How the lone survivor of Ned Kelly’s triple police murders sent him to the noose

The story of the Kelly Gang may have had a very different ending if not for Constable Thomas McIntyre, the lone survivor of the Springbark Creek ambush.

Policeman Thomas McIntyre was the only survivor of the ambush at Stringybark Creek. Picture: Victoria Police Museum

The story of the Kelly Gang may have had a very different ending if not for the testimony of the sole survivor of the Stringybark Creek triple police killings.

Constable Thomas McIntyre sealed Ned Kelly’s fate by escaping his captors on his sergeant’s horse then surviving the threat of assassination to become a star witness at trial two years later.

McIntyre’s story is told in a new episode of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters, with Grantlee Kieza, author of a new book called The Kelly Hunters.

After Ned Kelly shot and wounded Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick in 1878 as he tried to arrest his brother Dan for horse stealing, a party of four policemen rode out from Mansfield into the bush to hunt him down.

Sergeant Michael Kennedy and constables Michael Scanlan, Thomas Lonigan and McIntyre were ill-equipped for the job.

“The police were so poorly equipped that they had to actually borrow guns from citizens in Mansfield,” Kieza says.

Constable Thomas Lonigan was murdered by the Kelly Gang at Stringybark Creek.

Constable Michael Scanlan.

“So they borrowed an old shotgun from the local vicar that he used to shoot ducks.”

The four policemen set up camp at Stringybark Creek, in the Wombat Ranges in northeastern Victoria, but the Kelly Gang spotted them.

With Kennedy and Scanlan off on a scouting mission, the gang sneaked up and shouted to McIntyre and Lonigan to give up their weapons.

“Lonigan goes for his gun and Ned Kelly shoots him in the head,” Kieza says.

“McIntyre throws his hands up and immediately Ned Kelly and his three associates, Dan Kelly, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne, are now all murderers.

“So the only thing that’s waiting for them is a police bullet or the noose.”

Rather than killing McIntyre, Ned Kelly quizzed him at length about the police hunt.

When the two other policemen returned to the campsite that evening, Ned Kelly ordered McIntyre to make his colleagues surrender or they would all be killed.

“So McIntyre goes out to the police as they come in and says, ‘Throw up your hands, we’re surrounded by Kelly and his gang.”

The Kelly Hunters by Grantlee Kieza.

A photograph of Ned Kelly taken at Pentridge Prison about February 1874. Picture: Public Record Office Of Victoria

The pair initially thought it was a joke.

But when Scanlan reached for his gun, Ned Kelly shot him dead.

Kennedy was wounded in the shootout but made a run for it, but was caught and shot in cold blood in the chest by Kelly, who looted his pockets and stole his watch.

During the chaos of the shootout, McIntyre fled on Kennedy’s horse as shots and cries of “kill him, kill him” rang through the bush and he raised the alarm, triggering the two-year Kelly hunt.

Some of the Kelly hunters after bringing down Ned Kelly in his last shootout at Glenrowan in 1880. Picture: State Library of Victoria

Traumatised by the violent deaths of his three colleagues, McIntyre was moved to Melbourne in part to keep him safe from the threat of assassination by Kelly Gang sympathisers.

“The police realise he’s now the only eyewitness to the worst day in Victorian police history, three men killed who’ve gone out to lawfully arrest these members of the Kelly Gang,” Kieza says.

“They virtually put McIntyre in isolation for a long time. He’s taken back to the Richmond base in Melbourne and put into hospital to recover from his trauma.

“He becomes the star witness in building a case against Ned Kelly and the gang and ultimately he’s the guy whose testimony gets Ned Kelly hanged two years later.”

To hear more, listen to the interview with Grantlee Kieza on Thomas McIntyre in the In Black and White podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or web.

See In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.