How the Gatton triple murder mystery confounds Australians over a century later

On boxing day, Dec. 26, 1898, two of the Murphy sisters, Ellen, 18, and Norah, 27, and their brother, Michael, 29, headed off to a dance in Gatton, about 60 miles from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

They left around 8 p.m., riding in a sulky from their family’s farm just a few miles from town.

“When the girls left,” their mother, Mary, recalled later, “each had a laugh on her face.”

Dances usually swirled on into the early hours of the following day. But when there was no sign of them by 7:30 the next morning, Mary started to worry.

She sent her son-in-law, William McNeil, who was married to her eldest daughter, Polly, to find them. McNeil set off on horseback, watching the roads for the sulky’s tracks, which were distinctive because one wheel wobbled.

The tracks led him into a neighbor’s pasture, and to a scene of horror. Ellen, Norah, Michael and the horse were all lying on the ground. He thought they were sleeping. Then he saw ants crawling on Norah’s cheek.

Norah was stretched out on a rug under a tree. She had been strangled, and her skull smashed.

The corpses of Ellen and Michael were a few yards away, lying close together, back to back. Their skulls were also smashed.

Ellen and Norah had semen on their clothes and legs and had been raped.

The attackers even shot the horse.

Michael also had what looked like a bullet hole in his head, but the examiner who conducted the autopsy could not find a slug.

Gatton had a population of about 450 in 1898, and it would have seemed likely that whoever committed this crime would quickly be caught. A lay magistrate assured the victims’ distraught mother that it would be solved by nightfall of the day the bodies were discovered.

But the investigation was bungled from the start. It took two days for reports of the horror to reach the police department in Brisbane, leaving the initial investigation in the hands of Gatton’s small, inexperienced force.

The murder scene was not immediately closed off and, as they always do, crowds flocked to it to gawk. They contaminated the scene, making it impossible for trackers to find clues, such as the killer’s footprints, in the ground around the bodies.

Autopsies were poorly conducted. There were so many inconsistencies in the reports that the bodies later had to be exhumed for another look. The second time, the examiner found the bullet in Michael’s head that the first autopsy had missed.

Inspector Frederic Urquhart, head of the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Brisbane, traveled to Gatton to lead the hunt for the Murphys’ killers.

“Circumstances point to premeditation,” he wired to his superiors as soon as he arrived. “Details most atrocious. There is so far nothing to lay hold of.”

Within a couple of days, a local newspaper — the “Toowoomba Chronicle” — reported that locals were referring to the case as the “Gatton Mystery,” as if they had already given up hope that it would ever be solved.

Suspicion immediately fell upon the family, including McNeil, who had a rocky relationship with his in-laws. He had an alibi and was soon ruled out.

A woman in a nearby farmhouse said she heard screams of “father” around the time of the murders, sparking theories that the Murphy patriarch had killed his children to cover up incest. Others suggested that the town’s priest was to blame, or that one or more of the victims’ seven siblings were involved.

Another possibility was that one of Polly’s former suitors was driven to rage after she rejected him.

Gossip also swirled around Michael and his relationships with the women in the town, wrote Stephanie Bennett in “The Gatton Murders.” There were rumors that he had fathered more than one out-of-wedlock child, and a girl had died in childbirth. Relatives of the dead girl might have had the motive to kill him.

Norah also might have been the target of vengeance, Bennett wrote. Some years earlier, the girl had waged a psychological battle with a local schoolteacher. She harassed the woman at home and sent reputation-damaging letters about her to a Queensland newspaper. The schoolteacher eventually went mad, and her sister vowed revenge.

Detectives favored the theory that the murders were most likely the work of one or more of the seedy transients who moved through the area. They focused on two shady characters with substantial criminal records who had shown up in Gatton not long before the killings.

One of these transients was Richard Burgess, 39, a career criminal who had been released from prison a couple of weeks earlier. “I was born to be hanged,” he once boasted. But his alibi checked out.

Another habitual troublemaker, Thomas Day, 20, had recently started working for a local butcher and slept in a shack near the murder scene. Day, who went by several aliases, has gone down in history as the most likely suspect in this case as well as another unsolved Australian murder. But police could not gather evidence enough to pin the crimes on him.

After several months, and more than 3,000 interviews, no charges were ever filed.

“We have failed because from the very outset we had no chance of success,” was how Urquhart explained the case during an inquiry a year later.

But Australians have not given up. Retired detectives, historians, grandmothers and hobby sleuths have probed the case. Nearly 120 years later, they continue to propose theories about the who, how and whys of the Gatton mystery.