Maungatapu Murders - The notorious Burgess Gang

The trial of the notorious Burgess gang caused a sensation in the small town of Nelson in 1866. Murder was a rare crime and this one involved not just one, but five victims, and everyone was desperate to know all the grisly details.... 

Murder on the Maungatapu

The story began with the mysterious disappearance of five men on the Maungatapu track between Nelson and the Wairau in mid June1866. The first victim was travelling alone from Pelorus, and then it was the turn of a group of four from Deep Creek, on the Wakamarina goldfield.

The perpetrators were Richard Burgess, Philip Levy, Thomas Kelly and Joseph Sullivan, hardened criminals who had served prison time in England, Australia and Otago for robbery and burglary. Collectively known as the Burgess gang, they had arrived in Nelson via the Otago and West Coast goldfields on June 6, 1866 and decided to rob a bank in Picton.

The four murderers, The Nelson Provincial Museum, Museum Collection, LS9.3.7
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A change of plan saw the gang returning from Canvastown to the eastern side of the Maungatapu track. The new strategy was to lie in wait for men heading for Nelson from the Wakamarina goldfield and rob them of money and gold.¹

On June 12 they strangled and suffocated James Battle, a 54-year old whaler who had been working as a farm labourer at Pelorus. The robbery netted them a mere three pounds and seventeen shillings.²

Murderer's rock plaque at the Maungatapu saddle (Peter Lowish, Feb. 2009 - this has been noted as damaged 2011)
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The following day, the gang hid behind a large rock and ambushed a group of four men travelling from the Wakamarina to Nelson with a packhorse. Led off the track into dense bush, storekeepers John Kempthorne and James Dudley, innkeeper Felix Mathieu and miner James de Pontius were variously strangled, stabbed and shot. Having removed a quantity of gold and money, the gang loaded their victims’ swags onto Old Farmer, the horse, led him into the bush and shot him.³

The men were missed almost immediately by their friends, and a large search party, including men from the Maori community, was soon on the hunt for them.⁴   

Meanwhile the gang had slunk back to Nelson, where they spent money cleaning themselves up and buying new clothes.⁵

Local newspapers were full of the story of the “goldfield rogues” and the “supposed case of sticking up”.⁶

The failure of the search to find the missing men fed fears that they had been murdered. Suspicion fell on the free spending gang members and they were all in custody by the evening of June 19.⁷

The death masks of Kelly, Burgess and Levy, The Nelson Provincial Museum, Museum Collection, M539
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Sullivan took advantage of a Government offer of a 200 pound reward or a free pardon  for any accomplice and turned Queen's evidence. He told police he was only the lookout, while the other three were responsible for the murders of all five missing men.⁸

Information from Sullivan led to the location of the bodies of the Mathieu party on June 28, following the finding of Old Farmer by Hemi Matenga from Wakapuaka.⁹  The bodies were carried to Nelson and were viewed by thousands of people in the engine shed, which acted as a temporary morgue. This building still stands in Albion Square. Two days after the funeral the body of James Battle was found, and he was buried in the same grave. Nelsonians paid for a five-sided monument to stand over the shared grave at Wakapuaka Cemetery.¹⁰

Burgess wrote his confessions while in gaol.¹¹  All four men were convicted of the murders, with Burgess, Kelly and Levy being hanged at the Nelson Gaol on October 5, 1866. Their bodies were buried in unconsecrated ground behind the gaol. Sullivan's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he served time in Dunedin before being pardoned in 1874 and returning to England.

Maungatapu Murder Memorial (Karen Stade)
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In a grisly twist, the dead men's heads were removed from their bodies and plaster casts made from them. This was done in a bid to support the theories of phrenology, a pseudo-science that sought to determine personal characteristics by examining the shape of an individual's head.¹² The casts are held in The Nelson Provincial Museum (not on display).

Additional note

The bodies of the hanged men were not afforded the dignity of a proper burial. On the night following the executions the bodies were buried in the gaol yard. Over time some of the remains have almost certainly been dug up and possibly mistakenly reburied as Maori remains. ¹³  

About the Maungatapu Track. ¹⁴ 
The unsealed 40-kilometre Maungatapu track is currently closed to vehicles but can be walked or tackled on mountain bikes. It runs from the Maitai River Forks up to the Maungatapu Saddle and down into the Pelorus Valley. The infamous Murderer’s Rock is 4.3km from the summit on the Pelorus side.

2008 

Updated: Apr 3, 2020

Sources used in this story

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