Read Online Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly by Sue Bursztynski - Free Book Online Page A

suspicious and checked out the serial numbers, just in case.

MURRAY BERESFORD ROBERTS

    CON ARTIST

    H e was born in New Zealand in 1919 and his name was Murray Roberts … or was it John Cook? John Jackson? How about Sir Leonard Jackson? Lord Russell?
    This man used a lot of names during his life of deceit. The name he was born with though, was Murray Beresford Roberts and he spent his first 27 years in New Zealand. He began to study medicine at the University of Otago, but never bothered to finish his degree.
    That didn’t stop him from practising medicine. In 1941 he worked as a locum, a doctor who covers for another doctor who is busy, sick or on holidays. He was caught out by the authorities and fined 50 pounds.
    That didn’t put Murray off; next, he posed as a high-ranking army doctor.
    Perhaps he decided that he’d fooled all the people he could in New Zealand. Whatever the reason, he moved to Australia after the war in 1946.
    Murray managed to get several jobs by claiming to have a lot of university degrees he didn’t have. In Western Australia, in 1949, he married his first wife, a typist called Dorothy. For some reason, he used a fake name, John Malcolm Cook. The marriage lasted six years, with one son. It would be interesting to know what he told his wife about how he was earning a living.

    Murray just couldn’t help himself. He liked playing doctors and teachers (he didn’t have teaching qualifications, any more than he had medical ones). He was good-looking and spoke beautifully. Everyone believed him. Even some people who had worked with him still liked him after they found out the truth.
    In Melbourne, during 1954, he made money under the name of ‘Professor Sir Leonard Jackson’, saying he was a prosecutor in the Petrov royal commission, which was checking out spying in Australia. When he needed to speak to a prisoner in Goulburn jail, in New South Wales, he pretended to be a surgeon. He even offered to do a muscle graft at the Goulburn Base Hospital the next day.
    Luckily for the poor patient, he never turned up!
    In Tasmania, in 1956, he took 50 pounds from a truck driver as a deposit on a house. The trouble was, he didn’t actually own the house he was selling.
    His next scam was in Sydney, where he posed as the new Governor-General of Australia! It worked long enough to get him a luxury hotel suite, but not long enough. After doing prison time, he was shipped back to Tasmania to stand trial for the cons he’d carried out there.
    Unfortunately, Murray still couldn’t see that he’d done anything wrong – and he couldn’t resist playing more roles. In Brisbane, in 1958, he claimed to be a judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court. He left for Sydney without paying his hotel bill and was charged with theft.
    Still, he hung around in Sydney, where he posed as a Baron Alfred von Krupp and promised Manly a brand new car park. The Sydney public was amused, but the court wasn’t; he got another jail sentence.
    By this time, he’d been divorced from Dorothy for five years, and married again, to a woman called Beryl. Poor Beryl didn’t know her husband was called Murray Roberts. She thought he was John Jackson. Again, the court was not amused. In March, he got another prison term, for lying to the marriage registrar, and soon after, a divorce.
    Later in his life, his scams became nastier. In 1962, he played the role of a doctor again – Lord Porter, doctor to the royal family – and this time, he got 400 pounds out of his victim as payment for a cancer operation. He managed to get as far as Darwin before he was caught and brought back. This time, the jail sentence was four years.
    Naughty Murray hadn’t been out of jail for long when he proposed marriage to a woman called Joyce and sweet-talked 4000 pounds out of her. Luckily for Joyce, he was caught before he could get far.
    After turning to drink, he died in 1974, choking on his own vomit in a New Zealand hotel room.
    Was Murray Roberts a success