“Cock-Eyed Bob”
Sheds Light upon House of Death Compact.

The fair, slimly built Detective Parker took his last survey of the faded and dusty rooms. His work was complete. The mystery of the Kalgoorlie Death Pact was a mystery no more. The admissions of the man and woman who lay in the hospital corroborated in every detail the pathetic and intensely human story that the house had revealed to the trained eye of the detective. There had been no need that last Saturday afternoon to draw up the blinds. The storm, as startling and as damaging as any in the history of the old mining town of Kalgoorlie, had done its work with discriminating thoroughness. The storm had found the rotten nails in the roofs of churches and public buildings seemingly stoutly built; it had kicked into heaps of debris dilapidated halls and jerry-built shanties whose defiance of every building regulation tolerant officialdom had winked at.

It had lifted a thousand iron sheets from neglected buildings and hurled them hither and thither to the danger of humankind. In a moment of carelessness, out of harmony with its otherwise general humanity, it had thrown a cruel and jagged piece of iron against the gentle, tiny leg of a girl, almost severing it at the hip and sending the little mite inopportunely to the gods. Some called it a ‘Cock-Eyed Bob’. Others a tornado. It was both and neither. It was not the single whirlwind of Cock-Eyed Bob, twisting along an irregular course and lifting and tossing everything in its path. It had not the straight and narrow path of the tornado levelling destruction that men read about.

It was like a windy octopus, with tentacles spread over a wide area, that lashed here, there and everywhere, missing more than it hit, but hitting effectively where it did hit. It lifted the walls of a hotel balcony bathroom completely from around the embarrassed bather, whose unconsidered order of going was too fast for the swiftest cameraman.

It laid old churches in ruins. Whole rows of fencing with foundations rotted by ants exposed their weakness. An army official, Government building inspectors could not have exposed as effectively the rottenness of the building regulations in Kalgoorlie and their dangers to life and limb in any passing wind. It slipped with freakish touch, this windy “Bob” past the ‘House of Death’ alongside the railway. It sucked at the tangle of woodwork and canvas that shut out the light from the front bedroom and tore it aside, letting in a stream of light for the first time in many months. With a raucous shriek, it eddied over the vacant allotments all around, gathering up the rubbish and tins and pelting it across the street and shanties & a couple of blocks away

If “Cock-eyed Bob” had come three months earlier, would Charles Francis Hawkins, 55yrs, and Elizabeth Mary Smith, 31yrs, now be lying in the Kalgoorlie Hospital, praying that death will complete the job they bungled?

It is just possible they would not. The deliberate gloom of that house was part of the complaint of this unfortunate couple, whose recovery will involve a legal tangle that will require the finest judicial brains of the State to unravel. Three months of sunshine for Charles Francis Hawkins and Elizabeth Mary Smith might have made all the difference.

The detective looked around in the new and unaccustomed brightness of the front bedroom. There lay the double bed upon which the couple had been found on Wednesday, February 1, the woman with a bullet in the temple and breast and the man with a bullet in the temple. In the back room lay another bed— a single bed— upon which were also splashes of blood, indicating that here, as in the front room, a tragedy had been enacted. It seemed obvious that either the man or the woman had shot himself or herself on that bed. They both were found together on the front bed. The mystery of the single bed was elusive. But all things come to those who wait. The detective was patient. He found that,

Though a person had been shot on that single bed, neither the man nor the woman in the front room had shot himself or herself on that single bed.