The Twin Bandits
January 09, 2025 at 04:30PM
Andrew Dubbins | The Atavist Magazine | December 2024 | 1,226 words (5 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 158, “The After Dark Bandit.”
The Manhunt
The light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia nestled between mountains and surrounded by dense forest. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. Earlier that afternoon, on April 27, 1979, a bank robber shot Ray Koch, a beloved veteran of the local police force. Two bullets ripped holes in Koch’s stomach and intestines, forcing surgeons to remove his spleen. He lost a dangerous amount of blood, and nobody was sure if “Kochy,” as he was affectionately known, would make it.
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Brear, who worked for the state of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, passed through the swarm of blue-uniformed police officers collecting evidence, then had a look at the bank’s CCTV footage. It showed the thief running into the bank carrying a Browning pistol and wearing a black leather jacket, black gloves, and a mask bearing the face of an old man. Brear thought he knew who the perpetrator was: the After Dark Bandit.
The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname.
Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart. Newspaper reporters theorized that he must be driving a very fast car. Brear and Beever had attempted to reenact one of the back-to-back jobs, but they couldn’t make it from one location to the other in time.
Just as unusual were the bandit’s mood swings. According to witnesses, he could be cheeky and chatty on one job, menacing and severe on the next. Early in his career, the After Dark Bandit had been cautious and deliberate, taking small sums from off-track betting storefronts, known as TAB agencies. But in recent months he’d grown bolder, emptying banks, sometimes in broad daylight. So audacious was the bandit that he’d robbed the CBC branch in Heathcote twice in the previous nine months. As he entered the bank on the third occasion, on April 27, the ledger keeper recognized him; she could be seen in security footage standing arms akimbo like a peeved schoolmarm. The bandit had stolen her orange Datsun to use as his getaway vehicle the last time he was there. He took it again this time, after shooting Koch and packing up the money he’d come for.
The bandit ditched the Datsun at the edge of town and was then seen speeding on a motorcycle into a forested area outside Heathcote. Law enforcement descended on the spot from far and wide; they came from various branches of the state’s police force, including an elite SWAT team and a dog squad. A police helicopter and two fixed-wing aircraft led an aerial search. Police on motorbikes were tasked with covering the dense, rugged terrain of the forest, where thickets of eucalyptus and pine covered abandoned goldfields. “We are very hopeful that he is in the area and we will get him,” a detective told journalists. “He has used a firearm, and we must treat him as very dangerous.”
The following morning, senior constable Rick Hasty was cruising in his police van through the city of Bendigo, 40 minutes northwest of Heathcote. Hasty was a friend of Koch’s and had just visited the wounded cop’s wife. He would have preferred to be helping with the manhunt, but was ordered to remain on duty in Bendigo, part of a skeleton crew of officers keeping an eye on the place. Nobody expected the robber to turn up there, since doing so would require snaking his way through the nearly 200 officers searching for him, a maneuver considered too bold even for the After Dark Bandit.
While sitting in traffic, Hasty spotted a man walking with a blue suitcase and sporting a red Zapata mustache. Hasty didn’t have any particular reason to suspect that this was the man his colleagues were looking for, but he had a feeling. “I just knew it was him,” Hasty told me. He watched the man cross the road and enter a dead-end alley. He parked his van and got out. As he walked into the alley, the man came toward him.
“What’s your name?” Hasty asked.
“Peter Morgan,” the man replied. “Why?”
“Because I run this fucking town and I want to know who’s in it.”
Hasty wasn’t carrying a gun, nor did he see any lumps in Morgan’s pockets suggesting a weapon. He felt confident that he could take the man if needed. Tough and fit, Hasty competed as a professional cyclist and had been a farmer before a drought pushed him onto the police force to make ends meet.
“Where you going?” Hasty asked.
“Going to Melbourne to watch footy.”
“What’s in the case?”
“Oh, it’s only knickknacks.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Sure.”
Hasty knelt down, opened the suitcase, and rifled through it. There was a can of Coca-Cola, a newspaper, and—inside a drawstring sack—a sawed-off shotgun, stacks of money, and a mask that looked like an old man’s face. Hasty turned to Morgan, who now had a Browning pistol aimed at him.
It’s a toy, Hasty thought. Then: No, it’s death.
Morgan shoved his pistol into Hasty’s stomach, and the two men wrestled in silence. Morgan pulled the trigger twice, but there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber. Hasty forced his adversary’s gun hand upward and the pistol fell. (Later he would claim that he pried the gun away, and Morgan that he dropped it in surrender.) Hasty then pushed Morgan up against the wall and grabbed him by the throat.
“You’ve got me,” Morgan said. “I just made you a hero.”
“If you fucking move,” Hasty replied, “I’ll kill you as you stand there.”
Later that day, police detectives arrived at Peter Morgan’s farm in Nyora, a small railroad town in the rolling hills of southern Victoria, about 140 miles from Heathcote. While searching the property where Morgan lived with his wife and son, law enforcement found two Valiant automobiles, a motorbike, cans of black spray paint, a flashlight, a compass, a sleeping bag, and a variety of guns. They also found a beanie and a striped brown jumper—articles the After Dark Bandit was known to have worn during robberies.
According to Brear, the most shocking piece of evidence was a black-and-white photograph. It showed Morgan in a posh restaurant, smiling while seated beside another man. The two had matching shirts, matching mustaches, matching sideburns, and matching faces.
Finally, it was clear to police how the bandit had managed to be in two places at once: Peter had an identical twin brother.
Detective Brear called his partner, Beever, and told him that the robber they’d been chasing wasn’t one man but two. “Bullshit,” Beever answered. But it was true. And it meant that the After Dark Bandit—or the other half of him—was still at large.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/09/twin-bandits-robbers-atavist-magazine/
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