Hanging minister caught by the shed!

Inner Sydney was a terrible place to grow up in the 1880s, but Tom Ley was tougher. Despite living pretty well as a street urchin he delivered groceries and sold newspapers and studied hard at night school because he wanted to cast off his working-class origins. And it worked – by the time he was twenty, Ley could pass as a gentleman.

He lied about his age, raising it so he could marry a wealthy older woman named Lewie Vernon. Not only did he lie about his age but he lied his way into the New South Wales Parliament. In 1917 he campaigned against the evils of alcohol, calling himself 'Lemonade Ley' and voters fell for it. But once he won his seat, he sold out, because all along 'Lemonade Ley' was in the pay of a brewing company. By the mid-1920s, Ley was riding high. He was appointed Minister for Justice, he earned hatred with his brutal enthusiasm for capital punishment – earning a new name as the 'Hanging Minister'.

By 1925, Ley had his ambitions trained on the prime ministership of Australia. Ley's campaign was to have deadly consequences for the man who held the seat he wanted, Fred McDonald. He tried to bribe McDonald to ‘run dead’ in the election and McDonald told the papers - Ley vigorously denied it but the election went ahead and Ley won. A defeated McDonald pursued Ley with allegations of bribery. But the wealthy Ley retaliated by threatening to ruin him with a defamation suit. McDonald backed down, apologised and signed a document exonerating Ley. But McDonald changed his mind again and said he would charge Ley with bribery after all. On 15 April 1926 Fred McDonald simply disappeared and his body was never found.

Another politician fell prey to Ley some months later. He was Hyman Goldstein. Goldstein had invested heavily in a business scheme of Ley's to manufacture poison. Goldstein didn't realise just how poisonous the scheme would become. Ley had set up a company to rid Australia of prickly pear, the weed that threatened the nation's farmers. But the Prickly Pear company went bust because Ley had stolen the funds and spent the money on a holiday with his mistress. Goldstein brought a suit against him for fraud. On the evening before the case started, Hyman Goldstein left his home at twilight for a stroll on the cliffs. He never came home.

Ley beat a hasty retreat to England just a few months after Goldstein's death. As the years passed, Ley grew even richer. But then, sexual jealousy brought him unstuck - he accused his mistress of having an affair with John Mudie, a barman half her age. Mad with jealousy, he paid to have Mudie kidnapped and killed. When Mudie's body was discovered in a chalk pit, eager journalists dug up every last detail of Ley's public life back in Australia. In May 1947, convicted of murder, Ley was sent to Broadmoor.

He died from a stroke, alone and ruined. His only legacy is a trolley-load of boxes housed in the National Library in Canberra - a strange assortment of letters, legal documents, clippings and photos rescued over twenty years ago from a garden shed. They include the confession that McDonald signed, and chequebooks that show sums paid to known criminals just before the disappearances of Goldstein and Mudie.

Old shed photograph by tomhe, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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