Theories
Up to this point it had been taken for granted that Barclay had been killed by Bamford. Speculation now followed the line “that Bamford shot Barclay and afterwards Bamford was shot by some friend of the manager, in revenge, in the good old wild west manner.”
Police suspicion naturally fell on Harry Smith, but there was no direct evidence. In addition, he would have had to carry out a complex deception about the discovery of Barclay’s body, and he was present at the discovery of Bamford's. It is also unlikely he would have knowingly allowed the body of his friend Jim Barclay to lie where the murderer left it and be disturbed by animals for three weeks. He was not charged. Writing in 1980, Harry Stephenson seems to favour the theory that Smith “might have had an answer to the mystery” and noted that older cattlemen were still reluctant to discuss the case.
A second theory was that the two men had been victims of stock thieves. Wallace Mortimer suggests Barclay and later Bamford were perhaps killed by horse thieves, and cites “old timers are adamant in their belief such was the reason.” The Police report refutes this, pointing out that the only stock missing from Wonnangatta was Bamfords horse that had been recovered on Mount Howitt.
Wallace Mortimer dismissed any significance of the right shoe and a hat found placed near the crotch of Barclay's body. According to Mortimer, the idea that this implied a motive for the killing (Barclay, a ladies man, killed by a jealous husband) came from a novelist, "who had obviously done little or no research into the matter."
Read more about this topic: Wonnangatta Murders
Famous quotes containing the word theories:
“Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)