During the 1850s gold rush, the Wonnangatta cattle station was one of the most remote Australian outposts. By 1914, the station’s original owners were gone, and new owners appointed a man named James Barclay to manage it. It was a lonely posting, but Barclay didn’t seem to care, having already lost his wife to tuberculosis.
Eventually, Barclay hired a cook named John Bamford. Bamford was clearly erratic and hot-tempered and Barclay was cautioned against his choice, but once Bamford got to the station, everything seemed to go well. However, by the new year there was no sign of either man, and the nearest neighbors started to get worried. A few days of searching turned up Barclay’s body, poorly buried after he was shot in the back. It seemed clear that the cook had murdered him—until Bamford’s body was found buried a few miles away. He had been shot in the head.
To add to the mystery, detectives sent out from Melbourne made a startling discovery. It was a long ride out to the crime scene, and they attempted to fix themselves something to eat once they arrived. When the food turned an unsettling color, they found that a jar marked “pepper” was actually full of strychnine.
To this day, no one knows what happened to the two men, or why their pepper had been replaced with poison. Theories range from a confrontation with cattle thieves to a run-in with a jealous husband, but nothing has ever been proven.
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