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Kelly, whose father was an Irish convict, led a gang that robbed banks and killed policemen from 1878-80. These days, many Australians view him as a Robin Hood-like character who fought the British colonial authorities and championed the rural Irish underclass. Others dismiss him as a cold-blooded cop killer. After Kelly was executed, his body was buried in an unmarked grave outside a former prison called the Old Melbourne Gaol. But officials decided to exhume his remains along with those of other executed convicts in 1929 when the jail closed. The plan was to move the skeletons to the nearby Pentridge Prison, but a mob of onlookers stole some of the remains
-- including what was believed to be Kelly's skull -- during the exhumation. The skull was later recovered and put on display at the Old Melbourne Gaol, now a historic site. But in 1978, it was stolen again. In 2009, a farmer handed the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine a skull he claimed was Kelly's. Forensic tests determined it was not.
[Associated
Press;
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