This battered pile of decaying humanity in front of him had spent the better part of a month dumped down a mine hole so narrow the search parties had missed it. There it slumped, half-marinating in two feet of water until a miner chanced upon it.

Still, the body was recognisably that of Alexander "Alick" Brown, a single, 33-year-old miner working Victoria's endless goldfields. The doctor who peeled away his scalp thought there was more than enough evidence to say he'd likely been struck hard with a blunt instrument.

Little known today, Alick's death would occupy Bendigo's courts for much of the summer of 1862 and lodge itself into the zeitgeist of 19^th century Victoria. The case would cast a cruel pall on a mother and daughter, immortalise a man in a "house of horrors" exhibition and hint at the shadowy side of goldfields police work.

'Give a copper too many suspicions and not enough evidence and they might get to thinking'. That is how officers had hatched a plan to catch a killer by arresting a 12-year-old boy.

The boy was the unfortunate son of "Mother Brummy", a widow notorious in the Dead Horse Gully area, an isolated stretch of land outside Eaglehawk.

Today known to posterity by the less horrifying moniker "Harvey Town", Dead Horse Gully a huge stretch of ironbark forest scarred with the remains of old diggings. Those who stray off the path may stumble across a sign next to a huge hole being a grim warning: "Do Not Enter; Unstable Cliffs; Unstable Tunnels and Mine Shafts".

In 1862 it was even more pockmarked with mine holes oozing the thick sludge synonymous with the era's diggings. Sifting the refuse were Chinese and German "puddlers" - miners rifling mud for anything of value.

"Mother Brummy's residence, a slabbed, bark-roofed hut is situated on the side of an old gully ... the bush is thick ... and very dense in the back," according to a Bendigo Advertiser report from the time.

And it was into this hut that Alick walked, late on the last night he was seen alive.

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Mother Brummy's real name was Ellen Hoskins. Prison records depict her as a plump, 37-year-old. Her dusky brown hair sat above a high forehead, a large nose, small mouth and dark complexion. She lived with seven sharp-eyed children and her shady paramour Thomas McGee, a former convict transported from Dublin in 1852 for house breaking.

"The impression in the neighbourhood is that Brown has been murdered by McGee, with whom he had a dispute, about a year ago," an Advertiser correspondent had reported in the week after the miner vanished.

Police had arrested Ellen and Tom but lacked any compelling evidence.

They did have the Hoskins children, though. So they arrested one of her sons and arranged for a little playmate to drop by. That playmate was a fellow child who agreed to fish for evidence. Soon, police had a fragmented account of drinks, a card game and a dead man being carried off into the night.

"At first the boy, it is said, promised to show the hole into which the body was thrown, but on being taken to the ground, refused to do so unless he was first permitted to see his mother," the Addy reported.

The coppers declined and their lead came to naught. They got back to thinking.

The first person to see Alick's dead body was John Houschell, a German puddler working a nearby cutting. He had decided to check out a foul smell wafting from a nearby hole.

Word spread and Alick's brother James turned up to identify the corpse. "The police were sent for, and ropes and ladders having been procured, [James] went down and fixed ropes to the body, which was then raised out of the hole," the Advertiser reported.

Officers quickly revealed they had arrested and charged another of Ellen's children.

"It appeared that the girl had only been arrested by the police to induce her to divulge any of the circumstances connected with the affair," the Advertiser said. "And from statements she has made since arrested, there is little doubt of her being the most important evidence in the case."

Dinah Hoskins was "an intelligent looking girl", an Addy reporter remarked in the days that followed. She did not know exactly how old she was, though she guessed probably 14 years of age. Her father William had died two years earlier, leaving Ellen a widow. Tom had later moved in.

Dinah told a story about how Alick had dropped by her home after 11pm, about a month earlier, with a bottle of ale. He had found Ellen and Tom playing cards and sat down with them. Dinah knew this because she was still up and awake, as was one of her brothers.

As the adults played, Alick started using "very foul talk", Dinah told police. Tom put the cards away and Ellen said it was time she was getting to bed. Alick strode outside.

Tom followed and hit Alick with something, Dinah said, though she could not tell what. Alick fell. Tom kicked him.

Dinah was sure Alick was dead. "Oh!" her mother had apparently said. "Tom, you should not have done this."

Tom had lifted Alick onto the wheelbarrow, Dinah said, his head and legs hanging down on either side, and wheeled him away. She had walked outside the next morning and saw the wheelbarrow was returned.

Eaglehawk's Welcome Inn was packed with bodies in late spring, 1862. All but one of them were breathing. The preliminary inquest began with Alick's post mortem and ended with something like a committal hearing for Ellen and Tom. Its climax was Dinah's dramatic testimony and Tom's testy cross-examination of her.

Accusations flew thick and fast. At one point, an outraged Tom snapped that Dihah was telling tales and ought to be separated from her siblings. She retorted that Tom's actions had already seen to that. That, Tom replied lamely, "was nothing but spite, not a ha'poth more".

Ellen sat through the day's inquest nursing a small child and "taking but little interest in the proceedings," the Addy reported. But "the prisoner Magee [sic] appeared very restless during the examination, endeavoring to catch the eye of the witnesses, the girl more especially".

Unfortunately for Tom, the inquest took a dim view of the convict-turned-miner's testy relationship with Alick. The pair had been feuding since December over a pair of stolen boots found in Ellen's hut. Tom had denied stealing them but Alick thought otherwise. Tom resented that, just as he resented the police being involved.

"Never mind, they have done all they can against me," Tom told one witness who would go on to testify against him. "And if it were for seven years [I] would have my revenge for it."

Say whatever you want about 19th century doctors, but they sure knew a lot about blunt force trauma. They really did see it all: craniums pulpified by collapsed mine shafts, jaws soup-icated by flurries of drunken fists and limb bones blend-itated by shovels, picks, saucepans carriage wheels and a litany of other goldfields tools.

That said, a doctor testifying at Ellen and Tom's criminal trial in February, 1863 could not confirm what had slammed into Alick's head the night he died. Maybe a mallet? Maybe a stone? Alick's skull could have fractured as it landed at the bottom of the mineshaft, he said but that seemed unlikely given the angle of the injury.

Experts were hazier about forensic evidence. A number of hairs found lodged in the wheelbarrow's splintery timbers could have been human whiskers ripped, roots and all, from Alick's hirsute head, one man of science told the court after poking them under the finest microscope in Victoria. Some stains found on the wheelbarrow could have been human blood. Or bullock blood. They definitely were not pig blood, an expert confidently declared.

Both Ellen and Tom maintained their innocence. They told the court they had no idea what happened to Alick after he'd lurched off that night. Sure, someone may have attacked him, but come on, there were open mine shafts all over the place. Brown would not have been the first person to accidentally fall in one late at night.

Their arguments failed. Ellen copped a year's imprisonment. Tom was sentenced to hang.

Would Dinah - who had already lost her father and faced the real possibility of her mother being hanged - have had any reason to lie on the stand?

A rumour began circulating as the dust settled on the trial. It suggested that the police had left Dinah in a dank corner of Bendigo's gaol for two weeks, separated from her loved ones. It suggested one police sergeant had terrified the girl; and into this had strode the gaol's governess, who'd urged Dinah to tell "the truth" and save her mother from death.

Tom's supporters jumped on those rumors for a last ditch appeal.

They decided to go grubby too, and torch Dinah's character, not just her evidence. One person told the Advertiser 'the statement was openly made yesterday in the bar of a hotel in Sandhurst, by a man who should know ... that this young lady had a 'penchant for rambling in the Camp Reserve [modern day Rosalind Park, and] was discovered there in a very equivocal position, but the police looked over it'."

Another alleged "this girl has been for years accustomed to see and hear the most depraved acts of society in the mother's house. That she witnessed, daily, her mother living in open adulatery with McGee; nay that she herself ... could swear and speak the most foul language, which she learned beneath her mother's roof".

There was no #MeToo movement in 1850s Victoria, so no-one challenged newspapers publishing such tripe.

Still, these wild rumours failed to sway legal officials or government ministers at the highest levels of power. They could not find any evidence worthy of overturning Tom's death penalty.

"McGee, all along, had hopes of mercy until last evening about sunset, when ... the clergyman in attendance entered his cell, and assured him that there was none," newspaper The Age reported in late February, 1863. The priest stayed late praying with Tom. When prison guards ordered the priest out, a pious prisoner stepped in to take the ministrations through to dawn.

Hardly anyone came to see Tom walk to the gallows, but someone made a model of him for a Melbourne waxworks exhibition. It "graces the chamber of horrors" section, the Advertiser reported nearly two decades later.

Dinah's life might be a story for another time. Her mother served her time and returned to the area. Ellen died in 1879, aged 55, after slipping and falling down a mineshaft. A member of the public found her head jammed neck-deep in a foul puddle of water and sludge. A coronial inquest ruled her death an accident.

The last person to see Ellen alive said she had been excitedly hurrying towards the train station. She had been off to visit one of her children.

This story's part of a regular history series. Our thanks to Dr Michele Matthews and the Bendigo Regional Archive Centre's Sue Walter for help with research.