Execution - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1860: A Mercy Petition Backed by the Bishop of Adelaide Could Not Save a Man From the Gallows

John Jones, a hutkeeper on a station near Mount Joy in South Australia’s remote Eyre Peninsula, was found dead in his hut in May 1860, his skull broken and the hut stripped of flour, tea and clothing. The accused was convicted at the Supreme Court in Adelaide largely on the testimony of a young companion who admitted taking part in the killing himself.

Before the execution, around 400 citizens, headed by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide, signed a memorial asking the government to remit the death sentence. He had been tried and condemned under British law newly imposed on his people, with little understanding of its workings; the petition failed regardless. He was taken back across the Eyre Peninsula and hanged at Streaky Bay on 5 October 1860, near the district where the killing had occurred

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Adelaide Australia Colonial History Execution Murder Petition for Clemency SA Streaky Bay Trial

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1866: He Was Fed Breakfast, Then Declared Himself a Bushranger and Shot His Host

Henry Facey Hurst, the pioneer settler after whom Hurstbridge in Victoria was later named, was feeding a hungry stranger at his station near Diamond Creek on the morning of 4 October 1866 when his sister spotted a revolver hidden under the man’s coat. Hurst quietly loaded his own gun and confronted him. Offended at what he called an insult, the stranger leapt up and announced, “I am a bushranger”: Robert Burke. Burke tried to fire first, but the cap misfired; Hurst got his shot away, and Burke then fired three rounds of his own, one tearing into Hurst’s stomach and lodging in his own leg.

Though mortally wounded, Hurst clung to Burke until a friend, Joseph Abbott, wrestled the bushranger down and tied him with a halter. Hurst bled to death that evening. Burke was convicted of wilful murder, though the jury recommended mercy on the grounds that Hurst had fired the first shot. He was hanged at Melbourne Gaol.

The late Henry Facey Hurst, engraving by Samuel Calvert, 27 October 1866. State Library Victoria, IMP27/10/66/356.

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Australia Bushranger Execution Hurstbridge Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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1875: “I Come From a Race That Will Not Take an Insult”: Hanged at Melbourne Gaol for a Double Murder

Henry Howard ran the Frankston Hotel, near Melbourne, in partnership with widowed licensee Elizabeth Wright. When she hired a barman named Thomas Harman to keep an eye on the books, Howard convinced himself the pair were lovers, though Harman had a wife of his own and, as the judge later noted, there was no evidence of any affair. On the night the hotel’s contents were sold off, Howard stabbed Wright to death with a freshly sharpened butcher’s knife, then killed Harman as he ran to her screams.

He was found sitting calmly beside Wright’s body with the bloody knife at his feet, and when told Harman had also died, witnesses said he smiled. Arrested on the spot, he told police only, “Prove it.” At his trial his single explanation was, “I come from a race that will not take an insult, even if it brings them to the gallows.” He was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 4 October 1875, the hangman’s badly set noose leaving him convulsing for several minutes before he died.

On the scaffold he confessed to murdering Wright but insisted he had never meant to kill Harman.

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Australia Execution Frankston Melbourne Murder Trial VIC

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1889: The Devoted Wife Who Poisoned Her Husband in Melbourne, Then Killed Three More

Henry Needle was a robust carpenter until 1889, when he began suffering violent, unexplained vomiting at the family home in Richmond, near Melbourne. His doctor once found untouched broth and jelly by his bed, and noted Henry had grown strangely wary of food prepared by his wife, Martha. He died on 4 October 1889; his death was recorded as hepatitis, no post-mortem was ordered, and no suspicion touched the devoted nurse at his side.

The truth emerged five years later, after police caught Martha handing a laced cup of tea to another man and Henry’s body was exhumed and found packed with arsenic, along with the bodies of the couple’s three young children, all of whom had died in her care under equally mysterious circumstances. Martha Needle was hanged at Melbourne Gaol in October 1894 for the poisoning of her fiance’s brother, the last of at least five family members she is believed to have killed.

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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