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Chapter 1: What historical crime does this episode explore?
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. Our old pal Michael Adams from the Forgotten Australia podcast joins us again to tell us about an historical crime. This time we're travelling back almost exactly a hundred years to the gold mines of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
It's a classic Wild West scenario with lots of money to be made, lots of dodgy characters trying to get their hands on it and an under-resourced police department tasked with keeping it all under control. This is Australian True Crime.
Chapter 2: Who were the detectives involved in the Goldfields Murders?
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
there were these two veteran detectives, Detective Inspector John Walsh and Detective Sergeant Alexander Pittman. I think Pittman was about 53 and John Walsh was about 64. So they were long in the tooth.
Chapter 3: What events led to the disappearance of the detectives?
They were veterans. So what they would do is they'd go out late at night or early in the morning to catch these guys when they were sort of, you know, either setting up or about to come back in with their stolen gold. So anyway, on the 28th of April 1926, these two cops, and they operated on bicycles, you know, So they ride out of town and that's it.
They're just not seen and no one's worried because they often go out of town on these stakeouts.
Chapter 4: How did the search for the missing detectives unfold?
They don't tell anybody where they're going so that it won't leak out. They're not keeping anybody apprised. They're not expected back at any particular time. And it's not until the 9th of May that the Sunday Times in Perth raises the alarm saying these two veteran detectives, Walsh and Pittman, aren't accounted for. There's some fears held for them.
On the goldfields, the fellow police had gone to their huts, looked through the windows, seeing that nothing had been changed. Eventually, they broke in. They looked through the occurrence book that they kept. There were just no clues as to where they'd gone.
Chapter 5: What evidence was found at the crime scene?
But they saw that they hadn't taken any supplies, they hadn't taken warm clothing, and they hadn't arranged for their pays to be remitted to their wives in Perth. So it was clear that they had gone out probably for a short stakeout and not returned. So it was possible they'd gotten lost and succumbed to the elements. There were also, there were like thousands of abandoned mine shafts.
So it was also possible that they'd been investigating one of these dummy mines, there's been some rotten timbers, it's collapsed and they've gotten into trouble.
Mm-hmm.
Most likely, though, grave fears were held that they'd stumbled upon some operation and they'd been murdered. So there was a massive search. They got cops coming in from Perth, and then on the 12th of May, a bloke and his friend
Chapter 6: Who were the suspects in the Goldfields Murders?
who lived in Kalgoorlie were taking this guy's car out for a spin, and they parked on the side of the road about five miles southwest of Kalgoorlie. I think the guy was going to take a leak, and he wandered off the side of the dirt road there, and he smelled some bad stuff coming up out of an abandoned mine called Miller's Find.
And he looked down there, couldn't really see much, but he thought this is, you know, it could be a dead animal, but I might've found the coppers. Went back to Kalgoorlie. It was dark by that stage. So the next morning, everybody came out there. They brought a special murder policeman out from Perth. And they also had a really old miner called Billy Batten, who specialized in this sort of work.
He'd rescued people and so forth from collapsed mines previously. So he went down, and the mine at the bottom of this shaft, it was just sort of stacked with crap.
There was corrugated iron on the top, and then there were bags of bricks and coal and ore, and there was clothing, including a pair of tailored double-seated pants, grey trousers, which did not belong to the police, and these would become quite crucial. They found a bloodstained saw, knives, etc., And this guy's down in this hole, just surrounded by really angry flies and this stench.
And then he finds what's buried beneath it.
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Chapter 7: What were the key testimonies during the trial?
And it's dismembered arms, legs wrapped in Hessian sacks. It's all hauled up to the top. The police are weeping. There's no head. for these guys, either of them. And they've been down there for like two weeks. So they're badly decomposed. They've been chopped up. They've been burned. So they can positively identify one.
And they have things like cufflinks and false teeth and fingernails, which one of the cops had distinctive fingernails. So there's enough for them to know positively that there's one body identified. So they would only ever be able to prosecute based on one of the murders, but they know it's both of their mates. What they needed to find were the bikes.
If they found the bikes, then they might find the murder site. So for the next week or so, they were looking. They had Aboriginal trackers, and they actually, on the 18th of May, the same day that the funeral was held for these two police in Perth, 30,000 people turned out. That was one in five people in Perth at that time. So a massive outpouring of grief.
And this was a big story all over Australia.
Chapter 8: What was the outcome of the Goldfields Murders case?
So the trackers found the bikes. And then they found close to the bikes, they found a camp. And at the camp, there was these missing bits of the gold processing kit. They also found tins of like empty food tins. And they weren't just your baked beans. They were fancy stuff like chicken, crab, asparagus. So it's like, well, who in Kalgoorlie likes this fancy tucker? Yeah.
They also found tire tracks. The tires were Dunlop, balloon tires, they were called. So they were fairly unusual as well, particularly at this time when there weren't that many cars.
So they were looking for someone who had a car with Dunlop tires, who liked fancy, fancy food, and also might have something to do with these tailored trousers that had been found in there, which didn't belong to the police. One other thing they'd found were boot prints that were very small. And they thought, well, it's either a really small guy or perhaps a woman who's been at this site.
And at that camp, they also found shotgun wadding. They found splashes of blood. They found where a bush had been blown off. Wow. So there was strong physical evidence that this was the crime scene. And from the tracks, they also saw that one man had staggered, another man had chased, a man had fallen, earth had been scooped up and removed and so on.
So the cops played it pretty close to their chests. They were interviewing people. They had a very good idea of who they were after. They'd had tip-offs about these three particular guys. And on the 6th of June at dawn, they raided a hotel called the Duke of Cornwall in Kalgoorlie and arrested the owner, Teddy Clark, who was this dapper little guy. He was known as Flash Teddy.
He wore beautifully turned out clothing. He would keep his English complexion nice with lotion and he'd brush his hair every half an hour. So he was a real dandy in a place like Kalgoorlie where it was all sort of rough and humble miners.
Very macho joint still to this day.
Very much so. So he was known to be using the Duke of Cornwall Hotel. Yeah, he was making money out of beers, but if you wanted to sell some dodgy ore, his barman, Philip Trephine, who was this broken down old miner, would take care of you. And Philip Trephine was in his 50s and had previously been a champion bicycle rider in the gold fields at this time.
At the very same time, they were raiding another guy's place. This was a guy called William Coulter. He was a bookie. He had a fair bit of money, but he also had convictions for dodgy gold. When they raided the hotel, they found a shotgun. They had found various items down the mineshaft that had come from the hotel, like a tea kettle, curtains.
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