In the early hours, the killer known as Jack the Ripper struck twice within the same hour. His third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was found with her throat cut and still bleeding, her killer likely interrupted before he could mutilate her further. Denied his ritual, he found a fourth victim within the hour: Catherine Eddowes, whose body was left with her intestines arranged over her shoulder and part of her womb removed.

Weeks later, a Londoner opened a parcel addressed simply “From Hell” to find half a preserved kidney inside, accompanied by a taunting letter. Tests suggested it may have belonged to Eddowes herself, though the claim was never proven and the killer was never caught.

Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes
Murders of Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes

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In October 1851, at a shearers’ hut on a station on the Castlereagh, a Chinese labourer named John Newing burst in armed with a shear blade lashed to a pole and stabbed a fellow countryman, Hing, in the groin. Bystanders wrenched the weapon from him, but he returned with two knives before he could be disarmed again, and Hing bled out within minutes.

At his trial at Bathurst in August 1852, defence counsel argued there had been no intent to kill, telling the court that Newing himself had said he aimed only for the knees. The jury was unmoved and returned a verdict of guilty, and Newing was sentenced to death without hope of mercy. He went to the gallows the following month alongside an unrelated condemned man, Timothy Sullivan, in an execution remembered chiefly for how badly it was botched.

Unable to speak or understand English, and with no interpreter willing to attend him at the end, Newing left no final statement and died in silence.

Sheep shearer scissors.
Sheep shearer scissors.

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Eliza Benwell was housemaid at an inn in New Norfolk, near Hobart, where fellow servant Jane Saunders worked alongside her. In January 1845 three of the inn’s male servants seized Saunders in the garden during what began as friendly play, stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth and dragged her, apparently lifeless, down to the river. Benwell stood by and watched it happen, then waited at the house for the men to return before letting them in.

The three killers were tried and hanged first. Benwell was convicted separately as an accessory before and after the fact, a charge carrying the same capital sentence as murder itself. She was hanged before a huge crowd on 30 September 1845, closing her eyes on the scaffold so she would not have to look at the spectators, reportedly the first woman executed in the city in fifteen years.

On the eve of her death she confessed that she could have saved Saunders’s life had she known a murder was intended.

Hobart, Tasmania, Australia - December 24 2016: Hobart city and derwent river viewed from suburb of sandy bay with sea mist rolling over eastern shore | ID 130062583 © Andrew Balcombe | Dreamstime.com
ID 130062583 © Andrew Balcombe | Dreamstime.com

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By 1866 Joseph Bolitho Johns, known as Moondyne Joe, was already the most persistent escapee Fremantle Prison had ever held. Free again in August after breaking out once more, he teamed up with two other escaped convicts and raided Everett’s store at Toodyay, a shopkeeper who had arrived on the very same convict transport as Joe, stripping it of boots, blankets, guns and ammunition to equip an overland trek all the way to Adelaide.

They made it 322 kilometres east of Perth before running out of luck at Bodallin Soak, recaptured on 29 September 1866, the escapade that first put the name Moondyne Joe into print. Back at Fremantle Prison, he was handed a further five years, two for the escape and three for the robbery, in a saga that would run for another three decades.

Moondyne Joe - Perennial Escapee
Moondyne Joe – Perennial Escapee

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