Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (5 page)

ARTHUR ORTON

THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT

I
n 1853, Roger Tichborne sailed off to South America after an argument with his rich, upper-class family over a girl he wanted to marry. A year later, he drowned in a shipwreck. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t.

Around the same time, another young man, a butcher’s son, Arthur Orton, also sailed to South America. He didn’t like working on a ship, so he ran away when the ship reached Chile. After eighteen months, he went home, but he didn’t stay long. Like Roger, he had a fight with his family over a girl. He left for Australia.

Lady Tichborne, who lived in France, refused to believe that her darling boy was dead. Her husband thought she was crazy, but by 1866 both he and their younger son, Arthur Tichborne, had died. Now she could do what she wanted.

She put an advertisement in the papers, offering a large reward for anyone who could help her find Roger. The advert even reached Australia, where Arthur Orton had been living for thirteen years. He had settled in the New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga, where he worked as a butcher. He was broke and needed cash desperately.

Arthur wrote to Lady Tichborne, claiming he was Roger and asked could he have some money, please? As it happened, there were two former Tichborne servants living in Sydney, Andrew Bogle and Michael Guilfoyle. He would have to convince them first.

For some reason, both men agreed that he was Roger. Maybe he had offered them their old jobs back. Maybe he had promised to share the money. In any case, that was enough for Lady Tichborne. In December 1866, she paid for him to travel to France.

Here, the story becomes
really
weird. Arthur didn’t look anything like Roger. Lady Tichborne’s

He knew nothing about Roger’s childhood, family or friends except what he had learned from Andrew and Michael.

Still, Lady Tichborne accepted him as her son. After all, the poor boy had been sick. He’d suffered a shipwreck. Naturally, he had forgotten.

She gave him an income of a thousand pounds a year. In those days, this was a fortune. If he’d been satisfied with it, he could have lived happily ever after and his story would never have made it into the history books.

But Lady Tichborne died. Arthur wasn’t going to settle for a thousand pounds a year when he could have it all. Arthur knew he’d have to fight the family for it.

So started a very long trial, which cost everyone a lot of money and ended up costing Arthur much more. He managed to bribe some witnesses, including his own family. A man called Jean Luie said he was a sailor who had cared for Roger after the shipwreck. Unfortunately he turned out to be a con artist called Sorenson. In the end, Arthur’s brother Charles admitted Arthur was his brother. Even Arthur’s old girlfriend identified him.

In 1873, Arthur was sentenced to fourteen years for perjury (telling lies in court). When he came out in 1884, he admitted he’d lied.

Arthur Orton died in 1898, a lot poorer than he had hoped to be.

Could it happen today? Probably not the way it did. The world is a much smaller place, with aeroplanes and the Internet. And if Arthur did try to make a claim, a DNA test would settle the matter.

But we still love a good story. Even today, some people still believe Arthur was who he said he was.

So perhaps a modern Arthur Orton would get away with it for a while–

DID YOU KNOW…?

In the 1920s, Australian cat burglar George McCraig was working in New York and London. He was known as the Human Fly because he was so good at climbing buildings. When he wasn’t stealing jewellery, George was working as a stuntman. Spiderman would have been jealous.

NED KELLY

E
dward ‘Ned’ Kelly almost couldn’t help getting into trouble with the law. His father, John ‘Red’ Kelly, was brought to Australia in chains from Ireland in 1841. His father’s relatives, the Lloyds, were always getting into strife with the law. His mother Ellen’s family, the Quinns, were another lawbreaking bunch. It would only have been surprising if he hadn’t ever broken the law.

The Kellys were Irish and Catholic. To them, anyone English was an oppressor and Irish police were traitors. This is important, since in some ways, the Kelly gang formed because of an Irish policeman.

We’re not certain exactly when Ned was born, but it was in about 1855. When his father died in 1866, his family moved to north-eastern Victoria. They had a farm, but it didn’t earn them much and they probably stole to survive.

In his early teens, Ned worked with a bushranger called Harry Power. In 1870, the fifteen-year-old Ned was arrested for being Power’s ‘apprentice’. Charges were dropped because they couldn’t be sure he was the right person, but later that year, he got six months in prison for assault and obscene language.

Ned and his brothers, Dan and James, often got into trouble, but Ned stopped for a while.

Remember that Irish policeman? His name was Fitzpatrick. He liked Ned’s sister, Kate. The Kellys were never going to roll out the red carpet for him, but when he turned up to arrest Dan Kelly one day in 1878, he had a fight on his hands. Dan wasn’t even there. Ellen, Kate and two others were. Fitzpatrick was lightly wounded. Fitzpatrick claimed that he had been attacked by Ned, Dan, Ellen, a neighbour called Williamson and a Kelly relative, William Skillion. Skillion, Williamson and Ellen were all arrested. Ellen was sentenced to three years in prison for attempted murder. Her judge was Redmond Barry, who ended up sentencing her son to death.

In October, policemen McIntyre, Kennedy, Scanlan and Lonigan went after Ned, Dan and their friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, who had gone into hiding. In the gun fight that followed, Lonigan was shot dead. Kennedy was wounded so badly that Ned finished him off – out of mercy, he later said. He covered him with a cloak and left.

They robbed banks in the small Victorian towns of Euroa and Jerilderie. In Jerilderie, they tied up the police and made the rest of the town’s people go to the Royal Mail Hotel, where everyone enjoyed free drinks. There, Ned dictated what has become famous as the Jerilderie Letter. It was the length of a short book. He said he and his family and friends had been badly treated by sons of Irish bailiffs of English landlords.

Actually, the Kelly gang didn’t do much bushranging. Their whole time as outlaws lasted about eighteen months. There was more murder, when Joe Byrne killed a former friend called Aaron Sherritt, whom he considered a traitor.

Now the police got serious. A special train was arranged to bring many policemen to Beechworth. Ned knew about this plan. He had plenty of supporters. Some were going to come and fight beside him against the police. The gang ripped up the tracks to derail the train outside the town of Glenrowan. Wearing new armour made from plough parts, they herded the people of Glenrowan into the local hotel – and waited. There was a party. Ned made the fatal mistake of letting the local schoolmaster, Thomas Curnow, take his family home.

Curnow went to warn the police to stop the train.

The police besieged the hotel. Ned had gone to warn his supporters. By the time he returned, Joe, Steve and Dan were dead. Their homemade armour hadn’t helped much. Left alone, Ned now fought 34 police and received 28 wounds. Somehow, he survived to be tried for multiple murders in late October, 1880.

His trial was certainly unfair. Evidence that would have helped him was not used. Modern reenactments, done according to modern law, have found him ‘not guilty’.

But this was 1880. Redmond Barry condemned him to hang. First, he asked Ned if he had anything to say. Ned said that they would soon meet in a higher court.

On 11 November, he died with some dignity. His last words were ‘Such is life’. He was twenty-five.

Interestingly, Redmond Barry died, quite suddenly, only two weeks after Ned.

DID YOU KNOW…?

Ned Kelly’s younger brother, James, was one of the few family members to go straight. After a few years of getting into trouble with the law in his teens, James settled down and became a much-respected, law-abiding citizen. He lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1946.

FRANCES KNORR

BABY FARMER

I
n the nineteenth century and even in the early twentieth, there was no pension for single mothers, as there is today. In those days, with no husband to support you, you were on your own. It was even worse if you gave birth to a child without being married. You would have a hard time getting a husband or even a job, because this was considered shocking. So, many women who needed to work relied on baby farmers.

Baby farmers were people who acted as foster carers for poor women who were alone and needed to get jobs. You would take the baby to them and pay them to look after it while you worked, hoping you could see your child every now and then. The problem was, these people were out to make a profit. Looking after babies was not very profitable. You had to feed them and clothe them and that cost money. If you had too many children in your care, you wouldn’t have room for more, and that meant less money. Besides, child care was hard work. Why bother to do that when you could kill them and keep taking money from their mothers, making excuses for why they weren’t at home?

Frances Knorr was one such baby farmer and she ended up on the gallows.

Frances Thwaites arrived in Australia in 1887, after her affair with a soldier embarrassed her respectable English family. She worked in Sydney for a while before meeting and marrying Rudolph Knorr, a German waiter. The couple moved to Melbourne, then Adelaide, but in 1892, Rudi went to prison for selling furniture they didn’t actually own yet.

Frances was on her own, with a baby daughter and no income. At this stage, perhaps she might have become the victim of a baby farmer herself, but she tried working as a dressmaker. That didn’t work, so she stole enough money to get her and her child back to Melbourne. For a while, a man called Edward Thompson supported her, but he left her.

Desperate for money to live on, she took up baby farming. She didn’t kill all the children she was caring for. Some were sold to families that didn’t have children of their own. One went back to its mother. She moved house a lot, something that baby farmers often did, so that mothers wouldn’t find out what had happened to their children. But when Rudi was released and the couple went back to Sydney, the bodies of three babies were found in the backyard of a house in Brunswick where she had lived. Frances, who was expecting her second child at the time, was arrested. After her baby’s birth in 1893, she was put on trial for murder.

She wrote to Edward Thompson, asking him to support her with fake evidence, but the prosecution got hold of her letter to him and used it against her. Her husband begged for mercy for her, saying that she had an illness called epilepsy and didn’t know what she was doing. It didn’t help. Neither did a petition from the women of Victoria, who felt that men shouldn’t be executing women for doing things that no man would ever have been forced to do. Despite these pleas, she was sentenced to death.

Just before she died at Pentridge Prison in early 1894, Frances Knorr found religion. She went to the gallows singing the hymn ‘Abide With Me’. She even left a letter for the State Premier, advising how he could change the laws to prevent baby farmers from doing what she had done.

She was a sad case, but this would not have been of any comfort to the mothers of her victims.