The Crime
On or about 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday March 4, 1959, Detective Ivan Clarke was called by Dalby Police to investigate a shooting incident. An indigenous man had shot another indigenous man in a laneway off Condamine Street, Dalby.
The shooter had suspected that his wife was having an affair with the man who resided at the local camp. She’d had enough of her husband’s accusations and left him… to live at the camp too.
The irate husband borrowed a rifle from a friend stating that he needed to shoot a horse with a broken leg and was given one round of ammunition with the rifle. He fired off that round on the way home to see if the rifle was functioning, knowing all the while that there was a box of ammunition in his bedroom.
Armed, he went to the camp. A third party tried to dissuade him, but after laying down his accusations, he shot the victim in the stomach from approximately three metres, then fled the scene on horseback.
The perplexing case of one bullet, two holes
Police were notified and the victim was conveyed to the Dalby Hospital where the attending doctor informed Detective Clark that there were two bullet entrance holes in his stomach. The bullets were lodged so close to the spine that it was deemed inadvisable to remove them. Both the offender who was later captured, and the witness to the incident, were vehement in their testimony that only one shot had been fired and would not deviate from their statements.
Clark wrote up his report and was later paraded before his Inspector who berated him for not being able to adequately interrogate the offender and the witness. Their statements conflicted with the medical evidence that two shots must have been fired.
Expert opinion sought
Clark travelled to Brisbane where he sought an expert opinion from a forensic scientist known to him – Detective Les Bardwell, who was the Officer in Charge of the Technical Division with the CIB. After hearing the story and doing a preliminary examination of the rifle, Bardwell asked Clark to come back to see him in an hour… he thought that he could prove what had happened.
Bardwell, who was a founding member of the Brisbane Pistol Shooting Association (photographed above), a sports shooter, champion marksman, gun expert and collector, had an idea as he brushed the barrel of the rifle with his fingertips. There was a slight bulge approximately 20 cm from the muzzle. He construed that there could only be one possibility for one shot to cause two bullet holes and went ahead to test his theory.
Testing a theory
There was a gun range in the basement of the CIB’s laboratory. Bardwell selected a .22 calibre single shot Slazenger rifle and pushed a .22 calibre bullet through the chamber with a push rod to a position approximately 20 cm from the muzzle end of the barrel. He then placed the rifle in a bench rest as a precaution against any possibility of an explosion. From a range of 3 metres, to match the crime scene, he fired at the target by remote control. This produced two holes approximately 5 cm apart.
Clark returned to the laboratory well under the requested hour and Bardwell, accordingly, repeated the test firing. The detective was astounded by the results but could not understand why… he was not aware that Bardwell had already pushed another .22 calibre bullet up through the barrel. Detective Bardwell then explained the scientific explanation of events which had occurred to him when he first detected the bulge in the barrel.
In conclusion
The bulging of the barrel was caused by a faulty round of ammunition with insufficient propellant charge for the bullet to clear the barrel. It was followed by a second round with standard propellant charge. The second bullet caused a build-up of pressure between the nose of the second bullet and the base of the obstructing bullet in the barrel. This caused the slight bulge in the barrel which could be detected by a finger touch.
Bardwell had no doubt that when the offender had test fired the rifle in the air, the round of ammunition had been faulty, and the bullet failed to exit from the barrel. When he fired at the victim, both bullets left the barrel.
On 28 May 1959, the offender was sent to prison for five years with hard labour.
Names of the victim and offender have been omitted from this account with respect. Many of Australia’s indigenous people have a strong tradition of not speaking the name of the dead as the spirit may be disturbed or called back to this world.
This story was inspired by Les Bardwell’s story ‘That’s Incredible,’ from his anthology of works titled ‘No Stone Unturned.’ It was researched and rewritten by Museum Assistant Debra Austin using the best archival resources available.
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“FROM the VAULT – Million-in-one Shot” by the Queensland Police Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode