It had once been part of the Moran family farm, run since the late 1800s by early Gatton settler John Moran, then his son Frank.

The Morans were so established in the area that even today a culvert on Tenthill Creek Rd is called Moran’s Gully. Gary Samuelsen, a local boy, decided to break from the past and establish a hydroponic farm, employing modern technology and intelligent water usage. In the old Moran paddocks are the fruits of the Samuelsens’ labour — several types of lettuce (green oak whole, green oak leaf, red oak whole, baby cos) and a variety of herbs, from basil to chives to thyme. Their produce has won several awards, including Grand Champion at the district show.

Gary has a wide clientele, including restaurants and supermarket chains.

He also has an unforgettable name for his business: Ghost Gully Produce.

The company motto is, “So tasty it’s scary!” The Samuelsens learned, shortly after buying the farm, that it was the site of a savage

triple murder a century earlier, a crime that shocked the nation and remains arguably the country’s oldest cold case.

It was in a back paddock at Ghost Gully farm that Murphy siblings Michael, 29, Norah, 27, and Ellen, 18, from nearby Tent Hill, were found dead on the morning of December 27, 1898. Michael had been shot in the head. The two young women had their skulls caved in. The case

became known as the Gatton Murders, the Gatton Mystery, the Gatton Outrage. The press ran out of catchcries — one of the murders of the century; a fiendish crime; the worst in Australia. Years passed, then decades, with nobody brought to justice, and the killings became synonymous with the town of Gatton. Here, in the state’s renowned salad bowl, unimaginable atrocities were also possible.

The tallest monument in the nearby Gatton cemetery is the one to the Murphys, “who were the victims of a horrible tragedy”. And: “Requiescant in Pace ” — Latin for “May They Rest in Peace”. The memorial was erected by public subscription. “When we were kids we used to call Moran’s Gully the Murder Gully,” recalls Gary Samuelsen. “We all knew about the murders from when we were in school.” However, Samuelsen wasn’t aware that the murder scene was precisely on his property until two men arrived at his farm some years ago and offered the exact GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates.

Over the past 117 years, numerous amateur sleuths have attempted to solve the mystery. Who killed the Murphy siblings? Newspapers regularly revisited the case. Numerous books were published. Theories ranged from the murders being an elaborate act of revenge, to a police

conspiracy, to a scandal that went all the way to the Vatican in Rome. The local priest did it. A swagman did it. One of the Murphy relatives did it.

Even today, local historians with conflicting hypotheses snipe at each other. And as the distance from the actual crime increases, so too the innumerable suppositions. Samuelsen has read some of the books, seen the photographs, heard tales about the Murphys. But life goes on. Down the back of his property, however, close to a gully and in a stand of trees, there is a postage stamp of earth that holds a horrific secret. Now yet another investigator struck by the Gatton Murders fever, a former Queensland police officer, claims to have unlocked it.

BRISBANE-BASED AUTHOR NEIL RAYMOND Bradford, 69, was born almost half a century after the Gatton case was opened, but by the 1960s, after he joined the Queensland Police, he began hearing rumours among his colleagues about the murders and the likely culprit. The unsolved crime was still the talk of Queensland officers decades later.

After a career that saw him rise to inspector, and service across the state, Bradford left the force in 1997 and resurrected his personal interest in crime investigation. By chance in 2013, he stumbled across a newspaper article on a local historian who claimed he knew who committed the Gatton killings. The Gatton Star reported that Goodna writer Steve Behnke had concluded after lengthy research that the murderer was the district’s then Catholic priest, Father Daniel Walsh. He theorised that the motive might have been robbery or lust. Behnke suspected Norah Murphy might have fallen pregnant to the priest.

The story triggered something in Bradford. So he went back to the beginning, to the basic details of a crime that had been endlessly pored over, looking for a fresh way in. The facts remained that in the early evening of Boxing Day, 1898 — a Monday — Michael headed off from the family farm with sisters Norah and Ellen for a dance at the Divisional Board Hall at Gatton. They would be gone for just a few hours.

On the road into town, they passed Moran’s paddock on the right, and at the crest of Moran’s Hill, a set of sliprails. Further on, the sulky with a wobbly wheel went by the butcher’s shop of Arthur George Clarke. It was about 8.15pm. Witnesses later recalled that the moon was so bright that night you could “read ordinary newsprint” by it.

In Gatton, the dance organisers were faced with a quandary. Only six girls had shown up for the evening’s entertainment, and the musician still hadn’t arrived. They decided to call off the function. Michael Murphy, on hearing the news, turned the sulky around and headed back home. The trio passed their brother, Patrick, who was heading into town on horseback. They talked for a few minutes, then parted ways. At dawn the next day, the Murphy clan, along with relative William McNeill, woke to discover that Michael and his two sisters had not returned home. There was no sign of the sulky, owned by McNeill.

It was decided McNeill would head out and look for them. Perhaps there’d been an accident. “I started away on horseback and looked carefully for the wheel tracks, because I knew the particular track the wheel would make,” he later told a newspaper. “One wheel wobbled because of an accident I’d had once near Helidon. When I got to the sliprails on the Tent Hill road, I saw at once that the trap had turned in there.” McNeill didn’t suspect anything sinister. He simply followed the cart tracks into Moran’s paddock.

“I … came to the top of the slight ridge and there I saw the cart, and then the bodies came into view,” McNeill added. “Still I did not think they had been murdered. I thought they were sleeping in the sun. After I got a bit closer I saw the clothing of the girls disarranged and then I could see the ants crawling all over them. I did not go any further, but turned and rode straight into Gatton and told the police.”

McNeill alerted the officer in charge at Gatton, Sergeant William Arrell, and both men headed for Moran’s. It was a gruesome scene. The horse, still tethered to the sulky, had been shot in the head. As for the Murphys, the fatal injuries were horrific. Michael had been shot behind the right ear. Ellen’s face and upper body were covered in blood. Her hands were tied behind her back. She had been beaten about the head with a blunt object and brain matter was apparent through the fractures. It appeared Ellen had been raped. Norah’s hands were also bound. A strap had been tightened around her neck and she had a clean gash down to the bone above her right eye. Her skull was also shattered. A post-mortem would reveal she also had been sexually assaulted.

Inspector Frederic Charles Urquhart, head of the Brisbane CIB, was dispatched with two others to Gatton on the Wednesday morning, a full day after the bodies had been discovered. By then, the murder scene had been trampled by dozens of onlookers. That morning, also, a funeral was held for the slain Murphy siblings in the Catholic church. A newspaper reported: “ … residents [of the district] could find nothing to talk of all day … but the atrocious crime committed in their midst … ” More than 1000 people were present, the funeral procession to the Gatton cemetery more than 2km long.

IN LESS THAN A MONTH, POLICE TOOK MORE than 3000 statements and still weren’t close to identifying the killer or killers. A crime observer would later presciently note: “Rumours arose … which would lift the crimes to a plane of grim passion comparable to the themes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.” Who did it? Was it the stranger, Thomas Day, who had been working for the butcher Clarke for only a short time, and had subsequently disappeared? Was it the American-born swagman, Richard Burgess, known to police as a violent sexual offender, who was in the region at the time of the Murphy slayings? Or was it someone in the family?

With all leads running dry, a police inquiry was held into the investigation in late 1899. It was revealed that on the night of the murders, a man had been seen near the sliprails at Moran’s paddock. Margaret Carroll, who ran a fruit shop in Gatton, was also travelling by cart along Tenthill road that night and at about 8.30 she noticed a man opposite the sliprails. Her son, John Carroll, 14, identified the figure as “Clarke’s man”, as in Thomas Day. There were eight people who travelled the same road that night, and five saw “a man at the sliprails”.

Was it Day? In his early twenties, Day had arrived in Gatton in mid-December, less than two weeks before the murders, and was employed by Clarke. He performed general duties around the slaughter yard and was responsible for taking the meat into Clarke’s butcher shop in Gatton.

He had been briefly interviewed by police after the murders and claimed he was in bed, either reading or asleep, in his room off the stables. Day had disappeared from Gatton by January 10.

Clarke the butcher was re-interviewed by Constable R.G. Christie in April 1899. He furnished a report that contained some startling information. Just after the murders, Clarke said he saw bloodstains on a jumper belonging to Day. Clarke instructed him not to wash the garment as the police might like to examine it. “Day took no heed to this warning but a day or two afterwards washed and boiled the jumper twice, and scrubbed it with a scrubbing brush,” wrote Constable Christie. “Mr Clarke said in his opinion the bloodstains in question were not caused by carrying meat, as they were distinct spots or splashes and [of] shiny appearance.” Christie later told the inquiry he did not hand in his report on Day because he had been told by Inspector Urquhart that Day wasn’t responsible, and that Urquhart had threatened officers who pursued the matter with dismissal.

Incredibly, Day might have been involved in another murder just weeks before the Gatton atrocity. On December 10, 1898, Alfred Stephen Hill, 15, went missing after taking his pony for a ride to visit relatives in nearby Oxley. His body wasn’t found until mid-January. The pony had been shot in the head — a similar modus operandi to the Gatton case. Const. Christie had an inkling Day was linked to both sets of killings. Day had arrived in Brisbane from NSW on December 6 and spent a short time there before heading towards Gatton. He had plenty of time to be in the vicinity of Oxley by mid-December.

The police hierarchy concentrated its attention on the swagman Burgess. Very little focus was directed towards Day. He duly disappeared, leaving an unsolved crime and a gaggle of amateur

investigators, all as yet unborn, in his wake.

AMONG THOSE SUFFERING FROM GATTON murder fever, Neil Bradford has been afflicted for the least amount of time. He sits in his neat home in Brisbane’s northern suburbs and recalls the moment he decided to pursue the case two years ago, on reading the newspaper article in which historian Steve Behnke outlined his version of what happened in the Gatton murders. Behnke said he had been investigating the case for eight years. He had concluded the killer was Catholic priest Father Daniel Walsh. Behnke also believed the subsequent “cover-up” was linked to the series of rolling constitutional referendums held through 1898 to 1900 — and was done to prevent destabilising the Queensland vote on the way to making Australia a federation — and the alleged cover-up could have stretched all the way to the Vatican in Rome.

A state election was also looming. How would it play out if the public was to learn that a trusted local Catholic priest had slain three good Irish Catholic members of his own parish? Would Gatton be up in arms? Would they believe the police? What if the entire township turned against the Masonic-controlled government of premier James Robert Dickson? Behnke believed a plot was hatched to blame the killings on a “shadowy” outsider, and leave it at that.

The article also reminded Bradford of anecdotes he’d heard in his early years with the Queensland police, when he was transferred to Gordonvale, south of Cairns, and came under the authority of Sergeant Bill Putt. “I read the priest had done it, and that went against what I was

told in the 1960s by other police,” Bradford, himself a Mason, says. “Bill knew a fair bit about it, information handed down from generation to generation within the police force. He’d heard that Thomas Day had confessed to the Catholic priest [Walsh]. The priest also had an alibi for

that night.”

Bradford decided to investigate for himself, given the apparent anomalies in the story and, unlike his predecessors, kept a close eye on Thomas Day, aka Thomas Furner. Bradford’s book links Day/Furner to a double murder in Carcoar, 258km west of Sydney, the Oxley murder, and also the Gatton killings. If Bradford is right, Day was a psychopathic serial killer. He also believes the subsequent cover-up involved the Church of England and might also have reached the office of premier Dickson. Day, the author would assert, had relatives high up in the church hierarchy.

AND JUST AS THE GATTON CASE HAS ITS myriad twists and turns, so too does the world of Gatton conspiracy theorists. In February this year, Behnke claims he was sent, anonymously from Adelaide, a series of documents that point firmly to Day being the murderer. One of the

documents purports to be a copy of a page from the notebook of Thomas Day/Furner, taken from the pocket of his coat after he attempted suicide in Sydney in 1900.

Bradford writes that on October 23, 1900, a man with the surname Burns checked into a Sydney lodging house. The next day he was found with a gunshot wound to the head. A revolver was discovered on the bedcovers. Burns was taken to hospital but died two days later. It would be revealed that Burns was none other than Thomas Day. As for the notebook, it contained a telling admission in what appeared to be a suicide note. “ … before I leave this world I wish to state, which I know for a certain fact because I was there along with [Fr Daniel] Walsh, [swagman Richard] Burgess and a man known as Fitky from Brisbane. Richard shot Murphy … The case was to be kept quiet among the police … ”

If legitimate, the note places Day at the murder scene, but transfers blame for the killings to Burgess. In another document sent to Behnke, it was revealed that the body of Day was inspected by Insp. Urquhart of Queensland Police and identified as that of Thomas Day, formerly of Gatton. But how, so soon after Day’s death, did Urquhart manage to travel all the way from Brisbane to Sydney for the purposes of the identification? Behnke says he has no idea where the documents came from. A note accompanied the cache: “You certainly were wright [sic] that the QLD gov were involved with the Gatton cover-up and that Walsh was involved. But what you weren’t aware of is that Walsh had three accomplices, all male, and well known to the police and government … All the proof and evidence beyond doubt lay deep in the government holdings associated with the Commonwealth Archives and listed as not for public viewing.”

Behnke, now of Brisbane, does not agree that Day was the Gatton murderer. “But it’s crazy, and wrong, that this has gone on for so long,” he says. “Every time I try to get out of it, I get dragged back in.”

TWO YEARS AGO, QUEENSLAND AUTHOR Stephanie Bennett, 87, who claims she spent three decades working on the case, revealed her theory. In her book, The Gatton Murders, she argued that the target of the Murphy children was actually Michael, who’d had an altercation with swagman Joe Quinn during the 1891 shearers’ strike in Longreach. Quinn, argued Bennett, tracked down and murdered Michael, as well as his sisters, out of revenge as he passed through Gatton in late 1898. “I wanted to get to the truth,” Bennett said. “And I always thought the Murphys had a right to know what had happened.”

Elsewhere in Brisbane, single mother Cheryl Fagan decided in the early 1990s to try to crack the case. Fagan, from Miles in western Queensland, came to Brisbane as a teenager and was told about the murders by her mother, who always maintained they were perpetrated by the Murphy children’s father, Daniel Murphy. Years later, she started her investigation. She is convinced Fr Walsh was not involved. She doesn’t think the Oxley and Gatton murders are linked and she believes Norah Murphy was the primary target of the attack. She has no doubt Thomas Day was involved. But he had an accomplice, and Fagan is ready to reveal that person in a new book, Murder and Misconduct, to be published next month. She will follow that book with a full volume that charts her research and tells the whole story. “It consumes you, but it’s worth it,” says Fagan, who hopes her work will be made into a film. She wants to donate all earnings from her investigation to help struggling farmers in the state’s west. “I want some good to come out of this.”

Meanwhile, in a retirement village in Ipswich, Lyle Reed discusses his own Gatton murder research. In 2008, he published his findings in his book, As Plain As Day: The 1898 Gatton Murders. Reed had been a prominent rugby league player in the district and in the 1970s was in

Gatton to play the local side when he heard the story of the murders. His book was the first to nominate Thomas Day as the killer. “I couldn’t believe [Insp.] Urquhart let him get away,” Reed says. “We may never know the motive. The two girls were bound. Why? Why was the horse shot? This case always fascinated me. How could the murder of three people go unsolved?”

He says the public fascination with the case is alive and well. “It’ll never go away,” he says. “People want to hear all the gory details. I’m not sure, though, that it will ever be fully solved.”

Reed has a new obsession — the cold case murder of Betty Shanks in Brisbane in 1952. Has he found the identity of the murderer? “I can tell you that there was a conspiracy,” he says quietly. “Now let me tell you something that must not go beyond me and you …”.