. The Ordinary of Newgate was the prison chaplain, tasked with coaxing condemned prisoners toward repentance and extracting confessions before they swung. He published those confessions for profit; part priest, part journalist, part grief counsellor.
Footpad: a robber who works on foot rather than on horseback. Where a highwayman has a certain dark glamour, galloping in on a mount, the footpad lurks in alleys and side streets; he is the mugging to the highwayman’s armed holdup.
Cast: to be ‘cast’ in a court of law means to be found guilty. Today we cast votes, cast fishing lines, cast actors; in the eighteenth century, a jury could cast a man straight to the gallows with a single word.
Fuddled: drunk. A wonderfully soft word for a state that left its victim vulnerable to robbery in the dark streets of Georgian London. To be fuddled was to be confused with drink; a fuddled man on a dark lane was easy prey.
Prithee: a contraction of ‘I pray thee,’ meaning ‘please’ or ‘I beg you.’ Trippuck uses it with the prison chaplain; even a condemned highwayman remembers his manners when he wants a favour.
Impeaching: today impeachment is a political process, but in the criminal underworld of the 1700s, to impeach meant to inform on your accomplices in exchange for your own freedom. Richard Shepherd uses it as a survival tool; betrayal dressed up as cooperation with the law.
Facts: in eighteenth century legal language, a ‘fact’ is a criminal act or deed. When the text says Shepherd ‘committed several facts,’ it does not mean he stated truths; it means he committed several crimes. The word sounds innocent today, which makes its old meaning land with a quiet shock.
Turned off: the moment when the cart or platform beneath a condemned prisoner is pulled away, leaving them hanging. A chillingly casual phrase for a final, irreversible act.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
