Joseph Theodore Leslie “Squizzy” Taylor, Melbourne‘s most notorious gunman, had died days earlier in a shootout with rival criminal Cutmore. He was buried in a polished oak coffin with gold mountings at Brighton Cemetery on this day in 1927, while hundreds of onlookers, mostly women, crowded outside his Richmond home to watch the coffin leave.
What followed was described in the press as a disgraceful exhibition of morbid curiosity. Traffic was blocked for half an hour, and just before the funeral began a crowd surged at the gateway, forcing police to be called to clear a path. At the graveside few of Taylor’s former associates could be seen among the throng of sightseers. Cutmore, the other man killed in the same gun battle, had been buried the previous day at Coburg.
![The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)]](https://darkstories.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/leslie-squizzy-taylor-prisoner-sheet.jpg "The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)]")
