• This month:

  • The Big Apple girds for WWII.

  • Crime Australia-style.

  • John Smillie’s last cab fare.

  • Recommendations: A newsletter and two books worth your attention.

New York at War

The best thing about researching a book like the forthcoming Madeline Gets Life is the unexpected gems you can uncover.

The murder at the heart of the story occurred in New York City in March 1942, three months after the United States joined World War Two.

By that time, New York children were already wearing “dog tags” to school. The metal ID tags or plastic disks (Above) hung on chains around their necks and gave the child’s name, birthdate, address, and other identifying information. 

Unlike soldier dog tags, the child IDs did not provide blood type or religion, but their purpose was clear, if unspoken: to identify casualties in the event of an attack. The kids were told the tags would aid family reunifications during emergencies. 

Other developments on the New York home front in 1942:

• Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered schools to conduct weekly air raid drills.

• Teen girls learned first aid; boys became junior air raid wardens.

• Wartime rationing of tires, sugar, gasoline, and coffee took effect.

• Nightly blackouts began – cargo ships silhouetted against the glow of city lights had become easy prey for German submarines.

• A U-boat landed four German saboteurs on Long Island in June. (It didn’t end well for two of them, as we reported in Issue Two.)

• Police rounded up hundreds of Japanese, German, and Italian citizens for transport to internment camps.

• Entertainers opened the Stage Door Canteen in the basement of the 44th Street Theater to feed and entertain American troops on leave in New York. Below: Bette Davis serves a soldier a slice of cake.

Although 1942 was a momentous year for New York, Madeline Webb seemed oblivious to the war.

In 20 hours of interview tapes Madeline recorded in the mid-1970s, she mentioned the fighting but once. Trying to justify why reporters sensationalized her murder trial, she said, “They had jobs, they had wives and children, homes. Those were hard years, you know.  The war was on. Everything was hard.”

This Month in Australian Infamy

In 1935, Australia was making a slow recovery from the Great Depression, but war clouds loomed on the horizon. One constant was murder. After all, as the saying goes, “Australia is the place where everything wants to kill you.”

•  September 3 — Acquittal in Minutes

  • A courtroom in Charleville, Queensland, erupted into applause when a jury – after deliberating just seven minutes – acquitted Ruby Lissaman of murder in the death of her husband, William.

  • The woman testified she shot the man after he repeatedly threatened to kill her and their three children. The family lived in a one-room hut on a remote cattle ranch.

  • Jurors heard testimony that William Lissaman frequently whipped the children and traded whisky for sex with Aboriginal women.

  • Judge E. A. Douglas called the husband a “sexual maniac if not a sexual pervert” and told Mrs. Lissaman, “I sincerely hope your future life will be happier than your past life.”

• September 9 – The Severed Clue

  • After hearing two days of testimony in Sydney, jurors halted Australia’s so-called “Shark Arm Murder Trial” and acquitted Patrick Brady for lack of evidence.

  • The bizarre case began in April when a recently captured shark threw up a human arm at a popular Sydney aquarium. The arm bore a tattoo of a boxer and was quickly identified as belonging to a suspected police informant named Jimmy Smith.

  • Smith was last seen with Brady, a noted check forger. A witness, Reginald Holmes, told police Brady killed and dismembered Smith and threatened Holmes with the tattooed arm.

  • Before Holmes could testify, he turned up dead. The prosecution’s case against Brady fell apart, and the Smith and Holmes murders officially remain unsolved.

Above: Jimmy Smith’s arm, coughed up by a shark. The boxer tattoo helped identify it as Smith’s.

• September 14 – The Gentleman Escapee

  • Charles Watson, captured five weeks after a sensational escape from Brisbane’s Boggo Road Gaol, pledged to finish his sentence without complaint and marry his sweetheart.

  • “With her at my side, I will give up crime for good and remain honest to the rest of my days,” Watson told a reporter.

  • The 21-year-old had walked out the main gate of Queensland’s main prison wearing a suit he stole from the superintendent’s son. He took a cab to the airport and caught a flight to his hometown of Toowoomba, charging the ticket to the superintendent.

  • Watson was released in 1936 and promptly married Lily Styan. His honesty pledge lasted four years.

  • In 1940, he went to jail for swiping clothes from laundry lines. Then he was caught stealing scrap metal — with his father.

  • Lily appears to have called it quits around 1943 when Watson was sent to jail again. She remarried the following year. Watson took a new wife in 1945, but she died two years later.

  • Watson’s last arrest came in 1953 when he pawned a stolen sewing machine. He died in 1993 at age 79.

• September 28 – Bul-Bul’s Long Chase

  • Aboriginal police tracker Bul-Bul caught up with a convicted murderer named Minmara near Darwin in the Northern Territory, ending a nine-month chase covering a thousand miles.

  • Minmara had escaped in December from Darwin’s main prison, Fannie Bay Gaol, where he was serving life for murdering three Japanese shark fishermen in 1931.

  • The Aboriginal resistance leader Nemarluk was also sentenced for that murder and also escaped from Fannie Bay Gaol. Bul-Bul tracked him down, too.

Down-Under Bonus: Boyd Sinclair

Above: Taxi in which John Smillie was killed September 23, 1935, in a Sydney suburb.

One of Australia’s longest criminal sagas began ninety years ago this month when a Sydney cab driver picked up a fare in the western suburb of Homebush—and never came home.

The passenger told driver John Smillie to stop, pulled out a revolver, and shot him four times in the back, then beat him after he rolled from the taxi onto the ground.

Smillie lived long enough to give a statement, describing his attacker as about 20 years old with a boyish face. The crime rattled Sydney’s cabbies so badly that they petitioned the city for permission to carry guns—but to no avail.

Three months after Smillie’s death, his widow Jean gave birth to a son, John Junior.

For half a year, the case went nowhere. Then, in March 1936, police arrested a 17-year-old named Boyd Sinclair, who they said confessed to the killing.

Authorities charged him with murder, but before he could stand trial, doctors declared him insane and sent him to a mental institution. He remained there for nearly ten years, sometimes admitting to the murder and at other times denying it.

In 1946, amid mounting calls to determine whether Sinclair was responsible for Smillie’s death, the New South Wales legislature passed a law allowing a jury to decide if he was fit to stand trial. The jury ruled that he was.

Sinclair finally went to court in July 1946. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But within a month, doctors again certified him insane, and he was transferred from prison to a mental hospital.

In November 1971, Sinclair was released at last. He had spent 35 ½ years locked up. Soon after, he found a job—in a psychiatric hospital. He died in 2003 at the age of 85.

Above: Boyd Sinclair smiles after his release in 1971.

Recommendations

Above: A photo taken from the USS Santa Fe shows the USS Franklin listing after it was attacked on March 19, 1945. Scores of crew are on the deck of the crippled aircraft carrier. In a risky move, the Santa Fe pulled up alongside the Franklin and plucked 800 men to safety.

On March 19, 1945, a Japanese plane dropped two bombs on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin off the coast of Japan. The ensuing fires and explosions killed more than 800 men and crippled the ship – but it did not sink.

M. Glenn Ross is writing the forthcoming book Heroes By the Hundreds about the officers and sailors aboard the Franklin and the leadership lessons we can learn from them. The crew remains the most decorated in U.S. Navy history, yet their stories are largely unknown.

Glenn is documenting his progress in an e-newsletter. I have a soft spot for that period in U.S. history, so I look forward to Glenn’s bulletin every month.

You can sign up for free at mglennross.com.

Meet the Kellys by Chris Enss – Biography of “Machine Gun” Kelly and wife Kathryn, who gave her husband his first Thompson submachine gun and turned him into a Prohibition-era legend. Kathryn’s love for a criminal cost her 25 years behind bars – much like the woman at the center of our book, Madeline Webb.

Tremors in the Blood by Amit Katwala – Superbly written and researched story about the birth of the lie detector a century ago – and two murder cases that illustrated its serious flaws. One test helped acquit a man despite overwhelming evidence he arranged his wife’s killing. Another – performed in a “circus” atmosphere – sent a man to the electric chair.

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