When lookouts aboard HMS Dido spotted flames rising from a home near Auckland on 22 October 1847, sailors raced ashore to find Lieutenant Robert Snow, his wife Hannah and their young daughter Mary butchered, with flesh cut from each body and the house set alight. The staging was deliberate: ship’s carpenter Joseph Burns had mutilated the family to make the killings look like a Maori attack, hoping to steal the twelve pounds in naval pay kept in the house and spark fears of an uprising that gripped Auckland for weeks.
With Maori leaders unable to produce a culprit, suspicion only turned to Burns after he coerced his partner, Margaret Reardon, into backing a false confession blaming two innocent neighbours. Mid trial, word reached the court that Burns had cut his own throat in a failed suicide attempt, and in its aftermath he retracted the accusation. Reardon then testified against him, and Burns was convicted and hanged the following June, becoming the first European executed in New Zealand.
Burns went to the gallows having made a full confession, though it unfairly implicated Reardon, who was later convicted of perjury and transported to Tasmania.
