Over the last five weeks, The Daily Advertiser has taken a look back at some of Wagga’s most notorious criminals from days gone by.
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Among the stories we revisited were some of Wagga’s oldest and most complex criminals, including murderers, thieves, baby-killers, suspected prostitutes, and traitors.
If you missed out, here is a look back at five suspicious characters from Wagga’s history.
Jacob Bachler – a “malicious” murderer:
Firstly, we bring you the story of Jacob Bachler, who was charged with “feloniously and maliciously” murdering Nathaniel Griffiths on March 11, 1916.
The day before the crime, a construction train brought some 150 labourers to Wagga from Borambola to begin work at the railway construction depot.
The workers set up 70 to 80 tents to sleep in; inside two of these tents were Griffiths, 54, and his soon-to-be murderer, Bachler, 43.
Born in Switzerland, Bachler spoke only German, and had only arrived in Australia eight years earlier.
That night, workers heard Bachler talking loudly and using “bad language” after a night of drinking on the town.
Close to midnight, Bachler began pulling apart his tent angrily, with a fire made of half-dry tent poles burning right in front of him.
Griffiths and another worker confronted Bachler, telling him “those tent poles are too good to destroy”.
That was when Bachler lashed out, hitting Griffiths over the head with one of the poles.
A group of workers ran to Griffiths’ aid, finding him breathing heavily and unable to speak.
He was taken to the Wagga District Hospital and subsequently died just before 10am the following morning.
The workers grabbed Bachler, tied him up with some tent ropes, and held him until the police arrived.
His initial charge of malicious wounding was upgraded to murder after Griffiths died in hospital, and a jury took just 25 minutes to return a verdict of guilty at his trial.
Bachler was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment at Goulbourn Jail, and was not released until October 17, 1930.
The media described Bachler as “a powerfully built man of morose disposition [who] kept himself apart from the other men on the job” who was “looked upon as a man of moods”.
Upon his release, Bachler headed west for Broken Hill, and was spotted regularly in the town that December ordering a whiskey and soda in the mornings and a glass of beer in the afternoons.
On December 19, Bachler told his landlord he was walking to Menindee to camp on the river, leaving a few belongings behind and explaining he “would come back for [them] if things livened up”.
His body was found hanging from a tree on Christmas Day.
Alice Clark – an “undesirable character”:
Our next historical criminal is Alice Clarke, who was charged on April 8, 1912, with two peculiar offences; drunkenness, and “having insufficient lawful means of support”.
Jill Kohlhagen, the collection management archivist for the CSU Regional Archives, said the latter of those two charges was not entirely as it appeared.
“This was a charge used by police to ‘clean up the streets’,” Ms Kohlhagen said.
“I suspect she was quite simply a prostitute, although that was not something she was charged with.
“Alice was known to keep the company of many different men, drinking in pubs with them, then spending the night on the river bank with them.”
Clarke came into trouble when Senior Constable Field reported seeing her on Fitzmaurice Street of a Saturday evening with three or four different men, with the whole group under the influence of alcohol.
When the Senior Constable reprimanded her, Clarke promised to return home to her North Wagga residence.
However, the next morning, a witness complained that Clarke had spent the night in a tent with multiple men instead, and the police promptly arrested her.
In building their case against Clarke, police said she had been known to them for some 12 months, as she was constantly wandering the streets in the evening with different men.
In court, Clarke pleaded guilty to drunkenness, but said she was not guilty of "having insufficient lawful means of support”.
However, she was unable to convince the court of her innocence, and was sentenced to six months’ hard labour at Goulburn Gaol.
Clarke was labelled an “undesirable character”, with a 1912 issue of The Daily Advertiser reporting that she was labelled “a disgrace to her sex” in court.
Ms Kohlhagen of the CSU Regional Archives said Clarke was most likely arrested on these seemingly bogus charges because she had started to become a public nuisance.
“The police said in court that Alice had been in and around Wagga for about a year by the time they arrested her, and she was obviously well known to them, but it’s only at this point that they charge her,” Ms Kohlhagen said.
“The police wouldn’t have really cared whether she had a lawful job, unlawful job, or no job at all, as long as it wasn’t affecting the general public.”
Ms Kohlhagen suspected Clarke was sent to Goulburn to serve her time as a convenient way of making her another town’s problem.
James Lalor – arrested for “disloyalty”:
James Lalor’s story is particularly unique – he was arrested at the Wagga Hotel on August 10, 1915, after he committed an act of "disloyalty".
Under the War Precautions Act, it was illegal to do or say anything that prejudiced the community’s confidence in its war leaders.
That evening at the Wagga Hotel, Lalor got into a heated argument with Tumbarumba man Thomas Williams.
“This is a capitalists’ war – a rich man’s war. Half-a-dozen men started it; let them fight it out,” Lalor told him.
“The King of England should be shot and the Queen should have her throat cut.”
The tale goes that Williams then invited Lalor to go outside “where he would deal with him”, but Lalor ran away from the hotel before the argument could turn violent.
James was made to answer for his crimes at the Wagga Police Court, where he explained that he had received injuries to his head some years before the incident, after which a doctor told him he should never drink spirits.
However, Lalor had gone against his doctor’s advice over the previous 12 months, during which he took to drinking heavily.
Under the influence of whiskey, Lalor claimed he had no recollection of his argument with Williams, and had no clue what he might have said.
Despite Lalor’s protestations, the Police Magistrate found him guilty of disloyalty, but did make some allowances for his head injury.
Lalor’s sentence was a choice between a £100 fine or six months’ hard labour in Albury Gaol.
After the press assumed a connection between him and Peter Lalor, who was made famous in the Eureka Stockade, the story of Lalor’s arrest was quickly picked up by newspaper right across the nation.
Despite being charged with disloyalty, records show that Lalor still made a reasonable contribution to the war effort.
He presented himself for enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force on March 1, 1916, in Melbourne after he was released from prison.
Lalor did go on to serve in France with the 58th Battalion for most of 1917, and was discharged in February 1918, when he was deemed medically unfit to serve due to his rheumatism and age.
Lalor’s son also enlisted in the Army at the age of 18 under his mother’s maiden name, and actually served at Gallipoli and in France.
Margaret Donnelly – a murderous mother:
Our next notorious character is dressmaker Margaret Lucy Donnelly, who was charged with the “willful murder” of her own child in January, 1909.
Early one morning, a brick carter named George Sharp stumbled across a parcel; inside was a dead baby girl with a piece of tape tied very tightly around her neck.
A postmortem was later conducted, revealing the perfectly healthy baby of only one or two days old had been strangled to death.
In the course of their investigation, police noticed an address written on the parcel in which the baby was found dead.
They visited that address and found Donnelly’s very confused family, who had absolutely no idea that their 31-year-old daughter was pregnant or had given birth.
Ironically, her mother was a police constable.
When the police eventually found Donnelly, they described her as being in a “precarious state” of health and took her straight to hospital to be placed under supervision, where she remained for two weeks until she was imprisoned.
She pleaded not guilty and was quickly committed for trial.
During her trial, a doctor told the court he had examined when she was about seven months’ pregnant, but she had sworn him to secrecy.
When Donnelly herself was called to the stand, she insisted that she had no recollection at all of giving birth to a child or of being in the hospital – the only thing she could apparently remember was being in jail.
In his address to the jury, her lawyer tried to convince the court that his client had acted out of insanity, telling them “in all the sad circumstances… it was reasonable… to draw the inference that [Margaret] had broken down under the strain of her great trouble”.
However, the judge was not buying it, and gave the jury three choices: murder, concealment of birth, or contributory murder.
It took the jury only 15 minutes to return their verdict of concealment, however, they pleaded with the court to show Donnelly some mercy as a result of her mental condition.
After the trial, Donnelly tried to leave the court in the arms of her mother and father, but she collapsed and had to be carried out by two constables.
Donnelly was ultimately sentenced to 12 months’ jail with light labour.
The last known record that can be found of Donnelly is in a coronial inquest file, which says she eventually died of cardio vascular degeneration in September, 1949.
John Buckley – a whiskey thief:
Last, but not least, is the story of John Buckley, who was charged with stealing a two gallon jar of whiskey on October 8, 1898.
Born in 1864, Buckley worked as a labourer on a station in Wagga prior to being arrested for stealing.
The whiskey in question belonged to a man known only as P Moran, and mysteriously went missing from his delivery cart while it was parked in front of the Squatters’ Hotel.
After receiving a tip-off about the missing whiskey, plain-clothes police officer Constable Hansen went looking for clues in a North Wagga paddock, where he found several men “in a more or less helpless state of intoxication”, according to an 1898 edition of The Daily Advertiser.
Disguised as a civilian, Constable Hansen asked Buckley for a drink; however, Buckley must have guessed who the man was and, after some whispering to his friends, denied his request.
Later on, Constable Hansen returned to investigate and found Buckley and his friends in possession of a billy and a pannikin – a small metal drinking cup.
Not far from Buckley, Constable Hansen also found the stolen jar of whiskey planted in a hollow log of a tree; however, by that point, the jar had been all but emptied of its contents.
Buckley faced Wagga Police Court and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and hard labour in Goulburn Jail.
Buckley received quite a bit of media attention after the incident, with his drunken antics making it into the local paper the next day.