Owen McQueeny was a wandering Irish robber with one sightless eye who spent weeks haunting the proprietress of the Green Tent, a grocery and tavern serving gold diggers on a track near Geelong, Victoria. Elizabeth Lowe, a young widow raising two small children alone, had already told a passing carrier she feared the man and his talk of pistols. That July in 1858, McQueeny shot her dead and vanished with her jewellery.
Travellers soon reported a dead-eyed swagman heading for Geelong loaded with the dead woman’s distinctive earrings, and police closed in fast. Awaiting trial, McQueeny was caught hiding the earrings by swallowing them, retrieving them from the gaol’s waste tub and passing them to a departing cellmate to smuggle out for safekeeping. He was convicted of her murder and hanged at Geelong on 20 October 1858, freely confessing to a string of other robberies while insisting to the last that he had not killed her.
As the death warrant was read to him he only shrugged, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” convinced to the very end that public dislike of hanging would see him reprieved.
