Tuesday, May 3, 2011

THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF BOGLE AND CHANDLER

        
               
Doctor Gilbert Bogle and Mrs Margaret Chandler died in circumstances which have remained the topic of speculation and public fascination in Australia for more than four decades. The pair died in an apparent lovers’ tryst on a river bank in Sydney early on New Year’s Day 1963. 
The New Zealand-born Bogle was a scientist of international repute, a physicist working on lasers for the government research body, the CSIRO. He was a popular figure in scientific and intellectual circles in Sydney at the time. Not only was he highly successful in his work - he was about to take his wife and family to the United States, where he would be working at the prestigious Bell Telephone Laboratories - he exuded charisma, played the jazz clarinet, and had a reputation as a ladies man.

Margaret Chandler was the young wife of a CSIRO technician, Geoffrey Chandler. She met Bogle at a Christmas party in late December, and he ensured she and her husband were invited to a friends’ home for New Year’s Eve. Bogle offered Mrs Chandler a lift home, and they left the party together as dawn approached. They stopped off at a lovers haunt a few kilometres away, on the bank of the Lane Cove River, but little is known about what happened next. 
Their bodies were discovered a few hours later by two boys looking for lost golf balls from the adjoining course, and police rushed to the scene. Almost immediately the police and press realised they were dealing with something major, and very out of the ordinary. Not only was Bogle a well known figure in the more rarified echelons of Sydney society, but he had been found with a married woman, both of them in a state of partial undress suggesting sexual activity. Moreover, no obvious cause of the deaths could be found. They was no sign of any gunshot or stabbing: the bodies were virtually unmarked. Sydney and the entire nation were scandalised by the revelations. The inquest created enormous attention (and newspaper sales), yet at its conclusion the coroner was forced to bring in an open finding. A cast-iron alibi for Mrs Chandler’s husband - the prime suspect - removed him from  suspicion, and exhaustive testing failed to detect any toxic substances in either body. There the case rested, over time attaining the status of a mystery. 
What did come out during the decades after was that Bogle was doing work which might well have brought him to the attention of various spying agencies such as the CIA or the KGB. The laser he was working on developmentally in 1962 was in use in smart bombs in Vietnam by the end of the decade. There is also the possibility that Bogle was conducting his own inquiries into the death of his friend Cliff Dalton, head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, whose wife Catherine maintained he had been killed “without hardware”. 
There were suggestions too that Bogle might have been involved in the development of laser anti-satellite weaponry, although a veteran reporter, perhaps tellingly for the yellow press of the era, recently claimed that was concocted by newshounds keen to keep the story going. Whatever the case, there remains the suspicion in many quarters that there is more to the story than Sixties free love gone wrong, and that Doctor Bogle and Mrs Chandler may have been victims of Cold War intrigue. There is also an explanation, aired in a 2006 TV documentary, that the pair died from noxious hydrogen sulphide gas exuded by the river, but for some this raised as many questions as it answered. After all, if such lethal gas leaks were occurring from the river bed, why were Bogle and Chandler the only two ever known to be affected, in an area known as a lovers' lane? The case would seem yet to be closed.





5 comments:

  1. Great post Larry, and I love the sound of your book! It could be that they were indeed killed by a toxin that wasn't readily available, let alone detectable by the more primitive and limited toxicology tests of the day - let alone after some time of decomposition - after all, you can only find what you know you're looking for, even if it falls within a broad category. Also, wasn't there a theory that they were both drunk and on LSD (which was then experimental and not illegal yet) and may have overdosed on it? And, one suspects, that in those straitened times, any autopsy or report may have been conducted as quickly as possible to avoid any further scandal to them, their families or their friends and associates in the CSIRO, also working on similarly highly classified experiments (and who were, it's since been said, all involved in a weird, Nietschian, free-lovin', wife-swapping circle of friends).

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  2. Many thanks. As mentioned elsewhere, I somewhat doubt the "LSD overdose" theory, as how many other people have we ever heard of OD-ing on LSD? It's taken in such small amounts... not that it can't have very large effects, but not OD I'd say. There was some controversy about the autopsy reports, though they do seem to have been conducted as well as possible at the time, and tissue samples are said to remain still today, with the possible promise of throwing light on what really happened.

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  3. R U interested in the truth there is still one lady alive that I know of.and also the other children of Geoffrey Chandler that nobody wants to Know either.one women is hiding I know where and one daughter who is dying that knows more and nobody wants to know P butt & t Bowden .this doco made them famouse so let's see the rest or what are they hiding.regards Tanya

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