Sam Poo was an itinerant Chinese bushranger who spent ten days terrorising stockmen and settlers near Talbragar before shooting Senior Constable John Ward in February 1865. Tried at Bathurst that October, Poo took no part in his own defence; the court’s Chinese interpreter could not understand his dialect, and he sat through the entire proceedings in silence while witnesses and the dying constable’s own written statement were read against him.
The jury convicted him largely on that statement, in which Ward, certain he was dying, described being chased and shot by a “short, little, cranky old man” armed with a gun and pistol. The judge, visibly moved as he spoke the final words of the sentence, ordered Poo hanged, calling him a man who had terrified unarmed men, women and children before the killing.
