Michael Finnessy spent the afternoon of 26 September 1853 swinging between tenderness and menace, handing a neighbour his pistol and knife and then asking for them back, as he tried to win over Elizabeth Finnessy, the woman he lived with in a house off Little Bourke Street near the Queen’s Theatre in Melbourne. By evening, with the room lit only by candlelight, he asked her to speak to him, then shot her at point blank range in front of a shocked household.
As Elizabeth lay dying on the floor, Finnessy tried to finish what he had started, raising the pistol by its butt to strike her skull. A neighbour wrestled it from him, but not before Finnessy snarled, “You wretch, if I thought you was not settled, I would finish you now.” She died minutes later, begging only to see a priest.
The cruellest twist came at his execution. Finnessy already had a wife, whom he had deserted for Elizabeth, and she stood outside the gaol gates that October morning, asking strangers to let her see his body. He was hanged in Melbourne on 25 October 1853, one of seven men executed there within just twenty three days.
