Gangland Robbers (14 page)

Of the crime itself, he wrote:

 

When I took the pistol from my pocket I was naturally excited; and was grasping it very tightly, and when pointing it towards the man I gripped my hands tightly, and in so doing accidentally pulled the trigger. I was stupefied when I saw what had happened. I had intended to strike the man with the money with my clenched fist, and get away, and could easily have done so; but I could not bring myself to do so mean an act.

 

Rennie told how he enlisted at sixteen, and was injured when a dugout in which he was sheltering was blown up and a falling beam had hit him. He had suffered from attacks of memory loss at intervals since:

 

The last turn I had was while I was at work. I remember nothing from being in my office at Newport until I came to myself on the Karoola coming to Fremantle. I could not communicate with my wife as I did not know where she would be, so I tried to find employment and get back home, but I could not, and was practically destitute! I was worried and nearly frantic about my wife, whom I worship, and decided if I could not get money honestly I would steal it and get home as quickly as possible. My heart and mind have been torn to pieces at the sorrow and misery I have caused Greville's relatives. I would not cause hurt to anything on earth intentionally.

 

Chief Justice Sir Robert McMillan, Mr Justice Draper and the trial judge, Mr Justice Northmore, speedily dealt with his appeal, deciding that Rennie had revealed nothing that would justify their interference and that the law must therefore take its course. In any event, the appeal had been lodged outside the statutory time limit.

In January 1921 the incumbent hangman, 66-year-old James Croucher, had drowned himself in the Swan River, near Bunbury Bridge, with a bag of stones weighing around 40 pounds tied around his neck. He had informed his wife, Minnie, he was going to kill himself and was remorseful that he had not told her about his job before he married her. A new hangman, described as a short, stocky, clean-shaven man in his fifties or sixties who wore no mask, was brought in from the eastern states to do this one job. He hanged Rennie on 2 August 1926.

Rennie was reported as saying as he was being led to the scaffold, ‘This is the last daylight I will see.' He refused drugs, and said he was sure ‘his Maker would forgive him his great sin'.
His wife, who had visited him
in the death cell, had already returned to Victoria.

In 1928 more than £3000 was stolen from the train to Alice Springs before it had departed from a construction camp north of Oodnadatta, South Australia. Every fortnight, following paydays, Frank Jones, managing director of Wallis, Fogarty Limited, storekeepers at Oodnadatta, acting in his capacity of travelling postmaster, visited the construction camps on the North-South line to collect money from the men to be deposited at the Commonwealth Savings Bank.

At about nine o'clock on 3 July, after collecting the money and doing business for his firm, Jones joined the train at the 61-mile construction camp. The bag of money was placed on the seat in the travelling compartment of the brake van and was subsequently stolen.

Mounted police officer William Virgo was assigned a black tracker, Bob Wiltshire, to help him find the loot and the robbers. Within twenty-four hours, Wiltshire and Virgo found two pairs of sandshoe tracks, one from a new pair and the other from an old and worn pair. They followed the tracks along Hamilton Creek, where they found a bag buried in the sand. Also in the creek, Wiltshire pulled out about £1600 from a rabbit warren. He continued along and found a gum tree with marks on its butt. He climbed the tree, put his hand in the hollow and found more money in an oatmeal bag. He then traced the tracks back to a tent occupied by Ray Gordon and Ezra Bonke.

The youths said that Bonke had been training for a boxing match and the tracks were made when they went for a training run together. Convicted but with a recommendation for leniency by the jury, Gordon received a year and Bonke, who had previous convictions, two years.
The credit for the expert tracking
and convictions went to Virgo, rather than Wiltshire.

Between 28 and 30 May 1935 the Great Ghan Robbery took place, when 34 pounds of gold disappeared from an unwatched, elderly safe in the brake van of the Northern Express, travelling between Alice Springs and Quorn in the Flinders Ranges. The major portion of the gold consignment was from the Tennant Creek Granites, Tanami and
Winneke mines, and had been delivered to Alice Springs by car the previous Sunday.

There was speculation about insiders being responsible, using a piece of wire and then a duplicate key to open the safe. Another safe in another carriage, which was guarded and carried £2500, was untouched. Detectives were immediately sent up from Adelaide but, apart from going along with the duplicate key theory, they made no progress whatsoever. No arrests were made, nor was any gold recovered. It did, however, lead the police to comment that if police armed guards were put on the trains, this sort of robbery would soon end.
This time, someone had to suffer
though, and the company fined one train guard 10 shillings and another 15 shillings for carelessness.

This was the third large robbery from a mail train on this line. In December 1926 £5000 of the Queensland National Bank's money was stolen. In March 1931 a parcel containing £1000, consigned from the Townsville branch of the Queensland National Bank to the Cloncurry branch, was removed from a mail bag between Townsville and Cloncurry. It was thought that James Short had masterminded both robberies.

In 1935 the hotel ‘barber' Herbert Kopit, also known as Colbert after his Egyptian father had deserted him and his mother, served a six-month sentence in Queensland. On 2 April the next year, in what became known as ‘The Horror on the Rocky Mail', he climbed several steps in the criminal pantheon.

In March he had stolen an all-lines first-class railway pass and was placed in a sleeping compartment on the Bundaberg–Brisbane mail train. His fellow passengers, Harold Edward Speering and Frank Costello, were already asleep when Kopit boarded. When the next morning the conductor, Thomas Boys, looked in as the train approached Brisbane, he found Kopit trying to steal from them. Both woke up, and Kopit killed them with a tyre lever and then bashed Boys, who survived but suffered irreversible brain damage.

At the inner-north suburb of Wooloowin, Kopit left the train with all the money he could find and, wearing Speering's coat and trousers, made his way to Murwillumbah. It was then on to Casino and the train to Sydney, where he stayed at the Doncaster Hotel in Kensington and bought himself some women's clothes. He then caught the express train to Melbourne.

Three days later Kopit was arrested in Little Collins Street, dressed as a girl in a grey frock and white straw hat. When he had tried to check in to a hotel, he had given his name as Miss Williams but the young desk clerk, Doris, suspicious of the woman's deep voice, whiskers and hairy hand, thought Kopit might be a sex pervert and had contacted the police.

Kopit was returned to Queensland for his trial. It had been announced he would arrive at the South Brisbane terminus, but instead his police escort removed him at a level crossing at Moorooka, some miles from the city. Several hundred spectators had gone to the South Brisbane station, but even when Kopit failed to appear, they were not convinced they had been cheated and waited patiently for the best part of an hour at the station exits.

A series of remands began, at one of which the handsome and debonair Kopit wore a white carnation in his buttonhole. At his trial, at the end of June, his ingenious if unpromising defence was that he was insane at the time of the killings but immediately afterwards became sane again. His principal witness, Dr Julius Streeter, leader of the Douglas Social Credit Party, had written to offer his services, saying:

 

The case offers the opportunity of educating at least some of the judiciary at least with regard to scientific determinism and may help on the inevitable conclusion that a very large proportion of ‘criminals' are manufactured by the defective social and economic system and most are cases for psychological treatment rather than for vindictive punishment.

 

Streeter told the court that Kopit claimed he had had religion ‘belted into him at school'. He had been in trouble over cruelty to animals: ‘This is a sadistic tendency which Kopit did not seem to understand.' At the age of fourteen, he had been sent to a reformatory in sight of a lunatic asylum. As a result, so said Streeter, Kopit had had an obsessive fear of insanity:

 

From our point of view this is not murder but a peculiarity of behaviour which we attempt to account for. As soon as the conductor was struck down his actions in killing the other two men were done in a demented condition. The dementia lasted only from the time he saw the conductor until he killed him.

 

On the other hand, the government medical officer said that he had examined Kopit a dozen times and could not find symptoms that would indicate insanity.

Unsurprisingly, Streeter's defence failed, with a wholly unim-pressed, and seemingly ineducable, Mr Justice Macrossan commenting:

 

The plea of supposed insanity rests on the evidence of Dr Streeter, who wishes to educate me among others. I sincerely hope his form of scientific determinism will never saddle the administration of criminal law in Queensland. Very often students of psychiatry mislead themselves in their zeal to arrive at conclusions not warranted by the facts established.

 

Macrossan summed up for eighty minutes and, on 26 July, the jury retired for only half that time before convicting Kopit. Asked if he had anything to say, Kopit replied that he wished to thank his counsel and solicitor for what they had done on his behalf, adding, ‘It has been done without any help from me and they have done all they could.' Sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, he attempted to commit suicide at the beginning of August, cutting his neck and forearm with a broken piece of safety razor. The authorities regarded it as a sham attempt made in an effort to be sent to a mental hospital.

Five years later, Kopit decided to appeal, citing as grounds that he had evidence proving it was impossible for him to have been guilty of the offence, and that the evidence given against him was both irrele vant and inadmissible. He did not want legal aid and would not be calling witnesses. He did, however, want to be present at the hearing. He had not appealed before, he said, because there had been ‘high tension and public agitation' surrounding his trial. The court rejected his application within ten minutes, saying it was frivolous and vexatious and that he merely wanted a day out of prison.

In April 1942
Truth
, which thought he should have been a candidate for the rope, gleefully reported of the man:

 

His hair is cropped and stubbly; the skin of his face is yellow and lined; his teeth, decayed, have to be often treated by the gaol dentist; his eyes are weak and bleary; he is not over-particular about hygiene; never smiles now, seldom talks … he is sullen, morose, evil tempered, and thoroughly unpopular with his fellow prisoners.

 

In fact, over the years, Kopit made up garments for other prisoners, taking particular care that his own clothes were well cut, pressed and spotless. In March 1951 he died, aged thirty-nine, in Brisbane General Hospital, to which he had been transferred suffering from acute asthma.

The Brisbane correspondent of the
Maryborough Chronicle
thought it had been:

 

A brief but terrible story of a life which started in squalor, and ended in the dread misery of a death without a friendly smile to lighten the dark road of oblivion.

 

The train conductor, Boys
, had died the previous year.

On 28 March 1936 in Queensland, the Eidsvold-Cracow mail car was held up, the target being the £1400 Cracow goldminers payroll that the National Bank of Australia had sent. The driver, Charles Williams, had one passenger, Mrs Violet McDowell, who got out to open a wire gate some 53 miles from Eidsvold. While she was out of the car, a masked man holding a rifle approached Williams and demanded the pay. He forced Williams out and drove off, leaving him and Mrs McDowell at the gate. As he sped away, he threw her purse out of the car.

John Howard, a 37-year-old assistant engine driver, was arrested in mid-April, when he was seen passing £5 notes with numbers that matched those that had been stolen. The next day, he took detectives to an old post hole in the scrub, where he dug up a treacle tin containing around £1000 in notes.

At the end of the committal proceedings Howard threw in his hand, saying there was nothing he could do and might just as well plead guilty straightaway. On 12 May, when he appeared before Justice Brennan at Rockhampton and was asked if he had anything to say, he replied:

 

There is very little to say. I did the job all right and it's no use being sorry now. If I had not been caught I don't suppose I would be sorry at all. I can only say I will never do anything like this again.

Judge Brennan: Not for a while anyway… In a way it was in keeping with the greatest traditions of such robberies under arms and you took advantage of the occasion when you knew wages were going to
Cracow. Had the young driver been a more seasoned man and put up a fight you would probably be here today on a charge of murder.

 

He then sentenced Howard to seven years.

Mail-train robberies in Queensland, and other states, did not die with the conviction and death of James Short.
In 1938, when Henry Loftus and Harry Donaldson
took part in the last great American train robbery, attempting to rob Southern Pacific's Apache Limited and killing brakeman WL Smith in the process, train robberies in Australia were still going strong. On the evening of 31 August 1938 robbers took £3000 from the Mount Isa mines payroll as it was being transported there from Townsville.