1889: Identified by a Crooked Toe and a Pair of Scissors: a Kimberley Murderer Hanged in Fremantle
Louis, a Filipino labourer who had carefully saved his wages on the Kimberley gold fields, left Hall's Creek with his workmate Harry Pres on 9 June 1889, bound, Pres later claimed, for a camp further south. Days afterwards a teamster found a body smouldering at a river crossing, the skull crushed and the corpse heaped with burning wood until it was almost unrecognisable.
What gave the dead man back his name were things Pres could not burn away: a nicked pair of barber's scissors, a distinctive water bag, and one small, oddly shaped toe. The same items turned up in Pres's possession, along with one of Louis's sovereigns stained with blood. The jury took just half an hour to convict him, and he was hanged in Fremantle on this day in 1889.
Pres prayed with a fellow Muslim prisoner to the last and swore his innocence on the Koran before the drop. Shortly before his death he told a warder: "You have taken my clothes, my money, and now you take my life, same as your Christ: his clothes, his money, and his life taken too."
