Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 30
1863: The Escape-Proof Prison That Wasn’t: Captain Thunderbolt Breaks Out of Cockatoo Island
Frederick Wordsworth Ward, the bushranger known as Captain Thunderbolt, was serving time on Sydney‘s Cockatoo Island, a prison ringed by harbour currents and sheer sandstone cliffs and widely declared impossible to escape. On the night of 11 September 1863, Ward slipped his cell and plunged into the water, swimming through the cold, shark infested harbour to the mainland shore.
The breakout humiliated colonial authorities and turned Ward into a folk figure almost overnight. He spent the next seven years roaming the bush of northern New South Wales, robbing coaches, inns and travellers as one of the colony’s most enduring and elusive bushrangers before he was finally shot dead by police near Uralla in 1870.
Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 1951. Photograph by Frank Hurley. National Library of Australia, PIC FH/7951. Out of copyright.
John Meff was a housebreaker who had already cheated the gallows once, having been convicted and then transported to the colonies rather than executed. But transportation was meant to be permanent exile, and Meff broke its terms by making his way back to England, a crime that under the law of the day carried the same penalty as the original offence: death.
He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang for illegally returning from transportation. On 11 September 1721 he was taken to Tyburn and executed at the age of forty, going to the gallows alongside James Redding, who had been condemned separately for robbery.
For Meff the return to Tyburn marked the end of a second chance he could not keep: having once escaped the noose through transportation, the simple act of coming home proved fatal.
William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Casey never accepted the charge; he insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with theft and everything to do with Stone making indecent advances toward him, a claim that, if true, cast the entire prosecution in a very different light.
At the gallows Casey did not simply protest verbally. He left behind a written statement formally proclaiming his innocence of the robbery, a deliberate act by a condemned soldier determined that his version of events would outlive him.
“He maintained until death that the confrontation arose because Stone had made indecent advances toward him” and went to his execution still denying the crime for which he was hanged.
William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park
1935: The Sydney Shark Arm Murder Case Collapses on Judge Orders
The case began in the most macabre way imaginable: on April 25, 1935, a captured shark on display at an Aquarium in Sydney vomited up a human arm. Tattoos identified the limb as belonging to James Smith, who had vanished after leaving home on April 8 with the stated intention of going on a fishing trip.
Police investigations focused on Patrick Brady, an associate of Smith who had been with him around the time of his disappearance. Another central figure was businessman Reginald Holmes, who was in a position to give direct evidence about Smith’s killing and Brady’s alleged involvement.
But before Holmes could give that evidence, the case took another extraordinary turn. In the early hours of June 12, just hours before he was due to appear at the inquest, Holmes was found shot dead in his car at Dawes Point. With the Crown’s key witness gone, the murder case against Brady was left largely dependent on circumstantial evidence.
Despite what Chief Justice Sir Frederick Jordan acknowledged was plenty of cause for suspicion, the prosecution now faced two fundamental problems: its key witness was dead, and there was no body to prove that Smith himself was dead. A person could, after all, survive the loss of an arm. On September 10, 1935, Jordan ruled that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction and directed the jury to acquit Brady, bringing to an abrupt end what was described at the time as a case “without parallel in the annals of Australian criminal history.”
Brady’s freedom was short-lived. As soon as he stepped outside the court, detectives arrested him on an unrelated Tasmanian forgery charge. No one was ever convicted over Smith’s death or Holmes’s killing, and the infamous Shark Arm case remains unsolved.
