The boarding house stood on the edge of Boulder, its
corrugated iron roof catching the last rays of sunlight
like copper pennies. It was a place of openness and
honesty in a hard world, an island sanctuary amongst
the poppet heads and rusty iron that defined the gold‐
fields. Here, the Butler family kept their doors open to
miners, drifters, and dreamers-anyone who needed a
bed and a warm meal in the unforgiving desert land‐
scape of Western Australia.
It was into this world, in April of 1926, that murder
would come. But the seeds of that murder had been
planted years before, in the mud of France, where good
men had learned the price of survival.