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This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. Our old pal Michael Adams from the Forgotten Australia podcast joins us again to tell us about an historical crime. This time we're travelling back almost exactly 100 years to the gold mines of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. It's a classic Wild west scenario with lots of money to be made, lots of dodgy characters trying to get their hands on it, and an under resourced police department tasked with keeping it all under control. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
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There were these two veteran detectives, Detective Inspector John Walsh and Detective Sergeant Alexander Pitman. I think Pitman was about 53 and John Walsh was about 64. So they were long in the tooth. They were, you know, veterans. So what they would do is they'd go out late at night or early in the morning to catch these guys when they were sort of, you know, either setting up or about to come back in with their stolen gold. So anyway, on 28th April 1926, these two cops, and they operated on bicycles. So they ride out of town and that's it. They're just not seen. And no one's worried because they often go out of town on these stakeouts. They don't tell anybody where they're going so that it won't leak out. They're not keeping anybody apprised, they're not expected back at any particular time. And it's not until the 9th of May that the Sunday Times in Perth raises the alarm, saying these two veteran detectives, Walsh and Pitman, aren't accounted for. There's some fears held for them on the gold fields. The fellow police had gone to their huts, looked through the windows, seen that, you know, nothing had been changed. Eventually they broke in. They looked through the occurrence book that they kept. There were just no clues as to where they'd gone. But they saw that they hadn't taken any supplies, they hadn't taken warm clothing and they hadn't arranged for their pays to be remitted to their wives in Perth. So it was clear that they had gone out, probably for a short stakeout and not returned. So it was possible they'd gotten lost and succumbed to the elements there. Also, there were like thousands of abandoned mine shafts, so it was also possible that they had, you know, been investigating one of these dummy mines. There's been Some rotten timbers, it's collapsed and they've gotten into trouble. Most likely though gray fears were held that they'd stumbled upon some operation and, and they'd been murdered. So there was a massive search. They got cops coming in from Perth and then on the 12th of May, a bloke and his friend who lived in Kalgoorlie were taking this guy's car out for a spin and they parked on the side of the road about five miles south of southwest of Kalgoorlie. And I think the guy was going to take a leak and he kind of wandered off into the sort of off the side of the dirt road there and he smelled some bad stuff coming up out of a abandoned mine called Miller's Find. And he looked down there, couldn't really see much but he thought this is, you know, it could be a dead animal, but I might have found the coppers, went back to Kalgoorlie, it was dark by that stage. So the next morning everybody came out there. They brought a special murder policeman out from w. From Perth and they also had a really old miner called Billy Batten who specialized in this sort of work. He'd rescued people and so forth from collapsed mines previously. So he went down and the mine at the bottom of this shaft, it was just sort of stacked with crap. There was corrugated iron on the top and then there were bags of bricks and coal and ore. And there was clothing including a pair of tailored double seated pants, gray trousers which did not belong to the police. And these would become quite crucial. They found a blood stained saw, knives, etc. And this guy's down in this hole just surrounded by really angry flies and this stench. And then he finds what's buried beneath it and it's dismembered arms, legs in, wrapped in, in hessian sacks. It's all hauled up to the top. The police are weeping. There's no head for these guys, either of them and they've been down there for like two weeks. So they're badly decomposed, they've been chopped up, they've been burned, so they can positively identify one. And there's, you know, they have things like cufflinks and false teeth that they can. And fingernails, which one of the cops had distinctive fingernails. So there's enough to identify enough to, for them to know positively that there's one body identified. So they would only ever be able to prosecute based on one of the murders. But they know it's both of their mates. What they needed to find were the Bikes. If they found the bikes, then they might find the murder site. So for the next week or so, they were looking. They had Aboriginal trackers and they actually, on the 18th of May, the same day that the funeral was held for these two police in Perth, 30,000 people turned out. That was one in five people in Perth at that time. So a massive, like, outpouring of grief. And this was a big story all over Australia. So the trackers found the bikes and then they found. Close to the bikes, they found a camp. And at the camp there was these missing bits of the gold processing kit. They also found tins of, like, empty food tins. And they weren't just your baked beans, they were fancy stuff like chicken, crab, asparagus. So it's like, well, who in Kalgoorlie likes this fancy tucker? They also found tire tracks. The tyres were Dunlop balloon tires, they were called, so they were fairly unusual as well, particularly at this time when there weren't that many cars. So they were looking for someone who had a car with Dunlop tires, who liked fancy, fancy food and also might have something to do with these, you know, tailored trousers that had been found in there, which didn't belong to the police. One other thing they'd found were boot prints that were very small and they thought, well, it's either a really small guy or perhaps a woman who's been, you know, at this site and at that camp. They also found shotgun wadding, they found splashes of blood. They found, you know, where a bush had been blown off. Wow. So there was strong physical evidence that this was the crime scene. And from the tracks, they also saw that one man had staggered, another man had chased, a man had fallen, earth had been scooped up and removed and so on. So the cops played it pretty close to their chest. They were interviewing people, they had a very good idea of who they were after. They'd had tip offs about these three particular guys. And on the 6th of June, at dawn, they raided a hotel called the Duke of Cornwall in Kalgoorlie and arrested the owner, Teddy Clark, who was this dapper little guy. He was known as Flash Teddy. He wore beautifully turned out clothing. He would keep his English complexion nice with lotion and he brush his hair every half an hour. So he was a real dandy in a place like Kalgoorlie where it was all sort of, you know, rough and tumble miners.
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Very macho joint.
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Still to this day, very much so, yeah. So he was known to be using the Duke of Cornwall Hotel. Yeah, he was making Money out of beers. But if you wanted to sell some dodgy ore, his barman, Philip Treffine, who was this broken down old miner, would take care of you. And Philip Treffine was in his 50s and had previously been a champion bicycle rider in, in the gold fields at this time. So at the very same time they were raiding a. Another guy's place. This was a guy called William Coulter. He was a bookie, he had a fair bit of money, but he was also had convictions for, for dodgy gold. So they, when they raided the hotel, they found a shotgun, they found various items, had found various items down the mine shaft that had come from the hotel, like a tea kettle, curtains. And Philip Trephine, the barman, had had another pair of those trousers made for himself and there was the receipt. So it was like, it was a pretty, pretty good chain of evidence. All of them denied it. The cops, like I say, had spent three weeks piecing this all together. So they knew that these guys were lying. So they arrested Flash Teddy and they arrested Philip Treffine. They didn't have enough to arrest Colter quite at this point, so they took them into custody. Massive story. Like, the headlines are just like, you know, ghastly in terms of, you know, reporting the details of the crime. And the people were outraged, obviously. And then Teddy's wife Florie said to him, either you tell them the cops or I'm going to. So Teddy Clark blabbed. Colter, who's just been arrested, his version is, is that he was at the hotel and yes, they were involved in this, you know, gold operation out in the bush and Philip and William Coulter had been out in the bush and they'd come back and they'd said, we shot those cops. And he'd freaked out and they kind of roped him, forced him into helping them cover it up. So anyway, Teddy Clark's story was that he'd been roped into going out with Colter to help dispose of the bodies. So he'd, you know, taken out various things from the hotel and he reckoned he'd sat in his car, the one with the Dunlop tyres, while Colter had gone and done something, but he wasn't sure what it was. That would be sawing up two policemen, burning them, failing when that failed, wrapping the bits and pieces in thing and then loading it into the back of his car. He claimed that he didn't know exactly what was happening. It's like, yeah, sure, I mean, that's
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taking ages, all of that, for one thing. Yeah, ages and These smells and noises and. Yeah, no one's doing that quietly.
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And he's claiming that he had no idea what was happening while he was just waiting in the car for hours. So they go to the inquest and Philip Traffine then tells his story. Traffine reckons that he was out there and they'd take a shotgun out with them because, you know, if. If anyone came to bus them, they'd say, well, we were just out here hunting. So anyway, it had been, you know, early in the morning, he'd been out, you know, doing his cooking up the gold and so forth, and he'd been doing a bit of shooting like rabbits or whatever, and then all of a sudden the two cops had popped out of nowhere and he'd run with the shotgun over his shoulder and they'd said, stop. And he'd run and he sort of stumbled a bit and the gun had gone off once, the shotgun and hit one of the cops and wounded him in, like, in the neck. And the rest of the shot had blown the other guy's head off. So he turned around, gone back and gone. Oh, and he tried to help the. The mortally wounded policeman found that the other one was dead, freaked out, gone back to the hotel to see Teddy. And Teddy had said, we have. And Philip said he wanted to tell the police what had happened and te. And said, no, we have to cover this up. That was his story and he was sticking to it for the time being. Colter, in the meantime, said, I wasn't there at all. I'd come to the hotel and I'd heard about this and all I wanted was my money, my share of the gold. I didn't want anything to do with it. Teddy Clark had said that these two had come to the hotel and confessed that they'd shot the cops in cold blood deliberately. So it was. He said, he said, he said everybody was lying. So the trial in Perth went for a month. So it went to the jury, and the jury eventually found the two men guilty of willful murder of the one policeman, because they'd only tried them on the one, so they were going to hang. But the jury actually made a very interesting comment, which was they wished that Teddy Clark, who was supposedly then going to go on trial for being an accomplice, had been tried for willful murder also because they believed he was equally guilty and should be going to the gallows with these two guys. Wow.
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A
But police hadn't actually charged him with that by that stage.
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They hadn't had. They only charged him with Accomplice Their entire. Well, a large part of their case was based on his testimony. So these two guys were on death row then as. As the fateful date, I think it was the 25th of October, approached Philip Treffine, then confessed. He confessed to a new story. He said that he and Colter had both been out there. The cops had come out of nowhere, he'd shot one of the police through the hand, and then Colter had chased the other two. Chased them down and done them, done them in cold blood. Colter said Colter had stuck to his story the whole way. Say, I had nothing to do with it, I wasn't there. Etc. Trafine said this is the truth. And the idea was that he was now trying to make his story align more with Teddy's story so he'd be reprieved. No one was buying it. So they both went to Fremantle Gallows.
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Oh, they did.
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That was the end of them. So. Yeah. And, you know, Teddy ended up living as a recluse out in this forest and he died, like, you know, about 40 years later.
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Yeah, that shocks me. I assumed you were gonna say, and then Teddy's made millions and he lived on to have a great life.
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He. He tried. He tried to continue working and living in. In the gold fields, but he was kind of shunned. So that was 100 years ago this year. And the WA Police had a memorial on the 28th. Yeah. Out at the site where they. Where the bodies were found. There is also a memorial in. In WA to the fallen police. So it's not a story that's been forgotten. And they hold this story very. I mean, it was the worst murder of police since the Kelly G.
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If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org au Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13 yarn.org au.
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The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present, and those emerging.