John Trevor “Jack” Kelly was found guilty of kidnapping on 23rd September 1937, and was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, with a recommendation that he undergo observation following concerns about lasting effects from a motor accident.
Released in November 1938, Kelly committed murder less than three months later. He stood trial before the same judge who had sentenced him for kidnapping, but this time he was sentenced to death, becoming the last prisoner executed in New South Wales.
At the Central Criminal Court in Sydney, 30-year-old Yvonne Gladys Fletcher of Newtown was sentenced to death after a seven-day trial for the 1948 murder of her first husband, Desmond George Butler, who died after months of wasting illness caused by thallium poisoning. Asked if she had anything to say before sentence was passed, she replied simply, “No, your Honor,” but moments later a prayer book she had carried through every day of the trial crashed to the floor and she collapsed in the dock, sobbing, as police lifted her out.
Mr Justice Kinsella told the court the crime was “horrible” because the poison had been “secretly administered within the family circle” to an unsuspecting victim, destroying him “mentally and physically while permitting him to linger for months in wretched agony.” Fletcher was the first person in Australian criminal history convicted of murder by thallium poisoning, and the jury recommended that the sale of the poison to the public be banned outright.
What the sentencing did not reveal to onlookers was already known to the court: Fletcher had also been committed for trial over the death of her second husband, who had died from the same poison at Newtown only months earlier. The Crown Prosecutor noted the chilling parallel between the two cases, telling the jury, “There is no question that both Butler and Fletcher died from thallium poisoning… the same matrimonial discord, the same hatred towards each man, the same sudden illness, and the same dreadful symptoms.” The judge himself observed that had this conviction concerned her second husband, evidence of his cruelty toward her might have offered some mitigation, but no such excuse existed for the killing of her first.
On 22 September 1976, 36-year-old William Robert Wilson opened fire on Boundary Street in Spring Hill, a suburb of Brisbane. Armed with a .22-calibre rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition, he killed two teenage girls and wounded four other people. He had reportedly been upset after being rejected for membership by a model plane club.
Wilson then fled to a house in nearby Kelvin Grove and took five student teachers hostage. After around two hours of negotiations, one hostage escaped by pretending she needed the bathroom. Police stormed the house around 4pm, exchanging gunfire with Wilson before overpowering him and freeing the remaining captives.
Wilson spent three years in Hospital before being considered fit to plead. On 23 June 1980, he pleaded guilty to two murders and four attempted murders, receiving two life sentences and concurrent ten-year prison terms.
On 10 July 1985, agents of the French secret service DGSE attached two bombs to the hull of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior as it lay moored in Auckland Harbour, sinking the vessel and killing Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira, who drowned trying to retrieve his camera equipment. The ship had been preparing to lead a protest flotilla against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Two French agents, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, were arrested in New Zealand travelling under false Swiss identities and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter, drawing widespread attention to the operation’s codename, Operation Satanique.
For weeks the French government denied any involvement, until on 22 September 1985 Prime Minister Laurent Fabius publicly admitted that French secret service agents had sunk the ship acting on orders, an extraordinary confession of state-directed sabotage carried out against an allied nation.
True crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
