Know anything about this brothel-related murder in Brisbane Street?

[Historian]

It was at "Mother Chawkers" brothel in 1902

DOING JACK GRAY
10 April 2018

Doing Jack Gray: Part One
‘Doing Jack Gray: Part One’ is the first of two instalments about the murder of John Gray.

At 3pm on Friday, January 24th, 1902, John Campbell stormed into “Mother Chawkers”, a well-known brothel on Brisbane Street. He threatened Agnes Kelly, a married woman who moonlighted as ‘a woman of ill reputation’, with physical violence and demanded she give up John Gray. After Kelly threatened to call the police, Campbell left. He returned within the hour accompanied by two other men, Donald McKay and William Cullen.

The three men berated Ms. Kelly, and again threated her with physical violence, but she refused to give up Gray. After threatening to call the police again, the men gave up and left. Another of Mother Chawker’s girls was sitting in the court yard. She put her ear to the corrugated iron fence and heard Cullen say, “Yeah, well do Jack Gray. He peached on us, now he’s gonna get doing”

John Gray climbed out of Agnes Kelly’s cupboard, left through the back door and fled on foot towards Hay Street. At 8:15, he met with long-time associate, Detective Alexander Guthrie, on Murray Street. They spoke briefly before Gray set off to the Criterion Hotel.

Gray went by the name Jack, among others, at Mother Chawker’s brothel, and during his other criminal activities. John Gray was a well-known pickpocket turned police informant from Victoria who fled the state after giving evidence about some of his former associates in court. He arrived in Perth to turn over a new leaf, but found himself working as the yardman for Ms Chalker and living off the charity of the ladies of Mother Chawker’s.

McKay and his gang had discovered that Jack Gray was working again as a police informer. It inspired homicidal rage in McKay who set out to inflict a terrible retribution on him — to make an example out of the rat.

In 1937, after the Swan Brewery demolished the old Criterion Hotel, the new, art deco building was erected to be a modern and ‘up with the times’ public house.



McKay and his gang were far more tenacious, and far more furious than Gray had initially anticipated. Across the road from the Criterion, where the Wills W.A Office sits today, McKay spotted Gray. The gang confronted him, spoke violently towards him, and then McKay knocked him to the ground. McKay began to kick him repeatedly in the stomach and the ribs while the other two men stood over him.

The beating was so severe, and so prolonged, that a boy riding past on his bicycle had enough time to alert two police officers walking the beat. McKay’s men took no notice and when the officers arrived, they had to pull them off Gray’s limp body.

Both McKay and his gang, and Gray, were taken into police custody where a lengthy interrogation yielded no results. Gray refused to press charges against them, so the police were forced to release all four men from different entrance points of the building.

Gray was incapacitated and could not stand on his own. But McKay and his gang weren’t satisfied that Gray had learnt his lesson, so they continued their drunken rampage around the city roaming the streets, drinking heavily and asking after Gray.

Image: Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW) Sunday March 23 1902, p8


After running out of tobacco, McKay walked over to the tobacconist, staffed by John Ryan, and bought some more. Ryan would later tell the police about the men’s abusive behaviour in his store, but he would never make it to testify in court. He would be intimidated by associates of McKay and flee the Swan River Colony. The three men walked back over the road and into the Criterion Hotel. They proceeded to tear the hotel apart looking for Gray. In the front bar, McKay shouted, “God Strike me dead, I’ll kill him tonight.” To which Cullen replied, “God strike me blind, I’ll kick his ___ ___ out.”

As fate would have it, Gray had unfinished business of his own at the Criterion. He contacted his friend, James Clarke, a taxi driver. Clarke looked at Gray who was sitting in the back of his taxi in a curled-up, semi foetal position and asked just what the hell had happened to him. After Gray told him, Clarke said, “You’re lucky those boys didn’t rough up your face”. Gray muttered back, “well, they done my ribs no good.”

Clarke did as his friend asked and dropped Gray back at the Criterion Hotel. He watched from the driver’s seat as Gray stumbled across the road. No longer able to support his own weight, he sat down on the kerb and rested against the tram pole.

Clarke spotted McKay and his gang through a window, walking through the billiards room and he ran towards Gray. He pleaded with him to leave, but Gray, incapacitated, refused to move and stayed sitting on the pavement.

After finding nothing in the Criterion, McKay and his gang left through the front door where they saw Gray leaning against the tram pole.

Walking toward Gray, they circled him. Clarke watched on as the crippled man tried to stand and, completely unprovoked, McKay beat him to the ground. When he tried to rise, McKay beat him down again, and again a third time. The men began another frenzied kicking attack and McKay screamed, “Are you going to give me up? Are you going to give me up, Gray?” Over and over again.

On the ground, Gray pleaded with McKay, “No, I am not a man of that sort. Go away and don’t bother me anymore, you’ve given me enough.” Gray rose to his feet and McKay struck him under the chin. Gray fell backwards, hitting his head against the wooden block pavers. He now lay unconscious on the ground with severe brain injury. Witnesses saw McKay beat Gray while he was unconscious on the ground. The autopsy would later reveal that the trauma sustained, and the blood that had gathered between the scalp and fractured skull, meant that only a blunt object, like a black jack, could have caused an injury of such brutal severity.

“Oh, he’s knocked out!” Cullen said.

“Oh, yes he is!” Clarke screamed at the men. Clarke, who could watch no more, pushed the men out of the way and tried to pick Gray up.

McKay, who had seemingly come to his senses, looked at him in shock, “It wasn’t the blow that did it.”

Clarke dragged Gray up onto the kerbstone and McKay walked toward the two men to investigate. Clarke screamed at McKay again, “Don’t hit him again! He’s senseless now.”

Sure that his friend was dead, Clarke made his intention to call the police known. McKay overheard him and the three men left Gray unconscious on the pavement and followed Clarke to the telephone booth. Flanked by Cullen and Campbell, with McKay behind them, Clarke stared flatly at Cullen and told him, “I would know your face among ten thousand men”. This finally managed to spook the trio into leaving him alone. Clarke then called the police.

When the police arrived, Campbell and McKay fled the scene but Cullen remained. He had his fists raised, trying to start a fight with another young man waiting in the crowd. The two constables talked Cullen down and got him to lower his fists. Not knowing what to do with Gray, who was breathing heavily and unable to move, they put him in the back of a taxi to the police station.

Dr Haynes was called to the police station where officers had laid him out on the floor. His shattered ribs left him breathing laboriously, sputtering as he gasped for air. His eyes rolled in on themselves and when Dr Haynes could smell no liquor on his breath, he became certain the young man would die that night and sent him to the hospital.

Agnes Kelly of Mother Hawkers, John Clarke the taxi driver and Paul Ryan the tobacconist, among other witnesses, identified his battered body the next morning.

The John Gray murder shocked and baffled the Colony. Perth was unaware that such violent creatures walked its sleepy streets. The ensuing murder trial would see a media frenzy that openly criticised the police and their gross incapability, sensational testimonies given by witnesses, witness intimidation, and a murderer would cry in the stand, pleading for his life.

 

[Historian]

Part 2

DOING JACK GRAY PART TWO
23 April 2018

Doing Jack Gray Part Two – The Tragedy on Hay Street

Doing Jack Gray: Part Two’ is the second of two instalments about the murder of John Gray.

The Chief Justice, Sir Edward Albert Stone, looked down at the three men before him, Donald McKay, John Campbell and William Cullen, as they sat accused of the murder of John Gray. The Crown Prosecutor, supported by a multitude of witnesses, painted a bloody picture of John Gray’s death in his opening address. He was attacked twice by the three men outside of the Criterion Hotel. The second attack left him with a fatal brain injury.



Recounting the facts, the prosecutor argued that in no way was Gray’s murder accidental. Mrs Agnes Kelly was the first witness called to the stand. She knew the man who went by the name Jack Gray, she had known him for three years. She described him as a gentle and softly spoken fellow who would frequent Mrs Chawkers Brisbane Street brothel, where she worked, two or three times a week. When Campbell came bashing on her door, demanding to know the whereabouts of Gray, Kelly had refused him entrance. To her knowledge, she had never met Campbell before. Campbell left Mrs Chawkers, and met up with his two cronies, McKay and Cullen. It was known by the other ‘Ladies of Mrs Chawkers’ that the three men were ‘freely drinking’ around Brisbane Street after Kelly turned Campbell away.

Between 2.30 and 3.00 pm, all three men approached Mrs Chawkers, and again demanded they be allowed to enter. Again, Kelly refused them. The many first-hand witness accounts that followed Kelly’s own testimony were variations of the same story; John Gray was relentlessly pursued, and beaten to death.

James Clarke, a taxi driver and long-time friend of Gray, took to the stand and gave perhaps the most damning evidence of the whole trial. He also shocked the court when he claimed that ‘filthy and threatening expressions had been used towards him in connection with the case’, and that other witnesses had been threatened. The Chief Justice responded to these claims by saying “You should report this matter to the police, and if anyone is brought before me, I shall deal with the offender very severely. If these threats or expressions are used in the vicinity of the court, the offenders should be brought to me at once.” The prosecutor drew attention to the noticeable absence of John Ryan, the tobacconist, who was also an eye witness to the murder.

Ryan had attended earlier sessions of the hearing, and was due to give evidence, but had since left the state. Walter Derbyshire, licensee of the Criterion Hotel, told the court that Ryan was confronted several times walking over the Barrack Street Bridge on his way home by members of the ‘Push’ who told him they would “blow his lights out.” Ryan had told his friends he was sure the ‘boys’ were going to kill him. Derbyshire told the court Ryan was so terrified of these men that he stowed away on a ship bound for Africa, but on being discovered, he was brought back to Fremantle. Still too terrified to stay in the city, Ryan stole a boat and sailed for Victoria.

Doctor Haynes was next to take the stand. He told the court how he had found Gray, “Lying on his back with a puffing behind his ear about the size of a small mandarin orange and two smaller puffings higher up. I thought the man was dying. He gave a gasp, stopped breathing and it was with great difficulty that we got him to breathe again.” The post mortem examination was far more damning. Gray’s body was battered and bruised from head to toe, and there were indications that another beating may have taken place before the final assault outside the Criterion.

Mr Purkiss, the defendants’ lawyer, claimed Cullen and Campbell were innocent of the crime. He told the court that the two men had never laid a hand on Gray. Purkiss offered a weak argument in defence of McKay. He told the court that, “if there were three distinct wounds given to Gray during life, there is no way that the doctor could not have failed to have distinguished them after death. The assault was brutal and cowardly. Gray was pounded and kicked unmercifully. But, stripped of the sensational and the hysterical, Gray must have been guilty of some gross conduct with respect to one of the accused, given the lamblike way in which he took the assault. He made no complaint to anyone, and even assured McKay he wouldn’t give him up after the first assault had been committed. If Gray had not been guilty of something of which he was ashamed, why did he not complain to the public or seek the protection of the police?”

The defence was weak, and both the judge and the jury did not take to it favourably. Cullen and Campbell continued to deny their involvement in the crime, placing the blame squarely on McKay.

As the case progressed, day after day, the court was rushed by people clambering to get a seat inside, and large crowds would wait outside at the end of each day for the verdict. In a bold show of force, criminal elements in the crowd from the ‘sneak thieves’ and pick pockets, all the way through to the garrotters and hitmen, openly identified themselves among the crowds of people. Jury members and witnesses were intimidated as they walked to and from the court house and, most noticeably, the licensee of the Criterion Hotel, Walter Derbyshire, was heckled by friends of Cullen and Campbell. He reported that two unidentified men shouted “There goes the bastard who is giving evidence…We will settle him one of these nights.” The menacing presence of these men stretched the police so thin that the army was called on to deploy mounted troops.

Cullen was believed to be the most dangerous of the men, and the most volatile. He was reported to have made at least one attempt to escape from custody, and had “broken out in fits of violence on several occasions and even resorted to filthy language!” In explosions of rage, he assaulted officers and guards several times during transport from the dock to the prison van. When guards searched Cullen’s cell, they found two metal files hidden in his bed pan. It was believed these had been baked into a loaf of bread and smuggled in for him in order to break out of the gaol.

The case was sensational, and the public were outraged. In an unprecedented attack on the police, The West Australian Sunday Times spoke out openly saying, “Even Texan outlawry will compare favourably with our metropolitan security if the police are incapable of preventing such brutal outrages under the glare of the electric light and the highway of throngs of pedestrians.”

The jury were divided over the charge of murder. It was argued, somewhat successfully, that the nature of the attack was to cause grievous bodily harm and not death, so Gray’s death should be considered accidental and not premeditated.

On Thursday 20th of March 1902, the jury were locked in the jury room to reach a verdict. That afternoon, the foreman of the jury announced that there was still no verdict. By Friday morning, the crowd was surging outside the court house with people eagerly awaiting the verdict, but it was not until 10am Saturday morning that the jury emerged and entered the court.

The foreman announced, “We, the jurymen sitting on the trial of Donald McKay, John Campbell and William Cullen, finding the murder of John Gray, have had some trouble in agreeing to a verdict, and, in the interest of justice, the whole of the jury have agreed to a verdict of murder in the hope that the extreme penalty of the law may not be carried out for the following reason: – That, although the unfortunate man, Gray, met his death, in the circumstances, we do not believe that the accused meant to murder him.” He continued, “We find the prisoner, Donald McKay, guilty of murder, and the other two, John Campbell and William Cullen, guilty of aiding and abetting, with a very strong recommendation to mercy.”

The Chief Justice asked the prisoners if they would like to address the court in relation to the sentence.

McKay began openly weeping and addressed the court. “Yes, sir. I’ve been found guilty of a terrible crime. There is no doubt about that I was the cause of Gray’s death, but not wilfully. No, a thousand times no. I had received provocation. My blood rose and I hit him, but I had no intention of killing him.”

Campbell was emotionless when he said, “Yes, I am innocent. We were drinking together that day. I did not know Gray. I had nothing against him. I did not interfere with him in any way.”

Cullen looked at the judge and said, “Yes, me and Campbell took no part. I didn’t know Gray. I never saw him in my life”

After hearing the men out, the Chief Justice addressed them,

“Donald McKay, John Campbell and William Cullen. After a very fair and patient trial, and very careful attention to the evidence by the jury, and a long consideration from them of all the facts bearing upon the charge against you, you have been found guilty of the crime of murder. You, Donald McKay, are the man who caused the death of the unfortunate deceased, John Gray. You, Campbell and Cullen, from the evidence, appear to have acted in conceit with him. Although you did not actually assault the deceased – you left that to the prisoner, McKay to do – you were there and ready to assist and you are, in the eyes of the law, equally guilty with McKay of the offence of which you have been found guilty.

McKay, you are apparently a young man. I hope you feel acutely the position in which you are now placed. I do not want anything I may say to aggravate that position. You have a mother alive, you might have had a long, useful life before you, and you would have been able to assist your mother, but you have brought on her the greatest trouble that could possibly be bought to any mother on this earth. It is only for me to pass the sentence that the law directs me to pass in such cases as this. McKay, Campbell and Cullen, I cannot hold onto any hope for you of mercy being extended to you in this world, or the next. It is true you may not have had any intention of killing Gray, but from the evidence it is clear, I think, that you intended to do him grievous bodily harm. As I pointed out to the jury, if in carrying out this intention, death results, the law declares that the offence is murder.”

McKay’s mother, who had attended every day of the trial, broke down in front of the court. She was openly weeping and crying out hysterically in protest, pleading with the judge for mercy and was physically removed from court.

Chief Justice, Sir Edward Albert Stone, looked down on the three men and, having adjusted his black cap, said, “The sentence of the law is that you be taken hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you be dead. May God have mercy on your soul.” McKay started crying again in the dock as the sentence was read and whimpered out, “may God have mercy on my soul.” Cullen and Campbell said nothing and showed no expression. The three men were dragged from the court and the mounted troops made a corridor through the crowd. Donald McKay, William Cullen and John Campbell were paraded in front of the crowd and taken to Fremantle Prison for the last time.

Gerard McArtney