Free Gangland Robbers by James Morton Page A

was a press campaign for his release. He had now served twenty years, and complained about other men who had been convicted of murder, or attempted murder, during a robbery having been released. These included Allan Main, who had shot laundry proprietor Ernest Overton in Manly in 1913. He had left behind his hat, clearly marked Allan Main, Belltrees. Then there was Herbert Shaw, who, in April 1917, had beaten George King to death at the California, a boarding house at Katoomba. Shaw claimed he was innocent and had been fitted up. There was also Alfred Smith, known as ‘The Masked Burglar’, who had shot at John Thompson in February 1912, and David Galloway, known as Scotty McCall, convicted of the attempted murder of builder William Dettman during a burglary in Rose Bay in September 1919. Much of the evidence revolved around the burglar having a Scots accent, as McCall did. At an early identification parade, Dettman picked out four men, including McCall, whom he said resembled his attacker, who was known to head a gang of burglars. It was not until five months after the attack that the now-recovered Dettman was in court to hear the case against McCall of stabbing two men and claimed to recognise his voice. McCall could only call one witness, Black, who said he had been with him at a picnic, but the man had a bad criminal record himself. At first, McCall had been a prisoner whose cell a warder would not enter alone, and the ringleader of riots in prison, but over the years he had calmed down and, championed by the Seamen’s Union, was released in 1933.
    Freeman was finally released in 1939 and it seems he gave up his criminal career, with one minor exception. In May 1950 he was fined £10 for stealing a blow lamp from a shop. He had been drinking at the time. There is no evidence he ever saw Kate Leigh again.
    Not so Ryan, who over the next forty years was regularly in and out of the courts, and almost as often in and out of jail. Released in under four years, in June 1918 he was found not guilty of a Sydney bank raid when the clerk refused to give evidence against him and his co-accused, Gilbert Purvis and Neil Gant. Back in South Australia, he soon went down for eight years, this time for receiving cloth. On 12 July 1922 he managed to get out of Yatala with Edward Watts and William Shaw. Locked in their cells at night, they had opened the cell doors and climbed over iron grilles and then the prison walls. They soon split up and took off, but after black trackers were brought in, they were all caught within the week. The jury strongly recommended mercy but not much was on offer. Ryan received two years, and the others eighteen months apiece.
    At his committal proceedings, Ryan, it was reported, displayed close interest in the number and character of the locks, and requested that a number of keys be produced at his trial. The police were so impressed with his escape they asked if he would explain his methods but he declined, preferring instead to sell his story, which was smuggled out of the prison, to
Smith’s Weekly
to raise some money for his mother. He also made a set of skeleton keys and presented them to the Yatala governor. In July that year there were unfounded rumours he had died from complications following a bout of pleurisy.
    There was no question of reform on his release but sometimes his luck held. In 1928 he was acquitted in Brisbane of having stolen gelignite and a fuse with the detonator attached. The next year he was charged with a burglary in Rundle Street, Adelaide, but in August his conviction and a three-month sentence for failing to give a satisfactory account of himself to a police officer were quashed, due to insufficient evidence.
    In February 1930, while still in Adelaide, Ryan was charged with shopbreaking and the first jury disagreed. He had been able to explain he had a torch with him because he was looking for a key he had lost. As for the gloves … well, he always carried