1861: He Wept After Being Punched, Then Fetched a Hammer: a Melbourne Racing-Yard Killing
Martin Rice was a former steeplechase jockey with a reputation for violence when he picked a fight with Anthony Green, a well-known horse trainer, over the shoeing of a horse at Kirk’s Bazaar off Bourke Street in Melbourne. Green struck him once, told him to leave, and Rice wept and walked away, muttering that he would have his revenge.
Half an hour later, as Green stooped to check a horse’s foot with his back turned, Rice crept up behind him and drove a blacksmith’s hammer into his skull. Green lingered barely a day before dying, telling a friend he had heard his own bones crack. A coroner’s jury found the gap between the insult and the blow proved deliberate malice, not sudden provocation, and Rice was convicted of wilful murder at the Supreme Court and hanged at Melbourne Gaol.
On the scaffold Rice asked to speak, insisting he had borne no malice toward Green and had never meant to kill him.
