One of history’s great nude police chases resulted when two constables were sent after King William. They pursued him for two days and caught up on Christmas day. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

On Saturday the 23rd of December 1860, the Ipswich police in colonial Queensland received information of a madman, a maniac whose name was William Carroll Kearle, but he called himself “King William”.

King William was wandering about the village of Jeebropilly, just past Ipswich, and he was in a state of nudity. In the local indigenous language Jeebropilly means “flying squirrel gully”.

Two constables were sent after him and so the great chase began. They followed him for two days, pursuing him from Warrill Creek, to Walloon, then to Kyran Walsh’s place on the Drayton Road ten miles from Ipswich. Walsh at the time had not long been out of gaol after having served three years hard labour for cattle stealing.

The pursuit didn’t end until the morning of the third day which was Christmas day. They caught up with King William in West Ipswich, which back then was called Little Ipswich.

King William went quietly enough into town with the constables, who met Ipswich’s Chief Constable Quinn just near St Paul’s church. That’s when King William walked up to Chief Constable Quinn and handed him a note.

On the note was written advice that the chief constable and all his men were to go to Three Mile Creek and search for the bodies of two young women who had been murdered. One of them a daughter of a magistrate, and she was described as either an Englishwoman, an Irishwoman, or a Frenchwoman, and that she had an immense amount of money in her possession.

The letter was actually a ruse by King William designed to entice all of Ipswich’s policemen to gallop off to Three Mile Creek to solve the crime and collect the money, and so leaving King William alone to continue on nude.

But the police saw right through it and Chief Constable Quinn tried a ruse of his own. He told King William that he should actually hand-deliver his note to the house that he pointed out, where the real chief constable lived. The house was really the Ipswich lock-up.

King William saw through the trick, and so the accompanying Constable Stevens and Constable Smythe were required to forcibly take him into custody. But that’s when the trouble that ultimately involved what seemed to be the district’s entire police force.

King William pulled a razor from somewhere on his person. He cut the back of Constable Stevens’ left wrist and broke the forefinger and cut some of the sinews in Constable Smythe’s wrist.

He ran back towards Little Ipswich and was pursued by all the policeman that Ipswich had to offer. Eventually with Sergeant Carson and Chief Constable Quinn also on the scene, they cornered him.

While all the constables were getting King William down, he still managed to inflict a frightful gash on Sergeant Carson’s chest, cut the wrists of both Constable Smythe and Constable Stevens, broke Constable Stevens’ finger, and slightly wounded Constable Dunn, besides very severely wounding Sergeant Carson with a rock in the head.

Eventually it took all of Ipswich’s police to tie King William to a dray, and that’s how they finally brought him to the watchhouse, tied down in the dray.

The policeman in this spectacular fracas themselved achieved some sort of notoriety.

Chief Constable Edward Quinn rose to fame by leading the Ipswich gold escorts from the Tooloom Diggings. That included when he brought down more than 437 ounces on a single ride and reported that he saw in the hands of the diggers upwards of 2,000 ounces. That fabulous amount would be worth around six million dollars today.

Then there was Constable Jesse Stevens. For many years he was in charge of the Little Ipswich lock-up. In the end Constable Stevens suffered from dysentery for nine days before he died an exhausted man.

And there was Constable James Dunn. Constable Dunn claimed all of £100 reward for the apprehension of Ipswich’s own bushranger Bill Jenkins not long after his nude event involvement.

But King William himself disappeared from history because I’ve found neither hide nor hair of him apart from his two-day nude chase by police.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD LIVE ON RADIO.

Photo credits:
Mounted police gold escort sketched on the spot by T.S. Gill 1853 – National Library of Australia.
St Pauls Church of England Ipswich c1872 – State Library of Queensland.
Little Ipswich station – Queensland Times, Ipswich, 4th October 1949, page 1.