Thomas Johnson

Thomas William Johnson (1898 – 23 January 1939) murdered two residents of a boarding house in the delicensed Windsor Castle Hotel in Dunolly, Victoria, in October 1938. He was an itinerant labourer with a record of violence and petty crime. Johnson confessed to the brutal killings, but at his trial he pleaded not guilty for reason of insanity. He was convicted and executed at Pentridge Prison in January 1939. Johnson was the fourth of eleven people to be hanged at Pentridge Prison after the closure of Melbourne Gaol in 1924.

Biography Early life Johnson was born in Tasmania (possibly Burnie) in March 1898. He was from a family of thirteen children, nine girls and four boys. When Johnson was a child (his sister Lucy later recalled), he was prone to "outbursts of violent temper after which he did not remember anything". On one occasion, when Johnson was about ten years of age, he hit his father with a knife hone and then kicked him. By 1925 Johnson was living in Victoria. On 3 February 1925 Johnson appeared before the Rainbow Court of Petty Sessions, charged with having, on the day before at the Commonwealth Hotel in Rainbow, unlawfully destroyed a billiard tablecloth and twelve cues, the property of the licensee, S. H. Patterson. Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to two months' imprisonment.

On 16 June 1925 Johnson was sentenced at Ararat to six months hard labour for "wilfully malicious damage to property"; he was initially detained in Ballarat Gaol, from where he was transferred to Pentridge Prison in suburban Melbourne. In November 1925 Johnson was transferred to Castlemaine Gaol. Four weeks later, in early December 1925, he was transferred to the McLeod prison farm on French Island in Western Port. On 10 November 1926 Johnson was released on parole by the Indeterminate Sentences Board (in the belief that prospects for his reform were sufficient to justify such an action).

The assault at Toolamba In early-December 1926 Johnson met a man named Joseph Corp in Melbourne and the two decided to go fruit-picking together. They travelled by rail to Seymour and then walked the 37 miles to Toolamba in the Goulburn Valley (eight miles south of Shepparton), where they found work picking fruit on William Pyke's orchard. Johnson and Corp camped on Pyke's land, sharing the same tent. On Sunday, 2 January 1927, the pair spent the day at the camp; at seven o'clock in the evening Johnson left to walk to Toolamba, where he participated in a card game and lost money. He returned just after eleven o'clock that night and settled down for the night. Joseph Corp had five pounds in cash in his trousers pocket, and used the trousers as a pillow. At just after five o'clock the following morning Corp woke up with his head and bedding covered in blood after having been struck with a shifting spanner. The blow left a jagged wound on his upper left temple and fractured his skull. His trousers were found on the other side of the tent, the five pounds missing from the pocket. Johnson had left, leaving behind his belongings, including his hat and some clothes.

Pyke bandaged Corp's wound and conveyed him to the Mooroopna police station and then to the nearby hospital. Later the same day Johnson was spotted at Tatura by Senior-constable Burke. He gave his name as "Smith" and denied he had been at Pyke's orchard. When the Mooroopna police arrived, Johnson was taken by car to Pyke's orchard where Mrs. Pyke identified the man as "Corp's tent mate". He was taken before the Police Magistrate and committed for trial in the Melbourne Supreme Court on 15 February. The Windsor Castle Hotel, located on the corner of Broadway and Hardy streets in Dunolly, had lost its license in June 1912 when the Licenses Reduction Board delicensed seven hotels in and around Dunolly. The building had become run down and by the 1930s was operating as a low-rent boarding house.

Johnson was one of five men living at the Windsor Castle when the murders occurred.

Further information about the events preceding the murders were later provided by witnesses at the coronial inquest and Johnson's subsequent trial. Lancelot Cazneau, a pensioner and resident of the Windsor Castle, gave evidence at the coroner's inquest that he had previously lent his axe to Johnson to split wood. On the morning of the murder Gray, Bunney and Johnson had been seen together, drinking at the bar of the Railway Hotel in Dunolly, together with Cazneau and a pensioner named William Alexander. After retiring for six hours the jury delivered a guilty verdict. The judge then sentenced Johnson to death for the murders of Charles Bunney and Robert Gray.

The date of Johnson's execution was set for 23 January 1939. Groups opposed to capital punishment began to urge the State government to grant a reprieve for Johnson. On 17 January a deputation met with Henry Bailey, the attorney-general; the group was led by the State opposition leader, John Cain, and was made up of representatives of the Labor Party, the Trades Hall Council and the Churches of Christ. Members maintained that "hanging was not a deterrent to murder and was repugnant to the Australian people". Attorney-General Bailey was unmoved, stating that the Cabinet had already considered the matter and "the law shall take its course".

Efforts to stop or postpone the execution continued until late into the night before the appointed day. Johnson was hanged at Pentridge Prison, Coburg, on 23 January 1939. On the morning of the hanging, when the prisoner was asked by the sheriff whether he had anything to say before the sentence of death was carried out, Johnson "indicated that he wished the execution to proceed". The preliminary legal formalities were gone through in Johnson's cell (not on the scaffold as had been the previous custom). No clergyman attended the execution (according to the wishes of the condemned man).

Aftermath In July 1939 the delicensed Windsor Castle Hotel at Dunolly, the scene of the murders of Bunney and Gray nine months previously, was destroyed by fire. A resident on the opposite corner to the old hotel noticed a blaze in one of the rooms. He ran to the end of the building and smashed open a door to alert Charles Cazneau, the only occupant at the time. The two-storey building burned for three hours, during which the front wall crashed onto the footpath.

Victims Robert McCord Gray – born about 1865; married Emily Sheridan in 1898 at Hillston, New South Wales; living at 'Nithsdale', Hillston; the couple had three children born at Hillston between 1899 and 1906. At the time of his death Gray was recorded as a "prospector and old-age pensioner", living in a room at the Windsor Castle boarding house at Dunolly. Robert Gray was murdered by Johnson on 3 October 1938 at Dunolly, aged about 73 years. Charles Adam Bunney – born in 1877 at Gobur, in north-east Victoria, the son of Adam Bunney and Matilda (née Nolan). Bunney served in the Boer War in 1901–2 with the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles, during which he was taken as a prisoner-of-war by the Boer forces; he managed to escape and return to service. By 1914 he was working as a carpenter. He married Hettie Eliza Millard in 1914 in Victoria; a son, Charles Gavin Bunney, was born in 1915. Bunney enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in August 1914 (D Company, 5th Battalion A.I.F.); he served at Gallipoli in 1915; promoted to lance-corporal in March 1916; wounded in action (left forearm) in June 1916; court-martialled for drunkenness at Boulogne in July 1916; rejoined his unit in Belgium in September 1916; served in France in 1917; furloughed to England in June 1918; returned to Australia aboard the Boonah, arriving in Melbourne in September 1918; discharged from the A.I.F. as medically unfit ("nervous debility"). In 1931 the family was living at Ferntree Gully; by 1937 Bunney was living at Dunolly; his wife, Hettie Bunney, died in 1937 at Hawthorn. At the time of his death Bunney was recorded as a "returned soldier pensioner", living in a room at the Windsor Castle boarding house at Dunolly. Charlie Bunney was murdered by Johnson on 3 October 1938 at Dunolly, aged about 61 years.