James Watson, a pig dealer known locally as ‘Jimmy the pigman’, met two sandalwood cutters, John Maroney and William Watkins, on a bush track near Kojonup, Western Australia, on 1 May 1883. Within minutes Watkins shot him and crushed his skull with the gun’s stock, then piled the body onto a woodcutters’ fire that burned for days, the bones later raked from the ashes and reburied in the scrub.
At trial, Maroney’s own signed statement, in which he claimed he had only helped burn the corpse after watching Watkins shoot Watson, became the chief evidence against them both. Watkins’s counsel argued the case rested on circumstance alone, but the jury found both men guilty of wilful murder.
The pair were hanged in Perth on this day in 1883, neither accepting blame for the killing itself. Moments before the bolt was drawn, asked whether he still believed Maroney had lied in saying he fired the shot, Watkins answered firmly, “I do, sir”; Maroney, for his part, went to his death insisting, “I am innocent of this murder.”
