George Sturges was driving bullocks back from a creek near the Ironstone Bridge over the Wingecarribee River, about seven miles from Berrima, on the morning of February 21, 1842, when he found a man's body under a heap of broken bushes. The dead man wore only a shirt and a temperance medal on a string around his neck, and his head had been beaten in. He was identified in Berrima as Kearns Landregan, twenty-seven, an Irish laborer who had been working for an innkeeper in the town and had set out a few days earlier to visit his brother, an assigned convict at Stonequarry. He was said to be a sober, quiet man of saving habits, and he had left with forty pounds.
Four days later John Chalker, who kept the Woolpack Inn north of Berrima, came into town and told the police he could find the killer. Landregan had eaten dinner at the Woolpack the day before he died, in the company of a small man with a horse and cart. Chalker took Sergeant Freer and Chief Constable Chapman out to a farm at Wombat Brush, on the old Goulburn road, and pointed out the man, who gave his name as John Dunleavy. Landregan's brother Patrick later identified a belt found at the farm as his. The police also found stolen property, and they found out that Dunleavy was John Lynch, a runaway convict well known in the district, who had been tried in Sydney six years earlier for murder and acquitted.
The farm raised a harder question. It had been worked until the previous winter by John Mulligan, an emancipated convict of about sixty-one, with Bridget Macnamara, his reputed wife, and her two children, John and Mary. They were supposed to have left suddenly, and nobody had heard from them since. A neighbor named Gordon told the police that some months before he had called at the house expecting to find young John Macnamara and had found Lynch instead, tending a large fire; Lynch told him the boy was in some trouble at Goulburn and the others had gone up to see about it. When the Police Magistrate had the ground under that fire dug over, the searchers turned up a quantity of potatoes, several human bones, and a tooth that seemed to be a young girl's. Told of the find, Lynch said that no one could swear they were Mulligan's bones, or even the bones of a white man.
Lynch was an Irishman from Cavan, born in about 1812 by the convict records or 1813 by other accounts, five feet three, with small dark whiskers and, the Sydney Herald's Berrima correspondent thought, rather good looking. At nineteen he had been convicted at Cavan of obtaining goods under false pretenses and sentenced to transportation for life; his father, Owen, was transported with him on the Dunvegan Castle in 1832 and died in the jail hospital in Sydney two years later. John was assigned as a plowman to James Atkinson's Oldbury Farm near Berrima.
The first killing was at Oldbury. On March 4, 1836, another assigned servant there, Thomas Smith, who had just been released after being held on a charge of losing his master's saddle and bridle, walked out of his hut and did not come back. His body was found days later in the hollow of a fallen tree about a mile away, beside two heavy pieces of wood clotted with blood and hair. Lynch and a fellow convict, John Williamson, were tried for his murder in the Supreme Court in Sydney that August. The case rested on a hutmate, Michael Hoy, who said Lynch believed Smith had informed on him for a robbery and flogging of the overseer, George Barton. Hoy was shaken on cross-examination, Barton's own evidence was thrown out because he appeared to have dined too well, and the jury acquitted both men. Lynch confessed to the killing six years later. Some accounts, including the judge's sentencing address in 1842, put the Smith case in 1835.
The years between were spent in irons in various places, among them a stockade gang at Newcastle. There, on the night of June 27, 1839, he was stabbed in the chest and side and swore that three other prisoners, Thomas Barry, Thomas Bolson and Charles Wilson, had held him down under a blanket and done it. The three were sentenced to death in Sydney, and the sentences were commuted to transportation to a penal settlement. Before he died Lynch admitted that the wounds were self-inflicted and the three men innocent.
He came back to the Berrima district in about July 1841, a runaway. Mulligan had once fenced stolen goods for him, and Lynch went to collect his share and got nothing. From Oldbury he stole eight bullocks and drove them toward Sydney. On the Razorback Range he fell in with a carrier, Edmund Ireland, forty-five, a transported highway robber from Reigate in Surrey who had his ticket of leave, and Ireland's helper, an Aboriginal boy whose name was never recorded. They were driving a loaded dray and team belonging to the pastoralist Thomas Cowper. By Lynch's own account the plan formed that night. In the morning he killed the boy and then Ireland, each with a tomahawk blow to the back of the head, and hid their bodies under stones in a rocky cleft. When he met Cowper on the Liverpool road he told him his driver had broken a leg and the boy had taken him to the hospital at Parramatta, then drove the team night and day to Sydney to sell the load before anyone could check.
On the way back he joined a horse team driven by William Fraser, about fifty, and his son William, about twenty, from the Illawarra. At their camp at Bargo Brush a mounted constable rode in during the night asking, in close detail, about a missing dray of Mr. Cowper's. Lynch lay under the dray, "listening and trembling with fear," until one of the Frasers said they had seen no such thing. In the morning he drove his own stolen bullocks off into the bush, told the Frasers they had strayed, and rode on with them. On August 16, 1841, at Cordeaux's Flat, two and a half miles from Berrima, he went out with the son to look for the horses and killed him with one blow, came back and killed the father as he bent down, and buried them both.
Two days later he was at Mulligan's again, with the Frasers' team. He demanded thirty pounds and was offered nine. He fetched two bottles of rum from Gray's Black Horse Inn and "treated the whole family, taking care not to drink much himself." Then, since it was a cold night, he offered to cut wood if eighteen-year-old John Macnamara would wheel it in, and killed him in the dark with a backhanded swing of the axe. When the boy did not come back, his mother grew suspicious and told Mulligan to get his gun. Lynch came up behind the old man and killed him, tripped Bridget Macnamara as she came back from finding her son's body and killed her, and went into the hut, where thirteen-year-old Mary was. He said in his confession that he did not want to kill her but knew that if he did not she would hang him. He gave her ten minutes to pray, raped her, and killed her. He burned the four bodies on a pile. "I never seen anything like it," he said. "They burned as if they were so many bags of fat."
He then made the farm his. He placed a notice in the Sydney Gazette, published on September 9, 1841, in Mulligan's name, warning the public that his wife had absconded and that he would not be answerable for her debts. He wrote letters as Mulligan to the farmer's creditors saying he had left the district, called on the owner of the land, William Smith of the Angel Inn near Parramatta, and had the lease transferred to "Dunleavy." He hired a couple from Appin, Terrence and Catherine Barnett, who had known him by his real name, to work the place, because, he said, he knew them to be simpletons. By December the colonial government was offering twenty-five pounds for information about the missing carriers; Cowper's dray had been found hidden in the bush. Then, coming back from Sydney in February, Lynch hired Landregan on the road for fourteen pounds for six months' fencing, decided he regretted it, and killed him beside the fire on the morning of February 20 with two blows from the back of a tomahawk.
He was tried at the Berrima Circuit Court on Monday, March 21, 1842, before the Chief Justice, Sir James Dowling, with the acting Attorney-General, Roger Therry, prosecuting. The court had already refused his request to sell property from the farm to pay for his defense; Therry pointed out that the property belonged to the people he was suspected of killing, and that a convict under a life sentence could own nothing. Lynch asked for a full and fair trial against the prejudice raised by the crimes laid to him and then cross-examined most of the witnesses himself, with more skill, one reporter wrote, than anyone had expected. The trial ran twelve hours before a crowded courtroom, many of the spectators women who had traveled more than thirty miles. At ten that night the jury found him guilty. On March 23 Dowling put on the black cap and told him that "the trade in blood which has so long marked your career, is at last terminated," concluded that "avarice seems to have been the sole motive," and sentenced him to hang. Lynch insisted that the Barnetts, held throughout, had nothing to do with any of it, and said he would reveal nothing.
He kept that promise until the day before his execution, when he made a full confession to the Reverend Summers, who had been attending him, and then to the Police Magistrate, George Bowen. That evening he was taken to the farm and showed where he had buried what was left of the Mulligans. He was hanged on the morning of Friday, April 22, 1842, on a temporary gallows behind the new Berrima jail, the same day as another condemned man, Patrick Kleighran. He showed no fear, the Herald reported, and though his lips moved, it seemed more mechanical than penitent.
The confession, published in the Sydney papers within days, is the source of most of what is known about each killing, and it held up where it could be tested. The Frasers were found near Cordeaux's Flat where he said they would be, and on May 4, 1842, father and son were buried in the churchyard of All Saints at Sutton Forest, on the same day as the remains of John Mulligan, Bridget Macnamara, John and Mary. On May 10 searchers at Razorback found bones the coroner's register recorded as those of a white man and an Aboriginal boy, supposed to be Mr. Cowper's drayman and his helper. Landregan had been buried at Sutton Forest in February. The details vary in later retellings: Landregan also appears as Kernes and as Terence, the Mulligan children's ages as sixteen and fourteen, and the man who found Landregan's body as the carrier Hugh Tunney himself. On September 8, 2019, the Berrima District Historical and Family History Society unveiled a plaque at All Saints marking the graves of six of the dead: Thomas Smith, John Mulligan, Bridget Macnamara, John and Mary Macnamara, and Kearns Landregan.