A Forensic Footnote to the Forrest River Debate

In the debate between myself, Professor Geoffrey Bolton and Dr Neville Green concerning the allegations of mass murder investigated by the 1926 Forrest River Royal Commission, carried in the “Ethics and the Practice of History” Volume 26/2010 of Studies in Western Australian History, Dr Neville Green disputed the testimony of Dr D.S. Mackenzie, Chief Resident Medical Officer at Perth Hospital.

My recent research concerning Dr Green’s claims in this aspect of the case might be of interest to historians.

Dr Mackenzie testified concerning forensic dimensions in the matter. It was alleged that the police patrol to capture Lumbia, the Aboriginal murderer of pastoralist Fredrick Hay, led by constables Dennis Regan and James St Jack, committed mass murder of other Aborigines during the pursuit and cremated their bodies in the open air en masse at three sites (although Lumbia was captured and brought back safely for trial).

At Q 2466 of the royal commission legal counsel for the two accused police officers, William Nairn, asked Dr Mackenzie if there was substantive scientific evidence concerning the amount of fuel required to cremate a human corpse in the situation alleged. That is, in the open air and, by implication, with the type of timber available. He replied that a “classic experiment” had been done twenty years prior by a Dr Golden in the US state of Wisconsin.

Based on the experiment, Dr Mackenzie reported the tonnage of wood he thought had been required to cremate a corpse. But he also noted that even after such severe burning there would always be two portions of the body that “one would almost certainly find in quite identifiable amounts”: teeth and parts of the temporal bone.

However, virtually none of the bone material adduced at the commission concerning the Forrest River allegations could be identified as human. In particular, not a single complete tooth was found. At one alleged cremation site no dental material of any description was recovered. (My detailed analysis of the forensic dimensions of the case can be found in my book Massacre Myth, chapters 5 to 7.)

In his contribution to the Volume 26 debate Dr Green clearly saw the significance of Dr Mackenzie’s testimony and my analysis of the forensic evidence overall. So he set out to try and discredit it, a reasonable approach given his historical convictions in the matter.

He noted that Dr Golden’s experiment was not recorded in any professional medical journals. Further, Dr Green’s extensive US academic contacts could find no evidence that a Dr Golden existed in Wisconsin genealogies, obituaries or in the register of practising physicians:

Neither the trial experiment nor Dr Golden as an expert witness, is listed in the massive volumes of American Jurisprudence held at Murdoch University and the experiment was not known to the Wisconsin State reference library, the Department of Criminology and Law Studies at Marquette University in Wisconsin, the American Academy of Forensic Science, the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Department, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Wisconsin Historical Society or recorded in the Wisconsin and USA undertaker archives.

Dr Green seems to have become so convinced as to the suspect nature of Dr Mackenzie’s testimony (and of Dr Golden’s very existence, apparently) that he asked at one stage, “Was McKenzie [sic] mistaken or did he, like other police witnesses, lie?” (Quadrant, July-August 2003, p. 42).

It appears that, as a result of Dr Green’s efforts, the Wikipedia entry concerning the Forrest River allegations in this detail reads: “An investigation found that no such experiment was ever conducted and that in fact Dr Golden did not exist.” This will no doubt become part of the many false claims and folkloric nonsense surrounding the case. It would not surprise me if it surfaces in university courses, too.

However, Dr Golden did exist, and Dr Mackenzie was not mistaken, nor did he lie in the matter. Dr John Golden hailed from Chicago. The experiment Dr Mackenzie referred to took place on January 23, 1906. The context was the investigation into the murder of a farmer, Michael McCarthy, by one Wenzel E. Kabat, who had cremated McCarthy’s body.

As the well-worn cliché goes, the journalist writes the first draft of history. The initial report on the trial and Dr Golden’s experiment appeared in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, a Wisconsin newspaper still publishing, on June 9, 1906, on the front page of its five o’clock edition. Dr Golden is described as an expert witness. A cadaver about the age and size of McCarthy was cremated on the site where Kabat burnt his victim. As Dr Mackenzie testified, Dr Golden said it took four and a half hours to consume the body. All that was left were bone fragments and teeth. Just as Dr Mackenzie testified, the paper reported:

The experiment was conducted in the presence of District Attorney Krugmeler, Assistant Attorney Ryan, Dr Nolan, Attorney F. Heinemann and Henry Glondemann. The fire started at 11.50 at night and at 4.20 the following morning the body was entirely cremated.

Subsequent testimony at Kabat’s trial was given by Dr G.A. Dorsey, an anthropologist and a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago. He identified the remnant bones and teeth from the fire that had consumed McCarthy’s body as human, those of an adult male between thirty and sixty years of age. McCarthy was forty years old. “Dr Dorsey described the bones and fragments in detail and exhibited to the jury a number that were indisputably and characteristically human,” the paper reported. Kabat was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In the Forrest River case, no such definitive positive testimony could be adduced by the medical experts called to comment on the forensic traces involved, though the circumstances and forensic material were very similar. Almost all of those traces were described as not of human origin. The main expert witness was Dr W.S. McGillivray, Chief Pathologist in the Perth Health Department, probably the most experienced medical man in the state at the time.

The Kabat case and Dr Golden’s experiment would surface again over the years, perhaps as applications for parole were reported, or simply as a function of morbid public interest in the historical case. On October 17, 1930, the Post-Crescent, published in Appleton, Wisconsin, revisited the detail (page 20). A decade later, on August 10, 1940, the Friday edition of the Milwaukee Journal outlined the murder and Dr Golden’s clinching experiment (page 16).

Pace Dr Green, it appears undeniable that Dr Golden’s forensic experiment did occur. Its implications for the forensic dimensions of the Forrest River allegations, as I argued in Massacre Myth, are clear.

As for the murderer Kabat, the Journal of the Proceedings of the Wisconsin Senate indicate he was given an unconditional pardon on January 1, 1941, after serving thirty-four years and six months in prison—largely on the basis of the evidence from Dr Golden’s experiment.