Emma Williams, a young widow living in South Melbourne, told the man she was living with that her toddler son John had become “a nuisance”. One Sunday evening in August 1895, she carried him down the Port Melbourne pier, tied a stone weighing nearly 15 pounds to his frock with braid torn from her own dress, and dropped him into the lagoon.
She told her housemates she had given the boy to a Salvation Army woman, but when her lover read a newspaper report of a child’s body pulled from the water and confronted her, she broke. “I have only to say: I done it,” she told detectives. She described waiting half an hour by the water to see whether her son would surface, admitting she felt nothing but relief when he did not.
Williams made a full confession to police, declaring, “I will tell you everything from first to last.” A jury convicted her of murder within twenty minutes, and she was hanged in Melbourne on 4 November 1895.
