Hay Street Heist Part Two: Loose Lips Sink Ships
Hay Street Heist Part Two: Loose Lips Sink Ships
After the brutal murder of Edgar Arthur Whitfield at the Caris Brothers Jewellery store on February 5th 1935, the police launched a nationwide manhunt. Even with the £1000 ($95,554) bounty on their heads, Matthew Walsh, Stanley Flynn, Cyril Brennan and Charles Silverman flew under the radar. The police desperately pursued any leads and information from the public, but no concrete evidence could be established, and they could not produce a suspect. The state government even extended the bounty to South Africa — should the diamonds show up there — but the jewels, and the thieves, were gone. Every inbound and outbound train and ship was searched. Interstate, the police were encouraged to be thorough — to check the toilets, the inside of lockers and overhead storage, and they were asked to examine each and every passenger and worker. Still, they came up with nothing. The newspapers were calling it ‘the perfect crime’.
Flynn and Brennan remained, with Silverman, in Perth to dispose of the Jewels. Walsh had boarded the HMAS Westralia on February 8th to meet up with a buyer that Silverman had organised. On board, Walsh met a youth named Keith Gill, who claimed to have contacts in Melbourne he might find useful.
Walsh never made contact with Silverman’s buyer in Melbourne. The nationwide media scrutiny made the jewels unsellable, and therefore worthless to the buyer. On the 8th of May, three months after Whitfield was beaten to death, an employee of the Melbourne Postal Service collected a parcel. The receipt was from a man named Silverman. It was addressed to a man named ‘Douglas’, with instructions that it be delivered to a man maned ‘Curtin’ at the Post Office Club Hotel.
The next day, Matthew Walsh, accompanied by Keith Gill, walked into the Post Office Club Hotel and asked if a package had been delivered to a ‘Douglas’. Walsh collected the parcel and he and Gill booked a room at the hotel to wait for the next delivery.
Employees at the hotel noticed Walsh becoming more and more irate during his stay. He was heard using the names Douglas, Curtin, Williams, Watson and Willis on the phone, and on 24th May, when ‘Douglas’’ second parcel had not arrived, Walsh had a very public panic attack in the foyer of the Post Office Club Hotel. Three days later, a package about the size of a shoebox arrived, addressed to ‘Douglas’. Walsh snatched the parcel out of the hotel employee’s hands and the employee joked with him, “Does it contain dope for horses?†Walsh smirked at him over the counter and said, “If you had what that parcel contains, work would not worry you again.â€
With no money, and unable to contact the buyer, Walsh and Gill had to sell the jewels themselves. Gill set Walsh up with a contact who offered £960 for most of the jewels, Walsh accepted the price, opened two bank accounts and deposited most of the money, using the remaining money to open a line of credit with the Commercial Bank.
But that was the extent of Walsh’s fiscal responsibility. On a single bad day at the track, Walsh managed to lose all £960 ($91,731). This forced him, and Gill, to panhandle what was left of the jewels on the streets and in bars, and to deposit individual sums of money into banks all over Melbourne.
It was a diamond solitaire ring worth £45 ($4299) that undid Walsh. Walsh sold this particular ring to a David Davis for £30. Davis then sold the ring for £50 to a pawnbroker who, after cross-referencing the ring with the ‘Whitfield List’, went to the police. The police contacted Mr Davis, who told them he had purchased the ring from Walsh at a bar in St. Kilda, near where Walsh and Gill had been living. This corroborated another lead that the police had been following for some time. Walsh and Gill had drawn the attention of bank staff in Melbourne. They were disheveled and looked homeless, yet they were depositing large amounts of money in various banks all over Melbourne. On the 4th July, Walsh and Gill were picked up on suspicions of depositing money from the profits of stolen goods and arrested on charges of vagrancy. When asked to identify the witness, Mr Davis identified Walsh as the man who sold him the solitaire diamond ring. Walsh and Gill were both remanded and formally charged with the wilful murder of Arthur Edgar Whitfield.
Back in Perth, the police were becoming desperate. The commissioner of police had issued a formal pardon to any accomplice (who was not the actual murderer) if they came forward with information as to the whereabouts of the murderer and the stolen jewels.
In a seemingly unrelated incident, some friends of a fifteen-year-old city waitress, Marjorie Ede, had contacted the Central Police. They were concerned about two men who were chaperoning her around town, they were using her to sign at the post office for parcels and money orders. These concerned friends had discovered that Marjorie was sending money to a ‘travel agent’ in Melbourne, who was encouraging her to travel to Melbourne and meet him — they feared she might be being sold into prostitution. The two men were stopped at the post office to be questioned on minor charges, but when the name Silverman was read on one of the packages, both men were brought in for questioning.
The two men were identified as Stanley Thomas Flynn and Charlie Silverman. They were subsequently arrested and formally charged with the murder of Arthur Whitfield.
When police were able to confirm that Flynn had been romantically involved with fifteen-year-old Marjorie, and that their love nest was in Flynn’s mistress, Pearl Waters’ house, detectives saw the opportunity to pounce. They confronted Pearl Waters on the train as she was returning from a stay at her relatives. Waters returned to her home at 37 Dunedin Street in Mount Hawthorn and found ‘evidence’ in the bedroom and on the sheets, the food cupboard had been emptied, and her house was in a general state of squalor. This evidence of Flynn’s infidelity was enough for Pearl Waters to flip.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/7372727
She became a principal witness and agreed to give up Flynn and Walsh. She gave a damning statement to police, claiming that Flynn had come to her after the heist and told her about Walsh’ and his own role in the murder of Edgar Whitfield.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/234616406/25358727
While the others remained tight-lipped, Silverman immediately went to the CIB to make a statement in order to gain the pardon promised by the state. His testimony was thorough, but one-sided. He told police that he was not present during the crime, but that he was the receiver of the goods. He told police that it was Flynn and Walsh who had committed the crime and, for the first time, he alerted police to Brennan’s involvement, telling them he was their spotter. Silverman admitted that he was involved in receiving stolen goods, but claimed the mastermind was a man named Evans, and he was in no way responsible for the murder of Whitfield.
The interstate collaboration and diligence of the police was praised as a triumph for justice. Walsh and Gill, along with three witnesses, were extradited to Perth to stand trial with Silverman and Flynn, and Brennan who was arrested shortly after.
In Perth, Detective O’Keefe sat down to interrogate Walsh. The interview got off to a rocky start. Walsh’s only response was, “I have been advised to say nothing about itâ€.
O’Keefe stepped it up, “Then you have been poorly advised. I advise you to tell me so that we can get those ringsâ€.
“I have nothing to sayâ€.
O’Keefe nodded his head and said, “Well then, you had better have a listen to what Flynn had to sayâ€.
O’Keefe read a portion of a statement made by Pearl Waters. She told police that Walsh had scaled the high fence, climbed the window and led the way for Flynn who, after they had surprised the old man, held him and tried to tie him up. It was Walsh who assaulted and wrestled with Whitfield, crashing into a mirror before he broke his neck and threw him to the ground.
This was enough to flip Walsh. He flew into a rage as he sat before O’Keefe. “The ÂÂ___ did not tell you he hit him in the jaw three times and broke his jaw though, did he? You get a pencil and paper, and plenty of it, and I will tell you everything.â€
In his statement, he claimed it was Flynn who was responsible for assaulting Whitfield. He claimed that the old man had bit his finger and pleaded with them not to hurt him, so he sat him down on the bed and left him with Flynn and went to take the jewels. Walsh denied that he wrestled with Whitfield. He claimed that he heard a gurgling sound and then a crash while he was out of the room and that on his return, he saw Whitfield in a pool of blood on the ground. He claimed that Silverman was the mastermind behind the murder, and that Brennan and Gill were wholly innocent of the crime. He told police that, after the heist, he was the one who called the station from a North Perth public phone to alert them to the danger that Whitfield may have been in, and that he meant the old man no harm. After the police announced to the media that the Whitfield murderers had been caught, witnesses started coming forward and offering to testify.
In the opening days of the court case, Marcus Thomas Bruce claimed to have been walking with Flynn who, riddled with guilt, said to him “you know the Caris Brothers? Mattie and I did that.†Phyllis Beryl White, Walsh’s former landlord, took the stand and told the court how Walsh had asked her to burn some rags for him on February 6th. She had refused him, and the next morning she noticed the smell of burning linen coming from his room and the sound of two men in the apartment making a racket. White found Walsh’s front door open, the bathroom tap running, and the wood heater still on — burning the remainder of bloodstained clothes. A few days later, White claimed that Brennan, who was loitering around the apartment, had told her Walsh’s sudden departure was due to a large win at the track that enabled him to move to Melbourne, without notice, to pursue business interests.
On June 5th, Phyllis White was delivered a letter by a lodger that read “Keep your ____ mouth shut. Whatever you do. See you later. You know.â€
As witnesses continued to come forward, one thing was repeated by Silverman, Flynn and Walsh — that Brennan had no part in the Murder of Whitfield, that he was morally opposed to violence and that he had refused to take part in the actual burglary of Caris Bros. Brennan himself had tried to offer a plea in exchange for a deal. His lawyer, Mr Muir, claimed he was innocent of the crime as he was just the spotter. The magistrate, however, did not see it that way at all. He responded, saying that by “Brennan’s being cognisant of criminal intention he could be held equally liable with the others, even if the consequences went farther than he had had in mindâ€.
The Crown Prosecutor discovered that Silverman, in order to escape judgement on his role as the mastermind behind the operation, had forged a number of documents and invented a man named Evans, who he was using as a scapegoat to shirk his involvement and responsibility for the murder. Silverman had gone as far as to forge entries into his own account books, schedule meetings, and phone calls, and send and receive parcels to and from the man ‘Evans’. However, it was discovered that the addresses the parcels were sent to were fictitious, and correspondence received from ‘Evans’ was identified as being in Silverman’s own handwriting. Silverman was once again staring down a long gaol sentence.
The case was long and became more dramatic as people gathered outside the courthouse to hear the outcome at the end of each day. The judge refused to show Brennan leniency, but accepted Silverman’s plea bargain and dismissed his involvement in the murder.
The court case came to a crescendo and the crowds surged outside the courthouse when the sentence was handed down. Walsh and Flynn were both convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with hard labour. Brennan was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years with hard labour. Silverman may have been acquitted, but the CIB did not forget about him. Some weeks after the case was closed, he was arrested on the charge of receiving stolen goods. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years with hard labour.