SA - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1946: "Let Me Put the Poor Man Out of His Misery": A Timber Camp Killer Hanged in Adelaide

Charles O'Leary spent 6 July 1946 drinking heavily near Mount Gambier, beating two other men unconscious at a sawmill camp before dawn. When he found Walter "Spoggy" Ballard's bed ablaze with Ballard moaning inside, O'Leary knelt over him cutting away his burning clothes, his own arms already smeared with Ballard's blood, and begged a workmate for an axe, saying he wanted to "put the poor man out of his misery."

Convicted after a two-day trial, he was hanged in Adelaide on 14 November 1946. He had passed his months in custody reading an encyclopaedia of American presidents, troubled only that the entries for two of them were missing, and he walked to the gallows smiling, turning to his guards to say "Thank you, gentlemen" before the drop.

At trial O'Leary insisted he had never touched Ballard, but when sentenced to death he told the court he wanted no concessions and was "quite prepared to pay the full penalty."

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1929: She Asked for a Kiss, Then Bled to Death: Frederick Carr Hanged in Adelaide for Murdering His Wife

On the evening of 28 June 1929, Maude Carr walked into the police station near her home at Birkenhead, outside Adelaide, and asked if she could sleep in a cell. There was only one, kept clear for emergencies, so she was turned away. Hours later she was dead in the isolated weatherboard house she shared with her husband, Frederick Carr, her throat cut almost from ear to ear.

Carr's account was that he had woken to find his wife leaning over his shoulder asking for a kiss, then felt something wet. He ran to a neighbour's house drenched in blood, shouting that she had cut her own throat. A jury was not convinced: after five days of evidence they found him guilty of murder, though they added a recommendation for mercy.

Frederick Carr was hanged in Adelaide on this day in 1929, despite union campaigns pleading for his sentence to be commuted. He shook hands with gaol officials and walked calmly to the scaffold.

He denied the killing to the end, declaring from the condemned cell, "The law requires my body, but it cannot have my soul, as I am innocent."

Wooden house where Mrs Carr body found police and motor ambulance outside

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1871: "Don't Charley, don't Charley": The Final Plea of a Bailiff Near Mount Gambier

When assistant bailiff Thomas Garroway seized Carl Jung's horse, cart and pigs over an unpaid debt on 29 June 1871, Jung begged him to turn back, promising to sell his own gun to raise the money instead. Garroway refused and walked on toward Mount Gambier with the seized property. Jung followed, caught him in a gully, and demanded to know what Garroway had ever heard against his character. By Jung's own account to police, the bailiff's last words were "Don't Charley, don't Charley," as he threw up a hand and turned his head.

Jung shot him twice at close range, dragged the body into the ferns, then calmly sold off his possessions, settled an agreement with a neighbour and told his stepchildren goodbye, warning they would never see him again. He wrote a confession to a local newspaper and swallowed laudanum before his nerve failed. Captured days later hiding in the bush, he was tried for wilful murder and convicted.

On this day in 1871 Jung climbed the gaol scaffold at Mount Gambier carrying a bunch of flowers. He forgave "the English law for its severity," asked that the flowers be given to his wife, and died almost without a struggle, still mid sentence when the bolt was drawn.

Though he had earlier confessed to levelling the gun and firing deliberately, when the moment came to be sentenced Jung insisted the shooting was an accident, the gun discharging as his horse reared and threw him backward.

Mount Gambier, with one of its volcanic lakes (after sunset), 1846. State Library of South Australia,

⬅ See all events from 10 November

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1883: Not Afraid: Mah Poo Hanged in Adelaide for the Murder of Tommy Ah Fook

Tommy Ah Fook ran a shop on Adelaide's Hindley Street, where his cook, Mah Poo, lived alongside two other employees. Last seen locking up after midnight, Ah Fook vanished, and when nightmen cleaning out his cesspit two days later found his body crammed inside, dead from a gunshot to the head, suspicion fell straight onto the cook. Mah Poo had turned up for work the next morning in his best clothes, wearing his dead employer's scarf pin, and carrying bundles of laundry he could never account for; he had also bought a revolver and ammunition weeks earlier, and bank staff later traced Ah Fook's missing takings to a deposit made under a false name.

The case against him was entirely circumstantial but convincing. After five days of testimony a jury took only twelve minutes to convict him, and he was sentenced to hang in Adelaide. He was executed there on 10 November 1883, walking to the scaffold calmly and climbing its steps unaided.

Days before his death Mah Poo signed a full confession admitting he alone shot Ah Fook after enduring constant abuse from him, and told his gaolers without a trace of fear, "Me shoot Tommy, he die; you hang me, me die; me no 'fraid."

Looking west along Hindley Street from King William Street, Adelaide, c. 1891, eight years after the murder of shopkeeper Tommy Ah Fook. Ernest Gall, photographer. State Library of SA

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