Robbery - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1806: Hanged for Ten Shillings: a Sydney Robber Who Stabbed an Old Man with a Broken Hinge

George Holland broke into the Parramatta home of Laughlane Galligheoghan in broad daylight, prising open a chest for just ten shillings. When the elderly, frail occupant tried to stop him, Holland turned the fractured door hinge in his hand into a weapon, stabbing him in the side. The court later heard he had plainly meant to kill, and was only stopped by the arrival of help.

Tried in Sydney, Holland was condemned to death, the Judge Advocate delivering a lengthy admonition on the heinous nature of the crime before the man was led back to gaol. The sentence was carried out the following morning at eight o’clock; the ten shillings and the hinge were the only measure of a life taken for a life.

Human skull with treasure chest and gold jewelry still life

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Australia Execution Murder NSW Parramatta Robbery Sydney Trial

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1891: The Bushranger Who Taught Ned Kelly His Trade Drowned in the Murray River

Harry Power was already a seasoned escaper and highway robber when, in 1869, he took on a teenage recruit: Ned Kelly, son of a sympathetic Irish family who sheltered him in the Ovens district. For a few months the pair stuck up coaches and squatters together, Power later boasting of hundreds of robberies, until Kelly broke away and Power carried on alone, eventually suspecting his young protege of helping police track him down.

Captured in 1870 after being betrayed by a relative of the Kelly family, Power served another fifteen years at Pentridge before his release in 1885. He spent his last years as a guide aboard the old prison hulk Success, now a museum ship, before drowning in the Murray River near Swan Hill in October 1891, his body found days later at Tyntynder. One newspaper suggested suicide, but the drowning of a man who had survived two prison escapes and a life of robbery without ever killing anyone was most likely a simple accident.

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Accident Australia Bushranging Escape Prison Robbery VIC

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1923: Squizzy Taylor Walked Free While a Man Who Never Fired a Shot Hanged for a Melbourne Bank Murder

Thomas Berriman, manager of the Hawthorn branch of the Commercial Bank, was shot outside Glenferrie Station in Melbourne on this date while carrying £1,851 in bank funds to the head office. He died from the wound two weeks later.

Angus Murray was hanged for the killing, convicted as a principal even though it was his companion who actually pulled the trigger. Underworld figure Squizzy Taylor, swept up as the robbery’s alleged organiser, escaped a murder charge, convicted only of occupying a house frequented by thieves and serving six months.

The actual gunman, Richard Buckley, vanished for almost seven years before detectives traced him, bearded and living quietly, to a house in Moonee Ponds. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1946, dying and in his eighties, he was released to spend his final days at home.

Commercial Bank branch where manager T R V Berriman was shot: 1923

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Australia Execution Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Robbery Trial VIC

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1803: Masked Robbers Bound a Family and Threatened to Drown Them for Money They Did Not Have

One night in May 1803, two masked men forced their way into the Hawkesbury home of Charles Palmer and his wife, clubbing both with the handle of an axe until Palmer lay senseless for two hours. They ransacked the house for money, bound the family and a child, and warned they would throw them into the river if the cash they insisted did not exist was not handed over.

Stolen clothing later surfaced in the household of a woman who said it had been given to her to mend for Thomas McLaughlane the elder and his son. Both men were convicted and sentenced to death, but only the elder went to the gallows at Hawkesbury; of eight men condemned that session he was the third actually hanged, the rest reprieved into transportation for life.

At his trial the elder McLaughlane claimed the stolen goods had come from an informer already giving evidence in another case, a claim the informer flatly denied. On the scaffold he said nothing more, meeting his end, witnesses noted, with quiet decency.

Hand of a drowning man reaching above the sea surface

⬅ See all events from 7 October

Australia Colonial Crime Execution Hawkesbury Home Invasion NSW Robbery Trial

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