A grisly tale of murder, lies, betrayal and a scandalous love affair will be the subject of an upcoming podcast series to be released on Monday.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Michael Adams, who produces the Forgotten Australia podcast, has been obsessively following the case of The Human Glove, which unfolded in Wagga in 1933.
In other news
For months he has been scouring the archives and digging up ancient copies of The Daily Advertiser to get to the bottom of the chilling murder mystery.
"I have read every article they've published about the case as it was unfolding. They were following it daily, and some of the developments are just gob-smacking," Mr Adams said.
"The more I started delving into it, the more I started wondering how on earth do we not know about this one in the same way we know about all these other famous true crime stories."
The tale begins on Christmas of 1933 when some fishermen happen across a rotten, stinking corpse in the Murrumbidgee River.
The skull had been bashed in with considerable force, but the corpse had been in the water for so long that no identifiable features could be discerned.
That is, not until a police officer later discovered the skin of the man's right hand, which had remained so intact that it resembled a fleshy glove.
A non-squeamish officer managed to stretch the human glove over his own hand so that they could take down fingerprints, allowing them to identify the corpse as belonging to a man named Percy Smith.
A coroner at the time said he had never seen anything like it in his entire life.
"This case will go down in history as one of the most remarkable ever brought to a court in any part of the world," he told The Daily Advertiser.
Investigations began in The Rock and Narrandera, where he was known around town for his distinctive wagon with its black hood.
One person came forward, saying he had bought that wagon at an auction from a man named Edward Morey.
Mr Morey told police that he in turn had bought the wagon from another man, but after several aspects of his story did not add up, he was subjected to intense scrutiny at Wagga court.
The media interest reached boiling point when one of the witnesses, a man by the name of Moncrieff Anderson, was shot in the head one morning.
It transpired that he had been murdered by his own wife Lilian, who had fallen madly in love with Mr Morey.
Lilian spent 20 years in jail for murdering her husband and Mr Morey was sentenced to hang for the murder of Percy Smith, but later had his sentence reduced to 20 years in prison.
More details behind this sordid and tragic tale will be released on iTunes and other podcast apps on Monday, with the second and final instalment broadcast the following week.