Nicholas Baxter had been night watchman at the biscuit factory next to Mary Macnamara’s home in Sydney for six and a half years, and the elderly widow trusted him completely. By his own account he knew where she kept her money, had fetched change for her dozens of times, and could have taken it without her ever knowing. He never did, not until he resigned from the job in June 1907 and returned a month later.
On the morning of 8 July 1907 Macnamara was found bludgeoned in her ransacked bedroom. Police found Baxter that same day wandering in circles near Strathfield, drunk, wearing a hat taken from her hall stand and carrying her jewellery. When he tried to bolt after being re-arrested, he gave up with the words, “It’s all up, you’ve got me now.”
At trial his defence was that years of overwork as a night watchman, ninety-hour weeks with no night off, had left him unfit to know right from wrong. The jury was not persuaded, and Baxter was hanged in Sydney on this day in 1907.
He had earlier confessed to police, “I don’t know what possessed me to do it. I must have been mad. I didn’t intend to hurt the poor old body, but she would not keep quiet.”
