Ned Kelly is a genuine Australian icon. Born in Tipperary, Ireland and shipped Down Under for stealing pigs, Kelly served out his sentence and stayed in Australia. Accusations of horse and cattle theft cemented the Kelly family’s dislike of law enforcement, and it wasn’t long before playing cat and mouse with the police turned into murder. Kelly was hanged at the Melbourne Jail on November 11, 1880.
Originally buried in the cemetery there, his remains were dug up and moved in 1929. It was probably then that his skull vanished—and no one’s really sure what happened to it. According to one story, the skull made the journey with the rest of his bones but was later dug up, used as a paperweight, and stolen again in the late 1970s.
According to that theory, the skull ended up with a farmer, who kept it in a Tupperware container on a riverbank before returning it in 2009. But a recent DNA comparison has experts convinced that the farmer’s skull isn’t Ned’s at all. A self-proclaimed witch in New Zealand now claims that one of the skulls in her alarmingly large collection is Ned’s. It’s also been speculated that the skull was taken by a noted phrenologist who was present at his autopsy. Or perhaps a Catholic clergyman ended up finding the skull and giving it a proper burial. There’s certainly no shortage of theories, but there is certainly no clear consensus as to where the skull ended up.
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