The headless remains of Australia’s legendary criminal Ned Kelly has finally been identified. And this might be a good time to refresh our memories about the folk hero.
Kelly was the leader of a band of bank robbers in Australia’s Victoria state in the 19th Century. He and his gang killed policemen and robbed banks till he was hanged in 1880 at age 25 and then no one knew anything about his body.
Rumours said his body was in the mass grave at the Old Melbourne Gaol with the corpses of 33 others. The prison shut down in 1929 and it was decided that the bodies of executed inmates will be exhumed and moved to the Pentridge Prison.
At the exhumation a mob of onlookers stole some remains, including what was believed to be Kelly’s skull, which was later discovered and displayed at the Old Melbourne Gaol that had turned into a historic site.
But the skull was stolen again in 1978 and on November 11, 2009, Baxter, a farmer from Western Australia handed over to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine a skull with the inscription E.Kelly (Ned’s real name was Edward) without saying how he found the skull. Then through CT Scans and X-Rays, anthropological and historical data, and DNA analysis, a skeleton from the bunch at Pentridge was identified as Kelly’s but most of the head was still missing.
Kelly was known to be something like Robin Hood or Jesse James in folklore, as the man who fought British colonial officers and helped the rural Irishmen. His father was an Irish convict.
