Ned Kelly, the leader of the Kelly Gang, had spent years outrunning the law across the Victorian bush, his armour and audacity turning him into both outlaw and folk hero. That ended after the siege at Glenrowan, where he was captured wounded and alone while the rest of his gang died in the shootout or the fire that followed.
He was tried in Melbourne for the murder of a police constable, and on this day in 1880 he was sentenced to death. Within weeks the man who had defied colonial police for years would be hanged, his legend only growing in the telling long after the rope did its work.
