Eliza Benwell was housemaid at an inn in New Norfolk, near Hobart, where fellow servant Jane Saunders worked alongside her. In January 1845 three of the inn’s male servants seized Saunders in the garden during what began as friendly play, stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth and dragged her, apparently lifeless, down to the river. Benwell stood by and watched it happen, then waited at the house for the men to return before letting them in.
The three killers were tried and hanged first. Benwell was convicted separately as an accessory before and after the fact, a charge carrying the same capital sentence as murder itself. She was hanged before a huge crowd on 30 September 1845, closing her eyes on the scaffold so she would not have to look at the spectators, reportedly the first woman executed in the city in fifteen years.
On the eve of her death she confessed that she could have saved Saunders’s life had she known a murder was intended.
