The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.

By Andrew Dubbins

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The Manhunt

The light was giving way to darkness as detective Patrick Brear arrived at the CBC Bank in Heathcote, an old gold-mining town in southern Australia nestled between mountains and surrounded by dense forest. The quaint two-story redbrick building had been the scene of a crime. Earlier that afternoon, on April 27, 1979, a bank robber shot Ray Koch, a beloved veteran of the local police force. Two bullets ripped holes in Koch’s stomach and intestines, forcing surgeons to remove his spleen. He lost a dangerous amount of blood, and nobody was sure if “Kochy,” as he was affectionately known, would make it.

Brear, who worked for the state of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, passed through the swarm of blue-uniformed police officers collecting evidence, then had a look at the bank’s CCTV footage.  It showed the thief running into the bank carrying a Browning pistol and wearing a black leather jacket, black gloves, and a mask bearing the face of an old man. Brear thought he knew who the perpetrator was: the After Dark Bandit.

The bandit was the state’s most wanted man, suspected in two dozen armed robberies. Brear and his partner, detective John Beever, had been hunting him for over a year. They knew his MO well. He liked to hit rural targets just before they closed for the day, then escape into the bush under cover of darkness. The timing of many of his crimes was the inspiration for his nickname.

Though it pained Beever and Brear to admit it, there was something different about this criminal, almost superhuman. He was known to pull off two robberies within a half-hour of each other, in towns that were more than a dozen miles apart. Newspaper reporters theorized that he must be driving a very fast car. Brear and Beever had attempted to reenact one of the back-to-back jobs, but they couldn’t make it from one location to the other in time.

Just as unusual were the bandit’s mood swings. According to witnesses, he could be cheeky and chatty on one job, menacing and severe on the next. Early in his career, the After Dark Bandit had been cautious and deliberate, taking small sums from off-track betting storefronts, known as TAB agencies. But in recent months he’d grown bolder, emptying banks, sometimes in broad daylight. So audacious was the bandit that he’d robbed the CBC branch in Heathcote twice in the previous nine months. As he entered the bank on the third occasion, on April 27, the ledger keeper recognized him; she could be seen in security footage standing arms akimbo like a peeved schoolmarm. The bandit had stolen her orange Datsun to use as his getaway vehicle the last time he was there. He took it again this time, after shooting Koch and packing up the money he’d come for.

The bandit ditched the Datsun at the edge of town and was then seen speeding on a motorcycle into a forested area outside Heathcote. Law enforcement descended on the spot from far and wide; they came from various branches of the state’s police force, including an elite SWAT team and a dog squad. A police helicopter and two fixed-wing aircraft led an aerial search. Police on motorbikes were tasked with covering the dense, rugged terrain of the forest, where thickets of eucalyptus and pine covered abandoned goldfields. “We are very hopeful that he is in the area and we will get him,” a detective told journalists. “He has used a firearm, and we must treat him as very dangerous.”

The following morning, senior constable Rick Hasty was cruising in his police van through the city of Bendigo, 40 minutes northwest of Heathcote. Hasty was a friend of Koch’s and had just visited the wounded cop’s wife. He would have preferred to be helping with the manhunt, but was ordered to remain on duty in Bendigo, part of a skeleton crew of officers keeping an eye on the place. Nobody expected the robber to turn up there, since doing so would require snaking his way through the nearly 200 officers searching for him, a maneuver considered too bold even for the After Dark Bandit.

While sitting in traffic, Hasty spotted a man walking with a blue suitcase and sporting a red Zapata mustache. Hasty didn’t have any particular reason to suspect that this was the man his colleagues were looking for, but he had a feeling. “I just knew it was him,” Hasty told me. He watched the man cross the road and enter a dead-end alley. He parked his van and got out. As he walked into the alley, the man came toward him.

“What’s your name?” Hasty asked.

“Peter Morgan,” the man replied. “Why?”

“Because I run this fucking town and I want to know who’s in it.”

Hasty wasn’t carrying a gun, nor did he see any lumps in Morgan’s pockets suggesting a weapon. He felt confident that he could take the man if needed. Tough and fit, Hasty competed as a professional cyclist and had been a farmer before a drought pushed him onto the police force to make ends meet.

“Where you going?” Hasty asked.

“Going to Melbourne to watch footy.”

“What’s in the case?”

“Oh, it’s only knickknacks.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Sure.”

Hasty knelt down, opened the suitcase, and rifled through it. There was a can of Coca-Cola, a newspaper, and—inside a drawstring sack—a sawed-off shotgun, stacks of money, and a mask that looked like an old man’s face. Hasty turned to Morgan, who now had a Browning pistol aimed at him.

It’s a toy, Hasty thought. Then: No, it’s death.

Morgan shoved his pistol into Hasty’s stomach, and the two men wrestled in silence. Morgan pulled the trigger twice, but there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber. Hasty forced his adversary’s gun hand upward and the pistol fell. (Later he would claim that he pried the gun away, and Morgan that he dropped it in surrender.) Hasty then pushed Morgan up against the wall and grabbed him by the throat.

“You’ve got me,” Morgan said. “I just made you a hero.”

“If you fucking move,” Hasty replied, “I’ll kill you as you stand there.”

Later that day, police detectives arrived at Peter Morgan’s farm in Nyora, a small railroad town in the rolling hills of southern Victoria, about 140 miles from Heathcote. While searching the property where Morgan lived with his wife and son, law enforcement found two Valiant automobiles, a motorbike, cans of black spray paint, a flashlight, a compass, a sleeping bag, and a variety of guns. They also found a beanie and a striped brown jumper—articles the After Dark Bandit was known to have worn during robberies.

According to Brear, the most shocking piece of evidence was a black-and-white photograph. It showed Morgan in a posh restaurant, smiling while seated beside another man. The two had matching shirts, matching mustaches, matching sideburns, and matching faces.

Finally, it was clear to police how the bandit had managed to be in two places at once: Peter had an identical twin brother.  

Detective Brear called his partner, Beever, and told him that the robber they’d been chasing wasn’t one man but two. “Bullshit,” Beever answered. But it was true. And it meant that the After Dark Bandit—or the other half of him—was still at large.

The Inheritance

Understanding the Morgan twins’ crime spree requires understanding their father. On December 15, 1949, a 19-year-old Kay Morgan carried a briefcase into the Commercial Bank in Eltham, a suburb of Melbourne known for its natural surroundings. Wearing a dark blue suit, gray felt hat, and sunglasses, the nervous teenager presented himself as a customer looking to open a new account, then drew a Browning pistol, according to newspaper reports. “The game is on!” he shouted. “I’ll take the lot!”

The teller opened the money drawer. “Here it is,” he said, tauntingly. “Come and get it.” Then the teller and the bank manager pulled pistols of their own from their pockets.

Kay fired a shot that went straight through the counter and between the teller’s legs, then another into the ceiling as he hurried from the bank. He ran to his getaway vehicle, a stolen gray Singer sports car parked across the street. The teller and the bank manager chased after him, firing 15 shots at the fleeing car and hitting it numerous times. Speeding out of Eltham, Kay crashed into an embankment a half-mile down the road, then escaped on foot into the bush.

Following a large manhunt, police captured Kay, acting on a tip from one of his friends. “I am pleased you have caught me,” Kay told them, according to a newspaper report. “I will tell you everything.” He confessed to the failed robbery, admitting that he had attempted it to repay a loan to his father, a prominent real estate developer. (His father refused to pay Kay’s bail.)

Kay served nearly three years behind bars, then moved to the countryside and married a childhood friend named Beryl. On October 30, 1953, they had identical twins, Peter and Doug. The family relocated to Melbourne, where Kay thrived as a property developer, until a credit squeeze in the 1960s bankrupted him. To stay afloat, Kay may have resorted to shady business dealings that threatened to catch up with him, prompting an abrupt move to New Zealand when the twins were barely in their teens.

Kay found work as a carpenter outside Wellington, the small, windy capital city at the mouth of the Cook Strait. But after offering to import a Holden sedan for his boss, then blowing the money at the racetrack, Kay returned to crime. He’d break into a post office at night, put the facility’s safe on a trolley, wheel it out to his car, and speed off into the night. Kay rented a house where he’d use a cold chisel to open the safes, often while the twins were playing in the other room. In addition to money, they usually contained stamps, which Kay liked to sell back to the post office he’d robbed. He told the boys that whatever they needed to do to get ahead in life was OK, so long as no one got hurt.

To disguise himself during his crimes, Kay wore fake glasses and used Brylcreem to darken and slick back his hair. Sometimes he asked the boys if they wanted to come along to “give him a hand.” Doug always volunteered. The twins provided excellent cover—the police were less likely to pull over a vehicle with an adorable boy or two in the back—and doubled as lookouts.

One night, when Doug was 12, Kay parked near a supermarket and told his son to keep an eye out. Doug watched his dad run toward the store, a silhouette in the moonlight. Kay robbed the market so often he’d left a piece of roofing loose for easy access. Doug had just wiggled into the driver’s seat—he thought it would feel cool to sit behind the wheel—when the market’s alarm started blaring. He waited for what felt like an eternity. Then the driver’s-side door suddenly flung open and his dad appeared out of the dark. “Move over,” Kay said as he slid into the car. Father and son peeled away from the scene.

Kay’s criminal career meant that the family was constantly on the run. Over the course of their childhood, Peter and Doug lived in some 40 houses and attended five schools, where they were often enrolled under false names. In photos from back then, it’s impossible to tell them apart. As early as infancy, their mom liked to dress her sons the same. They wore matching shoes and jumpers and had matching hairstyles. The twins were often each other’s only playmate. Indeed, the family’s status as fugitives made them a tight unit; Doug considered them “a gang of four.”

But then Beryl became suspicious that Kay—charismatic and handsome, a “cross between Steve McQueen and Paul Newman,” in Peter’s words—was seeing other women. One evening, during an especially heated argument, Beryl refused to let Kay take the car to rob a post office. Instead, he pushed a wheelbarrow to his target, planning to haul away the safe. The police showed up before he could clear out, and Kay was arrested—but not before the former boxer bashed one of them in the head with a crowbar.

With Kay in custody, his 13-year-old twins were left to dispose of the evidence of his crimes. According to Peter, Beryl drove them to Kay’s rental house, where they filled the family car with empty safes. Then she drove them to a nearby bridge where, one by one, in the pitch dark, they were tipped into the river below. (In Doug’s recollection, the brothers did this without their mother’s help.)

After serving an 18-month prison sentence, Kay was deported back to Australia, and his family followed. Kay vowed to go straight and resume working in construction. The twins worked alongside him; he’d taken them out of school when they were 15 and trained them himself. The teenagers also worked briefly at a bank; Doug, who’d earned high marks in math while still in school, rose to become a teller, while Peter remained a junior employee.

One Sunday morning in December 1971, 18-year-old Doug and Peter were relaxing at home when they heard a guttural scream from their parents’ bedroom. They ran inside to find 41-year-old Kay lying on the bed with his arms in the air, as if reaching for the ceiling. Doug tried to lower them while Peter watched from the edge of the bed as his father gasped for air.

Someone called for help, and a nurse hurried over from a church across the street, where she’d been attending service. When Doug checked on his father later that day, he found the nurse straightening Kay’s legs and tightening the sheets around him.

“He’s OK?” Doug asked.

“No,” said the nurse. “He’s dead.”

Kay’s sudden death brought the twins closer for a while. “It sort of cemented a bond with my brother [and me] against the world,” Doug said.

A half-century later, Doug remembers his tumultuous early years fondly. “My childhood was a great adventure,” he told me. “I still look back and I smile. Maybe it was the teamwork, maybe it was being part of something.” At his home in the countryside north of Melbourne, Doug showed me the dusty old train set he and Peter used to play with when Kay was prying open stolen safes, and offered me some of his dad’s favorite cookies. Outside he pushed forward the driver’s seat of his Land Rover. Underneath, wrapped in some of his mother’s curtains, was his father’s ashes. “He goes everywhere with me,” Doug said with a smirk.

Peter doesn’t find this funny. “If I want to visit my dad,” he told me on the anniversary of Kay’s death, “I’ll have to steal my brother’s car.”

Peter doesn’t know where Doug lives, and he doesn’t like to talk to him. Doug is fine with that. The roots of the men’s resentment run deep. As kids their personalities clashed—Doug was irreverent, while Peter was serious—and they were hyper-competitive. When Doug found himself in the principal’s office in first grade for kissing a girl behind a shed, he claimed that Peter was the guilty one and had blamed him to avoid getting in trouble. Their relationship could hold an edge of violence: They had water and pillow fights so intense that their mom shut herself up in another room to avoid the chaos. Sometimes one twin would pull his jumper over his head, then hold the other twin’s neck under his arm as if in a vise, making it appear like he was carrying his own severed head.

Kay’s sudden death brought the twins closer for a while. “It sort of cemented a bond with my brother [and me] against the world,” Doug said. It was what happened later, when they followed in their father’s footsteps and became prolific stickup men, that transformed what might have been a bygone rivalry into a bitter, unbridgeable rift.

As Peter tells it, for decades Doug made himself out to be the good twin and Peter the bad twin. Peter finds this ridiculous. He also insists that Doug is unworthy of any media attention for the robberies that had once captivated the public across Australia. In Peter’s view, there was only one After Dark Bandit.

The Late Checks

Within six months of Kay’s death, Beryl remarried. Doug considered it the gang of four’s second loss. Around the same time, the twins began working together in construction. They were young, but they’d been trained well by their dad and could pull in more than the average subcontractor—sometimes over $500 Australian a week. (The country stopped using pounds in 1966.) Over time, though, Peter grew to resent being dependent on other people for his livelihood. The twins were 23 and at a construction site when Peter read a newspaper article about the Boiler Suit Gang, a group of bank robbers named after the blue outfits they wore during robberies. “We could do that,” he said to his brother.

At first Doug brushed him off, but Peter kept bringing it up, and Doug was soon indulging Peter’s fantasies about how they’d pull off a heist. They talked about how most robberies occurred in cities, where a cop might be parked around the corner, leaving the perpetrator little time to escape. But if they went after rural targets, they could ascertain how many cops were in town and suss out where they’d be at a given time. The brothers could strike at dusk, just before closing, and use the falling darkness to conceal themselves as they fled. They could anticipate where police roadblocks would be set up and hike through the bush to avoid them. The idea, Peter told me, “was basically guerrilla warfare: Do the crime, disappear, and then reappear outside the search area.”

It was all just talk until money got tight. The twins had families to support. Their mother’s second husband had six children, and Peter had developed a romantic relationship with his 16-year-old stepsister, Pamela. Peter married her when he was 19—the same year Doug married another woman named Pamela. Both were shotgun weddings, the twins told me, and Peter and Doug were soon fathers.

In the lead-up to Easter in 1977, the twins were waiting on payment for a pair of house frames they’d built. The person who owed them said that the checks were in the mail, but they hadn’t arrived. Peter, feeling stuck, decided that a robbery would free him. He was also anxious about his health. He’d suffered rheumatic fever in his teens and then developed chest pains. (These were later diagnosed as symptoms of panic attacks.) He feared an early cardiac event like the one that killed his father, and figured that if he wouldn’t be around long enough to retire, he may as well “go out and get my gold watch now.”

Doug was open to the idea—he, too, had been raised by a man with a criminal mindset. “My father’s philosophy was that it’s OK to do whatever you want to maintain the lifestyle you want,” he told me. He also realized that, were they ever to be caught, the fact that they were twins might keep them out of jail. Prosecutors would be forced to prove which of them had committed the crime. As long as the brothers stayed silent, reasonable doubt would always cloud the truth.

The brothers planned to use a stolen car during the crime, but Doug declined to help with that. He also refused to carry out the robbery or use a gun. “I’ll do it all,” Peter said. Doug agreed to serve as an “assistant,” helping Peter get to and from the scene. The twins decided that Peter would get two-thirds of the loot and Doug the remainder.

On a rainy Holy Thursday, Peter walked into a car dealership in a suburb of Melbourne. He told the salesman that he was interested in the Ford Falcon GT. Capable of going up to 140 miles per hour, and priced at about $6,500 Australian, it was the best car in the yard. The new salesman couldn’t believe his good fortune. “It’s a surprise for my wife,” Peter told him, “so what I’d like to do is take the car to our house and show her what I’m going to buy her.”

Peter got behind the wheel, the salesman climbed in, and they sped off along a rain-slickened road. Peter drove to a random house nearby. The two got out, and the salesman began walking up the path, eager to meet Peter’s wife, who he presumed was inside. Peter drew an air pistol.

“This is where we part company,” Peter said. The salesman saw the gun. “What, and the car?” he managed to say. “Yeah,” Peter replied. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and sped away.

Peter drove to a nearby cemetery where Doug was waiting in a Leyland P76 with a few jerricans of gasoline for the stolen GT, so Peter didn’t have to risk showing his face at a filling station. Rain fell in sheets over the tombstones and pounded the roofs of the cars. Doug poured the gas into the tank, bid his brother goodbye, and drove off. Then Peter waited in the cemetery for darkness to come.

At dusk, Peter drove to a TAB agency in nearby Mernda and entered holding a Jager .22 semiautomatic assault rifle he’d purchased in Melbourne. The rain had drenched his khaki carpentry overalls. He’d planned to wear a stocking over his head, but the moisture on his face had made it hard to see, so he went unconcealed.

Peter ordered the manager to empty the cash drawers, then stuffed the bills into a bag and directed him to open the safe. The man refused. Instead he gave Peter a lecture, imploring him not to ruin his life. Looking back, Peter assumed that this was prompted by his appearance—he was a “23-year-old bloke” who looked like “a drowned rat” in his soaked work clothes. Rather than threaten to shoot, Peter backed out the door and leapt into the stolen GT.

Doug was waiting behind the wheel of the Leyland a few miles outside Mernda. When Peter rolled up in the GT, he threw the bag of money through the driver’s-side window. Doug yanked the steering wheel from its column and shoved the cash into the exposed space. Then the brothers drove off in different directions.

With his adrenaline pumping, Peter raced along a forestry road in the deluge. Suddenly, the GT slid off the asphalt into a rushing creek. Peter abandoned the vehicle and made his way on foot to the rendezvous point he and Doug had agreed on. Only later would Peter realize the uncanny parallels to his father’s bank robbery in nearby Eltham, the one that landed him in prison for several years: Like Kay, Peter had failed to access the establishment’s safe, and like his dad he’d crashed a stolen sports car.

The haul from the TAB agency came to $320. “You’re not much of a robber,” Doug said.

Peter was shaken by the experience. He worried that he’d screwed up his life for a couple hundred bucks.  “The paranoia sets in,” he told me. “What if they know it’s me? What if the car salesman gave a really good description?”

When the cops failed to come knocking, Peter had an exhilarating realization: He’d gotten away with it. The missing checks from the construction job arrived four days after the robbery. By then it didn’t matter. Peter had tasted crime and wanted more. So did Doug.

The Bushrangers

In the late 18th century, Great Britain established Australia as a penal colony, primarily to alleviate overcrowding in British prisons. Over time, around 160,000 prisoners were transported to the continent. Those who were uneducated were made to perform backbreaking labor under threat of corporal punishment. Some escaped into the bush seeking freedom and turned to crime to stay alive.

Known as bushrangers, they adapted to life in the wilderness, forming outlaw bands that robbed travelers and settlers alike, stealing food, weapons, ammunition, bedding, and other supplies. Many bushrangers had short careers that ended in shootouts or capture, and in some cases execution. But a few gained notoriety for their bold escapades and their ability to evade capture for long periods in the wilderness.

The most infamous bushranger was Ned Kelly, born around 1854 in Victoria. Kelly’s father—just like the Morgan twins’—was a criminal. He’d been brought from Ireland to Australia as a convicted thief. Kelly eventually committed an infamous string of robberies and bush escapes. He was captured, tried, and hanged in 1880.

Unlike Kelly, who killed three police officers, the brothers agreed to avoid undue violence—they wanted the money, not to harm anyone. They pledged to walk away from a job if things got “too hot.” After the Mernda robbery, Doug decided that he wanted an equal role in the next heist, to prove that he was as tough as his brother. The twins set their sights on another betting agency, this one in the town of Berwick, on the southeastern fringes of Melbourne. It would be the first and only time the brothers pulled a job together.

Doug still felt squeamish about carrying a gun, so he went to a local army surplus store and paid $59 for an imitation pistol. It didn’t have a bore—the hole through the center of the barrel—so he’d need to avoid pointing it at anyone, or they might realize it was a fake.

On the evening of May 30, 1977, right before the robbery, Doug strolled past Berwick’s police station, a hundred yards from the betting agency. A cop car was parked out front. He punctured the tires with a screwdriver. Then the Morgan twins barged into the betting agency, with Peter carrying a rifle and Doug the imitation pistol. “I don’t like to boast,” Doug told me, recalling the event, “but the manager definitely opened the safe door when I went along.” The brothers filled their bags with $916, ran outside, and mounted a pair of bicycles. Peter had painted the bikes black so they’d be less visible at night. They coasted down a hill away from the betting agency, met up with a railroad line, and pedaled along the tracks to a car parked a short distance away.

For their next crime, Peter drew up what he called a “double job”—two heists committed within half an hour of each other. The first would distract police and clear the way for the second. The twins would wear identical jumpers, like when they were kids, to fool the authorities into thinking that both were carried out by a single perpetrator.

Peter did his part, stealing $1,277 from a betting agency in Hastings, but Doug got cold feet and aborted his portion of the plan. Twelve days later Doug sought redemption, charging into a betting agency in Koo Wee Rup armed with the imitation pistol and a sawed-off shotgun, which he vowed he’d use only to fire warning shots.

A month later, Peter planned another double job. He robbed $1,567 from a TAB agency in Lilydale, only to discover afterward that Doug had balked again. Ten days later Doug struck his assigned target, a betting agency in Healesville, a small town in the fertile Yarra Valley, where kangaroos were often spotted lazing in the shade. When he entered the TAB, a customer was placing a bet. Doug told the employee behind the counter to let the customer finish up before turning over the agency’s cash.

After exiting with $1,080, Doug leapt onto a bicycle and rode past the police station. He stashed the bike in some hedges and disappeared into the bush. Doug hiked about ten miles to a rendezvous point with Peter, scratching himself on blackberry bushes and lying prone as cars passed along the highway. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, he told me, “except your friend is going to shoot you.”

“You’re mainlining on adrenaline for six or eight hours,” Peter said. “That’s the most powerful drug in the world, adrenaline. And the cheapest.”

The twins were young and immature, and they’d found a way to make cash far more quickly than they could lugging lumber and bricks around construction sites. Plus, there was a sense of adventure in it all. Doug remembers sleeping under a giant fern during a storm and falling asleep to the sound of rain. Peter was once scouting an escape route on his motorbike when a dozen kangaroos rushed past. “For about 20 seconds, I’m part of the kangaroo flock,” he told me. Peter also thrived on the rush he felt after a job. “You’re mainlining on adrenaline for six or eight hours,” he said. “That’s the most powerful drug in the world, adrenaline. And the cheapest.”

The police were at a loss to figure out who was behind the brothers’ capers. Despite Peter carrying a gun in his left hand and Doug in his right, nobody caught on that there were two robbers and not one. The twins were  “cleanskins,”  meaning that they didn’t have a criminal record. Nor did they have any questionable friends, gang affiliations, or links to Australia’s underworld.  “The only criminal we ever knew was our father,” Peter said. This kept them off authorities’ radar but also meant that they only had each other to confide in and rely on.

Peter was the planner, and a meticulous one. He kept a black book of potential jobs, with the locations of various TABs and banks, when they opened and closed, exit points, nearby police stations, and even coffee shops local law enforcement frequented. He gave each target a score based on its suitability. “Two ticks if the building was good, and maybe another tick if the getaway was good,” Peter said.

The twins decided not to do robberies in the summer months, because that was when Australia’s venomous snakes were about. If one of them was bitten, he’d have to turn himself in to avoid succumbing from the venom. They also didn’t use walkie-talkies, concerned that someone might pick up the frequency. Instead, they developed a way of communicating in code by flashlight. When one brother arrived at a rendezvous point and gave a signal in the darkness, the other would signal back if it was safe to meet.

The brothers never ate before a job. “You don’t want a full stomach when you’ve got to walk 20 kilometers,” Doug explained. To cut down on weight, they didn’t even bring water; they kept their mouths moist by chewing gum with flavored liquid in the center.

After a job, the tradition was to drive to Melbourne and eat at an all-night burger joint. They’d pick up the latest paper, which sometimes included news of their crime. Peter remembered one headline declaring that the police had the bandit surrounded and were expecting an early arrest. The twins laughed as they scarfed down hamburgers several towns away.  

The Mask

Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad operated out of the Russell Street Police Headquarters in downtown Melbourne. A blond-brick skyscraper crowned with a tall metal radio mast, the building stood across the road from the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was hanged. Nineteen investigators had been allocated to the squad, and they were spread thin. Detective sergeant Jimmy Louden, who led one of the squad’s six crews, was in charge of the investigation into the prolific TAB robber, known initially as the Machine Gun Bandit because the assault rifle he sometimes carried resembled an automatic weapon. By August 1978, John Beever and Patrick Brear were running lead on the case.

Beever and Brear started by revisiting each crime scene. The detectives drove long distances to talk to small-town cops and reinterview witnesses, paying close attention to physical details of the bandit and his routine. He usually struck at around 7 p.m., and police noticed that he hadn’t been very active during the Australian summer of 1977–78. The officers concluded that this was because the summer months brought more daylight hours, preventing the bandit from using darkness to his advantage.

The robber was hitting targets all across southern Victoria, from windy Great Ocean Road in the west to the farm-studded flatlands of Wellington Shire in the east. Beever and Brear were especially baffled by robberies in Dromana and Sorrento that had occurred within 30 minutes of each other. The coastal towns were 15 miles apart on the Mornington Peninsula, a narrow boot-shaped strip of land south of Melbourne known for its vineyards, sheltered beaches, and great surf. As the bandit entered the agency in Sorrento, he told a female staff member, “Sorry I’m late, but I just held up the Dromana branch.” Beever and Brear were unable to cover the distance between the two towns in the time that elapsed between the robberies. “We were dealing with more than just your run-of-the-mill offender,” Brear said. “We were looking for a very smart operative.”

Once the bandit’s MO was established, Victoria police launched a broad-based surveillance effort code-named Operation Rimfire. The objective was to monitor TAB agencies in areas where the bandit was operating, in particular between the hours of 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. It was an enormous allocation of manpower for small-town police stations with just a handful of employees. Officers attended briefings and manned stakeouts in shifts. They were instructed to wear civilian clothes, stay near a telephone, and maintain radio contact. Meal breaks were forbidden. After the bandit struck while an officer was using the restroom, officers were ordered to hold their water, too.

As the search dragged on, the police grew annoyed by the public’s lack of assistance. The leader of Victoria’s Armed Robbery Squad, detective inspector Tom O’Keeffe, told the press, “It’s not a Ned Kelly fight between the coppers and the villain. It’s not a game people can join in by watching on TV.” He warned that the bandit was “a potential psychopath,” and compared him to rapists and murderers. “It looks like it’s a challenge to him,” he said, “and we accept the challenge.”

Doug feared that the heavy bag of cash tied around his neck might drown him, but managed to reach the bank and drag himself ashore.

Despite careful planning, close calls were unavoidable for the Morgan twins. During one escape, Doug encountered a roadblock on a bridge and had to slip into a swollen river to avoid detection. From under the bridge, he could see the cops above silhouetted by flashing lights. For a moment he considered yelling for help. He feared that the heavy bag of cash tied around his neck might drown him, but managed to reach the bank and drag himself ashore.

To stay ahead of police, the twins had to innovate. After one stickup in the bayside town of Edithvale, Peter experimented with a novel getaway method: a timber canoe. He built it himself, along with a paddle, to prevent the police from tracing it to a store. He navigated into foggy Port Phillip Bay with his stolen cash in a waterproof container, watching the lights of the police cars as they raced into town. Suddenly, the canoe started to sink—he hadn’t waterproofed it. Peter paddled frantically to shore, where he abandoned the vessel and hiked back to his car.  

One day, Peter was perusing a collection of novelty items at an agricultural show in Melbourne when he spotted a mask. It looked like the face of an ugly old man and had a mop of curly hair attached, long enough that it ran to Peter’s collar. He decided that it offered perfect cover. He came to see the mask as the part of his robbery kit that distinguished him as a serious professional criminal, and resolved not to let his brother use it.

That was fine with Doug, who used handkerchiefs and bandanas to cover his face during robberies. He had no interest in wearing Peter’s mask, which he tried on just once. “It was a piece of shit,” he told me. “Your vision was really bad out of it, so you didn’t have peripheral.”

Peter felt that his brother was an unreliable partner. Doug wasn’t balking at jobs anymore, but he was sometimes unavailable because of practice with his recreational football team. “I was full on,” Peter said, “whereas for whatever reason, Douglas became reluctant.” Peter planned TAB heists in Drouin and Keilor without telling his brother.

But TABs were beginning to feel too small-time for the kind of criminal Peter saw himself as. In early 1978, he decided to hit his first bank.

The Nickname

Because banks closed earlier than TABs, Peter knew that he risked being seen before the sun went down. This meant it was imperative that he get into the bush faster than usual. He decided to steal a motorbike to do so. One of Peter’s rules was to only steal from businesses, not individuals, so he went to a used-car lot, asked to test-drive a Honda 500cc motorcycle, and zoomed away without paying for it.

The next day, March 7, 1978, Peter rode the stolen motorbike to the State Savings Bank in Mirboo North, a tranquil farming town. He ran inside armed with a shotgun and ordered the manager to fill up a bag with money. He then escaped to a nearby pine forest, stashed the bike, and set off on foot. When he stopped to rest, he rifled through his bag of money and found a brand-new .25-caliber Browning pistol inside. It belonged to the bank. A staff member must have tossed it inside for some reason during the robbery.

The take was a hefty $15,098, and Peter planned to spend his share. While Doug sometimes used his portion of the loot to purchase sports cars, Peter preferred ski boats, motorbikes, and guns. Like their father before them, both men enjoyed betting on horses and greyhounds. Peter used this as a way to launder his money: He’d place a bet with stolen cash at one window, then claim his winnings at another, receiving clean bills in return. (Since the races didn’t always go his way, he figures that the method amounted to about a 20 percent processing fee.)

Peter also took up horse trading. He bought horses at country markets, transported them to his property, and sold some to recreational riders while keeping others for himself. It was an ideal cover for the robberies, justifying his frequent travel and surplus cash, and providing an explanation for how he spent his time. He’d even use the horse trailer to haul stolen motorcycles to robbery locations. Peter accumulated so many horses—he estimates that he bought and sold about 100—that he bought a farm in Nyora and moved his family there.

Several of Peter’s Thoroughbreds competed on the local racing circuit. As kids the Morgan twins idolized the Skelton brothers, who were among the best jockeys in New Zealand. Now, as an owner of racehorses, Peter had the opportunity to lift R.J. Skelton into his saddle before a race. “He called me Mr. Morgan,” Peter bragged to Doug. However indirectly, the robberies were earning him power and respect.

Peter claims that he hid his crimes from his family. He’d wait until his wife left for work—Pamela managed a hardware company—before washing the stolen bank notes, dunking them in water, shoving them in a stocking, and running them in the clothes dryer to remove any ink stamps the bank had marked them with. Like his father, he also rented a safe house in Essendon, gave the landlady a phony story, and kept a car at the property in case he needed to disappear in a hurry.

Doug’s son, Michael, told me that his mother once opened the trunk of their car and found it full of cash. “But Father was good at lying,” Michael said. “He said he’d won it at the races.”

The Morgan brothers treated their wives with coldness at times, and despite their fraternal competitiveness, they often opted to spend time with each other rather than their families. Doug’s wife was saddened by his absence and neglect; Peter’s wife finally left, taking their son with her, after Peter returned from a three-day heist and refused to tell her where he’d been. Peter spent the next day losing $7,000 at the racetrack. When his wife returned with their son and a new toy she’d bought for him, Peter bitterly blamed her for his losses. That toy had cost seven grand, he thought.

Still, the Pamelas stuck by their husbands even as their families grew: Doug eventually had a son and a daughter, and Peter had two sons. Just as Kay brought the twins along on jobs, Peter sometimes took his four-year-old to scout potential targets and police stations. One day the toddler was in the car with his grandparents when he said, “We need to go and look at the cop shop!”

“Why?” they asked.

Because, the boy said, Dad always liked to check them out.

After the Mirboo North bank heist, the twins targeted a string of betting agencies. Following one stickup, in the town of Torquay, Doug was fleeing in the darkness when a local service-station owner gave chase. Doug turned and fired his gun, which was loaded with buckshot. He intended it to be a warning shot and had aimed at the ground, but a pellet struck the man’s lip.

At around 7 p.m., Peter heard about the robbery on the radio and fell into a fury. “The shooting broke my rules,” Peter told me. “There was to be no violence.” Waiting in his Valiant Charger at the rendezvous point, Peter extended the barrel of his Jager .22 rifle through the open window. I’m going to kill him, Peter thought. The gun was loaded and cocked, with the safety off. He saw Doug walking toward the vehicle in the darkness, finishing what was a 15-mile hike from Torquay. Peter was about to pull the trigger when he thought: What am I doing? He put the gun back down on his lap.

In the wake of the shooting of the service-station owner, police reporter Geoff Wilkinson published a story headlined “Hunt for 14-Raid TAB Thief,” portraying the criminal as a “potential killer.” Wilkinson—who would later write Double Trouble, a book about the twins, with coauthor Ross Brundrett—also gave the robber a new nickname, based on his propensity for nighttime heists: the After Dark Bandit.

The Briefcase

Doug’s shooting of the man in Torquay brought to the fore some fundamental disagreements between the Morgan brothers. Doug had always considered himself the better carpenter, better with girls, and their father’s favorite. Doug felt that Peter now saw himself as the better bank robber and was intent on rubbing it in. For his part, Peter felt like his brother was just “along for the ride,” enjoying the fruits of his efforts while pulling fewer jobs and bringing in less money. This inspired Peter’s nickname for Doug: Parasite. He felt that Doug lacked commitment. “It was a business,” Peter told me. “Not a legal business, but it was still a business.”

Peter was meticulous to the point of obsessive when preparing for a robbery, scouting targets for hours at a time and repeatedly assembling and disassembling his rifle in the dark like a commando. As Peter saw it, Doug had never taken anything seriously in his life. In their teens, they’d been evenly matched in most sports, but Peter had the edge in track and field. During one race in New Zealand, Doug unexpectedly got out to a huge lead, and Peter exhausted himself catching up. Then, halfway through the race, Doug stopped and walked off the track. “It was all just a big joke to him,” Peter told me.

Doug’s lackadaisical attitude clashed with Peter’s desire to expand their criminal enterprise to include higher-stakes bank jobs. The last TAB Peter ever hit was in the small dairy town of Maffra. It was the second half of a double robbery; Doug had struck a betting agency in Heyfield 25 minutes earlier. Peter, wearing his mask, entered the caged area behind the TAB’s counter and collected the money from the cash drawers. But when the manager opened the floor safe, it was empty. “Where’d you hide it?” asked Peter, rummaging through a waste bin to see if any money was stashed inside. The manager just smiled. Reading the papers afterward, Peter concluded that after Doug’s Heyfield heist, the police had notified all TABs in the area that the After Dark Bandit was on the prowl. Peter was less annoyed by the measly haul—a mere $463—than by the feeling that he’d been outsmarted.

Two weeks later,  eager to show the police who was boss, Peter parked his motorcycle outside Heathcote’s CBC Bank, donned his mask, and ran inside carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a large bag. “I have to rob a bank because the coppers have got the TABs covered,” he told the frightened staff. He seized $15,106 in cash.  

Carrying the stolen money out of the Heathcote CBC, Peter spotted a man seated in a car wearing a blue Victoria Police uniform. Peter, still in his mask, dragged the man out of the car and frisked him for a gun.

“You’re a cop,” Peter said.

“No,” lied the off-duty constable, terrified.

Peter threw the man’s keys into a nearby field, then climbed onto his motorcycle and sped off down Heathcote’s main street.

Soon after, flush with cash from the bank heist, the Morgan twins went to the races at Ballarat, a provincial city in the gold-rich Central Highlands of Victoria. They drove Peter’s Valiant Charger, which he’d recently souped up to outrun the cops. “It was my pride and joy, obviously,” Peter told me. In the boot of the car was a briefcase containing two shotguns and thousands of dollars in cash.

Before the races started, Doug vanished. Peter couldn’t find him in the restroom or anywhere else he searched. He’d never known his brother to skip a race, so Peter panicked, worrying that the police might have nabbed him. He decided to leave, but walking through the parking lot he realized that the cops might be waiting at his car. He crept between vehicles, trying to remain unseen, until he came to his spot. The Valiant was gone.

Peter took a taxi back to his house, where he found his car parked with the door and trunk open. The briefcase was gone, and there was a note on the steering wheel: “Thanks bro.”

Doug had stolen the car by having a copy of Peter’s key cut the previous day. “My greatest job,” Doug told me. “I robbed the robber.”

For three days, Peter said, he “hunted Doug around Victoria prepared to kill him.” He drove to every motel he could find. “I’m looking for my twin brother. He looks like me,” he told each proprietor. “There’s been a death in the family, and I can’t contact him.”

Doug told me that he robbed his brother because he was fed up with Peter calling him Parasite. Plus, he wanted to prove that he could get the better of his twin. “I showed him who’s the real master,” Doug said.

A few days after disappearing, Doug called Peter. “We need to talk,” he said.

“You’re a scumbag,” Peter replied.

Still, the brothers agreed to meet. When they sat down at a pub in Melbourne, according to Doug, he handed over Peter’s gun and half the money from the boot of his car. (As Peter tells it, Doug had already spent it all, and slid him an empty briefcase.) Doug explained that he’d been at a motel in the town of Sale. Peter hadn’t checked it because it was next to a police station.

The incident strained the already volatile relationship between the brothers, yet they continued their criminal partnership. Despite a mutual hatred, they were the last remaining members of the original gang of four, and neither could simply walk away.

The Gum Tree

Robbing Peter made Doug more confident than ever. In the spring of 1978, he told his brother that he intended to hit a bank. Peter asked for specifics, but Doug simply said that he had it all planned out.

In fact, all he’d done at that point was pick a target: the National Bank in Warburton, an old gold-mining town on the Yarra River, surrounded by the lush green mountains of the Great Dividing Range. Doug had banked there a few years earlier, and once when he looked over the teller’s shoulder, he saw heaps of cash in trays—far more than he’d seen when working in a bank as a teenager. “It told me this was a good bank to rob,” Doug said.

Five nights before the heist, Doug stole a small Honda motorbike from a local garage. On October 17, he rode around Warburton for four hours, scouting his getaway route. As the afternoon shadows lengthened, he found a hill overlooking the bank and sat there for 20 minutes, counting the customers going in and out of the building.

Doug stepped into the bank dressed in a long oilskin coat, his face covered by a black stocking and a balaclava. He vaulted over the counter, shouting, “You probably know who I am. I am the After Dark Bandit!”  He announced that he’d shot people before, then he emptied the cash from the tellers’s boxes and locked everyone in the bathroom. He warned them not to contact the police, claiming that he knew where they lived.

After the holdup, Doug raced on his motorbike into the hills above Warburton. With the heavy bag of stolen money strapped to his wrist, he accidentally popped a wheelie that sent him swerving toward an oncoming bus, which he narrowly avoided hitting. He then doubled back over some dirt tracks he’d made that morning, forcing his pursuers to guess which direction he’d gone. After returning to the paved road, he puttered along for a distance before stopping. He threw the bike over a wire fence, covered it with branches, and set off on foot into the bush.

When he felt that he’d gone far enough to shake any pursuers, Doug took a rest against an enormous gum tree. “It was like a romantic painting,” he said. He opened his bag and counted the stolen cash: nearly $39,000. While some thieves might have considered the impressive haul ample reason to keep pulling jobs, Doug felt differently. “It was enough money to start a new life,” he recalled. “I could leave Australia. Maybe move to New Zealand or America. I could buy two houses in cash, maybe set up a business.”

He thought about his brother—blowing money on racehorses, doing jobs just to prove he could, and walking around like a movie gangster with the Browning pistol from the Mirboo North robbery tucked into a homemade holster.  Doug didn’t want to be like his brother, because he didn’t like his brother. If Peter was going to continue to define himself by robbing banks, Doug would take the opposite tack. He pledged to never do another holdup.

In the distance he could hear the thrup-thrup-thrup of a police helicopter searching for him. He looked up at the canopy of the gum tree. Its long branches and flowing leaves provided perfect cover.

Later, when Peter discovered how much Doug had scored, their biggest haul to date, he scoffed. “Beginner’s luck,” he said.

“He was like a bomb just waiting to go off, and the trouble is, the bomb was going to destroy my life as well,” Doug said.

On March 14, 1979, Peter put on his rubber mask and darted inside the same Heathcote CBC he robbed the previous July. “Hello,” he cheerily greeted the staff. “Remember me?” He tossed a bag on the counter and told the tellers to fill it up. Peter then placed his sawed-off shotgun on the counter and caught one of the tellers looking at it. “This is your chance,” Peter said, daring them to grab the weapon.

He forced the customers into the storeroom. A few noted that the bandit had grown a pot belly, causing his shirt buttons to pop. In a subsequent news article headlined “The after-dark bandit casts a broader shadow,” journalist Lindsay Murdoch wrote, “Police say the bandit’s big spending of TAB and bank money is starting to show.”

Peter announced that he needed a getaway car, and ledger keeper Jan Murphy handed him the keys to her orange Datsun. He drove Murphy’s car to a small building in the countryside, where earlier that day he’d stashed his motorbike—an unregistered, customized machine with a top speed of 100 mph. Zipping away on the bike, Peter was free.

Doug thought that his brother was insane to rob the same bank twice. “He was like a bomb just waiting to go off, and the trouble is, the bomb was going to destroy my life as well,” Doug said.

Peter didn’t take his brother’s retirement all that seriously, and felt validated when, a few months after the revelation under the gum tree, Doug agreed to do another bank job. The heist was planned for the idyllic farming town of Heyfield. Peter gave Doug his motorbike and guns, and dropped him off about 12 miles from the target. Doug, who later said that he’d felt pressured into the job, yanked a few wires on the bike to render it inoperable, then spent the day sitting by a lake. When Peter found out, he was furious—about the broken bike and because his brother had pulled out of yet another robbery.  

The twins had always fought, but their confrontations were becoming increasingly violent. Doug remembered Peter once holding his hair and kicking him in the face with his boot; another time, he said, Peter tried to run him down with a car. Doug also recalled punching Peter in the face and ramming his head through a plaster wall at a construction site. During one fierce fight, Doug begged Peter to give up the robberies. “You have to stop,” Doug said. “You’re going to get us killed.”

By then the twins had stolen close to $100,000, but for Peter it wasn’t enough. His goal was to become “the big guy in domestic horses in Victoria,” he told me. To do that, he needed a sizable nest egg. If Doug continued to dig in his heels and refuse to pull his weight, Peter figured that it would take six more jobs to get where he wanted to be.

The Church

For detectives Beever and Brear, each new robbery felt like a failure of their investigative work. But it also added to the pool of knowledge about the After Dark Bandit. They realized that he was becoming greedier, favoring banks over betting agencies, and also more daring and reckless. He was hitting targets during the day sometimes, and he’d robbed Heathcote CBC twice in eight months.

Beever and Brear’s working theory was that the bandit was a drug addict or gambler—someone “not very strong on investments,” in Brear’s words, who was spending the money he stole, then pulling another job when cash got low. The detectives recorded the dates of each robbery and the amounts taken. Using this information, they discerned what they thought was a pattern and tried to predict when he would strike again.

Beever thought that the next robbery would fall on April 27, and he sent a telex dispatch the day before, warning police in county stations to be on high alert. “Regarding the offender sought for numerous armed robberies on TAB agencies at banks in country areas, it is anticipated that this offender will commit a similar offence in the very near future,” Beever wrote. He urged police to monitor banks and TABs “in particular within half an hour either side of closing time,” to be “discreet in the surveillance,” and to stay off their radios. “It appears that this offender has monitored police broadcasts in the past,” Beever wrote.

Brear suspected that the target would be Heathcote CBC for a third time. He couldn’t say why—it was just “a hell of a strong gut feeling,” he told me. Sitting at Russell Street Police Headquarters, with nothing pressing on the day’s agenda, Brear suggested to Beever that they drive from Melbourne up to Heathcote, park near the CBC Bank, and watch for the thief. Beever doubted that the robber would hit Heathcote a third time, however, so the detectives stayed put.

Still, Brear was so convinced that Heathcote was the target that he called senior constable Ray Koch, one of two police officers in the small town. Brear urged him to keep an eye on the bank, and Koch reassured him that he was standing guard.

Around 4:40 p.m., 51-year-old Koch was cruising down Heathcote’s main street in his squad car when he decided to do another pass by the bank before it closed for the day. Koch gripped the steering wheel with his big hands. He was a strong, stocky man; his friends knew him as a gentle giant who enjoyed spending time with his wife and four kids. A pillar of the tight-knit community, he could often be found trap shooting, duck hunting, or drinking beer with friends.

Clad in his blue police jacket and trousers, Koch drove up to the brick bank, where he noticed a figure on a side street. It was Peter, who on an impulse had indeed chosen to hit Heathcote a third time, because he knew the bank inside and out. For the previous two hours, he had stood at the edge of a nearby football field, watching Koch’s police car pass the bank every 30 minutes. “Like clockwork,” he recalled. Come 4:30, Peter decided to strike, figuring he’d have half an hour to rob the bank before the cop returned. He didn’t expect Koch to come back early.

Peter had just put his mask on and was walking toward the bank when Koch pulled up. Upon hearing the car door open, Peter ducked behind a small tree, pulled off his mask, and shoved it in his jumper. He’d hoped to appear as a passerby. But then he changed his mind; instead of trying to blend in, he’d take action.

Peter drew the Browning .25 pistol, which he’d come to regard as his lucky gun. It was the same model his father had used in the Eltham bank shootout, and Peter always kept it cocked and loaded. Koch, now out of his vehicle and clearly facing the After Dark Bandit, made for the far side of his car for cover, but Peter came at him and grabbed him by the arm. Koch tried to seize the Browning, and as the men wrestled, Peter’s gun hand slid under Koch’s armpit and the weapon discharged. Koch was hit in the back of the hip. He dragged Peter to the ground as he fell. When the two men hit the pavement, there was another loud pop. Intense pain seared through Koch’s body. (Peter has always insisted that both shots were unintentional.)

As Koch bled under his jacket, Peter hoisted him to his feet, grabbed him by the elbow, and walked him toward the bank. Peter was about to don his mask and enter the building when he turned to Koch. “I should finish you right now, because you’re the only person that’s ever seen my face,” Peter said. “But I won’t.” Then he pulled the officer into the bank.

Peter ordered the bank staff, who knew his routine by now, to fill up his bag with cash and open the safe. Koch, meanwhile, sat in a chair by the door, moaning with pain. Peter wanted to get out of there fast, lest Koch’s colleagues show up. He also wanted Koch to pull through.

“When we finish this, you can ring for the ambulance,” Peter told a young bank teller.

“What’s the phone number?” the teller asked.

“You idiot!” yelled Peter, kicking the teller’s backside.

Once again Peter needed a getaway vehicle, and once again ledger keeper Jan Murphy offered the keys to her orange Datsun. Lugging $11,100 in stolen cash, he left through the rear of the bank and got in the car, which was parked in the same spot as the last time he stole it.

Peter drove the Datsun down a side street, then around the back of the football field and into Heathcote’s scrubby fairground, where he’d hidden a black Yamaha motorcycle. Because Doug had sabotaged Peter’s personal bike, he lifted this one from a garage the night before. Peter ditched the car and got on the bike just as a police car pulled into the fairground. Behind the wheel was Fred Hobley, the other half of Heathcote’s two-man police force, who minutes after Peter fled the bank got the call that Koch had been shot.

Peter maneuvered into a ditch and then up an embankment and onto the road, with the cop in pursuit. Hobley lifted his police radio. “I’m chasing the motorbike,” he reported. Hobley kept losing sight of Peter on a windy dirt road leading into the forest, but he could follow the dust stirred up by the bike’s tires.

Peter saw a vehicle up ahead also kicking up a cloud of dust. He turned onto a narrower track, then slowed down. Behind him the cop car sped past, following the other vehicle’s trail.  

Peter puttered along slowly, drained from the adrenaline rush. After a few miles, he reached a spot where earlier that day he’d cut some tree branches to cover the bike and also stashed a bag of supplies—two cans of Coke, some blocks of chocolate, and a portable transistor radio. He grabbed the sack and started into the bush.

Doug drove to his brother’s farm, grabbed some guns from Peter’s shed, and loaded them into his car.

Later that evening, Doug was visiting his 17-year-old mistress, Wendy Breen. He’d been smitten by Wendy after she came to ride horses at Peter’s farm. “She probably went for the older man that had nice things, being young and from a working-class family,” Doug said.  Now, while spending time at her home, he heard a news flash on the radio that a policeman had been shot. He knew right away that Peter was responsible, and that the two of them were in deep trouble.

Doug had played a minor part in the heist that day, dropping off Peter and his motorbike outside Heathcote in the predawn hours. Doug rationalized that this wasn’t as bad as holding up a bank—he was only driving. Still, he’d told Peter that this was the last time he would help. Now he drove to his brother’s farm, grabbed some guns from Peter’s shed, and loaded them into his car. He told me he’d planned to use them to fire warning shots if he encountered police.

As part of the heist, Doug was supposed to pick up Peter at 2 a.m. at a rendezvous point: a Catholic church outside the small farming town of Axedale. Fueled by adrenaline, Peter made it there early and sat on the steps of the old church, waiting for his brother. The night air was frigid, causing him to shiver. He thought about kicking down the door of the church to warm up inside but decided that wouldn’t be right. It was a church after all. He turned on his transistor radio and listened to the news about the shooting and the massive police manhunt. The whole world was going to come down on his shoulders, he thought.

Two a.m. came and went with no sign of Doug. Unbeknownst to Peter, his brother had decided to wait until morning to head to the church, hoping that the police presence would diminish with time. En route, Doug spotted a roadblock. He knew that if the cops searched his car, they’d discover the guns he’d concealed under a newspaper on the passenger seat, so he stopped at a convenience store and bought a Coke. Then he got back in his car and hung a U-turn. According to Doug, if either missed the rendezvous, their plan was to return 24 hours later.

By 10:15 a.m., Peter was fed up with waiting. Eager to make it home for his wedding anniversary celebration, he decided to hitch a ride on a nearby road. A woman driving with her daughter gave him a lift into the town of Bendigo. “Retrospectively,” he told me, “I should have went bush.” Peter walked into a Woolworths to buy a different suitcase to carry the cash from the bank job. On his way out, he thought he was probably in the clear. He was only ten minutes from Bendigo’s railway station, where he could finally make his way home. That’s when constable Rick Hasty spotted him, pinned him against the wall, and arrested him.

Peter was shoved into a police car with three burly cops. They drove him a couple hundred yards to the police station and escorted him inside.

Peter calmly asked for a white coffee with one and a half sugars. “He was a cocky smart-ass,” Hasty told me. “Don’t let him put it over you that he was sorry for [what he did].” Hasty added, “He should have been fucking shot between the eyes.” So many policemen crowded in to get a glimpse of the After Dark Bandit that Peter “couldn’t see the walls,” he told me. “All I could see was blue.”

Brear, who’d gone to Heathcote the night before after hearing about the shooting, now arrived at the Bendigo station. He and a couple of other cops took Peter into a room for questioning. The men slid a list of suspected robberies across the table and asked him which were his. To their surprise, Peter admitted to nearly every one, 23 in total. He also volunteered that his first robbery was in Mernda.

One of the stunned cops asked him the date of the crime. Peter said that it was Holy Thursday 1977.

Peter then described his robberies down to the exact amounts stolen and the weapons used. “He was very cooperative,” Brear told me. “He offered no resistance to us at all.” Peter was following in the footsteps of his father, who’d freely confessed to his crimes after the Eltham robbery. “If you ever do something wrong,” Kay had told his sons, “at least be a man and accept the punishment.”

Ten hours after Peter’s arrest, once the police had searched his home and discovered that he had a twin brother, detectives Beever and Brear sat Peter down for a second round of questioning. They said that they believed his twin had been involved in the heists, too. Given their recent feuding, Peter had no intention of covering for Doug.

Yes, he told the police, his brother was his partner in crime.

When Doug saw his name and face on TV, he realized that his brother had ratted him out. He figured that it was Peter’s revenge for stealing his car and money at the horse races. “I don’t think I really trusted people after that,” he told me.

Doug suspected that the cops would be watching his home, so he spent the next few days moving from motel to motel with Wendy. The police already knew his face, of course, and they had a description of Wendy, which was circulating in the newspapers: a petite blonde, “last seen wearing blue jeans and a navy jumper.” Doug needed a car the police couldn’t trace, so he put a deposit down on a Land Rover, the first model he remembered his father driving. His plan was to head deep into the bush with Wendy and lie low for a while.

But first he took Wendy to the beach in Frankston, a lively seaside suburb of Melbourne with a golden sandy shore. Doug was watching the surf when he saw police officers coming down the beach, pointing at him. He bolted but didn’t make it far. Within moments, he collided with a police car and the cops piled on top of him.

The Prison

Justice for the brothers was swift. Doug pled guilty to robbing 17 TABs and four banks; Peter admitted to the same crimes, plus the two TABs he’d hit alone. A jury acquitted Peter of intent to cause grievous bodily harm to Ray Koch but found him guilty of the lesser charge of using a firearm to resist arrest.

The judge sentenced the twins to 17 years, but on appeal the state argued that they deserved more jail time. They’d left countless victims in their wake. There were the bank tellers and the customers who’d been traumatized by the brothers’ crimes. There was also Rick Hasty, who for the next 15 years wouldn’t speak to anyone about his terrifying encounter with Peter. He drank to forget, costing him two marriages, and moved to a cul-de-sac in the countryside, where he still lives today, often venturing alone into the Outback. Then there was Koch, who survived his injuries, but not without consequence. Doctors were in such a hurry to save his life they didn’t have time to scan the 32 pints of blood—donated by friends and Heathcote locals—his surgery required. Many suspected it had been infected with hepatitis, which took Koch’s life 16 years later. “So Morgan actually did kill him,” Hasty told me.

As a result of the state’s appeal, Doug’s sentence was increased to more than 20 years, and Peter’s to nearly 22. “The longest sentence from a robbery in Victorian history,” Peter boasted to me. Doug served almost 11 years, and Peter 12, both at Pentridge Prison, known for its strict security measures and notorious inmates.

While behind bars, Peter and Doug’s wives divorced them, and the brothers faced violence from fellow inmates and guards. Doug told me that there were times he wanted to kill himself but found strength by pretending he was a tough-as-nails John Wayne character. He also developed a mantra: “Hang yourself on Thursday.” Meaning give it a few days—by then you’ll forget what was so depressing.

During our conversations, both Peter and Doug expressed remorse for their criminal acts, attributing them to youthful stupidity. “I have a chronic guilty conscience of what I did, on all levels,” Peter said. Doug posts videos of himself on Facebook that often delve into his feelings of regret. He records them the moment he wakes up, which he says is when his thoughts are clearest. Some are strikingly raw and poetic, such as his memory of standing on a hilltop before a robbery, watching a town’s “streetlights flicker on, the smoke escaping from the chimneys, the people keeping warm, innocently going about their business.”

He concludes: “I never forgot sitting there on that hill and how peaceful the town was. But I was not a bringer of peace. I was a bringer of grief.”

The final competition between the Morgan brothers is over their legacy, as each man seeks to prove who was the better thief and who became the better man.

Today, Doug leads tours of the old prison where he did his stretch, which ceased operations in 1997. Parts of the facility have been remade into the ritzy Interlude hotel, where guests stay in converted-cell suites and take a dip in the softly lit subterranean swimming pool. Doug told me that tourists often ask questions about the time he served: “What was it like?” “How did you make it through?” Doug might say something glib in the moment, but then chew over his response for days until he falls upon something closer to the truth.

Peter despises that his brother is a tour guide, calling him a “show pony.” But Doug told me that he doesn’t do it for the fame or the money. He says that he enjoys meeting people and talking to them. Often, after a tour, he’ll go to a chic bar inside the old prison called the BrewDog, where he’s served free beer, and swap stories with the people from his tours—locals, foreign tourists, even a cop once.

Doug likes to present himself as a loner. He’s had girlfriends since prison, but he told me that he never lets them spend the night. He took up painting behind bars and likes to capture scenes of isolation: a red mug in the corner of a white room, Ned Kelly seated alone in darkness, a tumbledown shack on a barren plain. The bush features prominently in Doug’s artwork, and he romanticizes his time alone there, running from the law.

But there are signs that he craves real community. After his release from prison, he got interested in charity work and became a Salvation Army volunteer. He still takes on construction jobs, even at the age of 70, because he enjoys mentoring younger carpenters. And he posts video diaries online, reaching into the ether for connection.

Peter told me that his parents were never affectionate. He recalled one time sitting in the back seat of the car with his mother, grandmother, and brother. “I pretended to be asleep so I could lean against my grandmother and get cuddled,” Peter said. “I got that from my grandmother, not my mother.” Perhaps somewhere in that Rosebud-like memory lies the origin of the Morgan brothers’ intense rivalry: Maybe as boys, Doug and Peter had to compete for scarce attention, affirmation, and love from their parents. It’s a rivalry that has lasted their whole lives. It didn’t surprise me, then, to hear that Peter, too, had tried his hand at painting, and was endeavoring to get a charity startup off the ground.

Both men were hobbled by leg injuries sustained during their nighttime bush escapes, but apart from a matching limp, the twins are no longer identical. Doug wears his brown hair long and has a tangled beard; Peter is mostly bald, with a neat white mustache. Peter, who retired from construction, told me that Doug’s Facebook videos are ruining the quiet life he tried to create for himself. Doug frequently portrays Peter as an egomaniac trapped in his gangster past. He points to Peter’s use of “ADB” in his email address, short for After Dark Bandit. Peter told me that he chose ADB because “AfterDarkBandit” was already taken—by Doug.

Peter claims that Doug was just his “gopher” and “sidekick” during the robberies, and yet Doug, because of his charity work, painting, and prison tours, has spent more time in the limelight in recent years than Peter has. Peter is planning to write a memoir, titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Doug, of course, is considering a memoir of his own.

The final competition between the Morgan brothers is over their legacy, as each man seeks to prove who was the better thief and who became the better man. Their feud has reached its climax; neither brother knows where the other lives.

On a cloudy day in Melbourne in December 2023, Doug led his son, Michael, along with Michael’s wife and son, on a private tour through Pentridge’s B division, where the ground floor has been preserved. Doug walked his grandson into a small, dimly lit cell. “That’s your whole life,” Doug said. “You lived there all day. How would you like that for being a bank robber?”

Michael was shocked by the tour. “I never expected it to be so barbaric,” he told Doug. “From the outside, I don’t know what I expected. It just wasn’t this. These old, tiny, shitty cells.” It was the first time Michael had been past the visiting area. As a kid, he relished prison visits with his dad. “They take you down the path in the building, down to the garden, and these big old metal doors open,” Michael remembered. “It was always joyful, because in the garden I got to see my dad. He’d always have a Crunch bar for me.”

Doug, too, felt joy when his son visited, but a sense of melancholy, too. He told me about the time Michael pulled a tee out of his pocket, because his new stepdad was teaching him how to play golf. “I look at it and I go, ‘Well, if I was still a free man, he would be playing football, but now another man is raising my son,’ ” Doug said. “That’s when I realized a lot about the cost of crime.”

Michael is a successful salesman and marketing manager. I asked him if he’d ever thought about how he’d managed to break the cycle of crime that started with his grandfather. He said that he never really considered a life on the wrong side of the law. Sure, he’d felt a little rebellious toward the police as a kid, having witnessed them ransack his home searching for Doug—much like what Doug had experienced when law enforcement came looking for Kay. But Michael also experienced the consequences of crime, the visits to Pentridge where he could see his dad but never leave with him. “You have to live it,” he said, “[seeing] your parent in prison.”

Then Michael smirked. “It’s too hard these days anyway,” he added. He meant robbing banks.

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