Australia’s favorite cop killer will finally be properly buried, 130 years later

Ned Kelly murdered three police officers in Australia during the 1870s and was hung in 1880, sometime this month he’ll finally be properly buried, but not everyone is happy.

“He was an outlaw, a thief and, unfortunately for my family, a murderer,” said Mick Kennedy, a police officer near Melbourne whose great grandfather, Sergeant Michael Kennedy, was shot dead by Kelly in 1878. “My great grandmother was left a widow with six children and there was no public service for her.”

Ned’s remains were found in a mass grave in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison, in 2009. Most Americans have never heard of Ned Kelly but in Australia the man is a legend. And just who was he?

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First, a bit about his father, nicknamed Red, born in Ireland and a convicted criminal. His court records were destroyed but it is suspected his crime was stealing two pigs. Red was sentenced to seven years penal servitude in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. Afterward he moved to Victoria, got a farm job and married the farmer’s 18 year-old daughter. They had seven children; Ned, born in either 1854 or 1855, was the oldest son. When Ned was 11, Red was arrested for killing a neighbor’s calf. Given the option of a 25 pound fine or six months hard labor he chose the hard labor, because he was broke. It ruined his health and led to his death. Ned never forgot how harshly the police treated his dad.

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At age 14, Ned was charged with the assault and robbery of a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook. Fook said that as he was passing the Kelly house Ned beat him with a long bamboo stick and robbed him of 10 shillings. But the Kelly’s claimed Fook had asked for a drink of water and when they gave him creek water instead of rainwater became enraged and hit Ned with the bamboo stick. Ned sat in jail for a week but the police couldn’t find an interpreter and eventually the case was dismissed.

A few years later he got in a fight with a man named Jeremiah McCormack, who had accused one of Ned’s friends of using his horse without permission. To get even Ned sent McCormack’s childless wife a note with a pair of calves’ testicles. For this stunt he was sentenced to three months’ hard labor. When he returned home he met Isaiah “Wild” Wright, who was as much trouble as his name suggests. Wild rode into town on a stolen chestnut mare but while staying with the Kelly’s it went missing. Sometime later Ned found the mare and was approached by a police constable who recognized the horse as stolen property and arrested him. Ned got three years hard labor; the crime, “feloniously receiving a horse”. Upon his release him and Wild allegedly fought a bare-knuckle boxing match that lasted 20 rounds.

In 1878, Ned became involved in a cattle rustling operation with the children of his mother’s new husband, a Californian named George King. Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick showed up at the Kelly house to question them about some stolen cattle. The Kelly’s claimed that Fitzpatrick made a pass at Ned’s sister, inspiring Ned’s mother to smash his hand with a coal shovel. Fitzpatrick insisted the wound was caused by a bullet. His word ruled and Ned’s mother and sisters were convicted of attempted murder. Ned, a brother and some friends went into hiding in the Wombat Ranges. A police posse was fast on their trail but Ned and his brother, figuring their chances at escaping alive were slim, ambushed them, killing three officers. An award equivalent to almost half a million Australian dollars in today’s currency was put on Ned’s head. Over the next few months his gang robbed a series of banks and stayed on the lam. In 1879 he issued The Jerilderie Letter, which famously paints the Australian police as crooked racists with a grudge against Irish Catholics like himself:

A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him, in the first place he is a rogue in his heart but too cowardly to follow it up without having the force to disguise it.

In June of 1880 Ned’s gang was raided by police at the Glenrowan Inn. The gang members each were wearing nearly 100 pounds of homemade armor, thick enough to stop a bullet. Ned was shot once in the helmet and twice in his body, then repeatedly in the legs, which were unarmored. He survived but the rest of his gang perished in the raid, including Joe Byrne, shot in the thigh while at the bar pouring himself a glass of whiskey. Ned was convicted of first degree murder. Some 30,000 people supposedly signed a petition requesting his life be spared. On November 11, 1880, he was hung.

With a proper funeral at last at hand, nearly 131 years to the day, Ned’s family is overjoyed. “Our family, like every family, likes to be able to bury their own family members,” said Anthony Griffiths, a great grandson of Ned’s sister. “Our aim is to give him a dignified funeral.”