Gangland Robbers by James Morton Read Free Book Online

should have been convicted on
    THE BARE WORD OF A CHINAMAN
    whose conscience told him that Duggan was the man who assaulted him.
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    Truth
claimed there were a number of senior detectives who believed the conviction was wrong, and the paper called for a full investigation. This did not take place. Tart never fully recovered from the attack and died from pleurisy at his Ashfield home eleven months later. By the end of his sentence, Flood, embittered by serving a sentence for a crime he claimed he had not committed, was a broken man. Friends took him to Gippsland , where he worked on a dairy farm, and his whereabouts after that are unclear.
    There may have been something to the theory that Tart had been killed by Henry Jones—a man certainly not afraid to use violence. On 19 January 1903 Constable Samuel Long was shot in the head when he surprised robbers at the Royal Hotel in Auburn. Theodore Trautwein, the licensee, chased the two men but they got to a sulky and drove off.
    The job resulted from a conversation in Bathurst Gaol between a safebreaker, Alfred Jackson, then serving a sentence for attempted breaking and also cattle stealing, and Henry Jones, who told him that ‘only fools and horses work’. Jones wanted a man ‘who understood the game and was not afraid to shoot’. His other men for the job were Digby Grand, who would ‘stop at nothing’, and Snowy Woolford, who was a ‘thorough cocktail’. Sensibly, Jackson declined. While Grand may have stopped at nothing, this did not stop him shooting off his mouth, telling a butcher, Joseph Gallagher, that he was tired of getting ‘stuff’ andwanted to go for the ‘ready gilt’, meaning he wanted money. At the time of Long’s murder, he was already on bail for shopbreaking and a big boot robbery.
    Woolford, the lookout, cracked first, weeping at and running away from Long’s funeral at which a police band was playing. This was heard by a servant, who told someone else, who told Trautwein. Woolford admitted making an impression in soap of the key to the hotel safe. Grand was arrested on 24 January, and Jones was arrested later, at 33 Ada Street in Surry Hills. Woolford was allowed to turn Queen’s Evidence, and at the committal proceedings told his story well. By the time of the trial, however, he had been sent to the Reception House, a psychiatric facility in Darlinghurst, and was claiming he had been made to give false evidence against Jones and Grand.
    He was in a state of complete breakdown by the time the trial began on 6 April and the first jury was discharged, in the hope Woolford would recover. At the second trial he was no better , and Grand, whose demeanour had been described as that of an amused spectator rather than that of an accused principal, smiled and gestured to the public gallery. Both men gave alibi evidence but the jury returned guilty verdicts, though adding, curiously, a recommendation for mercy.
    During the sentencing, Grand never lost his composure, somewhat echoing Ned Kelly’s ‘I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there where I go’, when he told Justice Rogers:
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    I have to tell you to your face that you have tried this case more like a Crown Prosecutor than a Judge. There was a Judge in this State named Windeyer. Where did he die? Away from friends and relatives where I hope you will die. I shall meet you before our God, and then you will know whether I am guilty or not.
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    Both he and Jones were hanged on 7 July 1903. Jones’s neck was broken but Grand was strangled to death. A subsequent medical report assured its readers that he had immediately been rendered unconscious and suffered no pain.
    Grand was correct. Sir William Windeyer had indeed died friendless and away from home, in Italy on 11 September 1897. He was on his way to take up a temporary appointment in Newfoundland. Windeyer was not only deeply unpopular over his conduct