The dark prince of melbo.., p.28
The Dark Prince of Melbourne, page 28
Among those who managed to talk their way into the hospital was Tom Kelly. He was standing with a small group of people in the casualty ward around 7 pm when he spotted Francis Foley, who he learned had admitted Squizzy. A few minutes later, he approached Foley and asked, ‘Is Taylor dead?’ Foley’s response was a direct, ‘Yes, and you know that, and you have been here before.’ Kelly did not deny that, but said, ‘I have been sent here by someone else to find out if Taylor was dead.’ Foley said simply, ‘Well, now you know,’ and walked away.
Ida Pender was another who arrived at St Vincent’s Hospital and was allowed access by the police who were now monitoring the situation. She would later recall how a stranger had knocked on the door at 18 Darlington Parade and told her that her husband was at St Vincent’s Hospital. Soon afterwards she was taken to the hospital by a man named Smith and another man she didn’t know.
Ida was allowed to view her husband and was given time alone with his body. Her only reported reaction was to look at his face and say, ‘Poor Leslie.’ When her time was over and Ida returned from the mortuary to the entry area of the hospital, there was no one there that she knew or recognised. Ida took a taxi back to her Richmond home, alone.
***
Roy Travers had been right about what would happen at 50 Barkly Street. Police constables McDonald and Payne were the first police to arrive but would be far from the last. When they arrived, they tried to impose some kind of order. Gladys King was there; she had arrived back with the milk she had gone out for to be met with the news from ‘mother’ – her term for Bridget – that John had been shot. Gladys went into shock. She went into their bedroom and somehow convinced herself that she had heard Snowy gasp as she approached him. She would also claim that she did not see any signs of blood until she attempted to rearrange the bedclothes and Snowy’s pyjamas.
Dr McCutcheon arrived in the middle of all this. The bedroom was cleared; McCutcheon examined the body of John Daniel Cutmore and pronounced life extinct.
***
There was plenty of action, too, when news of the gunfight reached Russell Street. Detective Sergeant John Brophy was delegated to lead the investigation and immediately began to assign roles. John Grieve, Fred Milne and a third detective named McPhee were given the primary roles and immediately set out to drive the short distance to Barkly Street. At almost the same time, a telephone message was received at the Fitzroy police station from St Vincent’s Hospital saying that Squizzy Taylor had been admitted there but had just died. Constable William Soutar was sent to the hospital, and he was the one who made the first formal identification of the body as being Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor.
When the three detectives from Russell Street arrived at Barkly Terrace, John Grieve took command of the crime scene straight away. They began their formal investigation of what had taken place there, of what evidence remained in situ and who would be able to assist them with their enquiries. Their most immediate concern, though, was Bridget Cutmore. She was not making a lot of sense, was clearly wounded, and Dr McCutcheon recommended that she be taken to hospital for further examination. Uniformed constables were detailed to escort Bridget to the Melbourne Hospital. Before she left, however, the detectives asked her what was in the room opposite her son’s. They were told it was another boarder, and, with her assistance, they woke Scotty King and brought him out, still drunk and still oblivious to what had gone on outside his door.
Their focus would naturally be on Snowy Cutmore’s bedroom, and it was a mess. The floor was littered with empty cartridge cases, all but one of which proved to be .32 calibre, the odd one out being .25 calibre. All four walls bore bullet marks; a mirror had been smashed and half the chimney of a kerosene lamp on the dressing table had been shot away, while a small ornament on the mantelpiece above the fireplace had exploded into a hundred pieces. In the wall above the bedhead was a large bullet hole just over where the detectives imagined Snowy Cutmore’s head would have been. They would look everywhere, but no firearms would be found in the bedroom.
Cutmore was still lying on his back on the bed, arms outstretched, bedclothes pulled up to his chest. Those bedclothes were now soaked in blood around the chest area, while the little finger of his right hand appeared to have been almost severed by a bullet. After close examination of the room and house, there was nothing more the detectives could achieve at the scene, and it was now too dark outside to organise a proper search of the local area.
All they could do was take the initial statements from those at or near 50 Barkly Street at the time of the gunfight. Then it would be organising the uniformed boys to secure the entire property and to not allow anyone to touch anything in the bedroom crime scene until forensics had finished. Grieve would supervise the removal of Cutmore’s body to be taken to the City Morgue, and a whole new process would begin.
***
I have no way of knowing whether or not the detectives came together that evening, or any evening over the next few days or weeks, to mark the passing of a criminal who had given them all, individually and as a group, the amount of work that Squizzy Taylor had served up to them over the years.
Whatever their personal experiences might have been, the Russell Street detectives would always remember Squizzy Taylor as a liar, a thief and a murderer, a suborner of juries and an intimidator of witnesses; someone who was able to bend the law to his own ends and who found no moral barrier so low that he couldn’t squeeze his dapper little frame under it.
And then they would drink a toast to his passing.
CHAPTER 19The Passing of the Days
I.
Bridget Cutmore would survive the shootout at her home relatively intact, physically at least. When she arrived at the Melbourne Hospital, Bridget was given a thorough examination, after which the detectives waiting for her were informed that her condition was not considered serious and that she would be able to talk to them.
Bridget was interviewed in Number 6 Ward of the hospital and, despite claiming that she was still dazed by the events, seemed determined to speak her piece. At times, her memory seemed sketchy, and then it wasn’t. She could remember two men brushing past her but could not remember who had shot her. She remembered everything that started when she was outside in the kitchen: ‘Suddenly I heard two shots. While hurrying into my son’s room I heard several more shots, and on opening the door, I saw two men standing at the end of the bed which faced toward the backyard.’1 One of the men ran out the back door, the other ‘staggered’ towards the front door. She told John Brophy that she did not notice that one of the men was wounded. Nor did she mention what Roy Travers was doing.
Bridget told the police that she then saw her son lying on the bed and just stood there looking at him. She was still doing that when the police arrived a few minutes later, and she was brought to the hospital. That was the end of the interview and Bridget asked Brophy how her son was faring. When told that he had passed away, Bridget became visibly upset.2 After the police departed, Bridget was taken to the radiography department where her shoulder was X-rayed to determine the exact location of the bullet lodged there. On Friday morning, the bullet was successfully removed from her shoulder. It proved to be of .25 calibre.
At St Vincent’s Hospital, other detectives were going through Squizzy’s belongings to see what they could find. In the right-hand pocket of his suit coat was a .32 calibre automatic pistol, its magazine empty. All indications were that the weapon had been fired recently. In the left-hand pocket of the suit coat was a box of .32 calibre cartridges, 46 of them. In his inside left suit pocket were three racebooks, all perforated by a bullet.
***
Hire car driver John Hall had remained at St Vincent’s after the mortally wounded Taylor had been taken from his car. He would be removed from the hospital by detectives who took him back to Russell Street to be questioned. Apart from the sequence of events and timing, what he gave them would be of limited value. Hall told police the circumstances around how he had come to be hired by Taylor, and how he had driven him and two other men around Carlton, stopping at three hotels. Shortly after 6 pm, he had been directed to Barkly Street, where he dropped the three men off. A few minutes later, one of those men and a wounded Taylor reappeared, and asked to be driven to the hospital. The other man jumped out, Hall brought Taylor to St Vincent’s and that was all he knew.
His descriptions of the two men who had accompanied Taylor were so generic as to be almost useless. The man who did not go into the boarding house was of medium height with a full, round face and dark complexion, clean-shaven and dressed in a grey suit. The second man, who had gone inside the house with Squizzy but had not come back out, was a little shorter, around the same age, clean-shaven and dressed in a dark suit and wearing a dark hat. Hall was thanked and allowed to leave.
***
The investigation would continue at first light the next day. It produced results almost immediately, although not through any great investigative techniques. A Carlton matron, a Mrs Hudson, lived at 33 Macarthur Place, around 200 metres from Cutmore’s home, and relatively early on Friday morning she was in her backyard when she noticed a pistol and two cartridges beneath the hedge at the back of her rear garden. There was a right of way behind the property and a small gap at the base of her rear fence; in the last 24 hours, someone had pushed the items through that gap.3 Mrs Hudson hurried to the nearby police station to report her find.
It would soon be identified as a .32 calibre Eibar automatic pistol with ‘Destroyer’ stamped into its casing. A small piece of its magazine had broken off, probably after being struck by a bullet. The missing piece matched the metal fragment found on the floor in Snowy Cutmore’s bedroom. One cartridge remained in the magazine while another was jammed in the barrel. Both would be found to match the bullet lodged in Squizzy Taylor’s body. Snowy Cutmore’s pistol had been found exactly where Roy Travers had left it.4
Later that day, Constable Lindsay Goode, on detached duty from the Carlton police station, followed a hunch. Standing on the seat in the small toilet in the backyard of Bridget Cutmore’s boarding house, he reached up and into the toilet’s cistern and soon found something that should not have been there. It was a Webley .25 calibre pistol, the weapon that had fired the bullet that struck Bridget in the shoulder. It, too, was found exactly where Roy Travers had left it.
***
Those believed to have information relevant to the investigation were interviewed or reinterviewed, with disappointing results as all honoured the code. When first interviewed, Ida Pender told the police, and subsequently newspaper reporters as well, that there was ‘absolutely no truth’ in statements suggesting that her husband and Cutmore had quarrelled over a woman. She said that since her husband had sold his fruiterer’s business in Bridge Road, he spent nearly all his evenings at home.5 She was not aware that her husband even knew Cutmore, and she certainly didn’t. Ida was also adamant that Squizzy had not been carrying a gun when he had left that morning, in part because she had laid out all his clothes on their bed.
John ‘Scotty’ King was willing to talk to the police and might well have been the only person they spoke to who was open and honest and told them all he knew. He said that he had been asleep at the time of the shooting: ‘I’d been out all day and had a few drinks. I went to sleep in the room opposite to that occupied by Snowy Cutmore and knew nothing of the shooting until his mother woke me up. It was then too late.’6
Gladys King was both more verbose and less honest. Her opening outburst set the tone: ‘The motive for the shooting is a complete mystery to me as my husband would not associate with the likes of Squizzy Taylor . . .’ She went on to describe her husband as a quiet, well-behaved man, ‘nothing to do with the razor gangs in Sydney’, who had no business with Taylor yet had been shot down like a dog. Gladys did not know who shot Squizzy Taylor but could say categorically that it was not her husband: ‘My husband never carried firearms, and he did not have a revolver under his pillow.’
She told the police of their almost idyllic life in Sydney, him training horses in the morning and then the two of them spending time together in the afternoons. She spoke of how Snowy had planned to buy a pony and then take her back to Sydney the day after the Melbourne Cup. She admitted that her husband occasionally had a few drinks, but when he did, he was always well behaved. Oh, and a man named Roy had come from Sydney with him.
***
Initially, the police played their cards very close to their chests. They were after the Kelly brothers, Norman Smith and Roy Travers, but after Thursday night they had all disappeared into the smoke. In what followed, there were slices of good detective work, good timing and good luck.
The good detective work began with John Brophy contacting interstate police with the descriptions of the four men they were seeking. They had almost immediate success as a thoroughly spooked Roy Travers had fled Melbourne on Friday and was arrested by New South Wales detectives at Albury as he waited to switch trains.
Next, Fred Milne was the racecourse detective at Flemington racecourse on Saturday when one of his informants told him that three men, who had recently arrived from Sydney, were returning posthaste to the Harbour City. The descriptions of two of the three fitted the descriptions of the men who had accompanied Squizzy Taylor to Bridget Cutmore’s home. This news was passed to John Grieve who, with Detective McPhee, was about to board the Sydney Express at Spencer Street station, en route to Albury to collect and return Roy Travers to Melbourne.
When their train reached Seymour for its 15-minute stopover, Grieve and McPhee went to the refreshment room where, to their surprise, they saw the three men they had been asked to look out for. As it turned out, the three had driven from Melbourne, supposing that the police would be now watching Spencer Street station. They had arrived by car at Seymour at the same time as the detectives’ train. The Kelly brothers and Norman Smith were arrested on the spot, and local police were conscripted as reinforcements. As John Grieve continued to Albury, McPhee and a local constable escorted their three prisoners to the same location. In a nice touch, they used the same vehicle that had brought the men to Seymour.
The three arrested at Albury, plus Roy Travers when he was brought back to Melbourne the following day, appeared at the City Court on Monday morning, charged with the catch-all offence of vagrancy. All four were remanded in custody until the following Wednesday, and all four had their bail set at the considerable amount of 600 pounds. All four also told the police absolutely nothing of interest. Court appearances and remands would become a routine for them in the coming weeks until they would all be released, without charge.
***
On the same day as the wanted men were being arrested in Seymour or extradited from Albury, Squizzy Taylor was being buried. As the morning newspapers were hitting the streets with their lurid descriptions of the shootout and graphic accounts of the dead men’s criminal exploits, people began gathering outside 18 Darlington Parade, Richmond. Inside, the modest house was filled with flowers in various arrangements, cards and letters on the mantelpieces and tables.7 Dominating everything, of course, was the gold-handled, highly polished wooden coffin in the front room.8
The crowd continued to grow, and by 10 am was estimated to be anything from several hundred to several thousand. The cortege was scheduled to leave the Taylor residence at 10 o’clock, but for at least half an hour beforehand it was almost impossible to move in Darlington Parade, and traffic in surrounding streets was also disrupted. Among the throng were several newspaper reporters intent on recording the unusual event for posterity: ‘A disgraceful exhibition of morbid curiosity, coupled with a callous disregard for the feelings of the bereaved, occurred at the funeral of Squizzy Taylor on Saturday morning . . . Just before 10 o’clock the curiosity of many persons overcame their sense of decency and a concerted rush was made for the gateway of the house. Finally, it was found necessary to keep the crowd from obstructing the funeral. The crowd surged around the waiting hearse, boys climbed on fences and posts, and mothers held their children above their heads so that they might have a better view.’9
With police assistance, the funeral procession left Darlington Parade shortly after 10 am and proceeded to St James Congregational Church in Fitzroy – Squizzy had married Dolly Gray and Lorna Kelly there – for a family service. From Fitzroy, the procession made its way to the Brighton Cemetery, where another large crowd awaited. This crowd was also full of sightseers, rather than those who had any kind of affiliation with Squizzy, however obscure. This crowd, though, were quiet, even respectful. Squizzy was laid to rest in a plain grave in a simple ceremony. In later years, he would be joined by the remains of his first daughter, June, a victim of the Spanish flu.
***
That Saturday afternoon there was another funeral, this one at the Coburg Pine Ridge Cemetery in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston. It was a simple, plain funeral and service, attended by just a few family and friends; at its conclusion, the body of John Daniel ‘Snowy’ Cutmore was laid to rest.
***
There was an expectation, shared by police, criminals and the public, that the coronial inquiry would answer a lot of yet unanswered questions. An indication of how seriously the interested parties were taking the proceedings could be gauged by the legal representatives who were in the courtroom when the City Coroner, Daniel Berriman, opened the inquiry at the City Morgue at 10 am on Monday, 21 November. Napthali Sonenberg was there, representing the Kelly brothers and Norman Smith. Richard Hourigan appeared for the relatives of Snowy Cutmore and for Roy Travers.10 Representing the police, and assisting the coroner, would be Detective Sergeant John Brophy, who informed Berriman that there was a list of 24 potential police witnesses. There would be another four ‘civilian’ witnesses called – Ida Pender, Bridget Cutmore, Gladys King and Roy Travers – but their evidence, individually and collectively, would in the end add little to anyone’s understanding of the circumstances contributing to the shootout.
