The Murchison Murders Read online

  THE

  MURCHISON MURDERS

  ARTHUR W. UPFIELD

  ETT IMPRINT, SYDNEY

  ETT IMPRINT, SYDNEY

  This eBook edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2015

  ETT IMPRINT

  PO Box R1906

  Royal Exchange NSW 1225

  Australia

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

  Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

  Copyright © William Upfield 2015

  First published 1932

  ISBN: 9781925416138 (ebook)

  ISBN: 9781925416121 (pbk)

  Design by Hanna Gotlieb

  THE MURCHISON MURDERS

  To give a clear picture of the country, and to clothe in words the personalities in the most sensational murder drama that ever took place in Australia, is essential to the proper appreciation of a case containing, as it does, several features believed to be unique.

  In the bush proper of Western Australia three men disappeared from human ken between December 8, 1929, and May 18, 1930, and it was not until the following February that the relatives of one, making inquiries from New Zealand, first called the attention of the police to those disappearances and started investigations that occupied many months, and entailed thousands of miles of travel, and the compilation of volumes of reports and statements.

  All caused through a novelist’s search for a plot to be used in a murder-mystery story.

  Government Camel Station

  The Government Camel Station is 163 miles north of the wheat town of Burracoppin, and about 75 south of the gold-mining town of Paynesville. The homestead is a four-rooms-and-kitchen stone building, situated about 100 yards west of the vermin fence, which, from the south to the northwest coast, is some 1130 miles long – undoubtedly the longest netted fence in the world. Standing at the homestead front door, one faces east, able to see the fence and the wall of mulga scrub beyond the fence track. From the back door a few scattered acacias are the only obstructions to the view. About half a mile north-westward a double-summited hill rises from a roughly circular plain, the two summits forming the rounded humps of the animal after which the place is named – Dromedary Hill.

  One familiar with the locality knows that northward along the fence at the edge of the scrub timber, there is a hut and a well named Watson’s Well; that southward along the fence there is nothing until Campian is reached, 138 miles distant; that by following a westward track for 10 miles one will reach The Fountain, a stockman’s hut, and, after a further ten miles, the homestead of Narndee Station to which the stockman’s hut belongs.

  As for people and traffic, one might wait a week, two weeks, to see a human face or a dust-coated car pass along the fence track; and only rarely did a Narndee man call when on his way to that station’s paddocks east of the Camel Station.

  Dry, parched, heated land in summer; brilliant, bracing, beautiful in winter.

  At the Camel Station lived George Ritchie. To the Camel Station once every month came two Government boundary riders: Lance Maddison from the north, Arthur Upfield from the south. From the west at irregular intervals came a station contractor named James Ryan, and a stockman named “Snowy” Rowles. These were the men destined to play important roles in a terrific drama.

  Enter “Snowy” Rowles

  I first met Rowles at the Narndee outcamp, The Fountain, where he was stationed. He was then twenty-five years old; a man well-proportioned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, neat in dress, and, from the feminine standpoint, better-looking than the average.

  Looking backward, I can find no excuse for any one on the Murchison not liking Snowy Rowles. His appearance at a bush camp at once vanquished depression. He arrived at the Camel Station one day, late in ‘28, on a motor-cycle, looking for a job. It happened that the owner of Narndee had bought a bunch of mules from the Government and they were being handled by a breaker in the Dromedary Hill yards, preparatory to being taken to Narndee. Rowles offered to ride his worst mules – for exercise.

  There was left no doubt in the mind of any who saw him, that he rode as well as the best in the great North-west of the State. He was offered work on Narndee, which he accepted.

  His horse-riding was point No. 1 in favour of this newly-arrived stranger. The second point was an equable temper; the third a most engaging disposition; the fourth a willingness to oblige. As a fifth point, he was a good bettor and a good loser. And the sixth and most important point was a ready sense of humour.

  On his arrival one day at Dromedary Hill we asked him if he’d brought any meat, as we had to eat either tinned “dog” or kangaroo. No; he hadn’t. Then he had better go back to his camp (10 miles) and get some.

  “Righto! You scour out the fry-pan”, he urged, laughing; and away he went on his motor bike in a cloud of dust.

  Expecting a fore-quarter of mutton at least, we got busy with fire and fry-pan. In half an hour he was seen dodging this way and that over the plain between the house and the hill; a spurt of dust as big as a cloud in front of his machine.

  “What the devil is he doing?” demanded my companion.

  “I always did think that what one wants in these parts is a pair of binoculars”, I rejoined. “He’ll break his neck among those rabbit burrows and rocks.”

  It was country over which I would not gallop a horse.

  Instead of bringing back a fore-quarter of mutton Snowy Rowles mustered into the back yard a ”boomer” kangaroo that he had rounded up; tailing it home like a sheep being brought in by a man on horseback.

  Plots – and a Plot

  In a proper review of the Snowy Rowles case, it is impossible to disregard my work as a novelist; because, although I did not provide Rowles with a motive, and was in no way an accessory before or after the fact, the Crown alleged that I did provide him with a method of destroying the bodies of his victims.

  It is the ambition of many novelists who are free from the obsession of sex, to discover an original plot, or at least an original variation of an old one. Fiction plots are like nuggets of gold dug out of a unique mine. A hundred years ago this mine contained much gold; to-day nuggets are scarce, and much digging is necessary to unearth them.

  Notable nuggets were discovered by: Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda; Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes; Rudd in his On Our Selection. They were golden nuggets literally as well as figuratively.

  During a several weeks’ stay at the Camel Station in the early winter of 1929, I thought much of the type of story to follow a psychological study – then nearing completion – of a lonely man on a desolate beach. Day by day Ritchie and I followed a simple work routine. In the morning one of us brought in the two camels on which we were working, and these were harnessed to a heavy buckboard and taught to pull it, to walk, to trot, to stop quietly at gates, and, above all, to stand still.

  To us the constant driving quickly became automatic, and when labour becomes automatic one’s mind is free to rove. One bitterly cold day, whilst we drove round and round Dromedary Hill, I recalled that Wilkie Collins dug up the murder-mystery nugget from the mine of golden plots. Nuggets of variation have been unearthed by such masters as Edgar Allen Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; but it appeared to me that these and lesser diggers in that field were bound by a single cast-iron set of rules. The body of a murdered person is found – formerly on the library floor; latterly on the top of a bus, beneath a lift, or other unlikely place – and then the detective has a look at the corpse, and his investigation leads inevitably to the arrest of the mur
derer.

  Questions demanded an answer. Why a corpse? Why be satisfied with what satisfied our grandfathers? Why continue littering the pages of a novel with blood? Here, then, was a new nugget, a beautiful theme nugget, waiting to be discovered. Instead of having the same old corpse in the first chapter, as the Masters and their sheep-like followers always did, why not date a fictional murder two months before the story opens? Why not write a murder-mystery without a corpse at all? In short, why not completely destroy the body of a victim of homicide, and then permit my fictional Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte to prove, first, that a murder had been committed, secondly, how it had been committed, and, thirdly, who committed it? I could make him begin his investigation two months after the corpse had been destroyed without trace.

  Difficulties

  The idea was attractive, but clothing the idea with life quickly presented difficulties.

  How many murderers in real life – including doctors and other intelligent persons – have failed to dispose of the bodies of their victims, despite all their ingenuity! Crippen, Landru, and Mahon come easily to mind; and Deeming’s fate was inevitable. Each of them cut up their victims, and then were unable to destroy the parts. Of all killers, perhaps the Paris Bluebeard came nearest to success.

  I was faced with what I may term Problem Number One. With appliances that the average person could obtain, how could a human body be so utterly destroyed that no trace of its existence should remain to damn a murderer? A crematorium, or a bath of corrosive acid, are not within the reach of ordinary people desirous of cheating justice. Putting a body down a well, even dropping it down an abandoned mine shaft and exploding tons of earth on it, would not destroy it. Although concealed, it would still exist, still menace the security of the murderer.

  The Nugget is Suggested

  I had decided upon the locality of the story to be written. I had gathered around me the cast of characters, had even planned a rough chart of the action; but I could not start the story because I was unable to invent a simple and effective method of destroying my intended corpse.

  Whilst playing poker one night, with a cold south wind rumbling round the chimney above the roaring wood fire, I said to Ritchie:

  “Can you tell me of a good way of getting rid of a man, assuming I killed him on paper? I want a method of completely destroying a human body, so that there will be no slightest trace left for Bony to find.”

  “What! Are you going to start another book?”

  “Yes, I am. I want to write another Bony yarn, in which he gets a job of work worthy of his brains and his bush craft. I want to give him the case of his life, if I can nut out a simple way of getting rid of the eternal hackneyed corpse.”

  “Well, all right. Suppose I wanted to do you in. I’d kid you into the bush, and when your back was turned I’d shoot you stone dead. Then I’d gather wood and lay you on it, clothes, boots and all, pile wood over you, and burn you. In a couple of days I’d come back with a sieve, and I’d go through all the ashes with the sieve, and get out every metal object, and every piece of bone that wasn’t burned up by the fire. The metal objects could be thrown down a well, and the bones I’d dolly-pot to dust. So that no chance passer would wonder what the fire really was for, I’d shoot a couple of kangaroos and burn ‘em over the same place.”

  I went outside and looked up at the chilly stars. The very kernel of my Problem Number One was a dolly-pot to deal with the bones that an ordinary fire would not destroy. Why had I not thought of a dolly-pot? It is a common object on the Murchison, as in other parts of Australia.

  Anyone could possess a dolly-pot. There was one in the blacksmith’s shop at the Dromedary Hill homestead.

  Problem Number Two

  The plot of the new novel was rushing into shape. My murderer should destroy the body of his victim in the way given; and then Bony should get to ‘work, and prove – ! But what could he prove? What could he prove if there was not a particle of the body remaining for him to exhibit before a judge and jury, who require the production of a body, or identifiable parts of a body, before they will listen to a charge of murder. If my murderer carried out Ritchie’s astoundingly simple method, how could my detective build up his case, though he possess superhuman intelligence? Obviously, my murderer must make one mistake in his perfect murder, because unless he did so no detective in real life, or even in fiction, could prove murder against him.

  Appreciating the fact that Ritchie had supplied me with a gold nugget, I offered him a pound if he could find a flaw in it. I believe he thought that pound was going to be easy money.

  The problem was compressed into a simple question. If a man did such and such and such, how could he make a fatal error? Thresh at it, argue how we would, we could not discover a flaw. It became a tantalising but intriguing conundrum: I could not solve it, nor could my friends on the Fence, at Burracoppin and at Perth.

  His mind on the pound, riding a fresh horse, hatless and unshaved, and carrying a .22 bore rifle, Ritchie one day met Snowy Rowles coming to the Camel Station on his motor-cycle. Without preamble of any kind, Ritchie said:

  “Hey, Snow! If I was to shoot you stone dead, drag your body over to that dead scrub, burn it thoroughly, then come hack tomorrow with a sieve and go through the ashes for the bones and the metal objects on your clothes, dump the metal objects down a well, and dolly your bones to dust, how could my crime be discovered?”

  Rowles subsequently admitted that he thought Ritchie had gone mad. Muttering something about being in a hurry, he skidded away on a roaring machine, expecting at any second to feel the bite of a bullet in his back.

  Ritchie remained on his horse, looking after him in astonishment. Not until several hours later did he realise that the joke was against himself.

  The Solution

  The weeks passed.

  I went back to my fence section; using two camels drawing a heavy hooded cart tandem fashion. 163 miles was that section; and at the completion of the first trip I had not worked out the solution of my problem, and I had practically given up the idea of ever finding that beautiful fiction nugget. Ritchie failed to earn the pound; Maddison was no help; Rowles did not succeed.

  Then one morning, when most certainly I was not thinking about murder problems, but was gazing down my shaft camel’s gaping throat whilst I struggled to put on him a pair of winkers, the solution flashed through my mind like the stab of a searchlight. My murderer could carry out Ritchie’s method in every detail and yet leave a clue for Bony to find, follow up, and convict him. Where he could make, his fatal slip was in his lack of knowledge of his victim’s war record. Within three seconds, whilst I gazed stupidly at Curley, the camel, I saw placed in position the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The plot of the new novel was complete to its last detail. Further weeks passed in another trip to Burracoppin and back.

  Then the Inspector reversed the positions held by Ritchie and myself, and from the interior of a boundary rider’s cart I transferred my writing to the comfortable stone-built house, where night after night I wrote, aided by the blessed peacefulness of the bush.

  October 5, 1929, was a Sunday. According to my diary for that evening there were present in the Camel Station homestead “drawing-room” Ritchie, Rowles, the Inspector’s son, the north boundary-rider, and myself.

  Rowles appeared anxious for Ryan’s return, and left me to run south to meet him. He did so at the 96-mile rainshed, and as his car had broken down, he returned with Ryan, who had brought with him as a mate a young athletic man named George Lloyd.

  The party stayed with me that night, but it did not seem certain that Rowles would accompany Ryan and Lloyd to the former’s camp until the next morning. During the evening Ryan sang songs in a really fine voice, accompanied by Lloyd on a brand new accordion.

  Early the next morning the three departed, and either that afternoon or the next Rowles and Lloyd passed through the Camel Station on their way to the 100-peg where Rowles’s old car
had broken down. They brought the car back, and left it in a shed.

  That was the last I saw of either Lloyd or Ryan.

  The Inspector arrived from Burracoppin on December 10; Ritchie on the day previous. The day after the Inspector left for the north, Ritchie went up the Fence to Watson’s Well, where a prospector named James Yates was camped. On his return he brought the information that Rowles, Ryan and Lloyd, instead of coming past the Camel Station homestead to reach the north track, had travelled along the north boundary of the hill paddock, round the back of the hill, and had passed through the rabbit fence at Watson’s Well to get to that north track.

  There was nothing significant about this. Ritchie did not make it clear to me – I was not that interested, anyway – that Yates had seen only Rowles, who told him that Ryan and Lloyd were walking through the scrub looking for timber with which to build a sheep-yard. To me, it appeared as Rowles had said. Ryan had pulled out from a bad contract, and he was with him on the long trip to the north-west. He had laid his plans rather well.

  Christmas 1929

  Late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve the north boundary-rider and I left for Youanmi to buy a sucking pig and a bottle of beer, and there on the steps of the Youanmi Hotel stood Snowy Rowles.

  “Hello? What are you doing here?” I asked. “Thought you were in the north-west with Ryan and Lloyd.”

  “Oh! We got as far as Mount Magnet,” Rowles replied. “Ryan stays put, so I borrowed his truck to come over here for Christmas.”

  It came out later that he told my companion he had bought the truck from Ryan for £80.

  Now there was nothing extraordinary in this story. Long before then Rowles had told us that his grandfather had come to his rescue with money on a former occasion, and that he was thinking of applying for a loan with which to purchase a good second-hand truck. And, too, Ryan was one of those unfortunate men who are fascinated by hotels, and who sometimes will attempt to sell their shirts, let alone a runabout truck, to buy a few more drinks. It was easy to picture Ryan, semi-intoxicated, generously granting Rowles permission to take his truck, with Lloyd, who did not drink, in the offing earnestly waiting to get his mate out of town.