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1902: “Me Done It, and I Am Satisfied”: The Chilling Calm of a Perth Murder

Samuel Peters killed his wife Trevenna in their home at Leederville, a suburb of Perth, on the night of 3 July 1902. A neighbour heard a scream and Peters’s voice between 2 and 3am, but it was not until half past nine the next morning that the couple’s children raised the alarm. Mrs Peters was found lying in a pool of blood in her bedroom, badly injured, with no weapon in sight; Peters himself was discovered fully dressed and asleep in an adjoining room.

When the arresting constable woke him and told him his wife had been murdered, Peters answered flatly, “Me done it, and I am satisfied.”

At his trial, witnesses described a marriage marked by constant quarrelling. Peters had accused his wife of carrying on affairs with two men, Adams and Nicholas, and was said to have taken to calling her Mrs Adams in front of neighbours. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death, later hanged at Fremantle Prison.

Old rustic bedroom with a metal-framed bed and rumpled blankets, sunlight streaming through an open door and a window in a stone-walled room.

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2005: The Granny Killer Found Hanging in His Cell

John Wayne Glover, 72, was found hanging from a shower rail in his cell at Lithgow prison in New South Wales. He had been serving life without parole for the murder of six elderly women on Sydney‘s North Shore between 1989 and 1990. The mayor of Mosman described his death as the end of a terrible era.

No evidence has ever surfaced that Glover killed before 1989, when he was 56 and had already been married for 20 years with children; his wife had no idea of the violence in his past. He only admitted to the murders once confronted with the police evidence against him.

Glover denied responsibility for other crimes in which he was a prime suspect. Years after his conviction, he admitted he never worried about who his victims were or why he killed them; he said he wanted to stop but could not, and simply returned to his normal life after each murder.

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1792: Sydney’s First Grave: The Convict Buried Beneath What Is Now the Town Hall

When Governor Phillip and the Reverend Richard Johnson chose a quiet spot on the outskirts of town for a burial ground in September 1792, the first person laid to rest there is believed to have been a convict named Michael Dunn. The site, later known as the Old Sydney Burial Ground or the George Street Burial Ground, now lies beneath Sydney Town Hall.

For 27 years the cemetery operated with almost no formal oversight: it was never gazetted, no trustees were appointed and no burial register or plan was kept. The Reverend William Cowper later admitted that “the dead of all communions were interred indiscriminately”, though social distinctions persisted among the military, with non-commissioned officers of different regiments buried in separate corners of the ground.

Once the cemetery closed in 1820 and burials moved to Brickfield Hill, now the site of Central railway station, the old ground fell into grim disrepair. Headstones were vandalised, pigs, goats and horses wandered among open graves, and grave robbers were blamed for prising up leaden coffins. A committee report even noted men using the abandoned cemetery to relieve themselves, and in hot weather the stench became unbearable.

Despite public opposition to disturbing the dead, the City of Sydney eventually cleared the site to build its Town Hall, ending nearly a century of neglect over the city’s first burial ground.

Old Sydney burial ground historic cemetery illustration

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1863: An Escaped Convict Asked for Directions After a Fatal Attack, Then Was Hanged at Perth Gaol

John Thomas, a convict known as prisoner number 7279, escaped from a work party at Sutherland’s Bay in June 1863, taking a blanket, a carpenter’s axe and other items. He made his way to Peninsula Farm near Perth, where he entered the cottage of 70-year-old servant Duncan Urquhart and began helping himself to clothing.

When Urquhart returned and discovered the intruder, Thomas fled through a window armed with Urquhart’s own axe. He pursued the elderly man outside and struck him repeatedly, fracturing his skull. Despite his terrible injuries, Urquhart managed to make his way more than half a mile towards the farmhouse on his hands and knees, covered in blood.

Around noon, farmhouse owner Joseph Hardey stepped outside and saw a stranger walking up the cart road, coatless and carrying a bundle over his shoulder. The man calmly asked Hardey for directions to a property several miles further inland, apparently unconcerned that the man he had just attacked lay gravely injured nearby. Hardey later identified the stranger as Thomas.

Urquhart survived for more than two months, but died in the Colonial Hospital on 24 August 1863 from his injuries. Thomas was tried before Chief Justice Burt at the Supreme Court on 2 September and convicted of wilful murder. He was hanged in front of Perth Prison on 8 September 1863.

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Australia Escape Execution Murder Perth Prison Trial WA

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