The Mad Dog...

William Cyril ‘Mad Dog’ Moxley (1889-1933)

 

Moxley, occasionally known to his criminal associates as ‘Snowy’, was disliked by practically everybody. Although he tried to curry favour with lawless types as well as the police, all he managed to do was irritate both sides of the equation. From the early 1920s, Moxley was a determined thief, usually targeting warehouses and shops in the inner city area of Sydney. At the same time, he was a trusted ‘phizgig’, or informer, selling information to the police, especially Police Commissioner Bill MacKay. However, it wasn’t long before MacKay suspected that Moxley was selling police information to the criminals as well: with Frank Fahy on his tail, he was discovered and dropped from the police payroll.

In time Moxley became listed in the Court Records as an ‘habitual criminal’, a qualification which many crims dreaded as it meant their sentences could be left open-ended. At his first sentencing as an ‘habitual’ Moxley was given 4 years with no opportunity for early release.

Upon leaving prison he quickly returned to a life of crime becoming embroiled in an attempt to blow a safe during daylight hours at a bank in the southern Sydney suburb of Sutherland. As usual he decided to play both sides of the equation and leaked information about the raid to the police. In return, after the scheme failed and all the criminals were caught, Moxley was left to go free. After their release in 1930, his associates in the bungled crime confronted him while driving down King Street in Newtown and one of them fired a pistol shot into the side of his head: he survived, after being rushed to hospital, but only after hundreds of fragments of lead had been picked out of his neck and skull.

Things got worse. Moxley began work as a timber-gatherer in the bush near Bringelly, south west of Sydney. One day in 1932, he surprised a couple making love near his camp. The man tried to assault Moxley and Moxley clubbed him with his shotgun barrel. He then badly beat the man and tied him to a tree while he beat and raped the woman. After this he made them lead him to where they had parked their car: he shot the man in the head, then walked the woman into the bush, shot her dead and buried her. He was arrested several days later after having been spotted driving their car around Sydney.

At the trial, Bill MacKay made a formal statement on Moxley’s behalf to the effect that Moxley’s gun wound to the head had altered his personality: previously, Moxley had been relatively upbeat, but had become grim and dour afterwards. Moxley himself claimed to have no knowledge of the events in the forest after the man had first attacked him. The jury was not swayed however and Moxley was hanged for his crimes in Long Bay Gaol in 1933. In the police mug shots book of the period, someone wrote the words “Well Dead” alongside his picture.