Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Shot in cold blood by ruthless gang that haunted real Luminaries town
came down the track and take the gold, simple. But the tragedy is it was a mistake – they had the wrong man.”
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.
“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
BEFORE HIS EXECUTION
Kempthorne was sitting. I took Mathieu 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.
Dobson’s disappearance also drew attention because he came from a prominent family. After seeing a poster offering a pardon “for any accomplice 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.”
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