Henry Bradley and Patrick O’Connor absconded from assigned service in northwestern Tasmania and broke into a settler’s homestead on the night of 14 September 1853, tying up the household room by room. When the owner escaped through a window, the pair turned on his young relation, Alfred Phillips, and shot him dead as he begged them to spare the women and children.
To vanish from the island, they forced the crew of the schooner Sophia to sea at gunpoint, keeping a hostage tied to the mast until they reached Victorian waters. There they kept robbing, wounding one man near Brighton, until a police patrol cornered them near Kilmore. In the gunfight that followed, Bradley and O’Connor shot mounted Cadet Thompson through the chest; captured the next day after a second running battle, they boasted to their captors of already having killed six people back in Van Diemen’s Land.
Convicted of shooting Thompson, both men were hanged together in Melbourne on 24 October 1853.
On the scaffold, Bradley said he was willing to die and had already dictated a letter confessing the full extent of his crimes; O’Connor remained defiant to the end, refusing to join seriously in the priest’s prayers.
