Kipper Billy was charged with abetting Billy Horton in the rape of Jane Rae while she was cooking lunch for her husband and two children near the Brisbane River at Fernvale in 1861.

By March 1862 both men were languishing at Boggo Road Gaol before they were to be hanged, however, Mr Billy was killed when he tried to make a break for freedom.

But just 31 days later, Mr Horton was pardoned on the grounds his involvement was "questionable", according to sentencing judge Alfred Lutwyche.

At the time of trial, Judge Lutwyche had indicated that if Mr Horton was found innocent, then so too would Mr Billy have been.

Queensland man Ken Blanch, who chronicled Mr Billy's alleged crime and death in his book White Lies, Black Blood, said it was "unfair" Kipper Billy remained a criminal in state records.

"I could never understand how the other bloke got the pardon and he didn't," Blanch said.

"I wanted to tell the story, it was straight down unfair of the treatment of the two people ... I thought maybe it would lead to a posthumous pardon.

"I suppose in those days they would have looked at his escape from goal as a crime anyway, whether he was guilty of anything or not."

Blanch, whose journalistic career spanned more than 50 years at The Courier-Mail until his retirement in 1997, uncovered a number of issues relating to Mr Billy's alleged crime and death during his research for his book.

At the time of the men's sentencing on February 17, 1862, The Courier advocated for change in the law of evidence relating to rape given the "uncorroborated evidence" of Ms Rae after a mailman claimed he had spotted Mr Horton 18 kilometres from where the attack happened looking "perfectly cool".

"We believe that evidence is procurable to show that Billy Horton was at a considerable distance from the spot when Mrs Rae was assaulted," The Courier wrote.

The "mental terror" the two men endured while waiting to be hung was entirely "unnecessary", Mr Blanch said and likely drove Mr Billy to flee the prison on the morning of March 5.

That morning, Mr Billy ground down the iron rings that held him to the floor and covered his legs with a blanket.

He then faked a sickness and when a prison guard, then known as a turnkey, came in to check on him, he fled for the inner wall of the gaol and began scaling the fence.

In sworn evidence before Mr Billy's inquest, turnkey Richard Whitehead said he had ordered him to come down before he shot him in the head.

No postmortem was held for the Mr Billy, who was buried in bushland the same day.

Mr Blanch revealed in his book that night his body was dug up by a group of men who removed his head, an event said to have been instigated by a man named T.S Warry, a chemist and Justice of the Peace in the region who claimed he had retrieved the head for scientific purposes.

Queensland Parliament clerk Lewis Adolphus Bernays eventually blew the whistle on the grave robbery and told two wardens of St John's Church that he had been shown a "partly boiled-down human head" inside a "three-legged iron pot" at Mr Warry's address.

Reports at the time indicated the skull did not have any bullet holes but instead an indentation above the right ear.

Some 30 years later in 1892, Brisbane historian Nehemiah Bartley made a suggestion of what really happened on the day Mr Billy was killed.

He wrote that a group of people walking in the area had heard carbines firing at the gaol before they saw an Aboriginal man fall from the wall.

"They (a group of people) realised matters at a glance, and some of them, who were constables and warders, made improvised weapons by tearing up some of the massive survey pegs which marked the newly laid out Crown lots on the Petrie Terrace...so as to be ready to apply them to the blackfellow's head so soon as he dropped from the wall," Mr Bartley wrote.

Blanch said there was no record of Mr Billy's body being exhumed and the resting place of his head remained a mystery.

He said he was preparing a petition to hand in to the Queensland governor asking for a posthumous pardon.

"I want to get justice for him," Blanch said.

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