When law enforcement first came for Ned Kelly, his brother Dan was the first to join him in the outback. Along with Steve Hart and Joe Byrne, Dan become a key member of the notorious Kelly Gang. The gang met its end after a famous shoot-out outside a hotel in Glenrowan, during which they donned homemade metal suits of armor. Ned was captured after being shot in the legs, while Joe Byrne was killed by a shot to the groin. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were found dead inside after a fire broke out in the hotel. Even the official story is uncertain about what happened to them, and it’s never been clear whether they were killed by the police or committed suicide.
But according to others, Dan Kelly survived the shoot-out—the two bodies recovered were simply unfortunates who had been drinking in the hotel at the time of the fire. Although a Kelly sister identified one of the bodies as her brother by his irregular teeth, Ned Kelly himself later hinted that there was no actual proof that his brother had been killed.
In 1933, a man who had been living under the name James Ryan approached a newspaper office and claimed to be the real Dan Kelly. He claimed that he had escaped the fire, waited for his burns to heal, and eventually ended up living in a hut in Queensland. The confession became a massive story, and people who had known the Kelly family were never able to successfully disprove his claims. The supposed Dan Kelly spent decades insisting that his brother had been innocent of the horse theft charges that had first gotten him into trouble. He claimed that was why he had come forward—he thought the statute of limitations was up, and he wanted to set the record straight about his brother.
Ryan died on July 29, 1948, still insisting that he was really Dan Kelly.
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