August Tisler worked for market gardener Edward Sangal, and became his employer’s wife’s lover long before Sangal’s body was pulled from the family well outside Melbourne, his throat cut. Tisler’s written confession described how the wife lifted a blind to show him a lit window, the signal that it was safe to come in and kill her husband, and how she then calmly staged the death as a suicide, leaving his slippers by the well so police would believe he had drowned himself.
At trial, Tisler repeated that confession almost word for word, while Selina Sangal denied any part in the plan, insisting she had been paralysed with fear as she heard her husband call her name during the struggle. A jury convicted them both and sentenced them to death, but Selina’s execution was deferred because she was close to giving birth. Tisler alone was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on this day in 1902, the drop breaking his neck instantly.
He showed remorse for the killing itself, telling the sheriff on the scaffold, “Whatever I have done in this world I am prepared to suffer for now.”
