It’s a bandit story you couldn’t make up
The best thing about the story of clever identical twin bank robbers who fooled police for years is that it’s all true, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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Truth is stranger than fiction but, as someone said, it needs a better editor. Who would dare make up the story of the After Dark Bandit(s), the “solo” serial bank robber who turned out to be identical twins?
Hollywood has had a shot at good twin/bad twin films, the best-known with big Arnie Schwarzenegger and little Danny DeVito (“Only their mother can tell them apart”), possibly the longest-running sight gag in cinema history.
The 1980s film — titled Twins, oddly enough — is about reuniting long-lost siblings supposedly born one minute but several worlds apart. Hilarious.
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In real life, twins on the wrong side of the law are not always quite so funny. Take the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, late of London’s East End. The funniest thing about the Krays was that Chopper Read called two fox terriers after them.
Closer to home, there’s the creepily perfect Dawson twins of The Teacher’s Pet, the murder mystery now globally famous through a serial podcast by News Corp sleuth Hedley Thomas and his crew.
But Chris and Paul Dawson are not the only identical brothers to re-emerge as “celebrities” decades after the event that first drew attention to them: in their case, the sinister disappearance of Chris Dawson’s wife Lyn in suburban Sydney in 1982.
Doug and Peter Morgan are the same generation as the rugby-playing PE teachers and don’t share the Dawsons’ soapie star looks or former sporting ability.
But the idea that identical twins can act in eerie synchronicity — driven by shared impulses, deep loyalty and weird jealousies — runs through both stories.
Unlike the Dawsons, whose alleged crimes apparently sprang from narcissism and lust rather than their apparently conventional upbringing, the Morgan boys were exposed to criminality at a young age.
That is the starting point of a new book revealing how the Morgans helped each other pull a string of robberies on small-town banks and TAB agencies in the late 1970s.
For two years, the robberies mystified police and reporters — including future co-author Geoff Wilkinson — because no one knew how they got away so easily.
The twins were the sons of a clever but not-quite-right builder, Kay Arthur Morgan, who spent much of their childhood pulling sneaky crimes in between building contracts.
As the boys would find out decades later, their light-fingered father had once tried heavy crime, using a stolen pistol and a sports car to rob a bank at Eltham in 1949, well before their birth. He got away but was arrested soon after.
Kay Arthur Morgan was a good talker with a weakness for taking a punt, if not on horses or cards then on speculative house building. He was the black sheep of a prosperous family that had moved from Hobart to Melbourne after the 1850s gold rushes.
The twins’ great grandfather was a mayor of Brunswick and their grandfather Keith Llewellyn Morgan-Brooker a respected citizen and landholder, but barely known to the boys after their disgraced father cut the family name simply to “Morgan” and moved on.
It was one of several name changes Kay Morgan made in an oddball life in which he veered from an estate house builder rivalling A.V. Jennings to a serial burglar who stole safes from post offices.
The twins were caught between the respectable origins of their Morgan-Brooker grandparents and the get-rich-quick scheming of their amoral father.
While Chris and Paul Dawson were playing rugby league for the Newtown Jets in Sydney in the 1970s, the Morgan boys were working up to pulling the first of a series of “jobs” that would baffle Victorian police for two years. They were no master criminals at first but the increasingly brazen robberies soon sounded like a “caper” film.
One advantage the Morgans had was having once worked as junior tellers in a city bank, so they knew the security routines. The other advantage was (mostly) not appearing together at a robbery.
One twin would pull a robbery, while the other staged a second soon after in a nearby town to divert police into a wild-goose chase. The first bandit would “disappear”, usually by walking into the bush and hiking long distances overnight before being picked up at a prearranged spot by his twin.
They often staged robberies just before closing time in winter months, which meant the getaway was masked in darkness. By the time dawn broke, the bandit was far away and his twin was getting ready to pick him up.
They cunningly changed escape methods. On a rare occasion that the pair appeared together at one target, they used “postie” bicycles — but spray-painted black and so hard to see at night.
Another time, after robbing a bayside TAB agency, the active bandit (Peter, this time) paddled a canoe into the bay while police rushed around on land. He planted the canoe at Patterson River before being picked up by brother Doug. He was incensed when he returned later to find someone had stolen it.
Then there was the time they stole a motorbike and used a horse float to move it to a town to use as a getaway that couldn’t be followed into rough country by police. Before one robbery, they first let down two tyres on the local policeman’s car so he was snookered when the alarm went up.
There are plenty more stories where those came from. Such as the one about Doug Morgan’s first real brush with the law. More than a year after the twins left the bank-telling job to go to South Australia to help their ailing father, he died and the twins returned to Melbourne.
Doug dropped into the bank to see his old workmates — and was promptly turned over to the police. It turned out the head teller had blamed him for $600 of American currency that had “gone missing” from her money tray the week he had left the job.
But after Doug explained that he had gone to South Australia (not overseas) and so would hardly steal “greenbacks”, the police switched their attention to how the head teller had managed to pay off her mortgage.
Before Doug left the interview room, the investigators asked him the whereabouts of his father, who happened to be wanted over missing money from a real estate agency.
Doug shrugged and said his father was “in the car”. He showed them it was true. Morgan senior’s ashes were under the passenger seat in a box.
The caper wasn’t nearly so funny a few years and 25 robberies later when Peter Morgan was arrested after shooting a country policeman who nearly died.
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