top of page

    University academic  Dr  Gilbert Bogle   was murdered with his friend,  Margaret Chandler  in the early hours of the First of January, !963, after an  otherwise  normal  New Year's Eve  party.

It was clearly a case of severe poisoning, and the poison was in something which they both had shared, almost certainly in a bottle of wine. No other person was poisoned, so it must have been just the one bottle of poisoned wine.  Dr Bogle was a successful physicist and as such had earned the jealous hatred of  the majority of the other scientists , who had much less promising careers. Poisoning is a very old technology, popular in Ancient Rome and easily managed by the Faculty of Science.  The Faculty also managed the cover-up,  since the concealment of poisoning is also a very old technology.  Forensic Science needs samples to work with  and so there were no samples retained for testing.  Destroying the samples is a foolproof way of defeating a criminal investigation and the Faculty needed it to be foolproof.

​

Great advances have been made in the past one hundred and fifty years in the identification of rare poisons. In particular, there were two citizens of Eastern bloc countries murdered by their own governments in London.  In 1978 Giorgi Markov (Bulgarian) was killed with Ricin and in 2006 Alexander Litvinenko (Russian) was killed with Polonium 210, but neither of these cases fooled the British forensic scientists for very long.

​

In the aftermath of the Bogle-Chandler murders, the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney knew that even if the investigation could be stopped within Australia, by exercising its political powers of fear and influence, any samples sent to other countries might still solve the case.  So the tissue samples were made to disappear entirely.  The University can easily stop people from talking, but the samples needed to be completely destroyed, then the people could be forced not to ask any questions.

bottles of poisoned wine

Boys will be boys, and one of the most important obligations of a major university is to ensure that the community's future leaders do not have their careers wrecked before they begin, by getting into trouble as students.  To protect these aggressive young men from their own impulses, the victims of rape (society's least important persons, young women) are usually told that if you are unhappy with University Life:  "Go home and kill yourself."

There were many suicides,  and everything was fine.

Then in 1977 there was a catastophe,  when due to a mix-up in the dark,  the body of a rape victim was found on Campus in the daylight.  Everyone had become so accustomed to the efficient system of cover-up,  that nobody was properly prepared to cope with this.  However, the success with the Bogle-Chandler case guaranteed that there was a way still to conceal everything. Once again, all the tissue samples were made to disappear, along with all the biological traces. Before today's DNA testing could identify individual rapists, in 1977 there were a lot of tests available for rape incidents,  including tests for blood-group and clues gained from use of microscopes on tissue specimens. Also, there were several thousand students and staff who could have been interviewed but that did not happen, either.  Yet another way which ensured that whoever raped and murdered Annette Morgan would never be clearly identified, was to falsify the times that the crime was committed.  By changing the times, the University could help the rapist/murderer establish a very solid alibi, so that he could not even be considered to be a possible suspect.  The Faculty of Science was in receipt of many millions of dollars to do (for example) DNA research and in 1977 would have been well aware that great improvements were being made in the more technologically advanced countries. So it was clear to the Administration that many layers of covering-up were necessary to make sure that Annette Morgan would be completely forgotten.

Now forty years later, not only is it all forgotten but the culture of university rape is fully back to 1970's levels, which is how the various Administrations like it.

bottom of page