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.
Jane Griffin is a woman of sharp wit, good reputation and a violent temper she cannot govern. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, she keeps a busy inn in Smithfield with her husband, drawing customers with her charm and driving them away with her rages; a figure who belongs as much to the annals of true crime as to any cautionary sermon.
She is well-bred, well-spoken and genuinely kind when calm; yet anger moves through her like weather, sudden and ungovernable. The domestic world she has built is real and prosperous, but it sits on a fault line that runs straight through her own character.
In the close quarters of a Georgian inn, temper and proximity are a volatile combination, and the question is never whether a spark will fall but when.
Hear the full account of Jane Griffin read aloud from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; let this voice carry the weight of a story that has waited nearly three centuries to reach your ears.
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.
Malice prepense: This is the old legal term for premeditated ill intent; deliberate, thought-out malice as opposed to a spur-of-the-moment act. In court it carried enormous weight: proving malice prepense could mean the difference between a lesser charge and a capital conviction. Today we would say ‘premeditated’ or ‘aforethought,’ but the older phrase has a colder ring to it, as if the law itself is whispering that it already knows what you were thinking.
Stays: Not pauses or delays; in this context, stays are the rigid, boned corset worn tight around a woman’s torso. They were everyday armour in Georgian England, laced and stiffened to shape the body. When the text notes that the maid’s stays happened to be ‘unluckily open,’ it means the one piece of clothing that might have stopped a blade was unfastened at exactly the wrong moment.
Ordinary of Newgate: The Ordinary was the prison chaplain assigned to Newgate, London’s most notorious gaol. His duties went far beyond spiritual comfort: he attended the condemned in their final days, recorded their confessions, and often published pamphlets about their lives and crimes for a hungry public. The Ordinary was part priest, part journalist, and part spectacle-maker.
High words: Today we might say a ‘heated argument’ or ‘shouting match.’ In eighteenth century usage, ‘high words’ meant angry, raised voices exchanged between people in a dispute. It sounds almost polite now, but at the time it signalled a confrontation that had moved past reason.
Taxed her with: Nothing to do with money. To ‘tax’ someone in this period meant to accuse them, to lay blame at their feet. It carried a bluntness that the word ‘accused’ sometimes softens; to tax someone was to challenge them directly and expect an answer.
Aspersed: To asperse someone was to spread false or damaging stories about them; to smear their name. We still have the noun ‘aspersion’ in phrases like ‘casting aspersions,’ but the verb itself has all but vanished. Jane Griffin uses the word to describe those who slandered her during her imprisonment, adding cruelty to an already crushing situation.
Temporal concerns: This does not mean time. ‘Temporal’ here means worldly, earthly; the practical matters of money, property and livelihood as opposed to the spiritual welfare of the soul. When Jane begs her husband to attend to his temporal concerns, she is telling him to keep the business alive and the family fed after she is gone.
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.
Few names echo through the corridors of Australian criminal history with as much thunder as Ned Kelly. Bushranger, outlaw, cop killer, folk hero: the man who strapped on a suit of homemade armour and walked into a hail of police bullets has become the most debated figure in the nation’s past. Was he a ruthless criminal who terrorised the colonial frontier, or a symbol of Irish resistance against an unjust system? More than 140 years after his execution, the argument rages on. What remains beyond dispute is that Ned Kelly’s story is drenched in blood, betrayal, and a kind of reckless defiance that Australians have never been able to forget.
Born Into Trouble
Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly was born between Dec 1854 and June 1855 in Beveridge, Victoria, the son of John ‘Red’ Kelly, an Irish ex-convict who had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing two pigs. From the moment he drew his first breath, Ned was marked. The Kelly family lived on the margins: poor selectors in the bush northeast of Melbourne, surrounded by other Irish Catholic families who nursed a bitter distrust of the colonial police. The constabulary, for its part, viewed the Kellys and their kin as little more than a breeding ground for stock thieves and troublemakers.
Red Kelly drank himself into an early grave, dying when Ned was just twelve. The loss devastated the family and thrust young Ned into the role of provider. By his mid-teens he had already been arrested multiple times. He served time for assault and for receiving a stolen horse, a conviction he always insisted was a set-up. The police kept a close and hostile watch on the Kelly household, and Ned’s resentment of authority curdled into something hard and dangerous.
The Fitzpatrick Incident and the Road to Outlawry
The spark that ignited the Kelly outbreak came in April 1878 when Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick rode out to the Kelly homestead to arrest Ned’s brother Dan on a charge of horse stealing. What happened next depends entirely on who you believe. Fitzpatrick claimed that Ned shot him in the wrist and that the Kelly women attacked him. The Kellys insisted Fitzpatrick was drunk, that he had made improper advances toward Ned’s sister Kate, and that the whole story was fabricated. Regardless of the truth, the consequences were devastating. Ned’s mother Ellen was arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labour for aiding in an attempted murder. Ned, furious and now a wanted man, fled into the Wombat Ranges with Dan and two mates: Joe Byrne and Steve Hart. The Kelly Gang was born.
The quartet hid out in the dense bush, surviving on their wits and the support of a network of sympathisers known as the ‘bush telegraph.’ The police, determined to bring them in, dispatched a party of four officers into the ranges. On 26 October 1878, the constables made camp at Stringybark Creek. They never imagined that the hunters were about to become the hunted.
Stringybark Creek: Blood in the Bush
The killings at Stringybark Creek transformed the Kelly Gang from petty fugitives into Australia’s most wanted men. Ned and his companions stumbled upon the police camp and decided to take the officers by surprise. Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlan were shot dead. Sergeant Michael Kennedy, who tried to flee into the scrub, was hunted down and killed as well. Only Constable Thomas McIntyre escaped, sprinting through the bush to raise the alarm. Three police officers lay dead in the Victorian bush, and the colony erupted in outrage and fear.
Ned later claimed the killings were self-defence, that the police had come to shoot him on sight. He pointed to the firearms the constables carried and to rumoured ‘body straps’ that he said proved they intended to bring back corpses rather than prisoners. Historians have debated this ever since. Whatever the truth, the government responded with fury, placing a record reward on the gang’s heads and passing the Felons Apprehension Act, which declared them outlaws who could be shot on sight by any citizen.
Euroa and Jerilderie: Audacity on a Grand Scale
Rather than flee the colony, the Kelly Gang doubled down. In December 1878, they held up the National Bank at Euroa, locking hostages in a nearby station while they calmly robbed the vault. In February 1879, they struck again at Jerilderie in New South Wales, this time locking up the local police, donning their uniforms, and parading through the town before robbing the Bank of New South Wales. During the Jerilderie raid, Ned dictated what became known as the Jerilderie Letter: a sprawling, passionate, semi-literate document that railed against police persecution, defended his family’s honour, and threatened dire consequences for anyone who stood against the poor Irish selectors of the northeast.
The Jerilderie Letter is one of the most extraordinary documents in Australian history. Part manifesto, part confession, part threat, it reveals Ned Kelly as something far more complex than a common thief. He wrote of systemic injustice, of families torn apart by poverty and police corruption, of a colonial system that ground the poor into the dirt while rewarding the wealthy. Whether you see it as the ravings of a killer or the cry of an oppressed man, the letter ensured that Ned Kelly would never be viewed as just another bushranger.
The Armour and the Last Stand at Glenrowan
After Jerilderie, the gang went to ground. For over a year they evaded capture, supported by sympathisers and hidden by the vast landscape of the northeast. During this time, Ned conceived his most audacious plan yet. Word had reached him that a heavily armed police party was being mobilised to hunt them down once and for all. Rather than wait to be cornered, he would strike first: lure the police train into a trap at the small town of Glenrowan, derail it on torn-up tracks, and eliminate the threat before it could reach them. It was a preemptive ambush born of desperation and cold calculation.
To prepare for the inevitable confrontation, the gang forged suits of armour from stolen plough mouldboards. The helmets, breastplates, and back plates weighed around 44 kilograms each and could deflect bullets. They were crude, medieval, and utterly iconic. Nothing like them had ever been seen in Australia, and nothing like them would ever be seen again.
On the night of 27 June 1880, the gang took over the Glenrowan Inn and held dozens of hostages. They had torn up the railway tracks outside town. But the plan unravelled when schoolteacher Thomas Curnow, one of the hostages, managed to slip away and flag down the approaching police train with a candle and a red scarf. The train screeched to a halt. The police surrounded the inn. And one of the most dramatic sieges in Australian history began.
Gunfire crackled through the cold winter darkness for hours. Inside, the gang fought back. Joe Byrne was hit and killed while drinking at the bar. Steve Hart and Dan Kelly retreated deeper into the building. Then, as dawn broke, a figure emerged from the mist behind the police lines. It was Ned Kelly, clad head to toe in his suit of iron, firing his revolver with eerie calm. Bullets pinged off his armour as the stunned police scrambled to understand what they were facing. For a few surreal minutes, it seemed as though Ned Kelly was invincible.
But he was not. His legs, unprotected by the armour, were riddled with bullets. A shotgun blast brought him crashing to the ground. Police swarmed over him and dragged away the helmet to reveal a bearded, bloodied face. Ned Kelly was captured alive. Inside the inn, the siege ended in flames. The building was set alight, and the charred remains of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were pulled from the wreckage. The Kelly Gang was finished.
Trial, Execution, and the Words That Would Not Die
Ned Kelly was tried for the murder of Constable Lonigan at the Melbourne Supreme Court in October 1880. The trial lasted just two days. Despite a spirited defence, the verdict was never in doubt: guilty. Justice Redmond Barry sentenced him to death by hanging. In one of Australian history’s most quoted exchanges, Barry told Kelly, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul,’ to which Ned reportedly replied, ‘I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there where I go.’ Redmond Barry died of natural causes just twelve days after Kelly’s execution; to the superstitious and the sympathetic alike, it felt like prophecy fulfilled.
On 11 November 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. He was just 25 years old. His reputed last words have become the stuff of legend: ‘Such is life.’ Whether he actually said them or not, the phrase captured something essential about the man and his story: a shrug in the face of fate, a refusal to beg, a final act of defiance that would resonate for generations.
Legacy: Hero, Villain, or Something Else Entirely
Ned Kelly’s legacy is a battleground. To some, he was a murderer who killed three police officers, terrorised communities, and brought misery to anyone caught in his path. To others, he was a freedom fighter, a product of systemic injustice who dared to stand against the colonial establishment. The truth, as always, is more complicated than either camp would like to admit.
What is undeniable is Kelly’s impact on Australian culture. He has been the subject of the world’s first feature-length narrative film, ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang,’ released in 1906. He has inspired paintings by Sidney Nolan, novels by Peter Carey, and countless songs, plays, and television series. His armour sits in the State Library of Victoria, one of the most visited artefacts in the country. In a nation that has always harboured a soft spot for the underdog, Ned Kelly remains the ultimate anti-hero.
But beneath the mythology lie real victims: Lonigan, Scanlan, and Kennedy, officers who left behind wives and children; Aaron Sherritt, the gang’s one-time friend, murdered by Joe Byrne for allegedly informing; and the dozens of hostages at Glenrowan who spent a terrifying night not knowing whether they would live or die. Any honest reckoning with Ned Kelly must account for their suffering as well as his.
The story of Ned Kelly is, at its core, a story about power: who wields it, who suffers under it, and what happens when someone decides they have had enough. It is a story that Australia keeps telling itself because it has never quite figured out the moral. And perhaps that is the point. Some stories are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to haunt.
This article is part of the Dark Stories series profiling Australia’s most infamous criminals in no particular order. From bushrangers to backpacker killers, each profile peels back the layers of a case that shaped the nation’s darkest chapters. One day, we will do what no one has dared: rank these criminals once and for all, from the merely notorious to the truly monstrous. Until then, the rogues’ gallery keeps growing, and the stories keep getting darker.
