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| BBC's The Luminaries: Grisly secrets behind TV's Gold Rush drama expose |
The gang lay in wait, hidden in the thick bush in deepest rural New Zealand as their victims neared.
It was a dull afternoon in June 1866 when the quartet of a gold miner, two storekeepers and a businessman were journeying along a track with heavy sacks of gold and money.
Unfortunately for them, the Burgess Gang knew this and their leader was growing impatient.
When the travellers and their packhorse came trotting along, the bloodthirsty gang sprung, ordering them to lie face-down on the ground.
Their hands were bound and they were searched for gold but the gang could not risk their victims getting away to tell the police.
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| Black and white landscape photograph of Otira Gorge near the town of Hokitika |
The first was strangled, but it took too long, so the rest were shot.
“I presented the gun, and shot him behind the right ear; his life’s blood welled from him, and he died instantaneously.”
This callous description of the last murder is in the 46-page confession of London-born Richard Burgess, a criminal but also a writer hailed by American writer Mark Twain as “without peer in the literature of murder”.
Burgess’s gang terrorised miners and prospectors in mid-19th century New Zealand, setting of BBC drama The Luminaries, starring Eve Hewson.
Based on the novel by Eleanor Catton, the drama, which ends on Sunday, follows a young couple who arrive in the gun-toting town of Hokitika to seek their fortune – the same town where Burgess’s real life gang was formed in 1866.
Burgess is one of the most prolific murderers in New Zealand’s history, described as “a cruel assassin”.
He is thought to have killed up to 30.
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| Eve Hewson stars in the BBC drama |
His extraordinary tale was uncovered using records and historical newspapers from ancestry website Findmypast.
Born in 1829 and raised in London’s Hatton Garden, Burgess had a love of and talent for literature.
But he also had a criminal streak which began with petty crime and grew to violent robberies, for which he was transported to Melbourne in 1847.
In and out of Australian prisons for most of his later teens and early 20s, Burgess, a “smart dapper little fellow, 5ft and 4-and-half inches, fresh complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes”, would rove the goldfields of Melbourne and rob miners.
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| Burgess |
When those crimes finally caught up with him, he spent eight years in prison boats off the coast of Melbourne – as mainland jails had become so overrun.
It’s thought this torturous spell is what turned him into a monster.
In jail he met Thomas Kelly, and once released in 1862 they headed to the goldfield region of Otago in New Zealand to prey on miners.
After another stint in prison, Burgess and Kelly fled to Hokitika.
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| Levy |
“Hokitika looked like a Wild West town, something from a Hollywood set,” says Professor Lyndon Fraser, a historian at New Zealand’s Canterbury University.
“When you look at the Luminaries period, the key thing is the Australian connection. The Burgess Gang, like other bush rangers, were ex-crims from Britain transported to the eastern Australian colonies. Most men and women who end up on goldfields came from there.
“The goldfields entertainer Charles Thatcher used to call them ‘the smoking, drinking, cursing crowd’.”
Burgess and Kelly formed a gang with Australian Joseph “Flash Tom” Sullivan and they recruited William Levy – a seller of stolen goods who passed on information about possible targets.
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| Sullivan |
In the Rose Shamrock and Thistle Hotel billiard saloon, their regular haunt, they plotted their next crime.
Two weeks before they murdered the four unfortunates in the bush, the gang were on the road to Greymouth about 25 miles north of Hokitika.
Through Levy, they learned a gold buyer called Edward Fox was due to pass through and saw an opportunity.
After a big drinking session, the gang waited in the bush. Prof Fraser explains: “The plan was to ambush him as he came down the track and take the gold, simple. But the tragedy is it was a mistake – they had the wrong man.”
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| Kelly |
They attacked a surveyor called George Dobson, son of prominent British engineer Edward, who was scouting out the best place for his father to build a railway.
In a panic, they strangled him and buried his body in a shallow grave.
“It was a huge scandal,” Prof Fraser says. “All the papers were lamenting it. Up to that point there had been great excitement over the prospect of gold bringing money into the province.
“It was the first time they were seeing the dark side that comes with gold.”
The town of Dobson was named after him and still has a memorial to him. The Burgess gang’s bloody spree was only just starting, but Dobson’s death eventually led to their demise.
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| George Dobson was murdered by the Burgess Gang in 1866 |
“The unusual thing about the Burgess mob is they were prepared to kill,” says Prof Fraser. “The danger with bush ranger groups is that someone’s going to tell and eventually you’ll get caught.”
Two weeks after Dobson’s murder, the gang targeted the group of four – Felix Mathieu, James Dudley, John Kempthorne and James de Pontius – on the Maungatapu Track.
Burgess’s confession adds: “Sullivan took De Pontius to the left of where Kempthorne was sitting. I took Math-ieu to the right. I tied a strap round his legs, and shot him with a revolver.”
But the travellers were soon noticed missing and a reward was offered.
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| View of the town of Hokitika with Southern Alps in the background |
After seeing a poster offering a pardon “for any ac- complice not specifically involved in the murders”, Sullivan turned traitor.
Claiming he had no involvement in any killings, he told police where to find all the bodies and about Dobson’s murder.
Burgess, Kelly and Levy were caught and jailed in the town of Nelson. A jury took less than an hour to find the men guilty of murder. Only Sullivan was spared the death penalty.
A special triple gallows was built. Burgess chose a noose in the centre of as “a prelude to heaven” and declared he “had no more fear of death than he had of going to a wedding”, even going so far as to kiss it, a newspaper said.
Burgess could have been an author if he hadn’t taken a violent road, and his writing was held in high regard.
But in New Zealand, he will never be idolised. “These guys were not romanticised,” Prof Fraser says.
“They were seen as really awful people that should have justice dispensed on them. He may have been linked to more murders than we can ever know.”
