KEY POINTS:
Ned Kelly, the legendary Australian bushranger who evaded police for two years before being captured and hanged in 1880, has gone missing again.
What are believed to be his bones have vanished from a mass prison grave in Melbourne where they were buried.
Kelly - glamorised by some as a champion of the oppressed in a harsh colonial society - went on the run with his younger brother, Dan, in 1878.
The pair were wanted for horse stealing. Joined by two friends, and aided by sympathetic villagers, the Kelly Gang robbed banks and distributed money, Robin Hood-style, to poor families in rural Victoria.
After killing three police troopers who had staged an ambush, the gang was finally cornered in Glenrowan, a country town.
Ned Kelly was the only one to survive a day-long gun battle. In a defiant last stand, he walked towards police, pistols blazing and wearing a home-made suit of armour hammered out of plough blades.
Kelly was found guilty of murder and hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. In the 1920s his bones, and those of other executed inmates, were moved to another jail, Pentridge, and buried in a mass grave within the prison walls.
Pentridge closed in 1997 and the site is being redeveloped for housing, with the state conservation body, Heritage Victoria, overseeing the work.
Archeological tests were recently carried out at the mass burial site, but no human remains were found.
Archaeologists discovered evidence that the soil had been disturbed about 50 years ago, probably during major drainage works.
Ray Tonkin, the head of Heritage Victoria, said: "We now believe these remains were probably removed in the 1950s or 1960s, as part of the installation of large service pipes that took place at the prison at the time."
The remains of about 32 criminals are believed to have been lost.
For Kelly, it is the ultimate indignity. His skull, which had been on display at Old Melbourne Gaol, was stolen in 1978. When his skeleton was moved to Pentridge, "his bones would have just been put in a sack in a disordered and deteriorated condition", Jeremy Smith, an archeologist with Heritage Australia, told the Australian newspaper. Then they were apparently dug up during the drainage works and discarded.
"What is now known is the area is disturbed, and we think it's more than likely Ned Kelly's remains were discarded in a nearby quarry.
"We think there would have been about 32 bodies in a mass grave, and probably all of them have been lost," said Smith, who plans to extend the dig in the hope of locating the remains.
- INDEPENDENT
