Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley on 6 September 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, firing two shots from a revolver he had concealed inside a handkerchief. McKinley lingered for eight days before dying of his wounds on 14 September.
Czolgosz’s trial opened on 23 September. The jury took less than an hour to find him guilty, and on 26 September he was sentenced to death. He was executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison on 29 October 1901, and prison officials later poured acid into his coffin to prevent the grave becoming a shrine.
Czolgosz showed no remorse for the killing. From the scaffold he declared, “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”
David Bennett spoke from the gallows for nine minutes, the longest statement ever made by a condemned man in Victoria. The 59-year-old painter and carpenter had walked to the scaffold calmly, and he spoke in a clear, steady voice.
He was hanged in Melbourne for a capital assault committed in July 1932, the first execution in Victoria since 1924 and the first since 1891 for any crime other than murder. It was not his first such conviction. In Western Australia in 1911 he had been sentenced to life imprisonment and a flogging by a judge who told him: “You are not fit to live in this world.”
He served just three years in Fremantle Gaol before the Attorney-General released him on legal doubts about the conviction, causing an outcry unprecedented in the state. Bennett moved east, and in 1930 he came forward to Melbourne detectives with information about a notorious unsolved murder. A man was arrested on his word, and was later found to be innocent.
Bennett admitted nothing. He claimed his defence had never been properly put to the jury, and ended: “I repeat that I am not guilty, and again ask forgiveness from those whom I have wronged as I forgive those who have wronged me. Good-bye.”
An Unspeakable Degenerate – CeVPRS 1100/P0002, David Bennett
John Hughes told the jurors who convicted him that they were “shopkeepers tired of waiting, and anxious to get home for their dinner”. They had taken ten minutes. Days later he was hanged behind Melbourne Gaol for the murder of Abraham Marcus, a traveller whose only mistake was chasing the men who stole his best horse.
In December 1852 Marcus was bound for the Ovens goldfields with his wife and nine-year-old son when their dray broke down at Yackandandah Creek. Four horsemen stopped, accepted a meal and even helped with the repairs. Hughes turned down four pounds for his tired horse and saddle, remarking that he would not go much further before he had another. When the riders had gone, so had the best of the Marcus horses, with the worn-out mount left in its place.
Marcus rode after them and seized the bridle. The gang kept him talking until a passing bullock dray was out of sight, then drew pistols, marched him into the bush and tied him to a tree, where he was later found dead. His whole party recognised the rope: it had hung around the neck of the horse Hughes rode. That same evening, by his own later account, the gang robbed a young Sydney man named Stone on his way home from the diggings; he broke free, was run down and killed, and his body was sunk in a creek, weighted with stones and a saddle.
A reward of 200 pounds was offered, but it was 1854 before the widow picked Hughes out of a line of 21 identically dressed prisoners in the yard of Darlinghurst Gaol. He made a long confession naming three accomplices, then asked to be sent to Melbourne quickly, since enough had been proved to hang him. At trial he called the jurors “new chums”, to laughter from the gallery. The judge replied that an innocent man would never have dared to browbeat a jury so, and that the clear evidence of the dead man’s young son had settled the matter.
From the dock Hughes withdrew his confession as false and swore the men he had named were innocent too: “I now say, and will on the day of my death, that I am an innocent man.” He went to the scaffold pale but composed, and made no further revelations.
Moments after the bolt was drawn at the Campbell Street Gaol in Hobart, the chaplain stepped forward and read aloud a letter the dead man had written the day before in the condemned cell. It was addressed “To all men at Port Arthur”, and Martin Lydon had begged that it be made public.
It was the story of a ruined life in a few lines. Disobedient at ten, a soldier at 16, Lydon struck an officer of his company in a moment of anger and was flogged: “this ruined me”. He came to hate the army and took to drink, and further violence saw him transported. “The vileness of Norfolk Island turned me into an animal,” he wrote. Only three weeks earlier, in H division, he had boasted that he did not care about being hanged. Now he called that his “wicked flashiness”: “Every man about to die must fear the judgment of God.”
Lydon had been capitally convicted in the Supreme Court of a felonious assault at Port Cygnet, south of Hobart, committed while drunk, a crime that then carried the death penalty. Lydon disputed part of the evidence given at his trial, but he did not dispute the sentence: what he had done in his drunkenness, he wrote, deserved death. “May the drunkenness that brought on me this misery be a warning to all of you.”
Norfolk Island settlement, 1838. Ink and wash drawing, artist unknown. State Library of New South Wales, SV8/Norf I/5.
