Samuel Gibbs, a miner working the Upper Wet Lead near Ararat, was accused of throwing his wife Anne down a disused 60 foot mine shaft after a drunken quarrel one stormy night in January 1858. She lay in the freezing hole for more than a day, her cries loud enough that at least one neighbour heard her, before she was pulled out barely alive. When first asked if her husband had done it, she insisted he had not. Only later, dying in her tent, did she change her account and say he had put her there.
Convicted after a trial built on these conflicting accounts, Gibbs was sent to Melbourne, where he was hanged on 12 November 1858 alongside another man condemned for a separate killing. The execution went horribly wrong: as the trapdoor dropped, the rope snapped under his weight and he crashed to the floor below, barely conscious. He was carried back up to the scaffold, fitted with a fresh rope, and hanged a second time, taking several more minutes to die.
Gibbs maintained his innocence to the last, screaming as the noose was fixed, "Mercy! mercy! I'm an innocent man; good people protect me, Oh God! Oh God!"
