Execution - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1894: Caught Serving Poisoned Tea: Martha Needle Hanged in Melbourne for a Family Poisoning Spree

Martha Needle had already buried her husband and both young daughters, each death blamed on a mysterious wasting illness, when she turned her attention to the family of her fiance, Otto Juncken. Months before her arrest she fed his brother Louis arsenic, and when his only surviving brother also sickened, doctors found arsenic disguised as rat poison in his vomit. Police lay in wait and caught Needle in the act, offering him a cup of tea laced with ten grains of poison.

Tried for Louis’s murder, her lawyer argued that she suffered fits of unconsciousness and should not be held responsible, but an insanity plea was dismissed. Convicted with no recommendation for mercy, Needle was hanged in Melbourne on 22 October 1894. Exhumations later found arsenic in the bodies of her husband and both daughters as well, confirming a killing spree that had gone undetected for years. She left everything she owned to Otto, the man who had stood by her to the end.

Martha Needle: Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 516/P0000, Central Register of Female Prisoners, register nos. 5926–6415 (1891–1896).

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Australia Execution Melbourne Murder Poisoning Serial Killer Trial VIC

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1841: The Scaffold Confession That Exposed a Wrongful Transportation by a Bushranger

Patrick Curran was a notorious bushranger who terrorised the colony’s roads and outstations, once storming a property with a loaded gun levelled at the overseer before he was overpowered, wounding one of his captors with the stock of his musket in the struggle. Sentenced to death, he escaped from his escort between Picton and Sydney that April, prompting a thirty pound reward before he was run down and returned to custody.

On the morning of 21 October 1841, Curran was hanged at Berrima. His final days swung between violent despair, so bad the attending clergymen were twice ordered from his cell, and sudden, sincere penitence that lasted through the night before his death.

On the scaffold, Curran confessed to the murder of a man named Fuller, a crime for which another man, Bright, had already been tried and transported for life in his place.

The Cat Walk inside Berrima Gaol prison yard Australia circa 1914 1941

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Australia Berrima Bushranging Crime Escape Execution Murder NSW Wrongful Conviction

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1858: He Swallowed Her Earrings to Hide the Evidence: Hanged at Geelong for the Green Tent Murder

Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.

Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.

As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.

Sly grog shanty on Victorian goldfields tavern scene

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Australia Execution Geelong Murder Robbery Trial VIC

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1878: “Hung for Her Like a Man”: The Vow Before a Brutal Axe Murder and Hanging in Hobart

Richard Copping was jealous that his sweetheart, Susannah Stacey, had grown tired of him. On 12 May 1878 he followed her into her parents’ home near Sorell, in Tasmania’s south, and split her skull with an axe as she tried to shut a door against him. When her father ran out and accused him, Copping only clapped his hands and said, “Yes, I know I have,” before declaring, “She deceived me, and I’ll be hung for her like a man.”

He then tried to shoot himself, loading a gun with nails after finding no shot, and botched even that, surviving with a shattered jaw. His lawyer argued he was suffering from a diseased brain, but the jury convicted him, and he was hanged at Hobart’s Campbell Street Gaol on 20 October 1878, sobbing and unnerved on the gallows.

Copping never denied the killing, having confessed within minutes of the attack, and he reportedly left written confessions in the sheriff’s keeping before he died.

Portrait of prisoner Richard Copping Hobart Gaol 1878

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Australia Execution Hobart Mental Health Murder Sorell TAS Trial

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