Some may have been too quick to judge a 1917 suspicious death because it was the Goondiwindi mother’s son who was the harbinger of death. I told a version of this story which is Part III live on Darling Downs radio 4AK.

In 1917 the Goondiwindi businesswoman Mrs Mary Bushell was killed in suspicious circumstances after attending a political rally. This was Part I of the saga.

The policeman who led the investigation Detective Thomas Head had questionable relatives including his wife who was convicted of running an illegal betting shop, and his brother-in-law of practicing as a solicitor without a license, and when the detective retired he was given a bag of gold sovereigns and gifts worth a remarkable £400 or $160,000 today. This was Part II and what follows is the final Part III of the Goondiwindi trilogy.

I may have been too quick to judge Detective Head, because it was the dead woman’s son who has proven to be a harbinger of death and so may be some sort of supernatural culprit.

Victor Roy Bushell was born in Gunnedah in 1883 before his family moved to Goondiwindi the following year. He became a jockey and moved back down to Armidale. It was there in 1901 when Bushell was just eighteen-years-old that his girlfriend was grotesquely disfigured in an awful accident.

The driver of the sulky in which they were travelling was thrown out and the reins tangled around the horses’ legs. Bushell tried to get hold of the reins by crawling along the shaft but he also fell off. Still in the sulky were two private school girls – sisters from a well-known New England family – and they decided to jump. Only one of them was seriously injured and that was Bushell’s girlfriend May Keightley. She hit the road face-first, her features were horribly lacerated, her nose broken, and she was taken to hospital unconscious in a critical condition.

Still in Armidale in 1909, Bushell was driving a cab when he drove headlong into motorcyclist on Dangar Street. The impact was so loud that a crowd of people was immediately drawn from up and down the street. The rider of the motorbike suffered terrible wounds to the head and was killed, and that was just weeks before the young man was due to marry a local girl.

Bushell was driving cabs because he’d been disqualified as a jockey for twelve months for suspicious practices at the Warwick races. There was no loss of life at Warwick, but racing all around this time proved deadly for the extended Bushell family. At Maitland the jockey Randolph Bushell was put on trial for causing the death of another jockey, and at Rockhampton the jockey Wallace Bushell was killed when his face was horribly crushed by a horse’s hoof.

Immediately after his disqualification and the disfiguring accident to his now-former girlfriend, Victor Bushell went home to Goondiwindi where he took up training horses.

He brought the spectre of death with him, because in 1917 he found his mother seemingly bashed to death in her Goondiwindi bedroom. And then in 1919 his first wife – and no, she wasn’t the maimed sulky victim – fell victim to the influenza epidemic which was raging following the First World War.

The death saga continued when his brother Walter and nephew Tim had to be buried in Goondiwindi on the same day.

And you won’t believe it, his sister Neva even married a man by the name of Charles Death – and he shocked the family when he died suddenly at the dinner table.

So I think I may have been too quick to cast suspicion on the detective who investigated the death of Bushell’s mother. It may well have been some sort of supernatural influence or curse by Bushell himself that killed her.

After all, his girlfriend was horribly disfigured, he killed a young man engaged to be married, jockeys were dying all around him, he found his mother dead on her bedroom floor, and his sister married Mr Death himself. Strange things happened in Goondiwindi back then.

Part I – The Body Beneath the Ballot
Part II – The Question that Followed Detective Head
Part III – Harbinger of Death: The Uncanny Life of Victor Bushell

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON 4AK.        

Photo Credits:
Harbinger of Death – Harold Peacock with Copilot.
Detective Senior Sergeant Thomas Head – Brisbane Courier, 5th January 1914 page 7 – repaired with Copilot.
Large crowd attending the races Warwick, 1924 – State Library of Queensland.