1884: Keep Away From Women: the Final Warning Scrawled on a Cell Wall Before a Hanging at Hobart
Henry Stock married Elizabeth Keats when she was nineteen and already raising another man’s child. The marriage soured, she took out a maintenance order against him, and when she vanished with her young son in April 1884, searchers found their badly decomposed remains in dense scrub near the Ouse district, both riddled with shot that matched Stock’s own gun. Witnesses recalled him muttering that he would “murder her yet” and would rather “swing” than live with her again.
His first trial ended in a deadlocked jury; a second, before Hobart’s Chief Justice Dobson, convicted him. On the morning of his execution at Campbell Street Gaol in Hobart, hangman Solomon Blay prepared to carry out his hundredth hanging. Before he was led to the scaffold, Stock scratched a message on his cell wall naming two sisters whose evidence had convicted him, hoping to see them “here before long,” and warning other young men to keep from woman. He walked to the gallows carrying a small bunch of flowers tied with a scripture text: “He shall speak peace unto the heathen.”
To the end he denied the killings, declaring on the drop, “I swear by Heaven that I am innocent.”
