The payroll robbery

Who exactly William Frederick Eggers was is still uncertain more than 100 years after his death..
Even his name - William Frederick - or Frederick William Eggers - or McMahon is not sure.
Whichever it was, he thought he would get away with robbing the State Coal mine payroll - holding up a car driven by John Coulthard whose two passengers were the manager of the company Isaac James and another employee William Hall.
The three men had just come from the Bank of New Zealand in Greymouth on November 17, 1917, with the payroll - in cash - and were heading for Runanga.
They had only been driving for a few minutes before they were forced to stop, seeing something in the road that they crashed into.
It was a makeshift obstruction made from a ladder and a box.
As they began to get out of the car a man rose from a nearby bush and shouted hands up.
The man did not give them a chance, he began firing his guns - one in each hand - immediately.
He killed Coulthard outright, Hall took a bullet to the spine and James was shot in the thigh, calf and hand but he managed to flee.
As it turned out, they weren’t alone. Hidden nearby was Peter and Leonard Manderson - a father and son who had been on a bike ride. As Eggers made off with £3659, Leonard rushed for help.
A huge manhunt started and on November 19 a man calling himself Fredrick Eggers McMahon was arrested as he came out of a hotel in Christchurch. He had a bag of money and a gun on him.
Living with him at a boarding house was his girlfriend Elizabeth who told police the gun was hers and that McMahon was her surname, that Fredrick was using.
He was found guilty at trial and found guilty of one murder - it might have been two since William Hall died of his wounds weeks later.
On March 5, 1918 he was hanged.
Eggers had been born on December 17, 1886 in South Australia. There are little records about him other than at one point he had been arrested for forgery.
By about 1914 he was in New Zealand.
It seems he spun a number of tales about himself, including that he had been enlisted (and then deserted), that he was rich and that he had served a detention on Wellington’s Somes Island.
A few things are known, he had a military service card on him when he was arrested. He claimed his parents were in Adelaide but they were originally from America and of German extraction.
That at least may be true. In records, Henriette Roenfeld had married a Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Eggers in 1850. Henriette was German by birth. Those names could well have been Anglicised to William Frederick Eggers for their son. They did indeed live in Adelaide. But the timing is a little uncertain - Henriette would have been 55 when he was born - and her husband had died years before.
He was the last man to be hanged in the South Island.
Eggers is buried in Lyttelton Cemetery.​