A drunken brawl at a Launceston public house turned deadly when William Brown, also known as Stockton, drew a knife and stabbed a man named James Stephens. The wounds were serious enough that a doctor testified to their severity at trial, and Brown was convicted of stabbing with intent to kill and sentenced to death, with no hope of mercy.
While he lay under sentence in Launceston gaol, word reached him that a relative back in England had left him a sum of money. Rather than let the inheritance go to waste, Brown arranged to bequeath it to a servant who had once worked alongside him as a splitter and sawyer on a property near the East Tamar. He was hanged on this day in 1853, his strange act of generosity settled just before the sentence was carried out.
