Murder on the Maungatapu: A Narrative History of the Burgess Gang and Their Greatest Crime

In the winter of 1866 New Zealand’s most notorious bushranger, Richard Burgess, knelt at a small desk in his Nelson prison cell, took up his quill pen and began to write. His life, he knew, was beyond salvation but words were the last weapon at his disposal to consign his mortal enemy, gang turncoat Joseph Sullivan, to the gallows. The blood-soaked confession that followed was described by Mark Twain as ‘without its peer in the literature of murder’. Five bodies had been recovered from Maungatapu Mountain in the upper South Island, and another from the West Coast. But who had done the killing, and how many other victims were there? What had brought the ruthless Burgess Gang to this point?