In the summer of 1898, the Murphy family farm stood about eight miles from the township of Gatton, roughly sixty-one miles west of Brisbane in the colony of Queensland. Gatton itself was a small place of around five hundred people, but it sat on a vital route linking Brisbane with the Darling Downs, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the colony. Grain, cattle, and wool passed regularly through the town on their way to the coast, and a railway line running through it only added to the steady traffic. Daniel Murphy, an Irish immigrant who had helped build that railway before turning to farming, and his wife Mary, also from Ireland, had raised ten children on a holding of about three hundred acres.
By the late 1890s, several of the older children had left home to find work. One son, Michael, was employed at a government experimental farm near Westbrook, while another, Daniel, served as a constable in Brisbane. Michael returned to the family farm for the Christmas holidays of 1898. On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of December, he and his younger sister Ellen attended the horse races at nearby Caffey.
That evening, he borrowed a horse and cart from his brother-in-law, William McNeil, and prepared to drive into Gatton with his sisters Ellen and Nora. The three planned to attend a dance at the local hall, a common pastime for the younger and unmarried residents of the district. They reached town around nine o’clock, only to find the dance had been canceled because not enough men had shown interest. They stayed in Gatton for about an hour to speak with friends, then set off around ten o’clock for the journey home along the Tent Hill Road.
They never arrived. The next morning, concerned that the three had not returned, Mary Murphy asked her son-in-law William McNeil to ride into Gatton and look for them. McNeil knew his own wagon well, especially its distinctive feature: one wheel wobbled slightly and left a recognizable track in the road. Riding along the Tent Hill Road, he noticed those familiar marks, but strangely, the tracks left the road through a slip rail and continued across rough ground.
He followed them along a path and through dense scrub for about three-quarters of a mile until he came upon a terrible sight in a paddock about a mile and two tenths from Gatton. The bodies of Michael, Nora, and Ellen Murphy lay arranged in a triangular pattern. Michael and Ellen rested back to back at the foot of a large gum tree, less than two feet apart. Nora lay a few yards away, placed upon a rug that had been carefully spread on the ground.
The horse stood dead nearby, shot as well. In a state of panic, McNeil rode back into town. Rather than going straight to the police station, he stopped at the Brian Boru Hotel and told those inside what he had found. He then informed Acting Sergeant William Arrol, who was in charge of the Gatton police station.
By the time Arrol reached the site, however, as many as forty people had already gathered there. Their presence destroyed any potential evidence. Sergeant Arrol remained for only about half an hour. He made no notes, asked no questions of those assembled, and took no steps to secure the scene.
He asked the local magistrate, Thomas Wilson, and a bootmaker, William Devitt, to keep watch while he returned to town to send telegrams, but neither man could hold back the growing crowd, and people continued to move through the paddock. Arrol’s telegram reached police headquarters in Brisbane at 12:52 p. m. , but because the day was a public holiday, it was not opened until nine o’clock the following morning.
The bodies were eventually taken into Gatton, placed in a hotel, and laid out for examination. The government medical officer arrived from Ipswich and carried out a brief inspection. Even with limited examination, it was clear that all three had died violently. Both women had their hands bound behind their backs with handkerchiefs.
Michael’s hands may also have been tied at some stage, though they were untied when his body was first examined. Near Michael lay an empty purse, despite the fact that he had left home that night with fifteen shillings. Michael had been shot on the right side of the head and also struck with a blunt instrument. Ellen’s skull had been fractured by two heavy blows to the left side.
Nora’s injuries were even more severe: her skull had been shattered by a blow, and a harness strap had been tightened around her neck until she was strangled. The positioning of Michael and Ellen suggested they had been sitting upright, back to back, when they were attacked. Indications pointed to a whip with a brass-mounted handle having been used, but despite an extensive search, police never found the weapon. From the very beginning, confusion surrounded the handling of the case.
When Michael’s body was removed, the purse strap had been placed between his hands, and the empty purse was found in one of them. Yet those who had first seen the body gave conflicting accounts of whether these items had originally been arranged that way. Some witnesses claimed an onlooker had interfered with the body to search the purse. On the twenty-eighth of December, police arrived from Brisbane with native Australian trackers, and a wide search of the surrounding district began.
Farm workers and laborers within fifty miles were questioned. Still, further complications emerged, particularly concerning the medical examinations and the burial of the victims. A justice of the peace, Mr. Wiggins, authorized the burials on the understanding that proper postmortems had already been carried out.
Police Inspector Percy Galbraith supported this claim, stating that Dr. Von Lossberg had told him he had completed his examination and had observed what appeared to be a bullet wound, though he had been unable to locate the bullet. Dr. Von Lossberg disputed this.
He maintained that he had not performed full autopsies because he was suffering from blood poisoning at the time and had advised that the bodies should not be buried until he had recovered. The bodies were exhumed, and a second postmortem confirmed that Michael had been shot in the head and then struck with a blunt instrument, which had partially concealed the bullet wounds. The bullet was recovered from his skull. The handling of the case drew sharp criticism from both authorities and the press.
Newspapers highlighted the lack of control at the crime scene, the conflicting accounts given by officials, and the premature burials. The combination of lost evidence, uncertain testimony, and administrative confusion deepened public unease and added to a growing sense that vital opportunities had been missed. On the third of January 1899, the Queensland government offered a reward of one thousand pounds for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Suspicion fell upon various individuals, including laborers and even members of the Murphy family.
One man who attracted attention was Thomas Day, a butcher who lived in a hut about nine hundred feet from the place where the bodies had been found. Several people reported seeing him walking along the road in the area on earlier nights, and one witness later claimed to have seen him washing blood from his clothes a few days after the crime. Reports of possible suspects flooded in, along with promises of an early arrest. Clairvoyants offered their own theories.
One woman, holding a seance in Brisbane, claimed four men from respectable families living near Gatton were responsible and predicted the murderers would soon be arrested. Nothing came of it. Among the flood of speculation, more credible witnesses emerged. Six people came forward stating they had seen a man at the slip rails between about 7:45 and 9:15 p.
m. , meaning he must have been there for a considerable time. Their descriptions varied slightly, but the consistency of their testimonies suggested the same individual had been hanging around the area. A seventy-seven-year-old man named Arthur Brooking said he passed the slip rails at about a quarter to eight and heard gunshots shortly afterward coming from the direction of the hill.
A woman named Mrs. Carroll saw the three young Murphys on the road and also saw a man at the rails. Her son John described the stranger as wearing a blue shirt and coat. A woman named Florrie Lowe reported seeing a man walking toward her at 9:15 and becoming quite frightened until two men passed by.
Thomas Drew, one of those men, told investigators that shortly after nine he had heard a shot and seen a sudden movement near the slip rails. He had noticed a man standing nearby and called out good night, but the man did not reply. His companion, Michael Donahue, confirmed this and added that not long afterward they saw Michael, Nora, and Ellen Murphy on the road and exchanged greetings with them. One puzzling detail remained: Acting Sergeant William Arrol had apparently passed the same spot during that time yet reported seeing no one at all.
If the man had truly remained there for so long, he must also have been seen by the Murphys as they traveled into Gatton and possibly as they returned. No explanation was ever found for this discrepancy. Throughout the inquiry, there were suggestions, sometimes openly expressed, that members of the Murphy family might have known more than they were willing to reveal. Such suspicions placed the family in an impossible position, forcing them to bear the added burden of suspicion during their time of grief.
Despite the many leads, nothing came of them. Reports were investigated, witnesses questioned, and suspects considered, but no clear line of inquiry led to an arrest. Over time, attention drifted away from the Gatton case. A constable later suggested the killings might be connected to another murder in Oxley, where a fifteen-year-old boy named Alfred Stephen Hill had been shot along with his pony.
In 1906, a revolver with four spent chambers, the same number of shots believed to have been fired in both the Oxley and Gatton killings, was discovered near the butcher’s shop where Thomas Day had once worked. Day had been questioned about the murders in December 1898, and soon afterward he had left the area and enlisted in the army, but he deserted in May 1899. In 1962, sixty-four years after the murders, a woman told Queensland police of a childhood memory: her father had mentioned a young laborer who had worked on their property and was suspected by some of committing the 1898 murders. She said the man lived as a recluse, camping in the bush, and behaved strangely, and that whenever the murders were mentioned, he would cry.
Investigators found no record of the man and concluded he was probably a drifter who had left Gatton a few days after the murders, been interviewed, and cleared of suspicion. No one was ever brought to justice. The deaths of Michael, Nora, and Ellen Murphy remain one of Queensland’s and Australia’s most enduring and troubled unsolved cases.