Gangland Robbers (6 page)

It was not thought to have been a crime of opportunity. Bauer always took precautions, carrying a loaded revolver and sitting facing the door, so he could not be taken by surprise. There was evidence that a man who gave his name as William Anderson had called on another diamond merchant, William Cutler, the day before the murder, saying he wanted to buy diamonds. When Cutler gave him Bauer's name, Anderson particularly wanted to know his address. He was then thought to have called on Bauer, asking if he could sell him a one-carat stone. Bauer had said he did not have any but would obtain some the next day. Cutler gave a detailed description of the man—about forty-five, with grey eyes, had a light brown moustache, was about 5 feet 10 inches tall and had a slight stoop.

There was one promising lead. As the man had run down the stairs to the first floor, he bumped into a secretary, Mrs Parker, and pushed her aside, knocking her to the floor. She also was able to give a detailed description, and when she was later taken to a restaurant where the man was dining, she identified him. There were, however, problems with this. She was living in the same lodgings as Cutler and it was thought, although they denied this, that they might have unintentionally influenced each other. Worse, the fearful Mrs Parker also refused to swear an information for assault against the man, which would have
given the police the chance to arrest and question him. In October 1907 a £1000 reward was offered, but at the end of November, the coroner recorded a verdict of wilful murder by a person or persons unknown.

There was some excitement at the end of February 1908, when Adelaide police arrested a William Anderson over the shooting of a young woman in Lansdowne Terrace in the city. A photograph of him was sent to Melbourne, where Cutler told the police it resembled the Anderson he had seen but that this man looked much younger. The inquiry came to nothing. This Anderson was found to be insane and was sent to an asylum, from which he made a short-lived escape in 1913.

Of course, over the years, there were all sorts of theories, one of which was that this was an amateur theft. The reasoning behind this was that a professional would not kill anyone, given the possibility he would hang. Other theories included that a Sydney criminal had been hired; that the man was known to, and trusted by, Bauer; that the killer had immediately sailed for Europe to sell the diamonds in Amsterdam—but that would surely be the mark of a professional. There was also a theory that the man might have been a member of a gang who, five years earlier, had tied up the 71-year-old father of Melbourne jeweller Alfred Kiss as he was leaving his shop. Another theory was that it could have been the work of a recently released criminal and there was a call for such men to be required to notify the police of any change of address. Finally, it was thought that a woman had been involved. In the corner of Bauer's room a lady's black glove was found. Had an earlier visitor dropped it or had a woman been used as a decoy?
In any case, no one was ever charged
.

History often repeats itself. At about 5 p.m. on 18 March 1978 three diamond dealers were found shot in the back of the head in the Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets. The killers had arranged to see $30 000 worth of diamonds. Newspapers described the crime as ‘unprecedented in Australia'; the diamonds would have fetched around $9000 on the black market, or their full value if taken to Europe. It was thought the robbery had been carried out by an interstate gang.
No charges were ever brought
.

In 1877, a quarter of a century after the
Nelson
robbery, 5000 gold sovereigns in three sealed boxes were sent on P & O steamer the 1502-tonne
Avoca
from Sydney's Darling Harbour to Melbourne. Bank officials supervised their transfer to the RMS
China
, on which they would be taken to Galle in what was then Ceylon. On the
Avoca
, only the English-born chief officer, Robert Elliston, held a key to the strongroom on the lower deck, which could only be reached through a hatch directly opposite Elliston's cabin.

The journey took just under three weeks and when, on 29 August, the vessel arrived in Galle, the boxes were opened, again in the presence of bank officials, and the seals were broken. All that was in the boxes was sawdust.

As the man with the key and the cabin opposite the entrance to the strongroom on the
Avoca
, Elliston was the principal suspect. However, he convinced the police, who were sure the coins had disappeared between Sydney and Melbourne, that he knew nothing about the disappearance of the gold sovereigns. All other members of the crew, from Captain Pockley to the ship's carpenter Martin Weiberg, were interrogated but they answered all questions satisfactorily. Elliston was given a leave of absence and returned to England. And there the matter lapsed. Some months later, Weiberg told his mates he was leaving the ship, marry ing a barmaid and going to live on a property on the Tarwin River in South Gippsland. And the crime would have remained unsolved except that Weiberg's in-laws moved in with him and his new wife.

In the spring of 1878, while cutting up metre-long bars of soap, his sister-in-law Emma found cloth in a bar that had been hollowed out, pulled at it and out came shiny gold sovereigns. She showed her find to her mother, who told her daughter to take it to the police. Initially, in a version of the stock defence to a receiving charge, the ‘I met a man in a hotel' story, Weiberg told the officers he had been given a parcel by a bearded stranger on the ship, who had told him, ‘Here is a present for you. Keep your mouth shut'.

When more coins were found in a search of the property on 25 October 1878, Weiberg made a complete confession, implicating Elliston who, he said, during a particularly rough part of the voyage to Melbourne had got him to cut into the strongroom and open the boxes. For his troubles, Elliston gave him £200. What he forgot to tell the police was that as the ship's carpenter with the full run of the vessel, he had spent months on board amusing himself by making a series of secret doors, hatches and passageways which had enabled him to break into the strongroom on his own. He offered to take the police to a spot where he had hidden more gold for Elliston, claiming he had placed the coins in a kettle that he had lowered into the Tarwin River. He suggested that he and a policeman take a boat out and, when they were afloat, Weiberg hit the policeman and was off.

Meanwhile, in London in January 1879, Elliston had appeared before Magistrate Vaughan in Bow Street on a charge of conspiring with Weiberg, with a view to Elliston's extradition to Victoria to face trial under the
Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865
. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the warrant was defective, which meant that the case could only have been tried at the Old Bailey. Not only would this have been extremely inconvenient but Weiberg had escaped. Sir George Lewis, representing the Victorian Government, withdrew the warrant, and Elliston, who had been living in his home town of Ipswich and had applied to be chief constable there, was discharged.
He later sued P & O and received
what was described as a ‘handsome settlement'.

Weiberg was not retrieved for five months, by which time he had persuaded a friend, Joseph Pearce, to buy a boat,
The Petrel
, with a view to taking off to South America. They were hardly out of Port Phillip when she began to leak. She was beached at Queenscliff and the pair made off into the bush. When Pearce returned to his old lodgings, the police questioned him and he gave up Weiberg, who he said was
probably in the Waratah Bay area. On 16 May Weiberg was captured near Cape Paterson. Both he and Pearce went on trial for theft, with an alternative charge of receiving. Weiberg went with the story that a bearded stranger had given him the money. The confession he had sworn before a magistrate in October 1878 had been extracted from him by an offer not to prosecute him in return for Weiberg giving evidence against Elliston.

The crowd was very much on Weiberg's side and when a not guilty verdict was announced, there was great applause. Unfortunately for Weiberg, the foreman of the jury then added the words ‘to the first count', which was the theft. Both he and Pearce were found guilty on the second count of receiving. Based on the principle that without receivers there would be no thieves, receiving carried a maximum penalty of ten years, and simple theft a maximum of five.
In the event, they received five and two years respectively
.

After Weiberg's release, there were reports that he drowned in Waratah Bay when, having left his wife, he was sailing to New Zealand. However, at Port Phillip in late November 1883, the police boarded the cutter
Neva
, which was owned by Weiberg's brother, Matthew Olsen, looking for more gold. There was none, but Olsen did have a large number of £10 notes.
He assured the police that his brother had not drowned
. In December 1893 there was a report that a prospector in Waratah Bay had found Weiberg's skeleton, but there were other stories he had been seen in Sweden, where he had bought a hotel. In any case, £4000 worth of gold sovereigns was never recovered.

One of the great criminals who flourished in the last decade of the nineteenth century was Augustus Howard; or Gus Everingham, or Charles Vivian Doyle, or George Sims, or a host of other names for a man who led a team of thieves, blackmailers, confidence men, murderers and robbers, two at least of whom spirited gold from the steamship
Alameda
. Possibly born in England—the American police thought he was the son of a Sydney stonemason—he had a brother, Burton Howard (also known as Brisbane Doyle), who was said to have spent some time in a prison in Samoa. Augustus Howard was certainly in Australia by 1882, when, using the name George Sims, he escaped from Braidwood Gaol in the Southern Tablelands between Canberra and Batemans Bay, leaving behind the only other prisoner, an Aboriginal man.

In 1891, along with James Casey, and going under the name Roger Watson, Howard again escaped from prison, while awaiting trial on forgery and bigamy charges. At the time, he was described as being around twenty-five years, 5 feet 7 inches, with dark brown hair and eyes, a short, thick nose and a full chin, and a light, small moustache. He and Casey had had help, a new rope having been thrown over the 29-foot prison wall either during the night or in the early morning.

In 1892 he served a short sentence in Melbourne for theft. It was then off to America, where he set up a series of long-term confidence tricks, which in the second half of the 1890s included fleecing the Denver businessman Willard Reed Green over non-existent shale sites in New South Wales. It was the usual sort of tale. The pair were to travel together to New South Wales to see the sites but Howard kept putting off the trip. Eventually Green went on his own and found nothing. Unsurprisingly, he took umbrage and began proceedings against Howard.

Meanwhile other gang members James Kelly and Jim ‘Strap' Murphy had skipped bail in October 1898 to take part in a warehouse robbery in Melbourne. James Kelly robbed the National Bank of New Zealand in Auckland of £250—Kelly and another man then cashed the notes in San Francisco. Members of the Howard gang robbed a wagon belonging to the Anglo-California company in San Francisco and got away with $10 000 in gold. It was then that Howard decided Willard Green should be killed on his way back to America on the SS
Alameda
, and he gave £5000 to James Casey to murder him and throw him overboard. Casey kept the money and set about another, less dangerous, plan.

In May 1899, on a voyage from Sydney to San Francisco, £5000 worth of gold disappeared from the
Alameda
. In Sydney, the purser had counted the thirty boxes in which it was stored. The trapdoor to the storeroom was then shut, barred and locked. Seals were put on the locks, and the keys were placed in the ship's safe. The
Alameda
sailed on 11 May and landed in Auckland two days later. There, the seals were examined and found to be intact, and it was the same at Honolulu. But two days later, the chief steward wanted some wines and spirits that were kept in the strongroom to prevent the crew getting at them, and found the locks were broken, the gate lock opened, the bar removed and the trapdoor opened. The purser, who was with the steward, found only twenty-nine boxes. The captain, chief officer and chief engineer also did a count but there were still only twenty-nine. When the
Alameda
landed
at San Francisco, detectives were waiting and they made a search of the vessel but could not find the missing box.

There were a number of theories about how the trick had been worked. The purser, Fulcher, on the steamer
Mariposa
, sister vessel of the
Alameda
, believed the missing box had never been on board. Another theory was that it had been on board but was carried to the stateroom of a man, Wilson, known to be part of the Howard gang; it was carried off at Honolulu and Wilson then sailed for the East. The police also discovered that the lock on the door of the
Alameda
‘s strongroom could be replaced without removing the seal, and another suggestion was that gang members had bought a bunch of keys while the boat was docked in Sydney and replaced the lock.

There were also all sorts of stories about Gus Howard himself. He had become ill after his troubles with Green but should recover in a month or so; he was in Canada; an arrest was imminent. Another theory was that he had left San Francisco in 1900. Whichever, if any, of these was true, he never seems to have been caught.

There was one final twist to the Howard story. His daughter Eva, variously known as Nulda Olivia and Magda Petrie, took up with Milton Franklin Andrews, one of a number of people to have been suggested as the author of magicians' bible
The Expert at the Card Table
, and certainly a billiards and poker hustler. In 1905 he and Eva, using the name Brush, went to Sydney where he spent some time depriving gamblers of their money with a succession of trick shots and sleights of hand.