PAST CRIMESto assess a person’s character by feeling the bumps of their head) has long
been discredited, but it was one of the new ideas being tested in the period.
A strange postscript to this case has occurred. A house close to that of Mrs
Thomas was bought in 1952 by Sir David Attenborough. In 2009 he acquired
the site of the now derelict pub for redevelopment. In October 2010 workmen
found a skull in the yard of the building. This was radiocarbon dated and the
results suggested it was at least a hundred years old. An archaeological
approach to the recording of the find enabled identification of the stratigraphy
in which the skull lay. This put it into the Victorian period, as it lay on some
Victorian tiles. Low collagen levels indicated that the flesh had been boiled
away, and there was evidence of a fracture and possibly asphyxiation which
was the probable cause of death. As Mrs Thomas had no traceable relatives,
DNA analysis could not be used to prove that this was her skull, but the
coroner felt that the identification was reasonable, and in 2011 recorded a new
verdict of unlawful killing.^11
An Australian outlaw
Modern forensic science has also been put to use to identify the remains of a
notorious nineteenth century criminal. In 1929, construction work began on a
new school at the site of the old prison in Melbourne, Australia. It was known
that executed criminals had been buried in the prison yard, with markers on an
adjacent wall. One marker bore the initials‘E.K.’. The bodies were exhumed
and reburied at another prison. A further group were moved in 1937. These
were all placed in mass graves. In 2002, another body was found, missed by
the earlier diggers.
There was great excitement at the idea that among these remains was the
body of Australia’s most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly (Plate 11). Son of an Irish
convict, Kelly was in trouble with the law from an early age, but his life of
crime truly took off in 1878 when a constable arrived to arrest his brother. The
constable then claimed that the family had attacked him; the brothers made off
into the bush, and their mother was arrested and sentenced to three years in
gaol for attempted murder. Ned and his brother Dan joined up with a couple of
other ne’erdowells, and the Kelly Gang was formed.
They killed three constables in the autumn of 1878 and a reward of £500
each was offered for their capture, dead or alive. In the December of that year
they took twentytwo people hostage at a sheep station and robbed a bank. The
next February they took over a police station, locked up the constables, stole
their uniforms and in these disguises robbed a bank. They moved into the hotel
next door and took sixty people hostage. Kelly issued a long statement about