“I shot a man. He is dead and I shot him with this revolver.”

On 11 March 1926 five quick gun shots shattered the tranquillity of the autumn afternoon in Pages Flat.

At a campsite next to the Victor Harbor Road, the body of wood cutter and WWI trooper Charles Byles was left amongst spent cartridges and splashes of blood.

He had been shot through the heart and his skull fractured.

The man who had pulled the trigger, Thomas Dugan, drove to the Adelaide watch house and gave himself up, telling police “I shot a man … he is dead and I shot him with this revolver”.

Despite this admission Dugan was acquitted of the murder at trial two months later. 

The verdict was cheered by court spectators but condemned by journalists. They asked why his claims of self-defence had not been cross examined and if they had been too easily accepted by those who believed a man ‘wronged’ by his wife and her lover had every right to take his revenge.

Thomas Dugan was a 'well-proportioned and bespectacled man' according to the police report. 

He was thirty-seven at the time of the killing and had been born in 1889 at Crystal Brook in South Australia’s mid-north. 

He worked as a horse breaker and farm hand and the age of 24 in May 1914 - and only 18 days before their first son Alfred was born - he married 21-year-old Euphemia Bates from Petersburg in the Holy Trinity Church in North Terrace. 

Thomas joined the Light Horse Brigade in 1915. He was sent to Egypt but was discharged as medically unfit due to knee and eye problems.

After returning home he became a publican, running establishments at Lower Light, Hilton and Innamincka.

It was in 1925 in Innamincka, in South Australia's remote north, that he met the man he would shoot through the heart.

Caleb (Charles) Byles held the mail contract between the dusty outpost and the now ghost town of Farina. He boarded at the Dugan’s Hotel. 

Until Dugan got suspicious of his relationship with Euphemia and told him to leave.

Byles was originally from Gloucestershire in England and was 38 when he was killed. 

At the age of 16 he had joined the British Army and spent time in India with his regiment. He then came to South Australia as a reservist.

When the first World War broke out in 1914 he travelled back to England and rejoined his regiment, serving in France, Palestine and Serbia.

Caleb (Charles) Byles

After the war he returned to South Australia in 1920, working at Nappainerrie Station in the far north before securing the Innimincka mail contract.

When Euphemia took her youngest child to Adelaide for a holiday in October 1925 Byles also disappeared from the far north town.

The rumour soon reached Dugan that Byles and his wife were together and he drove the more than 1000-kilometre journey to Adelaide.

Accompanied by his mother and sister, he found Euphemia and Byles in a house at Norwood and had to be restrained from attacking him.

Euphemia left the house and was taken to a hotel in Sempahore where she stayed while Dugan returned to Innamincka, sold the pub and went back to Adelaide.

He took over the licence of the Alma Hotel in Norwood and lived there for a short time with Euphemia and their three children, Alfred (11), Thomas (9) and Beryl (7) until she left again a few weeks later.

As one paper put it, she preferred the primitive living conditions of the wood cutter’s camp to living at the hotel with her husband.

Dugan wasn’t going to let her go though and started trying to track the pair down. He eventually heard that she was with Byles at Pages Flat. 

Willunga based mounted constable Raymond Casey took a phone call from a man identifying himself as Dugan the day before the shooting. Dugan asked him if there was a man called Byles in the area. He said his wife was living with Byles and calling herself Mrs Byles.

Constable Casey made enquiries and then phoned Byles on the morning of 12 March to tell him the couple were indeed in the area. He said he asked Byles if he was intended on violence and Byles said no. The policeman then told him where he could find the couple.

Another witness, Cedric Craig, told the inquest he happened to be walking along South Road, just past Dawes Road, with his rifle to go kangaroo shooting, when Byles stopped his car and offered him a ride.

The two men then drove to Willunga and on towards Victor Harbor.

They stopped when they saw a tent near the roadside and Craig said he saw a woman and pointed her out to Dugan.

Dugan then got out of the car and pursued her. Craig got out of the car and followed and said he noticed Dugan had a pistol in his hand and that a man (Byles) was standing nearby He heard Dugan tell Euphemia to pack her clothes and go with him but she refused saying she had taken nothing from their home.

Dugan then fired at the ground in front of her feet. He then spoke to Byles calling him a rotter and a mongrel. Byles did not reply and Dugan fired into the air.

Dugan then aimed at Byles and Euphemia cried out ‘Don’t shoot Tom; don’t shoot’ but the gun was fired and Byles cried out and fell to the ground.

Dugan then hit Byles over the head with a bottle while he was lying on the ground.

Craig said he then retrieved his rifle from the car and starting walking to Willunga. He said Dugan and Euphemia passed him in the car as he walked along the roadside.

Byles’ friend and camp mate Albert Matchlos who was nearby but did not see the shooting later told the court he heard five shots in total.

Dugan stopped at the Willunga Post Office and told the startled postmaster to call the police and tell them there had been a shooting at Pages Flat and that the man responsible would be giving himself up at the Adelaide police station.

The postmaster sent a message to Mounted Constable Casey who was attending the Mount Compass show. He hurried back to Pages Flat and found Byles dead, on his back, his body still slightly warm.

Caleb Byles was buried at Willunga the next day.

An inquest was held later than month and the Coroner found that Thomas Dugan had killed and murdered Byles.

A doctor giving evidence said a shot that had passed through Byles’ heart had killed him. He had also been shot in the face and had a fracture to his skull.

The four-day criminal trial took place in May 1926. 

Thomas Dugan pled not guilty due to self-defence. He said he had only taken the revolver for self-defence and had fired when he saw Byles stoop to pick up an axe-head or bottle and thought his life in danger and had not intended to kill him.

In his summing up Justice Poole told the jury to consider whether Dugan had intended to hit Byles with his shot and then any justification for the killing saying, a man wronged by his wife’s adultery had not the right to kill, whatever his feelings might be.

After only two hours of deliberation on Friday 14 May, the jury handed down the verdict of not guilty.

The outcome was cheered in the strangers’ gallery before the court was cleared and Dugan was discharged and free to go.

However, an editorial in Adelaide based newspaper The Register condemned the outcome saying “In this country the right of the injured husband to kill his wife’s lover is not yet wholly conceded; for which reason apparently, Dugan did not altogether reply on the injury done to him by Byles to procure the favour of the jury.”

It noted that he had ‘a second string to his bow’ in claiming self-defence even though his account was not supported by the evident of Cedric Craig, the only independent witness to the event.

After regaining his freedom, Thomas became a farmer in the Murraylands and he and Euphemia had another son in 1928.

Euphemia passed away at the age of 65 in Murray Bridge in 1962.

Thomas remarried and died at the age of 88 in 1977.

After Caleb Charles Byles was buried in Willunga the public trustee gathered all his belongings and sold them for 3 pounds and 10 shillings to cover some of the funeral costs.

His friend and fellow wood cutter Albert Matchlos paid the remaining 7 pounds it cost to bury Charles.