By Mic Looby
Back in 1878, when one Victorian Edward Kelly sealed his fate as a cop killer, it seemed a fair bet that history would not repeat. And yet it did.
Fifty years after notorious Ned shot a police sergeant in cold blood, another Edward Kelly did the same on the other side of Australia.
Edward Nicholas Kelly: no relation to the infamous Ned, but the similarities are striking.Credit: National Library of Australia
Edward Kelly, the latter – and apparently no relation – has the dubious distinction of having fatally shot a police sergeant half a century after Ned delivered the same fate upon Sergeant Michael Kennedy at Stringybark Creek back in 1878.
It was a sunny Wednesday in March 1928, and Edward Kelly was out on parole. He had served seven years with hard labour in Fremantle Gaol for a string of shop-breaking burglaries – “That’s a nice stretch,” he reportedly murmured as he was led from the dock – having previously done two stints for petty theft and escaping from custody.
Free once more, with nearly 50 convictions to his rather familiar name, this Edward Kelly felt he had earned a drink or several.
At midday in the front bar of Perth’s Brisbane Hotel, he boasted to one and all that he had been at a wine bar since 9am. Someone warned him against mixing his wine and beer, saying “it will turn you mad”.
Ignoring the advice, Kelly scanned the room and declared: “I could wreck this bar.”
Stumbling out, he returned a short time later, calling for more beer. He was turned down.
According to witnesses, Kelly then got into a violent temper. “You won’t give me a drink? I’ll soon fix you,” he told them. “I’ll get down to town and buy a revolver and blow your head off! This is no bravado. I mean what I say. I’ll come back and blow your heads off.”
A second-hand dealer would later confirm selling Kelly a revolver and cartridges that same afternoon.
The shopkeeper was reported to have helpfully explained how to load and fire the weapon. (How a man deemed too drunk for service in a pub could so easily and hastily buy a gun would soon become a topic of public debate.)
Kelly caught a cab back to the Brisbane Hotel. Leaving his hat in the taxi, he told the driver: “I will be back directly.”
The Brisbane Hotel: the killing of a policeman in 1928 is part of the Beaufort Street watering hole’s history.
The drunken gunman entered the hotel and opened fire, shattering the mirror behind a barman’s head.
Onlookers screamed and scattered. Another shot smashed into the ceiling as a burly man rushed at Kelly. That man was Sergeant Alexander Mark, officer-in-charge of the local Highgate police station, who had gone to the hotel after the alarm was raised about an abusive drunkard.
A third shot rang out. It struck the sergeant at close range, piercing his stomach and lodging in his leg. Though badly wounded, he wrenched the revolver from Kelly before passing out.
Kelly reportedly told arresting officers: “I have shot that big fat bastard … If I had my gun I would shoot you too.”
Sergeant Mark died in hospital three days later.
During his trial in early April, Edward Kelly delivered a half-hour speech in his own self-styled defence.
“My heart did not will murder, but my mad brain did,” he told the court. Tapping his head, he said: “There is something wrong right here. There are times when I am sane as anyone else, but there are times when I am not.”
Like the slaying of police by Ned Kelly and his gang, the senseless death of Sergeant Mark caused a public outcry, with calls for authorities to toughen rules governing the sale and distribution of firearms (the state would heed the call several years later, introducing new gun-control legislation in 1932).
With that would come the droll joke in many a Perth pub – that this Edward Kelly fellow deserved to hang for giving grog such a bad name.
According to one account, Edward Nicholas Kelly was born to Irish parents in Brooklyn, New York, around 1875.
From there he apparently went to Ireland, where he enlisted as a soldier. But his military career was cut short one night in 1892 when he leapt from his dormitory bed to threaten roommates with a sword, screaming “loud oaths and murderous threats”.
He was committed to Dublin’s Richmond Asylum, where the medical board adjudged his condition to have been “the result of excessive alcoholism”.
He then joined the maritime service, and sailed for Australia. In 1901, in Perth, he was charged with robbery. It was the first of his many crimes on Australian soil.
Continually in trouble with the law in Western Australia, Kelly headed for Sydney in 1904.
Over the next decade he built himself a criminal record in the eastern states, while also spending some months in Sydney’s Gladesville Asylum. Returning to Perth in 1914, he picked up where he had left off.
Fourteen years and two prison terms on, he stood in the dock once more to hear the judge hand down his verdict.
Tabloid star: Edward Kelly’s colourful career was heavily covered by the news of the day.Credit: National Library of Australia
On April 12, 1928, Edward Nicholas Kelly was found guilty of the wilful murder of Sergeant Mark.
He was sentenced to death by hanging, with the Chief Justice telling the court that Kelly’s record was far worse than the jury was aware. Soon after, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because, as one report put it, “doctors disagreed about Kelly’s sanity”.
Before he was hauled away, Kelly handed his lawyer an emerald-green handkerchief, which he had worn as a scarf during the trial. “I am grateful for what you have done,” he told the solicitor.
“I have nothing to give you but this handkerchief, which is my dearest possession. My old mother gave it to me in Ireland … to bring me good luck.”
A court reporter saw goodness in Kelly’s simple gesture: “For even in this man of crazed or criminal mind – whichever way you will have it – there was spark of tender sentiment.”
Back to Fremantle Gaol Kelly went. Promptly declared insane, he was shifted to the Claremont Hospital for the Insane.
“He is by far the most notorious figure in the most notorious ward in the asylum — Ward No. 5,” readers of Perth’s Truth were told in 1929.
“Truly Hell hath no fury like this Ward No. 5. It has about eighty inmates. Sixty of them are in the category of criminal lunatics. Fourteen, including Kelly, are convicted murderers. Ward No. 5 has rescued fourteen men from the gallows. Kelly is the fourteenth and the worst of the bunch.”
But now it was the end of the line for this Edward Kelly. Or so it seemed. Within a year he was back on the streets, having vanished from Ward No. 5 one October night in 1929.
Even with specially fitted double doors on his cell – bolted in place after an earlier escape attempt – Kelly had somehow made it out.
“Insane murderer” on the run, the headlines screamed. With a frantic search launched, “the whole community waited fearing some act of violence, particularly if Kelly got access to strong drink”.
Steering clear of watering holes, he opted instead to “attend the centenary Royal show dressed as an old woman”. Kelly apparently donned a frock to visit the show on children’s day, waltzing straight past two police officers.
Crowds gather the Claremont Asylum for the Insane to greet the Edward Kelly, who voluntarily returned to be locked away.Credit: State Library of Western Australia
Like the Kelly Gang of old, this Edward Kelly was also an enthusiastic letter writer. While on the loose he wrote to several local newspapers, saying he would voluntarily return to the prison asylum the following Monday, at 9.30am. He would do so, he wrote, “accompanied by three little girls”.
The girls had been bringing him food at night while he was in hiding, he said. Should anyone harm these girls upon his return, he vowed to become what he had been branded – namely, a murderous lunatic.
Come Monday morning, a curious crowd gathered outside the asylum.
Sure enough, Kelly fronted up. Conventionally dressed in coat and hat, he even posed for photographers, leaning jauntily against a fence.
“His story about having been fed by three little girls is not believed,” noted one reporter at the scene.
“An incongruous aspect of this Ned Kelly,” Smith’s Weekly observed, “is that while he remains in that institution there is no need for him to be there. He is practically a normal citizen. But as soon as he is away from it the volcano in his brain is likely to get busy, with its tragic possibilities.”
Less than 18 months later, in March 1931, Kelly broke out again, clambering from a high window using a rope of knotted blankets. In nothing but underpants and singlet, he was nabbed before a police search party was organised – they found him hunting for a bag of clothes he had stashed within the asylum grounds.
“How he managed to escape from his cell is a mystery,” one newspaper said, “and is likely to be the subject of close inquiry.”
Or, perhaps not. Five years on, in 1936, Kelly got out once more.
Again he penned a letter to a newspaper, saying he felt he had paid dearly for the “rash act” that killed Sergeant Mark. He said the public had nothing to fear from him “despite vicious police propaganda”. He added that he would sooner take “a friendly bullet” than be recaptured alive.
His death wish was not granted. Safely back behind asylum bars, Kelly stayed put for the next nine years.
Edward Kelly would make his final escape 12 years later. Well into his eighties, having spent almost 30 years in the Claremont asylum, he died there in 1957.
If he had any last words, they went unreported.