Thieves slipped into the Museum of Natural History in New York on this day in 1964 and lifted an extraordinary haul of gems, among them the 565-carat Star of India, the largest sapphire in the world, and the 100-carat DeLong Ruby.
The brazen theft stunned collectors and investigators alike, yet within weeks the culprits were tracked down and most of the stolen jewels, including the Star of India, were recovered.
Edward Wildblood sailed to New South Wales on the Second Fleet ship Surprize, a voyage so brutal that dozens of convicts died before it even reached Sydney in June 1790. He was one of the lucky ones, stumbling ashore half starved after months chained below deck, only to find the colony offered little mercy either.
Within three months he and fellow convict William Harris had taken to the bush around Rose Hill, the settlement that would become Parramatta, robbing huts and killing a settler’s goat. Caught and sent back to labour in irons on bread and water, the pair slipped away again during their overseer’s absence, broke into a hut and beat its lone occupant, a sick settler, before making off with beef, flour, a frock and a book. Tried and convicted on 28 October 1790, Wildblood and Harris were hanged that same day at Rose Hill, their bodies left swinging near the very hut they had robbed, one of the earliest executions carried out in the colony.
In a remarkable twist of fate, both men were recorded as having been born on the same day, 1 January 1764, only to die together on the same day, aged just 26, at the end of a hangman’s rope.
William Harris had only just walked free from a Birmingham gaol, a three month sentence for robbing an outhouse behind him, when he broke into another house in the same street that same night. Caught in the act, he was convicted of burglary and condemned to death, later reprieved to transportation for life. He survived the notorious Second Fleet voyage aboard the Neptune, one of the deadliest convict crossings in Australia’s history, in which scores of prisoners perished before the ship ever reached Sydney.
In the young colony, Harris fell in with fellow convict Edward Wildblood, and the pair spent weeks pilfering from other convicts’ huts before fleeing into the bush. Recaptured and chained together on bread and water, they escaped again within weeks and broke into a hut, beating a sick settler and stealing beef, flour, a frock and a book. Tried for the break-in, the two men were hanged together on this day in 1790, among the first executions carried out in the young colony, with settlers gathered to watch them die from a tree.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Harris and Wildblood were both recorded as having been born on 1 January 1764. Their lives would ultimately end together, on the same day and at the same gallows, aged just 26.
Patrick Mahon had faced the gallows before. In 1827, convicted of a highway robbery on the road from Manchester to Sheffield after borrowing a fellow traveller’s own knife to rob him, he was sentenced to death at Derby Assizes, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land the following year and spent decades drifting through minor convict offences: insolence, drunkenness, breaches of his pass, a stint in chains.
In September 1852 he was convicted again, this time of a capital crime, and sentenced to death a second time. On this day in 1852, with no reprieve coming this time, Mahon was hanged at Oatlands, the clemency that had saved him twenty five years earlier nowhere to be found.
On being sentenced, Mahon protested his innocence, but told the court he was perfectly satisfied with his trial.
1861·They Dined on Stolen Ham While the Family Lay Bound: Thomas Sanders Hanged in Melbourne for a Farmhouse Attack
1866·"Unprecedented in Our Annals of Crime": A Sydney Butcher Committed for Trial Over a Dismembered BodyTrue crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
