Who Killed Clarence McLennan?

A brutal murder, a failed prosecution and a glimpse into Sydney’s hidden gay subculture left one of the city’s most intriguing mysteries unsolved.

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By Elliot Lindsay

On the afternoon of 3 October 1922, visitors strolling through Sydney's Centennial Park made a grisly discovery. Hidden amongst dense ti-tree scrub near the Darley Road gates lay the battered body of Clarence Carrington McLennan, a 30-year-old tuberculosis patient from the Woodville Red Cross Home at 128 Belmore Road, Randwick. His outer clothing had disappeared. His underpants were around his ankles. An almost empty beer bottle lay beside his body, while a pool of blood nearby suggested he had been struck elsewhere before being dragged into the scrub.

For the police, it initially appeared to be a straightforward murder investigation. Within days they believed they had identified their suspect. Yet nine months later the prosecution collapsed, the accused walked free, and McLennan's killer vanished into history. More than a century later, his murder remains one of Sydney's forgotten unsolved crimes.

McLennan had left the Red Cross Home earlier that morning and met his long-time acquaintance James Robert McKeevers, better known by the feminine nickname "Rosetta." The pair spent much of the day drinking together before encountering Sylvester Patrick O'Reilly, a 26-year-old horse trainer and former First World War soldier. O'Reilly later admitted drinking with the men before claiming he left McLennan alive. According to another witness, McLennan was last seen in Centennial Park between 1.45pm and 2.15pm walking with two men.

Clarence McLennan Murder Investigation takes strange turn

The investigation soon took an unexpected direction.

From the earliest reports, detectives believed McLennan's death bore striking similarities to the 1921 murder of Constable Ernest Wolgast, who had been killed while investigating criminal activity in Centennial Park. Newspapers reported that detectives were conducting large round-ups of men "suspected of immorality" alongside known thieves and park touts who preyed upon vulnerable visitors. The Barrier Miner observed that police believed "the same sordid story of vice" surrounded McLennan's death, revealing that investigators already regarded Centennial Park as a place where homosexual men met discreetly and where criminals sometimes targeted them.

This was no idle speculation. Only three years earlier Sydney had been transfixed by the sensational trial surrounding the death of Hugo Tuck, a man living under an assumed name who belonged to the city's secret homosexual subculture. Tuck had invited a 17-year-old youth to his Elizabeth Street flat before suffering fatal head injuries. During that trial detectives uncovered intimate love letters, diaries recording dozens of male visitors, and evidence of a clandestine social world largely invisible to respectable Sydney. The similarities between the two cases were sufficiently striking that O'Reilly was questioned during the Coroner's inquiry about his knowledge of the Tuck case and people associated with it, suggesting investigators themselves considered whether the two murders were somehow connected.

At McLennan's inquest, another revealing piece of evidence emerged. Detective-Sergeant Truskett testified that O'Reilly had described both James Robert McKeevers and Clarence McLennan as "queens"—a contemporary derogatory term commonly applied to effeminate homosexual men. This evidence is further supported by the feminine nickname "Rosetta," by which McKeevers was universally known. Historian Garry Wotherspoon, writing on Sydney's post-war camp subculture in Hyde Park, observed that it was common for camp men to adopt or be given feminine names by friends, a practice that can be traced back to the nineteenth century. McKeevers' nickname therefore provides further evidence that he belonged to Sydney's clandestine homosexual community.

Whether the same accurately reflected McLennan's private life can never be known with certainty. Nevertheless, the available evidence strongly suggests that police believed they were investigating a murder connected to this hidden social world. The newspapers quickly seized upon this aspect of the case, filling their columns with lurid references to "degenerates," "vice," and Sydney's so-called subterranean underworld, often devoting more attention to McLennan's presumed sexuality than to identifying the person responsible for his murder.

Initially, the evidence against O'Reilly appeared persuasive. He had first denied knowing McLennan before later admitting they had spent part of the afternoon drinking together. Fingerprint experts identified one of O'Reilly's fingerprints on the beer bottle found beside the body, and police arrested him only days after the murder.

Prosecution case falls apart

But as the inquest unfolded, the prosecution's case steadily unravelled.

The fingerprint expert conceded that O'Reilly could simply have handled the bottle while the men were drinking earlier in the day. Two additional fingerprints recovered from the bottle remained unidentified. A motor driver named Myers, who knew McLennan by sight and saw him walking with two companions shortly before the murder, failed to identify O'Reilly during an identification parade. McLennan's missing clothing was eventually traced to a pawnshop, but the pawnbroker specifically stated O'Reilly was not the man who had pawned it.

Despite these weaknesses, the Coroner committed O'Reilly to stand trial. Yet the trial never occurred.

Over the following months, the Crown repeatedly sought adjournments, informing the court that the delays were necessary on unspecified "grave public grounds." O'Reilly spent three months in prison before being released on bail, all the while protesting that he possessed evidence capable of proving his innocence. Finally, in June 1923, after nine months living under the shadow of a capital charge, the Attorney-General quietly abandoned the prosecution. No explanation was publicly offered.

Mystery remains

Who killed Clarence McLennan remains unknown.

Robbery certainly appears to have played some part. His clothing vanished, and someone later pawned it. Yet the circumstances surrounding his death also point towards another possibility. If McLennan had entered the secluded scrub expecting a consensual meeting with another man—as many homosexual men of the era were forced to do because their relationships remained criminalised and hidden—he may have been particularly vulnerable to robbery, blackmail or violence. History records numerous cases in which men exploited such secrecy to prey upon their victims, while others ended in sudden violence fuelled by fear, shame or the ever-present threat of exposure.

The surviving evidence is insufficient to determine which explanation is correct. What it does reveal is how quickly the investigation became entangled with contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality. Police and newspapers alike viewed the crime through that lens, yet for all the sensational headlines, the central question was never answered.

More than one hundred years later, Clarence Carrington McLennan remains not only the victim of a brutal murder, but also one of Sydney's most overlooked mysteries.