James Gardiner, a 19-year-old cabman, lived off the earnings of a woman known as German Ada in a Rockhampton brothel. On the night of 21 August 1883 a drunken quarrel turned fatal: he kicked and stamped her to death. Police tried to suppress the story, closing the inquest to reporters, but a neighbour who had heard her screams and been waved off by a constable made sure it got out anyway.
Gardiner was sentenced to death by Justice Pring and hanged at Brisbane Gaol alongside two other condemned men. Among those at the gate stood Charles Muller, an elderly German man and father of the dead woman, whose real name was Matilda. He had asked to watch his daughter’s killer die, stood opposite the scaffold through the execution, then pushed forward to view the body and walked away looking, witnesses said, satisfied.
Gardiner never denied killing her, pleading only that he had been drunk, and spent his last days exhorting the two men hanged beside him to repent.
